Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About

This is Installment 11 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!

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Previously…

My hands still ached from my blisters, the skin of my palms stiff and tender, but all still strong beneath.  I stood up.

And finally looked up at the tablet for my bell half-template.  There was something there, in the upper-right corner where before there had been only nothing.  Two arched lines.  But I could see what they really were: The beginnings of a strange face, half-hidden, but staring up at me.

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…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About

Installment 11: 20.0126

It was a long while before I could look away from the face.  It was so clearly there that it seemed almost to be trying to push itself out from the surface of the tablet.  It wasn’t a human face, not really.  But here, on this slowly forming bell-template, it would look almost as though it were.  You wouldn’t be able to see how pale it was, or the way it would move if ever it had a chance to look away.  You wouldn’t be able to see the way it would change into something else once it had rounded a corner and was out of your sight.

Two arched lines that I didn’t remember making.  Just like I didn’t remember getting home last night.  Didn’t remember getting back on the bus to come here.  It would be as though I had never left, except that I did remember staring out at the grey morning city, and at the rusty shipping containers filling acres and acres of junkyard.  When I was finally able to wrench my eyes away from the not-yet-there face, it was to look away from the tablet entirely.  I was afraid what I might see in the other corners, of whether the meaning behind them would begin to grow.  Of knowing too much.

Fortunately, looking away let me see my workspace, which had first: managed to become a horrifying mess; and second: acquired in my absence an array of new tools.

There was a straight-edge among them, one of the really good ones that I might have used at my old factory, maybe even might have hidden when some of the other, less meticulous workers came scrounging around for tools.  Aside from the etchings on the straight-edge, there were also a neat set of calipers, and a good, heavy measuring tape.  Plus compass and protractor, chisels, a whole array of knives and spatulas that were unfamiliar but, I suspected, probably very handy when it came to shaping clays.  I meant to pull them all off the sand-table – where they had all been dumped with no regard for my very poorly shaped lantern – and lay them all out to sort through, but just picking up the straight-edge I remembered what I’d wanted it for…

This time I came back to myself before Elka came around the screen corner to inspect what I’d been up to, but still not before I had time enough to get back down off my stool.  I heard the thump of her step and had time to turn and clasp my hands.  Her look when she saw me perched up on the stool said she was not ameliorated by my manner.

“Sacrifice girl!” she growled, then glared up at me until I clambered down.  But, before my feet even had a chance to steady on the floor and my bow only half started, she snapped, “What have you been doing now!?”

I resisted the urge to twist around and look for myself.  My hands still remembered some of what they’d been doing.  By turning them toward the shape they’d held just a moment before, I was able to extract an answer from the otherwise haze of my recent memory.  “Measuring out the workspace,” I said.  I pictured the bell-template’s tablet surface very firmly in my mind as I said it, because if I didn’t picture something I was going to remember the complete and perfect blackness that had been the state of my mind just moments before.  If the others had noticed that I’d essentially blacked out several times now, they didn’t seem to mind.  And while I very much did mind, I couldn’t see any avenues of escape from here.  I’d been banished from my old factory for no reason I understood, and the old woman standing in front of me had suggested it was more than just my own welfare depending on the work I now did.

“Measuring…”  Elka’s eyes narrowed and she pushed me to one side, staring up at my tablet with hands on her hips.  With her back to me, I risked a look up myself.  Yes.  That looked better.

There were now narrow-cut lines running across the surface of the template.  They marked out top and bottom border spaces, then cut the rest of the space into half-a-bell quadrants, except that the center had been blocked out separately with another large square, and also given space for a border.  If I’d looked more closely I might have also noticed what seemed to be a meandering trail of dots wandering in a curved line across the different quadrants, but I didn’t have time to see that before Elka had turned around and gestured imperiously.  “Go away now,” she said, finger pointing to the local exit.  “Go with Jack and eat lunch.  I have to look at this.”

Before I could protest my confusion, or that I didn’t even know where Jack worked in this maze of workshops and screens, she raised her voice to a level that was too thin to be a bellow but still much too full-bodied to be a screech.  “Jack!  Jhanni hasn’t eaten lunch in three days!  Take her to the noodles place three blocks away!”

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