SSCS 03: Installment 7 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 7 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…
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.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 7: 19.0706
***
The next day started out mostly the same as the first, only now I had a destination to picture in my mind as I rode the bus, slumped and sleepy with my head resting on the window. The early morning traffic outside was grimy and brown, and the sun coming up cut bright corridors between the gaps in the buildings. We passed one large junkyard, the stacked-up shipping containers rust-colored versions of green and red and orange, but I didn’t see any lions this time. Instead, in the deep shadows where the sun hadn’t got yet, a weird fog seemed to be shifting and oozing, swirling like the fog in the workshop, trying to draw shapes in my brain, until it seemed I saw the ghost of a huge Fish rise out of the ground and then dart away, gross and swift, between the stacks, terrible spikes and spines bristling over every inch of it – a sudden flash of death-by-monster. Maybe there were lions in the next junkyard we passed – I didn’t remember which it was I seemed to see them in yesterday – but by then I’d put my back to the window, gripping the split rail of the bench in front of me and trying not to stare at the indigo of my sleeve where before I used to see red.
The black of the bricks in the alleyway of my stop was just the same as before, though someone had taken down the tatted, out-of-season cherry blossoms. The factory door still looked sullen beneath its red lantern, and there were still no banyan trees visible holding up the crumbly high walls. Any red geraniums growing in the cracks were tucked out of sight from where those on the outside could see them.
The man who opened the door was still silent, ghosting back behind the glass walls of his greenhouse as quick as he could. There were leaves pressed against the glass that hinted at what was inside – something broad like palm-leaves maybe. But still the fog was too thick to see anything more than the ghosts of other people moving around inside. Crumbled brick and old, with no roof most places, this factory still seemed to be a factory of strange mist and steam and fog rather than the fig vines and banyan trees of the rumors – or steel and sparks like my last factory.
I climbed the rusty stair – the bolts singing in high-pitched whispers beneath my weight – stepping over the dandelion with two bright, fluffy flowers now smiling up at me. I could see the stinking steam seeping around the edges of the clapboard door before I even pushed it open and the smell of old bamboo and metal filled my mouth. Elka wasn’t lurking on the other side this time, but I thought I glimpsed the shadow of her hunched form down a ways at the end of a long workbench I passed while trying to find my way back to my place. When I finally did, the tablet was just as tall and wide as before, just as eerily formal and daunting, but this time the bit Lily thought Maia had been sculpting into a ship looked more like a building being dragged down by an enormous Fish, spiny tentacles reaching high. It seemed wrong for a ceremonial bell, but I’d never been artisan-class before yesterday, so I couldn’t argue it. And what had looked like bird tracks had become fractured handprints, pressed against a glass that hadn’t yet accepted the shape of their prayers.
Those hands were meant to go around a lantern. I could see the shape of where it wasn’t yet and had started yesterday, very clumsily, to try to mold out the form of it on the sand-table for Lily or Elka’s surely horrified inspection today. I needed a good straight-edge, and maybe a welding torch. My hands didn’t know how to shape things with just soft fingertips alone. And I had decided I wasn’t going to think yet about what the center of the tablet – what would be the center of both the front and back of the bell – would hold. I could tell I wasn’t ready to see that yet.