SSCS 03: Installment 23 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 23 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…
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?
—
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 23: 21.1020
The next day, I remembered to bring my lunch box. I remembered to set my alarm, to rise and reach the bus stop while it was still dark out. I remembered to count the blocks as we passed them, and to watch first the smudgy, pink light, then stabbing flickers of morning sunlight, glinting between the stacks in the junk yards. There were lions lurking in the stacks, and I counted twelve that my eyes could catch sight of. They were watching me back.
I remembered to wear a close, long-sleeved shirt under my tunic so that the burning in my arm and starting to creep out across my back was muted, didn’t get rubbed by the tunic every time I shifted and flare pain and doubt out across the surface of my skin. The scar was very long by now, but it was keeping away from my hands, and the long-sleeved shirt would help hold it together.
I remembered to pass through the black-stone alleyway, beneath the red lantern, and through the rusty, iron door without sparing a glance for the doorman. And I even kept my eyes off the happy, yellow dandelions poking out of the crack in the stairs as I stepped over them and up. I was standing again in front of my bell-template, looking up at my work and skirting my eyes around what would have to be placed in the center (one-half-of-the-bell center), soon, before Elka even remembered to notice me.
“You did good work yesterday.” Elka always stumped along when she walked, but somehow she could do it silently, so I couldn’t help flinching when she spoke up from right behind my shoulder. She didn’t say my name, but she didn’t call me ‘sacrifice girl’ either. “The Minister might almost be satisfied, if” – her voice shook sternly – “you can have something at least started in the center of it before –”
“No,” I interrupted her. I had kept my head yesterday, after I’d calmed down and mastered the pain. I’d worked hard, and I’d realized as I did that she owed me some concessions. She’d never laid a finger on this Template, never specified any particular design, and I was pretty sure she couldn’t. I didn’t know why, but that didn’t make it not true. “Not yet. Tell him I’m waiting for his feedback before starting the center design.”
Elka had come ‘round to stand next to me as she was speaking, and now I saw her head tilt curiously from the corner of my eye. “You’re the dreamer.” She didn’t hiss it – not quite.
“At my old factory, we never finished a project without feedback from the client part-way through. You wanted someone who could dream and shape things. This is how I work.” I was proud of myself that I was able to stand perfectly still as I said all of this, that no hint in my voice nor tremble in my hands revealed the fear I still felt, deep inside me, when my mind glanced off the edges of what might belong in the center of this design. I needed time. I wasn’t ready yet to let it split me in two.
Following up my smooth statements, I looked over at Elka, just as smoothly. We would have been of a height if her back wasn’t stooped, and I could admit to myself that the deep, deep indigo of her tunic, near black with her years of experience, still gave me pause. But the look in her iron eyes, before she flicked them away from me, held far too much for me to read in one glance. It wasn’t anger, or dislike – though it wasn’t not those things either. It wasn’t fear.
“You’ll have to tell him yourself,” was all she said, before turning sharply and stumping away back around the corner of the bamboo screens. I’m pretty sure it scared me more that she’d given in so easily. At least my hands finally were shaking as I picked up the stylus from where I’d left it on my work-table yesterday.
But then the dandelion plate, still heavy and sharp and hanging in my tunic pocket, thumped against my belly, and some of the trembling stilled. I had accomplished a lot yesterday. The bell half-template rising in front of me now had recognizable shapes – a face looking up, hands praying around a lantern, a ship that was also a building being dragged beneath the waves, a field of cogs and stars – and a half-started swarm of patterning around those. And I remembered putting those things there, because yesterday I had finally figured out how not to black out.
It was both simple and a terrible, bone-numbing truth. You just had to know what you were going to do before you did it.
***
When I came to, I was standing in front of my bell-template, my workbench pushed well to the side, and a richly dressed man I didn’t recognize standing beside me. In front of us, in front of the Template, was a small crowd of what must have been most of the artisans in the workshop, indigo tunics dusty and smudged with various powders and ash, and Elka standing at the front. A frission ran through me as I saw her and she spoke, “Bring the Torch and the Kindling.” Her eyes were black – everyone’s eyes were black.
Were my eyes black, too?