SSCS 03: Installment 29 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 29 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…
–– And then I blinked, and found myself again standing inches away from my bell-Template. But it was Jack who was standing up on my stool, holding one line of the molding form we’d just pieced together using my dandelion plate. I turned my head, just in time to find Elka coming around the end of the bamboo screens.
“I need his help to finish it, Elka.” My eyes were black, and so were Jack’s, I’d made sure of it. So Elka just scowled, and hunched in on herself a bit more than usual, but then turned back and stumped away.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 29: 22.0401
“Jack?” I reached up and touched the back of his elbow, didn’t feel him flinch. But then, I no longer flinched if something touched my arm either. Maybe he’d gone past his pain, if he felt it, just as much as I’d gone past mine. It had been a pain half made of fear, anyway. “Which side of the dreaming are you standing on right now?”
“I don’t think there are sides.” He was still turned toward the Bell’s template, his beautiful hands carefully positioning the molding to work the next section of border that went around the center panel. We’d used the dandelion plate, but the result faded between dandelions and the silhouette of the city skyline as seen from the river, just before it crumbled. It would go along the very top and bottom of the Bell as well, though we’d need to switch to something more with gears and stars for the center spokes. I could almost see it, almost clear enough not to be pulled into the fog of Dreaming.
“You can do the rest without me.” Somehow Jack was down from the stool now and standing beside me, hand holding mine, fingers twined. When I startled and looked toward him, his eyes were still black, but he didn’t seem to notice, just leaned over and kissed my cheek before slipping away again into the maze of the workshop, back to his own work. I wondered if he’d been remembering something else that hadn’t happened yet. And I tried not to be afraid of what might happen once his work was done.
I almost reached up to the bell-template, to pick up the molding and hurry it along. But there was a soft, red light falling on it, cast through the opening out to the rail deck, and something in the light called to me instead. I’d forced my way ahead through enough of the dreaming today. Perhaps I should rest. Perhaps I should let the dreaming force me a bit instead.
Out on the rail deck, the air was earth and salt, gas fumes and last week’s rain. It was a taste that sat heavy on my tongue, just as the red light of the smog-lit sky fell heavy on my face, and my hands. Something in the city shifted, a tremor that rippled through my inner senses and was gone.
If I’d had claws, I would have dug them into the stones of the wall. Instead I crouched, and ran my fingers first over the soft fuzz of dandelion petals, then against the stiff fuzz of geranium leaves. I didn’t need to lean in to kiss those petals to know they’d be softer than my lips.
……Behind me in the workshop, hammers rang out, chipping away the plaster to reveal a great, and monstrous Bell. And the light falling from the sky was no longer red, but instead clean and clear as water in a deep, fast-running stream.
……Behind me in the workshop, someone was crying, keening – Elka – as they stripped the last of her dreaming from her and used it to bind her hands. The light falling from the sky was as soot-stained as her tunic and boiling toward a color as dark and as deep, portending of rain about to come sheeting down and swallow us.
……Behind me in the workshop, foul-smelling steam hissed and billowed outward to where I crouched, layering the scents of artistry into the old, crumbled bricks, catching in the breeze and whispering through the gaps in the buildings to send a sulfur and metallic tendrils twisting out across the nearest junkyard to the east.
–– And then the breeze turned cold, and the sky again cast a red light, and I was crouched alone in the silence beside the wall of the rail-deck. But it was the day that I’d been reaching for, or from, returned to the time that I could think of as the present. So I uncurled myself, unfurled myself. I needed to seek out a place where the banyan trees held up the walls.