by Shane Jones
Another mine worker says, “Nice… reeeeaaal nice. They are laughing at us every day and this, what does this do to help?”
The Brothers have no reaction. They enjoy their dinner in the street.
A man outside a bar reaches into a rusty barrel and extracts a turkey leg. With a big swinging arm he launches the leg skyward, toward the stretching bag, the ameba in the sky. The turkey leg lands on the table and wobbles their plates. They thank the man and portion off the gristle-rot. Men and women in their traditional robes, their backs hunched from mandatory years working in the mine boo the Brothers with spittle.
“Just working on our public image,” Bobby T. tells the crowd.
“Quiet and obedient is what we need,” says Ricky.
“It makes sense to be disciplined,” says Z. “Don’t act weird, right, right.”
They all smile and nod and eat. They drink coffee from a metal urn kept hot by the air. The sweat on their skin thickens to a clear goo that traps lightweight bugs. Z. takes a long drink from his mug. He notices one bug has a sucking mouth and he leaves it there, sucking, on his wrist.
A woman in an orange robe runs up and slaps the cup from Z.’s hand. The coffee paint-splatters Ricky’s sleeve. The cup rolls across the table and falls to the ground while Z. sits frozen, mouth open, pretending to still hold the cup until the woman walks away mumbling, calling him a lost child.
“The s-s-s-service here is awful,” says Z. and everyone laughs. He heard the “lost child” comment and it hurt. He just needs to define the jailbreak in reverse and his life will work out. Everything that has become before will be nothing.
Daylight wastes to dark. Residents retreat to their homes. The Brothers stay at the table in the street, candles flickering, the bag of hot air in the sky, the moving ameba, pops and pours millions of locusts, black bugs, bugs with sucking mouths, invisible tiny things with just wings. The Brothers barely notice, they look at the city. Another building is on fire. Village radicals known as Black Mask are trying to stop the city’s growth by burning sections. This has happened several times and no one in the village is sure who is doing it exactly, but it’s most likely two or three mine workers. Some think it’s Royal Bob, running in his blue shorts, his long gray hair burning and swatting the base of the buildings. But no one believes burning buildings will stop the city. For every building burned to the ground, three more rise in its place.
Full dark from above. They stay up with the heat figuring out what the jailbreak in reverse is. Z. reads over the letters received from the prison. There’s a new one that he somehow missed and Z. blames Arnold for the letter being placed in the old, already read piles. Arnold’s skin burns so bad from the heat he thinks he’s covered in biting bugs and he slaps his arm. There are bugs, tons of them, on him. He apologizes. Z. reads the letter once, twice, then three more times, holding it up with two hands. He cross-checks it with several letters and notes, then goes back to this new letter. Arnold notices, his nose practically touching his arm, that little bugs, barely visible, are burrowing into him.
Z. shouts, “I GOT IT,” and startles Arnold and the others.
He’s covered in glistening sweat.
He’s shaking and smiling and holding the paper with two hands like he’s looking through it and into the sky and he screams again, “I-I-I DID IT I GOT IT I ACTUALLY DID IT Y-Y-Y-YOU FOOLS DID YOU HEAR ME I-I-I GOT IT.”
They finalize the plan that will free The Sky Father Gang and make Z. forever known. It’s all he’s ever wanted. As a child he spent eight days looking for a turtle because he heard they existed, came from the city. He never wanted something so bad. His mom ended up getting one from Mob of Mary’s and it died three days later. When he stands on the table again it’s not with anger, but joy. He carves circles in the air with his fingers and gyrates his hips. Streams of burning turquoise rain down a curve in the sky. Arnold slaps the table and Ricky and Scotty and Bobby T. mouth-fart a beat and shout, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” They dance and celebrate and swat bugs from their faces until the sun comes up, the temperature rising, the future as them in it, forever.
23
With a screwdriver from Dad’s toolbox Mom chisels off a piece of black crystal, why not. She listened for years to her son speak about increasing count (life, longer). He once walked home with the first black crystal and gave it to her. She didn’t know he had others. She didn’t know he would experiment and form something as dangerous as The Sky Father Gang. She should try something, anything, even if she doesn’t believe in it, yes, even if she doesn’t believe in it because the meaning of life is to feel some good even though what’s inside you is a waiting zero. She moves the screwdriver.
Mom has okay days and bad. At her worst, she stays in bed where she coughs crystals into the spitting cloth (Chapter 2, Death Movement, Book 8). Her number skims a green lake, dives, and tadpole-swims away from her. During her okay days Mom sits in the triangle of sunlight entering her window and warms her face for hours. At the dinner table she acts in a way that doesn’t turn Remy’s head in the opposite direction. But most days are bad. Under the covers at night she traces with her finger the sharpness of her hipbones and imagines a man fitting both hands around her as if she were a clay pot, lifting her up, and drinking what liquid is left.
She moves the screwdriver over the black crystal trying to peel it apart.
The family has broken apart over the years in a honeycomb hexagon of ways. That’s how she sees it – a solid shape but with separate pieces inside. She remembers the night in the mine, the men. They were dressed like mine workers. She didn’t speak to anyone about what had happened. The distance between herself and her husband is an endless black field, their bodies as shadows inside the black field moving away from each other, neither able to see the other. She didn’t want to be touched after it happened and Dad’s hand-on-hip move in the kitchen was viciously swatted away. She told herself, or was it Dad, she could push the experience away, and with time, destroy it.
She places the piece, which is the size of a clipped toenail, under her tongue. It’s sharp and with any movement will sink in. She sits on the floor in the sunlight triangle. She considers trying for the Horses Hologram again, and in the thought, doesn’t realize she’s chewing the crystal, breaking it into specks, and swallowing.
It’s a good amount of black crystal to take. When a hot flash blankets her body she inspects her arms because they feel swollen. There’s the tadpole-swimming-away-from-her feeling again but this time it’s pleasant and warm. Her body is at first underwater, then exploding out of the water and into the sun. Heat, a hard ball of it, rolls up from her stomach and clogs her throat. She screams, laughs, sees herself running the circumference of the earth. She swallows and the lump in her throat flattens. Mom thinks she’s added and with one finger she taps her chest and counts to fifty. She smiles into the sun with her eyes open, blinding, not caring. On thirteen pieces of paper she writes
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
I’m not sick anymore.
and throws them into the air before she feels an insatiable need to move.
She walks from her room and through the hallway with beige paint peeling and family portraits with green crystal-studded frames melting. It’s impossible to lose her balance, she feels so good, so she skips on one foot for several steps, laughing, until walking again, hands tracing waves on both walls. She stops at his room in one big jump.
Dad sits on the bed, pillows propped up behind him, his legs extended. He wears a pair of white underwear with blue trim. His body is sprouted with blac
k hair, his skin tan and cracked. He is sad, quiet, tired. From the uncovered ceiling light his body glistens. She asks why things are so difficult. He sighs dramatically. Mom isn’t acting like Mom, asking him more questions, brimming with energy. What can she do so Remy doesn’t grow up to be like her Brother? Is she bad? Tell her she’s not. Tell her things like bathing her children in the kitchen sink, and breast-feeding them every hour, and walking them for miles inside their home to sleep, and comforting them through endless cries, and trimming their nails while they squirm, and massaging little constipated bellies, and walking slanted from exhaustion, bruising her arms on doorways, and not bathing for a week, and eating all meals over the kitchen sink, eyes and mind always on her babies, everything for her babies, never putting herself first, tell her it meant something.
“Talk,” she says, not sounding like Mom. “Say anything.”
Hundred barks through the walls and Dad smiles thinking how they tried hiding him.
“Please,” says Mom. “I need you to.”
She moves her weight from one foot to the other, her heavy blood shifting inside her from leg to leg. She can’t stop her twitching fingers. Her eyes burn undiscovered colors.
“Did you actually have the energy to make that cherry pie?”
“Cherry,” she says. “You bought it days ago at Sheperds. Do me a favor.”
“You’re a good mother,” he says getting up from the bed. He doesn’t want to be bothered with words. The worst thing you can do to Dad is trap him and only allow an escape by conversation. He’s so limited. It’s unfair to him and more unfair to Mom.
“One favor,” says Mom.
“She’s smart, she’ll be fine. Not everything needs to be discussed all the time.”
“All the time.”
“See, right there.”
“This isn’t about you. Can you do something for me?”
He stands in his underwear, and she stands in her gray nightgown, both under the light. Paint is peeling around the edges of the window where the heat enters. Even the floor feels heated. She puts her arms around his body and rests her head on his chest. He can’t remember the last time they touched like this and the gesture, after sending an initial shock through his body that makes him move one step backward, then seems to soften him, his body going back against hers, makes his hands move up and through her hair.
“What is it?”
“Just move a little,” she says.
He squeezes her gently around her upper back and swallows her smallness. He envisions a life without her, living in this heat with Remy, and thinks how a family isn’t a family with just a daughter and a father. You need higher numbers. He’s going to lose her. Each strand of her hair is coated in sweat. He hums, and together their hips sway and he says yes, her children remember everything, that’s their job, to keep remembering.
22
He found a bird with a broken wing. He stepped on the broken wing with one foot, and stepped on the good wing with his other foot. He moved his toes away from the bird’s body until a bone cracked. Remy told him to stop. He smeared her wings across the dirt. This was the worst thing he ever did as a child. The bird exhaled her final crystal in a circle of knotted smoke.
21
Remy walks into the mine before the workers arrive. Her bare feet slog through mud created by the heat wave rain. Steam rises from the ground in a prehistoric kind of way. Over her dirty red shorts with white trim she wears a purple nightgown taken from Mom’s closet. Smells like old person. She imagines walking through younger ghost-versions of herself (how many times have I walked into this mine?) and swats them away, sprints, shouts at them, plays spit-tag with them. She’s at the mine for one reason and one reason only.
In a plastic bucket she collects a dozen black crystals. They exist. Dug up by a truck’s tires during the rainstorm. They’ve been here all this time, beneath everyone’s noses who never looked close enough and just needed the perfect combination of temperature and rainfall to unlock the mud. Her bare feet helped, the workers with their thick boots are useless. Black crystals slide around the plastic bucket Remy holds. The sun is a bully on her shoulders, pushing her head down, face to chest. The sun highlights the black crystals and she fills the bucket and runs home.
In her bedroom she breaks them into shards with a hammer taken from Dad’s toolbox. On the floor she forms a black box. She steps in barefoot and marches. It don’t hurt. She shouldn’t be doing this, but ever since running in the mine with Hundred and cutting her feet, sitting in the tub and getting sky-high, she’s been craving the sensation. Remy believes she’s discovered a way to live longer. Each crystal inside me births a twin. The broken crystals slice her feet until her legs end at the ankles.
She jumps up on the bed and pulls her left foot up to her mouth and picks each crystal out then puts them back in. She does this foot, then the other, and goes back and forth in a blur until she can’t do it once more, her arms sore like lifting buckets of YCL, helping Dad and Brother. Under her bed it smells like vomit. She stretches out and goes giddy with anticipation. Her body hums. When she places her hands on her stomach she ascends and the black crystal drawn on the ceiling inflates with light. Mom says something from her bedroom. Her body is kept together by disease. Her wrists are the diameter of a broom handle. Remy has had a repeating nightmare for a week of a game show where Mom is a table made of slush she has to carry down a staircase. The surrounding audience, wearing raincoats and green casino visors, hold signs that read ZERO MAMMA. Remy always trips and launches table-Mom skyward to the audience leaning away.
Remy remembers those who came from the city – meaner looking compared to the soft faces of Mob of Mary’s – selling stolen televisions, the white price tags still on, dangling in the dark. They had heard of these machines before and the box of light in person was real seductive. Dad said okay, wanting to do something special for the family but hating having to engage in these kinds of forced interactions. They bought one with a long metal antennae the sellers seemed to mock. They tried to get him to buy a more expensive one. But it worked just fine – Dad adjusting the wire V into a position so you couldn’t leave the room without knocking it over. The shows they watched didn’t relate to them at all but the colors were pretty and the actors’ voices always loud and stories engaging. For a full year, once a week, they watched a show about a family living on a beach near a forest. The family used their stove as a boat to catch fish. Remy and Adam couldn’t stop asking Mom and Dad what an ocean was, why couldn’t they have one, what’s a turtle, why does the moon pull the ocean, what’s a jellyfish, does sand burn.
Black crystal doesn’t last long in teenagers. It’s leaving her system but she’s still seeing the new.
Sensation reenters her feet as Remy floats down from the ceiling draped in dogs. Hundred is wrapped around her neck like a scarf. Harvak, sinking into her chest, tells her no one will live much longer, this life is constantly ending, it’s her job to save Mom. Remy says she knows, it’s what she’s going to do, stop choking me, if this life is constantly ending, then it’s constantly beginning.
20
Driving in his truck at night, thinking about treating Remy with more kindness, don’t be so short with her, she’s just a girl, you understand how hard she has it, she can name her dog whatever he hits something that crumples the hood into a pile of tents.
The sound of the accident can be heard in the city and some run to The Bend with their binoculars.
His body hugs the steering wheel. His head touches the windshield which is the hood. Smoke rises from the headlights and the engine hisses. The tires on the left side go flat and Dad leans. When his arms slide off the steering wheel he jolts up with a loud gasp.
Hands on his chest, he exhales and coughs blue slush. Dad inspects his arms, chest, stomach, and thighs. No sign of blood or crystals leaking out from these parts, but from inside, yes, some organ split open. On the rearview mirror is a honeycomb hexagon in thin black marker with t
he words THIS IS WHAT OUR FAMILY IS LIKE written across it. Remy how dare you what’s the matter with you. She’s been acting strange, someone not Remy moving inside Remy, someone not the same daughter he sat with wearing floppy robes, talking his heart out.
He rolls his neck and practices breathing. His ribs are sore at each inhale and he’s reminded of the last time the wind was knocked out of him – in the only fight of his life – by a kid in The Sky Father Gang. Dad wanted to talk to his son before he went into the city. Dad wanted to tell him not to go, maybe it was his fault he was acting this way, how about we try talking this out. The kid with the black crystallized facial scar in the shape of a key said his son didn’t want to talk and aimed his fist for the backside of Dad’s heart and landed.
When he opens the door, his knees and hands hit the ground. He crawls to the front of the truck. What he drove into is a table with dinner plates, melted candles, and a turkey leg with little meat. Dad massages his calves. His jeans are covered in dirt and some YCL from a mason jar that was to be added to the home generator. They’ve been running low lately and Dad is worried they will run out. It takes him ten minutes to stand.
“Hey, you. What you doing out here?” says a girl, a runaway, in purple spiked shoes. She smokes a cigarette awkwardly, her T-shirt looks shredded, and she stands in the glow of a break light.
“What am I doing out here?” says Dad. “What are YOU doing out here?” He spits up more blue slush and the girl steps back. “GET. NOW. OUT OF HERE.”
The girl runs toward the fence, back to the city.
“NO ONE FROM THE CITY BELONGS IN THE VILLAGE,” shouts Dad. “STAY AWAY.” Then, even though he knows it’s impossible, “I’M TELLING YOUR PARENTS ABOUT THIS.” His chest hurts from the words coming out and he imagines a jagged crystal now lodged across his lungs.