SSCS 03: Installment 2 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 2 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!
Previously…
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.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 2: 19.0311
When the bus drove off in a rattle of old diesel, I was left standing on the chipped, black bricks that made up the crumbled roadway in this part of the city, facing a long alley decorated with laundry lines two and three stories up and a single bright, pink, and probably tatty spray of cherry blossoms left over from last month’s festivals. At the end of the alley a red paper lantern hung over a battered steel grey door marked the only sign of the factory, though a couple other passengers from the bus were already halfway to it. What looked like the edge of a bright turquoise tunic peeked out from below the frayed, brown, quilted coat-hem of one of them. The other was too bundled up to offer even a guess of what color they might wear.
I hurried after the pair, reaching them just as the grey door was being pulled open from the inside. They didn’t look back to greet me, and the man on the other side of the door turned away from my questions, only shutting the door behind me and pointing toward a rickety stair leading up before turning away and disappearing into the mist on the other side of what looked like the glass walls of a green house. I was in the factory, but there was no one here, and no tunic handed to me to give me a hint of what I was meant to do now. The stairs looked patched and wobbly, bolted to the side of a crumbled brick wall. And there was no roof, the factory – as much as I could see of it beyond high walls, both brick and smudged, dusty glass – open to the sky. There were no banyan trees. But when I made myself take a breath and head for the rickety stair, I found a dandelion poking out of a crack on the third step up, brighter than the lion on the trash heap and offering a yellow smile rather than a snarl and a flash of teeth.