Crystal Eaters

by Shane Jones

  “And now,” said Mom, pulling Remy’s hand from her face, “they’re gone.”

  She thinks about her parents, and Brother in prison, and wonders who is closest to exhaling their final crystal. Who will become a husk? Who will become zero? She thinks Definitely Mom. She thinks Then Dad. She thinks Then just me filling up their space.

  Mom’s illness diminishes Dad because he is helpless against it and is forced to fall back on vague coping mechanisms of, “She is sick and losing, and it’s natural. Let the process be the process.” He crushes everything inside. Emotion comes in outbursts, the occasional closed eyes and biting-his-bottom-lip while standing over the kitchen sink, washing dishes with the sun seeping in hot and ugly. Remy hates the way he moves through the house – slowly and with caution – as if he knows, selfishly, egotistically, that he’s the one who will hear her last breath.

  Dad shouted about count through every wall, floor, and ceiling in the house last night. “Doesn’t she understand you start with a hundred and then you lose them,” he said. Mom sat in bed, covered in dandelion-print sheets and used the spitting cloth to expel the color red. “It’s simple,” he said.

  36

  He keeps a box in the closet. The bottoms of hanging shirts cover the box like a hiding child. The box is white. Inside is a crystal with eight smooth sides, a sharp point, and a rough fire-burned looking end.

  Gripping a sharpened spoon he uncurls a fingernail-sized piece from the black crystal. Tapping the edge with his thumb he makes sure there is a sharp edge to cut his mouth. More dangerous if the edge is dull.

  He sits on his bed with the crystal floating in a pool of saliva beneath his tongue. His legs are splayed in a wide V. He throws himself back, aiming for the pillow, but bangs his head against the headboard. Moving the piece of crystal around the bottom of his mouth he inhales and exhales, feels a surge of expecting blood widening its cells. Sliding down on the bed he positions the pillow behind his head and gets ready.

  Before the prison was erected there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony. There were pink-skinned politicians and a crowd of shoulder-shruggers and a pair of giant scissors an intern held for two hours. A politician named Sanders stood at a podium too short for his height and struggling to speak into the microphone said: “Ellsworth Correctional… we will treat inmates with respect and compassion here. They will live with minimal supervision. Cells will be similar to our own bedrooms at home. The idea is simple – those who break the law should be kept away from the general population, but in the community that lawbreakers create inside Ellsworth Correctional they should feel free and normal no matter if they are uneducated people with poor social skills.” And then later, near the end of his speech: “Inmates are not animals!” The crowd cheered but they weren’t sure what they were cheering for other than the sweaty enthusiasm of Sanders. Construction began immediately with men in orange hats and yellow machines zigzagging the grounds. Sanders pressed his suit jacket to his heart when a backhoe struck rock. For months the villagers watched the prison rise slowly, dangerously, blinking and craning their necks, wondering how something so large could be so real.

  Head on pillow, box resting on his stomach, Pants McDonovan presses his tongue on the crystal until it’s angled against his gums, aimed at the roots of his bottom front teeth. He grinds it in. Ringing his head, the tearing of cheesecloth. He sees himself as a child kissing Mom goodnight, Harvak barking, when the family was a family. He played spit-tag with Remy in the mine and jogged with Dad through the streets and the family glowed, discussed their day over plates of pork and carrots. Before bed, Dad poured YCL into the generator and he helped with little nervous hands because Dad always corrected him, always told him he was either pouring too fast or too slow, he wanted to get it right, he wanted to pour smoothly, and sometimes, he did, but Dad never noticed with Pants holding the bucket just so with his arms trembling. This was a time of worship and prayer. The sun didn’t scream and spit a heat wave. The city was faraway and could be laughed at, could be mocked by thrusting your hips at it or turning and lowering your pants. He collected bugs in mason jars and hid them in his closet. He asked Mom for potted plants to be placed near his crystals. He wanted living things to always be in his room. At night he would listen to the bugs and position the plants in the moonlight.

  Fire pools across his chest and drips from his ribs as he swallows. He sits up and inhales – eyes trying to escape from their sockets looking cartoonish – chest puffed in rash, arms stiff at his sides with fists punched into the mattress. His feet are numb with needles, but it’s worth it. Going to come alive, going to balance out now. He leans over the bed and spits a stretched glob of sparkling blood on the cement floor.

  A dirt cloud from clapped together shoes (Friday, Tony’s job) floats by and a transparent Younger Mom hovers in the debris. She says hello then disappears, her gown becoming her then all becoming the dirt cloud becoming the air. Without moving his arm, hand at his side, he does a little wave.

  More spit. The glob is a thick stream with no end. This is a reaction from eating black crystal that happens once every two hundred times. A cleansing. When the stream detaches from his mouth he falls to the floor and does 50 pushups – his ponytail wrapped around his neck hitting the floor before his chest. Turning his head, he spit-sprays the wall in the shape of Mom.

  He stands. He touches the heat inside his forearms by way of his lips. His shirt, a ridiculously huge hand-me-down from Mom with a duck drawing that Dad once wore and made fun of, is saturated in sweat and he pulls the shirt off and whips it around his head before helicoptering it across the room. His right foot twists and slips left in blood.

  He hits the peak.

  Jogging in place, he imagines a sunset at his back and Harvak at his side. The black crystal is collapsing his veins. He runs his hand through the top of his buzz-cut before grabbing the rubber band holding his ponytail. Once pulled through he shakes his head and a flap of blond hair bounces off his upper back. He looks ridiculous and insane. He’s on a beach telling the tide to wait. He’s running from the smell of salt. The village is in the distance and there’s a forest to enter. He shouts that Mom will live forever. She stands under an oak tree with her mouth open, her lips highlighted in red crystals. His eyes rocket into clouds raining sparks. His right foot slides out from beneath him. Heel on sky, his left leg upright, he floats across the sky with the village and beach and forest below.

  Then the prison gets real quiet. The PA announces lights out. A voice from the upper level, might be Jeremy, screams to be taken back to the village where things are simple and quiet, people love each other there, and someone says People might love you there but here you’re just annoying.

  Pants McDonovan jumps into bed and is soon asleep and back on the beach. Mine workers dressed in mud wearing clear masks ask if he wants to die and he answers I’m ready. Harvak runs at his side. He says to him No illness that’s my fault will take Mom away, come on, we’re breaking out of here. The prison is quiet with only the night-shift steps of guards as Mom opens a door in the oak tree.

  35

  The heat wave continues. The elderly don’t wear their traditional robes anymore. Few possess air conditioners donated by the city charity group, Mob of Mary’s, who make bi-monthly runs into the village with clothing and canned meat. Those who do have Relief Gatherings where people take five minute turns in an air conditioned room where they smile in splayed out naked forms across a marble slab. At night they pray to their crystal collections for snow. Green crystals melt in direct sunlight. The leader of Brothers Feast, Z., finger-painted the green across his forehead in three bug-smeared lines. From the way he’s dressed, the heat doesn’t seem to bother him. The elders question his mental health.

  Younger villagers who are against Brothers Feast, who have inherited land from the older generations, believe in selling to the city for reasons of safety. They believe the transfer of land will somehow spare their lives. The elderly have become conservative w
ith their land, not wanting to give anything up. There have been secret discussions near The Bend with rogue mine workers willing to sell out and city politicians hungry to consume. The differences between the two cultures are absurdly obvious when a mine worker tells Sanders he has to get back to the mine to melt the yellow for the night’s electricity. Another mine worker asks what each of their counts are and Sanders says, “We’re good.”

  Dad says, the only one smiling, “Was the stove left on over night? Remy, see if the refrigerator is overheating.”

  Houseplants kept in shade and usually watered daily by Remy have wilted to cooked leaves of spinach because Remy is consumed with what is happening to Mom, not the heat, fuck the heat. But she knows it’s getting worse. The forks and spoons on the kitchen table burn to the touch. Remy imagines the moon as a bucket of water she kicks over, cooling the sun below. Parts of her body that never sweat like the margins of her lips, her ears, her nail beds, are now continuously covered in sweat. The day’s heat runs into the following day and the following day after that with no break, only a build-up, a layering of more. She sits at the kitchen table eating another meal prepared by Dad, taps her knee ten times while watching Mom doing nothing but staring into whatever she sees in the blank space before her. Remy thinks she hears a dog barking inside the house. She thinks about touching Mom. She worries about Dad, his decision making.

  In direct correlation to Mom, Dad has lost several crystals. When he jokes in his passive-aggressive way See if the refrigerator is overheating Remy can’t look at his awkward smirk, his do-nothing ways with Mom sitting skeletal. Dad’s strategy is to let time make all decisions, but with Mom rapidly losing her count, he wonders if he’s wrong, wonders deep down if doing nothing will just end in a faster zero. But he still believes in time and nature and tradition. How Remy sees the world is something three dimensional and lit up, where Dad sees an endless and flat blackness.

  Mom’s room is the coolest in the house. Disease moves faster in heat. She has a red box with a green felt top. Inside, a black crystal given to her by her son. He never explained its use and Mom keeps it a secret from Dad and Remy. Her son, not the myth of Royal Bob, is the only person to ever find the black crystals. Some of the desperate elderly, closing down, believe in what he and The Sky Father Gang were trying to accomplish but they’ve never seen something like a black crystal. Mom walks into her room.

  She plays a game when the sun reaches a special height in the sky. She sits down. The sun splits the window in the shape of a triangle and from the doorway her spine is visible through her nightgown. Her body aches with no sleep nights because not only is her count well below fifty, Mom basically a cat, but the number is falling incredibly fast now and she can feel it leaving her body. The game helps.

  From the box she takes out the black crystal and dips it into the sunlight. The triangle warps and skinny lines of light reflect off the crystal. Mom tilts her hand until a hologram of another black crystal appears above the one she holds.

  During her best games she produces eight crystal holograms attached to the black crystal she holds by eight beams of light. The highest touches the ceiling, the lowest flickers near her ear, and once, she moved her head until half the crystal disappeared into her hair.

  Last week she stretched her fingers into positions that burned her joints. Her heart skipped a beat. The illness scratched her skin, ran the slopes of her body. She stopped the game when she heard Remy and Dad arguing about Twinning.

  Today she plays the game perfectly. She dominates the sun. Twin horses float above her hand. She smiles because horses are new. She’s 5’4 in height, her gown drags through hallways, but she feels like a giant creating holograms from the black crystal she holds and now, horses. Their bodies are a blue-black shine and they stomp their hooves and radiate six ribs of light across the room. For a moment, her life is a delirious and beautiful dream, something worth extending.

  When she drops the black crystal from exhaustion, feeling sick, the floor seems to sink into the room below where Dad and Remy are looking up.

  34

  The baby slept in the shade of the red pencil Remy had used and the drawing took up most of the wall.

  “That’s new,” Dad said and pointed at the drawing.

  “Bored of blue and yellow so I drew a red, no big deal. Dad, what’s Twinning?”

  “You drew a baby.”

  “Just felt like it.”

  “Does it mean anything?”

  “Not really.”

  When Dad walked into the room days before, Harvak was on a table under a blue sheet with a wreath of hair balanced on top. Walking from the room Dad had a terrible feeling, something like anger, that became sour inside him when he convinced himself not to process what he was feeling. Since he was a boy he always managed his feelings this way because it felt safer to live this way. It hurt to take the feelings, drag them up and through his body, twist and mold them into words that he had to force from his mouth. Besides, having those words interpreted by another person was dangerous. Language distorts emotions. What he did, even as a little boy, for example, standing in a dark room full of strange adults, was erase the emotions before they could exit him in words. He told Remy, without looking at her, that Twinning didn’t exist. A hard and simple no.

  “You sure?”

  He mentioned those who cut themselves with crystals. They believed in ascending count, and in a stunt similar to the things Brothers Feast does, marched into the city only to be imprisoned. They preached about Twinning and carried banners that read WE WILL BE REMEMBERED AND LIVE FOREVER. Dad didn’t mention his son participating because denial is holy. He stopped talking and stared blankly ahead, fighting the flickering images of his son walking toward the city, away from him, the sun nothing but a pinprick in the blue.

  “Did it work?” Remy asked bouncing on the bed. “They add?”

  He forced himself to look at her. “They are in jail. The point is, sorry, your hood is falling down and I can’t see your eyes. There, better. What I’m trying to say is, what is it I’m saying, yes, they went crazy with those crystals they found, trying to do what you’re talking about. Extending a life, come on now, you’re just a person and your life is special because of that.”

  “Black crystal moves your insides,” said Remy. “Kids in my school say it changes your blood, and they’re still buried underground. What do you have to say about that?”

  “I wouldn’t listen because who knows who their parents are. Adults get weirder and weirder as they get older. Everyone has their opinions but you’re mine, you listen to me.”

  “Tell me again about the Gang,” she said, feeling embarrassed. “I like when you tell me.”

  “Okay, I can do that.”

  Remy knew the story about The Sky Father Gang to near memory but wanted to hear Dad talk, she wanted his words, his soft words, in the air surrounding her.

  They were seven kids who dressed in identical red robes with black hoods and black belts. What they believed in was different from Brothers Feast who waste their time with stunts (the village is so accustomed to them that their last stunt, pretending to dig up the crystal mine road with comically large cardboard shovels while dressed as city residents in navy blue suits donated by Mob of Mary’s, everyone ignored). Remy remembered Brother being in The Sky Father Gang and she knew where he was now, prison. She remembered him with a duffel bag full of crystals, ready to leave forever, and she remembered how long his hair had grown down his back, and she remembered how distant he was to her, to everyone, to everything. It wasn’t him anymore.

  Mom went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  The Sky Father Gang wanted to live longer. They founded their belief based on certain blue and yellow crystals Twinning. These crystals shared a similar lattice structure and grew together, intertwined. If Twinning existed outside the body, why not in? Why couldn’t you double what you already had? These were the questions they had asked, were forgotten about with their
imprisonment, and the questions Remy now resurrected and Dad tried to repeal.

  She leaned into his words.

  Experimenting with black crystal is what drove The Sky Father Gang into the city, wide-eyed and tongue-out. Boys and girls in undone robes showing crystal laced underwear screwed and bled in city streets. Brother didn’t wear any underwear, only robe. They took turns inserting crystals inside each other’s holes and created new openings in their stomachs, chests, and thighs. People took pictures on phones and uploaded them to websites. The city charged the village to remove the crystals, to repair the bruised bones and missing skin at a place called a hospital. Rumors in the village said The Sky Father Gang were close to finding a solution to increasing count. Brother wanted Mom to live forever. A news report showed them jumping in the courtroom, skeletal-lunging faces spitting on a pale-faced judge with thinning red hair. Cameras followed. The Sky Father Gang kicked a table over and laughed with their heads tilted back. Veins webbed their bodies. They tackled a guard, everyone falling to the floor in a crashing wave, and the Gang spun their bodies by kicking their feet against the floor. Brother howled in a fish-flop directly on top of the guard. Brother was the loudest. Brother was raw. Remy believed in what he was trying to accomplish. Why not try if that’s all there is to do.

  Dad loosened the fur collar of his robe. He told Remy it was too hot to be wearing these but she insisted he talk more and he agreed, wanting, needing, to connect with his daughter who on some mornings he didn’t recognize. Sometimes, when she entered a room, the size of her startled him, as if a stranger had entered the house, and he’d jump in his chair and wonder where the biggest knife in the kitchen was.

  In the bathroom, the porcelain clink of the toilet bowl raised by Mom.

  “What about eating them?” Remy asked.

  “Tried that. Very sick.”