The morning that Janica began to hear numbers, five months before, was easily the best in years. Years of bruised breasts, of scraped elbows, of a damaged and repaired rib cage (it gets stronger that way). She’d heard the numbers on the clock that morning. They sang in the chords of an angel’s harp. They played a melody as she passed her gaze from the 12 down to the 1 and around through the numbers back up to 12 again. She could compose any song she pleased on the harp. Practice would make perfect.
It gets stronger that way, as Brian might say.
All around the world people had woken on that morning to wonders. Some saw sounds erupt in color, or tasted emotion on their tongue, or smelled patterns and facial expressions. A shift in the earth’s magnetism, theorists proposed, or the impact of radiation from a distant supernova, or the world’s governments drugging up the rain clouds. No one had a sweet fucking clue. No one knew why the phenomenon had suddenly been gifted, or cursed, upon billions of people. Early estimates were that roughly half the human population was affected.
Not Brian, though. And what would he do with such an ability? Would he taste his fists on her chest? Would he see the sores deep inside her when he forced his fingers in dry, the textures leaping in kaleidoscopic explosions before his eyes?
No, half the world had been left wanting, but many were trying to reverse their exclusion. Over the following days the news covered reports of those taking blows to certain areas of the skull, identified online by latter-day phrenologists, all in frantic desperation to experience what so many others could. It had worked for a few, and the media had flaunted success stories, reporters staring with liquid, laughing, childlike eyes as they detailed the places those lucky individuals had been struck on the head. Many who tried it died with their heads split open. Cerebrospinal fluid drained onto linoleum floors, onto concrete, onto hardwood, onto sand. Everywhere. In every nation.
People wanted the experience. The experience was everything. Those who couldn’t have it needed it. Those who had it couldn’t help but gush their wonder, their rapture, their revelations, on the web and every other form of media.
“Swing, bitch,” said Brian. “And you better hit the fucking sweet spot.”
The base of the skull, behind the right ear. Brian was waiting.
“You’ll die if it doesn’t work.”
“If it doesn’t work, you’ll die, cunt.”
She swung the bat. Too hard, perhaps. Brian hit the floor, moaning, writhing.
“I’ll try again,” she said.
“No,” said Brian, blearily. A violent purple crack had appeared at the site of impact. “No more.”
“It gets stronger that way,” said Janica. She looked to the kitchen clock, ran her eyes through the numbers. An angel stroked its harp, just for her.
She swung again.
