SSCS 03: Installment 4 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 4 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…
“Minister himself commissioned a new piece, and the last three girls they sent us jumped off the rail deck, one after the other, like they were reading from a script that said ‘suicide after tea.’ And not a one of them got half a corner done on the template before-hand. You’d better know how to piece things together, or we’ll all-of-us find the manacles waiting, no matter how long since we made our posting.”
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 4: 19.0327
With that pronouncement, the old woman had virtually vanished into the smelly fog and I hurried to catch up, clutching the indigo tunic to my chest rather than try to struggle it on over my head and follow her at the same time.
The workshop, I found out, was full of bamboo screens. Almost a labyrinth of them, really. And the choking steam didn’t fill it up entirely but seemed to just be concentrated in a few places: by the door, at the far end of some make-shift corridor away to the left, and as a cloudy screen between where the old woman eventually lead me and what looked like it might be the back wall of the factory – I could just make out a brick wall with something dark-green and fuzzy growing in the crevices. “Rail deck,” she said shortly, gesturing that way, and I realized I only saw part of the wall not because the steam was so thick that way but because there was an actual gap in it. Was there really view enough from there to see the sky?
“Now you…” She stopped and glared at me until I realized what the evil look was for and scrambled to get the tunic pulled on and tied off at each side. It had a big pocket in front, just like my last one, and I had to force my hands not to fidget with its awkward emptiness as she gave me one more parting glare and continued.
“Now you can see this is meant to be a very large commission, and none of the other girls so much as started on the center – do not, the heavens, ask me why – but they’ve never-the-less managed to set you up with a pretty knotted puzzle. (Don’t you feel special?)” If she’d had spectacles, she would have looked at me over the tops of them. “Sand-table is obviously here.” She kicked at a large, box-framed counter thingy. “And tools and materials are in the cupboards. Only rule you have for today is: Don’t actually touch the tablet. If you have something tomorrow, me or Selmi or Lily can approve it, but until then Stay. Back.” With this last, she wagged a finger at me for emphasis, then nodded once and stumped off away around a different bamboo-screen from the one we’d arrived here by.
And this whole time, I’d been working to keep my knees locked and holding me upright in the face of the template or tablet or whatever it was I was supposedly supposed to be working on. It was half-again taller than me, and just as wide. Standing upright. It looked like it was made of clay, but then how could such weight be held up when most of the walls around me were just more of those flimsy bamboo screens? I certainly did not want to touch it and find out how precariously done that was. There were designs on it – also of clay? and raised from the surface – but the vast center of it was indeed perfectly blank. I finally got my mouth shut and my eyes turned away from staring, but by then the old woman was long gone.
And I had less than no idea of what to do.
A fish.
I blinked and rubbed at my face. Coherent thought was apparently not a possibility either.