Crystal Eaters

by Shane Jones

  -4 CRYSTALS FROM DAMAGING PARENTS’ WORDS ENTERING MY BRAIN.

  She continues the game until her skin turns blue and she needs a tiny black crystal flint to regain strength. She stabs her mouth. A freckle expands through her cheek in a red circle that covers one side of her face. The following visions of all things negative she sees awake: Harvak dying, Brother leaving, parents fighting, sun killing. Then, there’s the beach again and the clouds are slowly coming down and each one holds a cop holding a baby under an arbor rung with flowers.

  Black crystal dissolves everything.

  Black crystal is everything.

  Here she is with limbs shaking, lungs sky-up and filling with the good kind of pain, head all air, Remy with eyes glazed-over and wanting everyone she loves to live forever.

  +25 FROM BLACK CRYSTAL.

  “Mom, I need to speak to you, Mom,” she says, knocking on the door and not waiting for an answer, flinging open the door and walking into the bedroom where Mom sits on the floor in a hunched lotus position. Her spine is visible through her nightgown (Chapter 4, Death Movement, Book 8) in the sunlight coming in through the window. When she turns and sees Remy, she slides a red box under the bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I ran the mine during the rainstorm. I know, I know, I shouldn’t, but I did, and it happened.”

  “You’re sick?”

  “With Hundred. A truck almost ran us over. I have to tell you something.”

  “I saw the mud. Come here.”

  Remy sits in the folded angles of Mom’s lap and it’s the first time she thinks maybe she’s too big for this, but being so close to Mom is comforting, even in the heat. She places her head on Mom’s chest and there’s no heartbeat. Wait. There it is.

  “Black crystals,” says Remy, looking up at Mom’s chin. “They exist. They cut my feet and I felt a rush. I know, it’s wrong. But Mom, I’m sorry. I’ve done it again and I’m telling you it adds. I have some left and I don’t think there’s more left in the whole world.”

  Mom moves Remy’s head and body facing forward toward the window so Remy can’t see her skin. Last night, Dad found red scabs in the shape of a door on the back of her neck. “Your Brother talked about this.”

  She couldn’t remember the last time Mom said the word Brother or his real name, Adam. Remy never saw him use black crystal for sure, but she assumed he had it. There was a night when she walked past his bedroom and he was in there with three kids and they were taking turns eating a dark-colored rock. Brother used one side of his mouth to gnaw on it while the others jumped on the bed and told him to keep going, eat it all. It was a dare. Then he acted funny. He ran in place and dripped sweat and slapped his face. He fell to the floor and barked. He rolled over and looked up at Remy and screamed to close the door. After one of the boys slammed it closed they laughed forever. They ran and threw their bodies against the door and she could see little slivers of light around the doorframe and she stepped back thinking the little slivers of light were forming a box around her.

  “It could help you. Or what about the hospital?”

  “You’re still doing it? You have some left?”

  The lace curtains pulled open are singed black at the edges.

  “No,” lies Remy. She can still feel the black crystal inside her. Her feet keep moving when she doesn’t want them to move.

  “Remy.”

  “Just try?”

  “Do you have any left?”

  “I said no.”

  Mom rubs Remy’s shoulders. “Children replace their parents.”

  Remy stands, her legs momentarily tangled inside of Mom, and stomps her feet. She marches. Mom pushes herself backward trying to avoid getting crushed. Remy’s face is all knots, and her cheek, where she placed the black crystal flint, is swollen. She gives one more monster stomp and the sunlight triangle shakes.

  A fire truck’s siren can be heard in the distance and they both look at the window. More city buildings are burning, flames mending seamlessly with sunlight.

  Mom looks up at Remy, a shifting adult-to-child perspective that saddens Mom. “This is what happens.”

  Remy asks, “How many?”

  “It’s something you don’t need to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll feel better knowing what’s inside you.”

  “Remy, please.”

  “But how many? If I have to accept it, I should know it. Mom? Please?”

  “Two.”

  16

  He sits on the roof in the midnight dark. New lights shine from the city. Buildings built in hours. One building shoots up so fast that Dad closes one eye and with his opposite hand finger-walks the sky with each level completed. Windows with workers’ flashlights open to his touch. The sound of hammers fold inside the sound of saws.

  City inspectors are told to sleep outside and report back to Sanders if the city is growing. The inspectors wear white helmets with flashlights and one-piece jumpers the color of pearl. At night they patrol the fence with their lights crisscrossing as they examine the ground. They measure the dirt between the fence and the nearest buildings, and each time the measurement shrinks a quarter-inch.

  “What’s going on?” says one inspector to another, in a concrete stairwell that rises with each word spoken. “We losing our minds from the heat?”

  “Beats me.”

  “We have to report something, Jim.”

  “I told you, it beats me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means I don’t know.”

  “How can we not know?”

  “Just don’t.”

  Later: “Well,” says Sanders, who is aging quickly, not the young buck who once gave a speech at the opening of the prison. He’s balding. In his closet in his office, worn under a suit jacket and pressed between two suits, is a blue dress. Only his wife knows about this fetish, and one day soon, his son.

  The ten dirt-encrusted inspectors stand in the room and their jumpsuits crinkle with movement. Sanders stares. One inspector has his flashlight on. Another inspector pulls the helmet off his head and with the heel of his palm knocks the batteries out and onto the floor. They do their best to stand silent.

  “We don’t know why, or how,” says an inspector. “Also, the sun might be getting closer, but our reports say it’s an optical illusion.”

  “And how, exactly, is that supposed to make sense?” says Sanders.

  “What? The sun, or the city? Or both?”

  “Let’s start with the city.”

  “It doesn’t,” says the same inspector. His black mustache is saturated with sweat. “It doesn’t make any sense at all, that’s what we’re trying to tell you. Not sure if the land is retracting or these buildings are new buildings. I know what that sounds like. We orange-tag them and the tags disappear. Is someone, maybe a villager, taking the tags off? I doubt it. Could be the guy who keeps lighting our buildings on fire. What I’m saying is that one of us sleeps in a building only to wake up with a building in front of that building.”

  “Ghosts are working the night shift?” asks Sanders.

  The inspector without a helmet says, “I touched the sky where the sun is and burned my fingers.”

  “No, well, not exactly,” says the sweaty black mustache. “We can’t prove that. We can’t prove that because we have no physical proof of seeing the buildings going up. Yes, we see, we understand, there is less land between the village and here. Yes, there seems to be more random buildings, but, I, we, just don’t know.”

  “Did you ever think,” says Sanders, rubbing his face with both hands, “to have one, maybe two people, stay up for a few days and just watch, or, I don’t know, take a few pictures? We have so much technology, use it.”

  “But we did,” says the sweaty black mustache. “And we didn’t see anything. There’s no proof of construction, only what our eyes see, which is new buildings, fully constructed.”

  “That soun
ds,” says Sanders, “insane.”

  “We know.”

  “Last question,” says Sanders, sighing and looking frustrated at a maroon-draped window. He wants to take over the village, he wants it more than anything, but he also wants to control it, to understand it. He has speeches to give. He has an election to win. “In your inspectors’ opinions, is the city, however impossible that it can grow on its own accord, actually growing?”

  The sweaty black mustache takes a deep breath and his protective suit crinkles. “Yes,” he exhales.

  Half of Dad’s body hangs over the edge of the roof. He asks a group of nightwalkers below dressed in dark robes with droopy hoods if they’ve noticed the city changing shape. Dad wonders if they’re Black Mask, the ones burning the buildings.

  With faces turned up they whisper-yell, “OF COURSE WE HAVE YOU FOOL FACE. THEY WILL MOVE RIGHT IN. HA! HA! HA! DID YOU HEAR US? WE SAID, HA! HA! HA!”

  “Are you Black Mask?”

  “NO!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “POSITIVE!”

  The air is so hot he doesn’t want to breath. He lies back on the roof, studies the sky, and sees a woman in a constellation whose elbows are stars. Circling his finger he spins a crystal balanced on her lips. He whispers her name. He wants to cry, the idea is there, but he doesn’t because his emotions kept inside have cemented him, have hurt him over the years, and to let it out now would be impossible. He imagines his count attacked with sun-red knives. But whatever he’s at is nothing compared to Mom because she could be at one. She could be an ant. She could be a flower. He didn’t help her. Dad doesn’t have relationships, he has obligations, like making dinner and keeping the generator going. He spins the crystal until it burns a hole through her mouth.

  When he stops spinning she vanishes and white lines that connected stars, created legs, arms, her face, become birds, rats, deer. He thinks he sees a rabbit, her favorite animal, fall from the sky and land on the roof of a building being set on fire by a man without a shirt.

  I need sleep, I’m losing it, help me.

  Below him his family is trying to sleep. He imagines the house is transparent, a dollhouse, and he’s a hand crawling the floors, pulling a blanket to Remy’s chin, moving the hair from his wife’s eyes. He moves into the city, glides over the prison where his son sits on the roof… just… like… him… and Dad’s hand pats him on the back then tugs his ponytail.

  Standing on the roof, Dad admires the homes that are falling apart. Through a home’s window, he sees water pouring from the ceiling. An old woman holds a bucket in her right hand and with her other hand she shakes her fist at the water. Skip Callahan runs into the room waving his arms, telling the woman to get away, he’s here, he can help. He stands under the water with arms raised and the water gets stronger. He keeps screaming that he wants to help, he’s a born helper, until the old woman pushes him out of the way with surprising force, nearly knocking Skip to the floor. She fills the bucket and signals him to get another. Dad looks back up at the buildings then back down and over the shacks.

  As a child what you see is creation. As an adult what you see is destruction.

  Dad leaves the roof by jumping into a pile of hay built in the backyard for such a stunt. One of the nightwalkers jerks his head around and whisper-yells, “BIRD MAN, CAREFUL, YOU’RE GOING TO HURT YOURSELF.”

  15

  I’m going to bed,” says Mom.

  Remy reaches for words with her arms. When Mom peeks her head further into the room and sees her lying on her back in bed, knitting the air with her hands, Mom thinks Remy’s dreaming so she closes the door.

  Remy’s taken the remainder of the found black crystals by tongue cutting. She hoped the black crystal contained powers. Total desperation to try and reverse what’s always lowering. Remy scared and failing to save Mom. Ingesting black crystal is an effect similar to a flooding of poisonous berries in the bloodstream. But it does make you feel better, so she should just take it. Why should she watch Mom be pulled from her life without trying the one thing that contains movement? Most people are content to be squashed by city and sun. Like Dad.

  Remy falls asleep and sees herself as a toddler. She’s recently learned how to walk and Brother is running circles around her. They’re playing spit-tag in the crystal mine. Brother runs, shouts, “You got crystal fungus ON YOUR FACE. IT’S ON YOU,” and she can’t keep up. Her spit is drool and bubble. Most kids would cry, but Remy laughs, she loves any game played with him, and she slaps her arms in the air as her spit and his spit mix on her face. Even when he rides his bike right in front of her, lands a glob across her eyes, she giggles, stomps her feet, and tries to open her eyes by blinking through the froth. The idea to run after him results in her falling.

  When she wakes she asks for Mom to come back, she wants to say goodnight, she wants to say sorry for acting the way she did before. What does it feel like to have two left?

  The black crystal drawing on the ceiling tells her in flashes of light that Mom will be taken. She understands the cruelty of the universe. She doesn’t move and she doesn’t speak. The black crystal inside her dissolves and cleans her blood black. She feels so alone. There’s never anyone to talk to even when there’s someone to talk to. You put your words onto a body and hope for an equal return. Tonight she’ll stand naked at the bathroom mirror, and touching her stomach, wonder what’s left.

  14

  A guard wearing a gold cross on a gold necklace picks at the donuts. One leans back to admire, he’s actually smiling, the flow of coffee into his cup. Another sits on an invisible chair, his back against the wall, his face pained. His hands are on his thighs and every few seconds he adjusts his body, rubbing his ass against the wall, until he falls and the guard from the table touching all the donuts says, “You owe me ten.”

  Voices echo off metal and concrete. The door opens and then closes.

  “Are you lazy now?” says Jug, sitting in a chair, legs spread wide, his torso leaning to the left, finger running back and forth between ankle and knee. “Used to iron in these creases so sharp I’d get goose-bumps. Seriously, goose-bumps.”

  When Pants rolls his neck he can’t feel his head. His teeth hurt. His hair is uncombed and filthy, a hard mat of blond that has grown to the middle of his back. He still requests the top shaved and the look is disarming and absurd and the inmates aren’t sure what to think but most decide to stay away.

  “I’m doing the same job I’ve always done,” Pants says, entering the circle of chairs.

  The guards at the table take notice except the one on the floor fingering through his wallet.

  “Sit,” says Jug.

  Pants pulls a chair away from the others, as far away as possible without being told to move closer.

  “What,” says Pants, sitting down, smiling, looking around the room. “This about laundry, really? I’ll be more aware. I’ll double check, but, you have to give me a break because, I’m just going through some stuff right now.”

  “You have it easy here,” says Jug. “Everyone does. You do what you want, have a nice room –”

  “Are told when to eat, sleep, shower, exercise. It’s not like before. It’s not like the beginning when we decorated our cells. What happened? Power and corruption. City values. This place is rotting from the inside. A guard told me there’s moldy streaks running down the outside walls.”

  Jug smiles. In a way, he respects him for being disrespectful, and what Pants says is true. “Okay, some structure. A prison is a place to hold people who didn’t follow the law and to help those people recover. The word is re-ha-bil-i-ta-tion. Nothing wrong with that I don’t think. The way I see it, I’m part of helping people. Hey, you feeling all right?”

  Pants hasn’t had crystal in days. Besides, he’s leaving this place soon. He’s heard a rumor about the failure of the jailbreak in reverse, that some of the men are now in the prison for good. But he hasn’t seen anyone and his closest gossipers – Tony and Pete – haven’t
said anything. He scratches his head and the sound is amplified and migraine producing. His forearms have blue-black veins like tangled wires. He imagines his count – 74, 55, 39, 28, 16, 10 – as actual numbers, three dimensional, falling in rain.

  “Mom?”

  Jug looks around the room and so does a guard. “Huh?” says Jug, leaning forward. From where Pants is sitting, combined with how Jug is sitting, Jug is two spread legs and just a head, a confused face in the middle, and Pants smiles, looks haunted.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “I’ve had enough too. Got in a lot of trouble for what you did before. What I want to tell you is that we read your letters from Brothers Feast and the ones to and from your mother.”

  It’s hard to say who is more shocked by his reaction – the guards who have their hands on their clubs, their fingers tracing the metal rings in the wood, or Pants himself, who feels the few muscles left in his body tighten like anchored rope. Even Jug is uncomfortable, his eyes zigzagging around the room as he ignores Pants who is crying the type of crying where the eyes are bloodshot and filled with water and the upper body shakes.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” says Jug, regaining his role as the one in control, his voice getting deep and serious, professional Jug acting quickly now, the guards wondering how he’s going to handle this situation (a man crying!) after the last health meeting mishap. “Your friend will bring back the crystal or you’re never going to leave this prison, never going to see your mom, never going to do a thing. Do you understand what I’m saying, a thing.” He leans back and sneers, then leans forward again. The guards smile at each other and one tries to hold back his laughter by biting his bottom lip but exhales an odd half-hiss half-fart sound.