SSCS 03: Installment 35 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 35 of this year’s SSCS (the final installment!). 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…
There was a Bell I had to finish. A spell I needed to cast. And a beautiful boy, with black eyes and white teeth and beautiful, long-fingered hands who was waiting to be saved. He would help me cast my Bell in bronze, pour two molten metal sheets across my Template, wrap them around with plaster, and then, deeply, pour in molten metal again, for real. And when the Minister came next, to hold the Court’s ritual ceremony of False Appeasement, I would be there.
I would stand inside that Bell, and speak us into the Dreaming, and dream us free. And I, then, would wake everyone up.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 35: 22.1210
***
After the Dreaming, I ride the bus, diesel engine over a black-brick road jolting my head where I lean against the grimy window. We pass a junkyard and I watch cranes lifting down the containers from one of the stacks, opening a broader canyon to shine through morning sunlight.
After the Dreaming, Elka, Lily, and Hafiz, the doorman, stand in front of the shabby, grey door to the factory, beneath a red paper lantern, but cannot enter. The door has been locked. The rest of us have long since fled. The rickety door to the workshop above-stairs sags half-open, but no one can see it, and, behind the glass, the greenhouse is filled with a motionless fog, silent and opaque.
No one has seen the Minister since the Bell was rung, the Dreaming ended.
After the Dreaming, Nina has walked down the street to the corner to buy a glossy magazine and a bag of sweet dumplings wrapped in pink and green paper and stamped with plum blossoms. After paying, she turns around and, before walking away, hands out two to the woman and her little boy who are next in line behind her.
After the Dreaming, Jack and I buy noodles from a shop where the lady behind the counter wears a brown tunic picked out with stars in bright stitches along the hem. We walk with our cardboard bowls down to the muddy jetty that runs along the River. Jack watches the skyline of the city, the swooping of birds the only piece of the silhouette that trembles. I watch the shape of Jack’s wrist when he raises his bowl to his lips, remind myself that scars, even over knobs of bone shaped like cogs, mean healing.
After the Dreaming, I kneel beside my mother in front of my father’s alter, leaving an offering of three lychees, half-peeled. My little sister kneels beside us too, in her crisp, ochre tunic, and is offering a small bowl of ice-cream, already starting to puddle amid incense and the warm, evening air. Lychees with ice-cream was my father’s favorite desert, but he always complained they didn’t taste good if we didn’t peel them together.
After the Dreaming, I stand in the lamp-lit twilight, waiting on a black-brick corner for my bus. My worker’s tunic is already stuffed away in my bag, and a stranger comes to stand beside me, a silver-tipped cane grasped lightly in one hand. We ride the bus until it has emptied of all but distant city lights glittering through smoggy windows like starlight. Then we leave our skins on the back-bench, and go running through streets that are never quite quiet, up onto rooftops and beneath a sodium-lit sky that is never quite dark. Sating ourselves on slivers of the city, and all its possibilities.