SSCS 03: Installment 21 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 21 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 could feel a smoggy breeze on my cheeks up here. I could look out past the shabby buildings all the way far enough to see the rusty glint of a junkyard, and know that I was still far from them, still free.
When a warmth touched my shoulder, I didn’t move my eyes, but I drew in a long breath I’d been holding, then felt my terror seep away as I breathed out. “Will you stay with me for a little bit, Jack?” I asked.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 21: 21.0418
“They said you needed more salve.” Rock scraped as Jack leaned against the wall beside me, angling to get a look at my face. “Did you hurt your hands again?”
His voice was so soft and kind, I just wanted to close my eyes and imagine we were somewhere else, somewhere we could both just rest and be happy. I shook my head, though, before I could start imagining where that somewhere might be. He was beautiful, a beautiful acquaintance. And I was supposedly trying to keep this factory job. Without a job…
An image flashed in my mind, suddenly and too clearly: Me without anything – alone – walking out into a junkyard through an opening between shipping containers, knowing there were lions, somewhere in the maze inside, but too hopeless to care.
I shuddered and pushed up from the wall. “No.” I looked over just enough to see that Jack was there, but I couldn’t bring myself to look straight at him. Instead I pushed up the sleeve on my tunic. “My arm’s been burning.”
Even as I said it, Jack hissed in through his teeth. It must have looked worse than when I showed it to Nina last night. Last night it had only stretched from elbow to wrist, but the pain was definitely in my upper arm now too, what felt like it was almost all the way up to my shoulder.
“Was this from yesterday?” Jack had pulled over a tin of something, presumably the salve. His beautiful long fingers reached in to scoop some out while I watched, looking half-over my shoulder. I still couldn’t quite see him, though.
“I don’t know…” I grit my teeth and turned away as more fire flashed up my arm at his touch. And I had another image flash in my head: Again standing in a canyon of shipping containers in one of the junk-yards, but now I was naked, and my skin was splitting open, tearing off my body.
I almost jerked away from Jack, but was able to hold it back to just a hard flinch and an aborted scream choked off in the back of my throat. With my other hand, I was gripping the crumbled wall of the rail deck, and looking down I saw the lone geranium poking up from one of the cracks. I wanted to reach out and feel the fuzz of its leaves against my fingertips, pinch it to smell the sharp stink that meant it was real. But I couldn’t make myself let go of the wall past the pain. All I could smell out here was smog, with an earthy, damp under-current that wanted to be rain but was probably just a nearby sewer.
“Did your ankle ever hurt?” I asked, still staring down at the cracked wall and the flower.
“Hmm?”
“You –” I swallowed against the burning, “– have a scar.” Maybe this was all just normal somehow. Maybe I just didn’t even know.
“Oh. Yeah, I can’t remember what that’s from. It must have been from when I was a kid or something.” Jack didn’t mention the pattern of a cog where most people have an ankle-bone, and I didn’t either. Maybe I’d just dreamed that part somehow.
Though, now I’d be waiting for another chance to look at his ankles, to see if I was right or not, and if they both matched. If they both looked liked cogs, maybe he wouldn’t know the difference. I felt a giggle bubbling up at that thought and tried to keep my teeth clenched against it. What came out instead was somewhere between a hiccup and a whimper. But then Jack was done at last and I straightened up, pulling down my sleeve.
“Thank you.” I managed a little bit of a smile, and to actually look at him now. The white flash of his smile was nowhere in sight, though. Instead his brow was pinched up with worry, and he was twisting the tin of salve in his hands.
“I wish I could help more,” he said. And then he looked away, turning to duck back inside. Jack kept getting pulled away from his own work to come help me. I still didn’t even know what his work was.
Just like I didn’t know my own work very well. But I was learning, and this had to get done. I could tell it was only going to keep getting worse until I faced it. Pulling the dandelion texture plate out of my tunic pocket, I gripped it in both hands like a talisman, and went inside to take a good, long look at the center of my half-bell Template.