SSCS 03: Installment 1 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
We are now live with Installment 1 of my next SSCS! (That stands for Serial Stream-of-Consciousness Story, which is something you can find out more about here.) I’ll be putting out a new installment once each week, on Friday, until the story is done (around about late August).
This year’s story, ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About,’ is definitely its own thing, distinct from those of the past two years. This time, I’ve gone for something that’s a little bit creepy.
SSCS 03’s tone: Urban-fantasy / Ghost-story
SSCS 03’s mild content warning: Mysterious Wounds
Hope you enjoy!
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 1: 19.0309
The first time I saw them, the lions, I didn’t know I should be afraid. For all their roaring, for all the sprawling mass of their domain, they seemed separate from the real world, like the things I saw out the bus window were just pieces of a dream and didn’t really mean anything.
But they were riveting whenever I caught a glimpse of them. The first junkyard we passed stretched for three city blocks and the cargo containers had been stacked up – haphazardly – high enough to cast long shadows over the buildings opposite, with the morning sun just shining through briefly between intermittent canyons of painted steel. That was where I saw the first one, at the edge of one of those canyons, crouched midway up. He was tawny and smoke smudged, and his mane glinted in that brief flash of sun, his teeth white against the shadows as he roared. Not at any of us passing, or the rest of the city, but at a second lion crouched on a ledge of the canyon’s opposite wall, claws dug into the steel in challenge.
And then we’d driven past.
I was preoccupied then, too. I’d been sent away from the factory yesterday, the scarlet tunic I’d worn for the past three years taken away and handed to someone else. And now I was on the bus to a different factory. One rumored to be so old its walls were crumbling and half-held up by banyan trees and fig vines, and red geranium growing in the cracks. They hadn’t given me a new tunic. I didn’t know what color I was meant to be when I got there.