SSCS 03: Installment 26 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 26 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…
Just then, something that was part of me came loose, and I found myself clutching at my own arm. Not in pain, but in fear of some sort of collapse and discovery. All the scents still rising around me, the paint and the metal upon metal of the Machine, a touch of blood, seemed to wash suddenly across my skin in a way far too intimate to be real. It was as though my skin had suddenly come loose from my body, and now the world was pressing itself into all the exposed cracks and crevices, and I couldn’t pay any attention to the scene playing out in front of me any longer. I had come loose, or the world had come too close, and it burned, in a horrible, stretching sort of way.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 26: 22.0217
***
In the evening twilight, I stood on the street corner, waiting for the bus that would come and take me home.
My hand itched. They both did. And my arm. But there were other people waiting on the same concrete-and-black-brick bus corner as I was, and so I made myself hold still. I was maybe becoming good at that.
But then the itch started just beneath my shoulder-blade, and I needed to move. I would just walk down the alley and back. Maybe follow the crumbling brick wall around the factory to see if I could walk a loop all the way around it. And then come back. If I missed the bus, I would wait for the next one. There was always another bus, eventually. And nothing but my bed to hurry me back to my flat.
***
Standing beneath a street-lamp holding back the night, I waited for the next bus that would come and take me home.
The cone of faintly gritty light was empty except for me. Though, I could hear some traffic and passers-by on the next road over – in the direction Jack had taken me to go to the noodle shop, where we’d hid from the rain. My hands didn’t itch anymore. Now they ached, as though desperate to be stretched in some way I couldn’t quite sort out. And my tunic was feeling too close to my skin again, every shift of the fabric vibrating along my shoulders and back.
Could this be what Jack’s elbows would be feeling like? – I didn’t know why I thought that, wasn’t sure what I thought I was comparing to what.
I rubbed at the edges of the dandelion plate in my tunic pocket. My hands couldn’t quite stretch around it right, but it helped. The plate was cold in a night that wasn’t really. I could smell the clean, brushed steel of it, rubbing against the cotton and polyester, dust and sweat, of my tunic pocket. I could smell the damp funk that was the River far from here, and, just as far, the rust of the junkyards, stacked and waiting in the night, well beyond sight.
In the cone of gritty light was humid silence.
In the alley behind me – toward the factory – came the sound, faint and then louder, of a steel-tipped cane pinging against the paving stones.
***
In the deep, black night I rode the bus, but not homeward. I’d never rode this far before and the city outside the bus windows showed itself foreign when it showed itself at all – almost no street-lamps still lit this late at night.
There was someone else on the bus with me. I could smell it breathing. And beneath the rumble of the bus’s engine, and the ticking creak of its suspension, there was a thumping rhythm that seemed to be saying my name. Jhaani.
Jhaani.
Jhaani.
Give me your hand.
It was as though the stranger could speak using only its heartbeat. And I could hear it.
The rain wasn’t falling outside, and Jack wasn’t here to help hold me back from reaching out. And most of the pain had gone. A lion took my hand.
You can get free of your skin like this.
It was just a shadow, sitting on the seat across the aisle from mine, a wide mane spilling around its head. Holding my hand in one of its own, it slipped a talon beneath the line of the scar, between my wrist and my elbow, where all of yesterday had been a line of pain and now was just a long, maddening itch. And something that was me came loose. And parted.
And even in the dark of the night, I could see that beneath my itchy skin was something soft, golden.
Jhaani.
Slip free.
***
I let myself into the flat quietly. Nina would be back by now, and sleeping. And there wasn’t much night left before dawn for me to get my sleep in. I touched my teeth again, to make sure they weren’t still long. I folded my indigo tunic on the chair next to my bed, the dandelion plate still tucked safe inside it. And I laid myself down, picturing exactly what next needed to be added to my bell’s Template.