SSCS 03: Installment 6 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 6 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…
“Well, whatever you do, it will have to pull the entire template into a unified whole.” Now she gestured to the other corners. One looked like it held nothing so much as bird-like footprints of some kind. “It’s to be the half-template for the next palace bell, to be cast in bronze, with two sheets, joined and wrapped around,” she cupped her hands in a circle. “The bell will hang just inside a new gate that will face east, and open directly onto the river.”
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 6: 19.0529
A fish, my mind said again, and this time a slow dread rolled through me with the image/thought. A gate to face east, and onto the river. Was my mind saying ‘fish’ or ‘Fish’? It might very well be the latter, but most of us had trained ourselves long ago not to think of those. The river was theirs, and we kept to our city and our factories and stayed safe. Weren’t we? I remembered the junk yard with its stacks and stacks of shipping containers. Rusting, and going feral.
“You’re already dreaming, that’s good.”
Lily’s hands landed on my shoulders from behind again, and again I startled, but sort of slowly; the touch felt soft and distant. I was imagining the great Fish, enormous, sharp and monstrous as nightmares, swimming through the painted iron junkyard.
“Use the sand table if you get an idea you want to get down. Or there should be charcoal and paper in here if you have to start with that.” A muffled thump as Lily kicked at the boxy table/cupboard. Then a hollowness in the air, clean-smelling within the complex, grimy smells of the workshop – metal and dust and old bamboo – that meant that she’d gone.
A bit of foggy steam rolled out from behind the screen nearest me, and with it came the image of ghostly, little fish, swimming and flipping in the foggy coils, slipping and rolling near to me, nearer, the coils of fog growing more and more like tentacles, claws outstretched. I shivered suddenly, drawing back from it, and that was finally enough to wake me up again, so that I drew in a deep breath and then wished I hadn’t. I knew I’d get used to the smell eventually – my last factory had smelled like wet cement and charcoal and grease oil, and most days I could have sniffed the air purposefully and not noticed it – but right now this one was making me feel like I couldn’t really breathe.
I crouched down to look in the nearest cupboard, hesitating at the feel of the gritted dust it seemed to be coated with. Paper and charcoal would at least make my pocket less awkwardly empty. Once I found them, though, I just clutched them in my hands and turned right around to head for the gap that was the ‘rail deck’. I needed to not have that mostly blank tablet – bell template, whatever – looming over me. The city never offered anything that truly resembled fresh air, but I needed to breathe.
On the other side of the wall – crumbling brick with no door – there was another wall, about waist high enclosing a space open to the sky but little bigger than the tiny kitchen back at my flat. The brick of this wall was also crumbling, and out of the gaps – nearly every one I could see – there sprouted little, yellow dandelions, scraggly, with ragged, toothy leaves and bright, soft flowers.
Everywhere except at the base of the wall, where a long, dank crack held the fleshy green leaves and bright petals of a red geranium.