SSCS 03: Installment 22 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 22 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 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.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 22: 21.0713
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Fish – the great Fish – have always been with us. That’s what we tell ourselves, so that we don’t have to think about how it got this way, or wish that things could get better. We say it, silently, even though we know it’s a lie. The junkyards dot the city, stretch for blocks and blocks, their stacks rusting, rotting, because something has stopped, something that used to be. But the junkyards have always been with us also. What is a city without trash? Without forgotten corners where the things we’ve built have grown so old they’ve started to crumble? Because, of course, the city has always been.
The city has air that smells bad, and roads that are crowded and pitted, buildings that are sometimes shabby and always tight. But the city protects us, gives us shelter – from the Fish. Outcasts don’t last long here – they disappear, and there are endless junkyard mazes they might have wandered into – and then there are the lurking Fish, hungry, patient, and never very far.
Because of the great Fish, we don’t like to think about the river. There are many streets that lead down to it, always the straightest, broadest roads, so it’s impossible not to notice it sometimes, a hazy mist in the distance, and the smell of salt. Some seasons it threatens to flood, and we think about what it might be like to wade out into its waters, to feel the wet of it all around us. And then we remember the Fish. They are like a razor slicing through our dream of the River, cutting closer, and drawing blood. We never speak of the Fish. Never. And certainly never out loud.
Once, on a rare day free, I came home to find my flat-mate, Nina, sitting at the table, hollow-eyed, a mug of cold, green tea clutched between her hands. Her long eyes glanced up at me sideways, before dropping again to the cup, and she said, “In my dreams, they always have such sharp teeth,” and of course we knew which ‘they’ she meant. I went out again and found a vendor on the street selling sweet dumplings wrapped in pink and green paper and stamped with plum blossoms and brought one back up to her. A piece of the city, because the city is what protects us. I should have bought two, but Nina knew that, and the next day there was a sweet dumpling perched brightly on the rice box I was meant to take for my lunch.
The great Fish have always been with us. And so, sometimes there are people we knew who aren’t with us anymore.
There used to be a Palace on the river. Its walls were made not of the black bricks, so common, but of white and blue, the colors of the river reflecting the sky, before the city was built and the skies became grey. It might still be there. It might be a Palace for the Fish.
This Template is meant to mold a ceremonial Bell, which will stand just inside Palace grounds, on one side of a gate facing east, onto the river. Which palace do they mean? Only the old Palace touches onto the river, and why would they want this Bell of Horrors placed among the new?
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