Crystal Eaters

by Shane Jones

  “To see if she’s dead?”

  “To check.”

  “Just help her. Let’s go. Come on, please.”

  Dad walking toward the front door: “I’m doing everything I can.”

  “You’re not doing anything.”

  “Remy.”

  “You’ll be remembered for doing nothing.”

  “Who will remember?”

  “Me.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’ll stop when you help her. This has been going on for too long. Please.”

  “Remy, I told you.”

  “Let me see her face.”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to see her face before she’s gone, you owe me that.”

  “You shouldn’t see her like this.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  She follows Dad into the house where he dumps the triple blanket on the couch. They walk to Mom’s room, Remy stepping on the heels of Dad. The house is heavy with heat and difficult to navigate. Things are melting: a diamond-print reclining chair holds the impression of a giant, and the flesh-toned paint on the walls is dripping on the floor. When they enter the bedroom their bodies move slower in her presence. Mom looks tiny on the bed. Dad removes the blanket from her face in a quick passive-aggressive sort of way, looking at Remy the entire time, as if he knows what her reaction will be, as if he knows, and doesn’t care, that it will hurt her.

  “You wanted to see.”

  Remy’s shoulders fold inward and her stomach absorbs a hammer. Sharp pieces of crystal trickle down inside her. She’s never seen a body get this far.

  Mom’s face has lost meat the skull once held. And Dad was right, something is wrong with her mouth, as if she chewed bricks. Her eyes are glazed and rust-colored. Soon, her left eye will drip crystals (Chapter 5, Death Movement, Book 8). Her nose is hardened ash that Remy imagines if she touched would crumble. Gray hair gunked with shit fans her pillow. Dad repeats Can you hear us? Can you? Are you okay? and Remy thinks Don’t leave me. Smell of dead dogs. Smell of burning. She peels the blanket from Mom’s feet and sees the skin is a darker red compared to her face and neck, and even her veins, once strong and blue, have disappeared beneath this new red shell. A lack of circulation results in the color red drying everything up, erasing the last crystals in the body (Chapter 9, Death Movement, Book 8). The red is moving toward her chest and aiming to stop her heart.

  “You don’t have to be here,” says Dad, in a softer tone now that he’s seen Remy’s reaction. “I know you’ve heard this before, from me, from books, and maybe you don’t believe it, but it’s never been disproved. Parents go and their children step into their place. There’s nothing wrong with just letting that happen.”

  The blanket on the bed, also significant in size but not quite triple blanket size, falls off the bed and to the floor. Shards of broken black crystal and blood dot the carpet and there’s something resembling half a tooth. Remy wants to pick up the black pieces and eat them. Mom’s face is turned up to the ceiling, throat exposed and seemingly not moving with breath.

  “Do something,” says Remy.

  “But I can’t,” Dad says.

  “Let’s just go.”

  “No.”

  “Come on. Like you said, it doesn’t matter.”

  Dad kisses Mom on the forehead and her throat moves. He turns his ear toward her mouth and listens. Remy can’t hear her, but whatever the words are, whatever the sound does, it makes Dad put his hand over his mouth and nose like he can block the emotion from coming out. He speaks into her ear. A block of melted ceiling crashes on the floor next to the bed but Dad doesn’t notice because he puts his ear back on her mouth and listens. He cries and then laughs, nodding. He rubs her head then says more, none of it audible for Remy to pick up on other than her name and Adam and the word younger. When Dad listens again it’s just sick person air. Maybe she’s smiling, with her lips like that. Dad turns to Remy, his body still leaning over Mom and says, “She’s such a –” He turns back to Mom. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll go.”

  “Yes!”

  Remy immediately feels embarrassed for being so excited.

  “We’ll figure out how to navigate the city. We have nothing to lose, you’re right. I don’t care if we get arrested. Okay, let’s go.”

  “It’s going to work,” says Remy. “I can feel it.”

  Dad picks Mom up and feels the odd non-weight of her body. Seemingly unhinged, her head flops back.

  “Careful,” says Remy, and moves in to support her head.

  Before they leave Dad puts Mom back down on the bed and covers his face with two hands. He can’t handle it anymore. The emotion is pushing him around. But Remy is ready. She’s been waiting for this. She picks Mom up in the blanket and says it’s going to be okay, they won’t let her die, the city has powers (Chapter 14, Resurrection, City Hospital Myth). Thumb and finger around the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, Dad makes a snarl-face, inhales, and composes himself, says okay, just be careful with her. The house is full of hot disease and it throbs – walls, ceilings, floors – beating inward. Another block of melted ceiling, it appears saturated with water, crashes near the closet. Remy holds Mom to her body in the blanket. She’s so light. Remy unfolds wrinkles of fabric to find her legs which are tucked up to her chest and look like dried fruit.

  She has at least one left.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  Remy exits the bedroom with Dad following like Remy followed him before into the house, Dad now the one stepping on Remy’s heels.

  Outside, and walking quickly with the city in the near distance, everything is blowing dirt and bugs and heat. Most people are hiding inside, but a few dozen are out in the streets, watching. An elderly woman wears necklaces of green crystals that cover her entire neck, bracelets of blue and yellow from wrist to elbow on both arms. She stands on a rock and screams at the buildings. She smirks at Remy and Dad and Hundred. She tells them that everything comes for the village because the village is pure, this is the end of times, soon nothing will exist but dirt and it’s going to be better. Remy tells her to get inside, protect your number, you crazy.

  The temperature today will shatter records with the sky creamed. They just need to keep moving toward the hospital and they won’t notice their dehydration, their exhaustion. A group of villagers point at three buildings built directly on top of the fence and there seems to be dozens of skyscrapers in the near distance too. Remy holds Mom closer. Dad walks beside them. They move toward the fence.

  Mom’s weight increases when she suddenly stretches her legs out. The blanket trips Remy who stumbles but keeps her balance. More dirt and dust blows through the air and she squints, makes sure the blanket covers Mom. Dad offers to carry her. Remy says no, she does this, and Dad says okay, just please, be careful. They check her breathing by gazing into her mangled mouth, listening for wheeze and air. If this smell, like dead dogs, an odd sourness burning, is part of the death process, Remy’s never read about it, only experienced it from Harvak and smelled it on Mom that day in the kitchen. Her left eye drips a skinny trail of red.

  “She’s close,” says Remy.

  They run.

  The sky isn’t a sky because the sky is a sun.

  They run.

  The sky isn’t like skin.

  They run.

  The sky is shit.

  They run.

  Dad loses his balance before standing still with his arms braced outward and he says Hold on, the ground tilted. Is this really the end of everything? He’s sure of it, the ground moved.

  Remy stops. The towering buildings are scattershot in her vision because of the heat and swirling dirt. Windows are black boxes containing the faint outlines of nine-to-five workers eating ham sandwiches and discussing what they’ll have for dinner. She felt something move too, her feet trembled, but isn’t sure what, and figures it’s her own exhaustion, lowering count, causing her to lose her balance like Dad. She wai
ts to feel something move beneath her but there’s nothing.

  “We can’t keep stopping,” she says. “Come on.”

  Remy pulls the blanket over Mom’s head before running again. She’s incredibly fast, much practice in the mine. Dad runs several steps behind, to the side. He concentrates on the tails of blanket sweeping Remy’s feet and Hundred darting around them, biting them. Can’t have Remy trip and drop Mom so he yells at Hundred, feels like he’s doing something important when really the dog has never listened to him. The ground tilts again. Dad slows down, a sad little trot because he doesn’t want to stop but he’s tired and has that side/back pain he’s had since the truck accident. Besides, the ground is trembling, he’s sure of it.

  “Hurry,” Remy says, nearing the fence.

  “The ground.”

  “I know, just, come on.”

  Those in the village shield their eyes from the sun. Growing smaller in the distance – Remy, Dad, and Hundred. Standing at the fence is Skip Callahan, crouched and holding up a section of peeled open fence, a pair of wire cutters next to his boot, his hands covered in thermal burns, a giant grin plastered over his face telling them to hurry up, he’s always wanted to help, come on.

  4

  He sits with his knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs. He’s playing Mom memories. She let them play in the mud during a rainstorm. Pants laughed in his soaked clothes and Mom said she’d clean them up later. The sky was a feathery gray. Dad isn’t in the memory because Dad was somewhere else. Mom bounced baby Remy in her arms as baby Remy covered her eyes with forked fingers, partially protected from the rain, but wanting to see the outside world, the movement of raindrops, light. He can still smell the mud.

  But he can’t avoid the later Mom memories. Dinner table fights. Slammed doors. All those angry clichés proving true and hurting. The evening when she went after him with flailing fists and he had to restrain her against a wall, and how that moment triggered the night he saw her with the robed men. He pressed her fists into the wall, the wall thudded, and Dad asked from his bedroom Is everything okay in there? but didn’t get up. He was in bed eating eggs. Mom said to stop and twisted her head from side to side and he couldn’t stop because he was so scared from what he had to do. He pushed her onto the bed and ran.

  Then he plays the night he can’t process. The night he discussed during the health meeting. He sees her with the men in dark robes who at the time, at his young age, possessed a creature-like quality with pawing claws and freakish hip sways. Or maybe that was his imagination because in his revisiting of the memory he isn’t watching from a distance, he’s standing there as one of them. He puts his hand inside his mouth and screams. His eyes hurt from his voice. There is no key to life only doors. He rolls on the floor and watches Mom with the men so close he could comb her hair. When it’s his turn, when the men with their evil green grins tell him Get it, son, don’t stop, get it get it, Pants crawls to the corner of the cell and balls himself up until he can push his neck into the wall by extending his legs against the other wall. He wants to get back inside the memory of the rainstorm, of being a boy again, but each time he tries to focus on his reflection in the puddles, Mom’s gown soaked at the very bottom, his bare feet running through wet grass, the calmness he felt knowing nothing about death, it’s all shredded by the hands of the men. In this version they’re from the city, just dressed like villagers, just trying to make things worse for the village, just trying to make it feel unsafe so the city is a hero riding in, and Pants thinks yes, that’s who it was all along.

  He can’t turn his head off. When his neck can’t be pressed further, his legs fully extended, his body goes limp and he rolls onto his back. For a moment, he sees nothing, and that feels good. Hands on his chest he breaths in bursts that raise and lower his chest in such a dramatic fashion that he screams for help even though he knows the guards can’t hear him or don’t care to. He thinks he should have been a better son, and should have been a better brother, but he did the best he could, and it’s only in this present moment, looking back, can he think such a non-helpful thought as I should have done better. In the past you can change yourself into someone better, or worse, but not in the present moment, no, that’s impossible because the memory can’t be molded yet into what you want it to be, and Pants thinks this, and laughs, and he moves his hand across the always cool prison floor imagining the dirt from the crystal mine as he breaks apart a layer of static.

  3

  After he hits something hard, the machine abruptly stopping, the back two wheels bouncing up a few inches and jarring Z., he jumps out. A cloud of dust and debris takes a moment to clear. He looks under the machine for broken machine parts. He’s a mud mask with white eyes. He swallows another bug, a lightweight thing consisting of only wings, and waits for visibility to return inside the tunnel he’s created. He stares at the wall.

  In front of the machine he crouches at the wall and uses the flashlight to form a head-sized white circle around a protruding spike. Tilting the flashlight up, down, left to right, the spike gleams. One side appears mirrored, and Z. doesn’t even recognize himself. He licks his lips and tastes dirt. A triangular section of the spike is smooth as glass. Using his fingers, he digs a little deeper into the wall, around the base of the spike, and dirt pours around what becomes a crystal. The more dirt that falls away the wider it becomes. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He wonders what it tastes like, what it can do to a person, how is this possible.

  He grabs tools from the machine. He moves faster now, trembling with excitement. Here he is, someone who has discovered something thought never to have existed. He picks and digs. The crystal is double the size of his torso and it’s an unmistakable solid black. The light from the machine flickers, makes a terrible short-circuiting sound, and Z. turns to the change in light like it’s a bottle breaking. He checks the flashlight propped up on a rock that he has aimed in his direction. It’s already going to be impossible to find his way out of here, he can’t have the lights go. He imagines driving aimlessly through the tunnels, a flashlight held in his mouth, the machine full of black crystal rumbling through darkness, dirt swells, bug colonies.

  He raises the hammer.

  He breaks off fist-sized chunks. Clanging echoes reverberate through his arms. There’s gunk in his nose and he blows it out on his right arm, then raises the arm, aims, comes down and breaks off another chunk. He only needs so much to bring back but the more he gets, the bigger the hero he is or something, or so he thinks in the moment, so he cracks off more ham-sized pieces and leaves the remaining black crystal protruding from the wall. He can’t stop smiling. He wonders how far the crystal extends, maybe a network of black roots covering miles.

  He places the chunks in the back of the machine where the toolbox is. Then the light on the machine burns out in a burst. Everything goes dark. Z. makes a noise he’s never heard before.

  He sits in the idling machine with a narrow path of light filled with dust extending from his mouth where he holds the flashlight. How deep am I? He hears footsteps. Why has no one come? He jumps from the machine again and walks to where the remaining black crystal is and puts his ear against the wall, one hand flat against a cool side of the crystal. Through the wall gritty and cutting against his ear there’s water rushing through sewers, cars accelerating under yellow lights.

  2

  They run in a nightmare of heat and dust. Everything looks red. The sun pierced by buildings wrapped in tornadic filth. Flames as kites are being pulled endlessly from the windows of several burning buildings and men below in red and gold helmets aim their hoses skyward where the water’s arc disappears just as it begins. Newspapers, umbrellas, plastic bags, fast food cartons, black flies, clumps of hair, dirty diapers, spaghetti, magazines, a million types of colored garbage, all blow across the sky. There’s a howling. It’s so loud because in the city everything makes a noise. Their eyes sting with sweat. They squint as they run.

  Into the c
ity streets scattered with people they run. Cabs, motorcycles, sidewalk corners crowded with men who stand in the sweltering heat wearing suits – their faces expressionless shining with sweat in the sun. There is a store that sells just coffee. There is a store that sells just cheese. There is a store that sells just pie. A man holding a plastic plate holding a slice of pie takes a bite and his eyes widen. He turns to his wife and says, “Fresh apples,” while pointing to the pie with his fork. She tries the pie and nods while chewing. After she swallows she says, “Really fresh.”

  Remy overhears someone say that the city is moving, it’s crawling over the village now because it’s destiny, it’s what god wants, hooray! The man stops people by placing his hands on their shoulders. He asks if they’ve seen his gold cross necklace. Everyone shrugs him off and the man keeps running, starts tackling people. City people hate touching so the man is their worst enemy. Eventually three cops stop him, the man saying he’s a cop too, hey, stop that, until he goes quiet in the mush.

  City people wear fancy t-shirts. City people don’t show their fear. Babies are pushed in carts by parents in sunglasses so you can’t guess their count. City people run for fun and call it jogging. The howling sound dips lower and pummels legs with wind. Again, the ground moves.

  “Hurry,” Remy says, and they cross a street, dodging cars and bicycles.

  City people scream with blood-red faces and slap the air with their fists. “You wait for the man to glow in the box to tell you when to walk,” says a small angry woman to Remy and Dad as they cross, the woman’s facial expression stoic in the blowing filth. “That’s what you do.”

  “You tell ’em, Mom,” says a man standing next to her.

  A car tire comes an inch from running over Remy’s heel and she leaps onto the sidewalk, tilting Mom a little, but not dropping her. Dad says to be careful and puts his hand on her back, pulling her further from the street, but not really doing anything, Remy already jumped. They have no idea where they are going but the hospital is somewhere and there’s an end point they are working toward. The small angry woman begins crossing the street while walking bent forward at a severe angle, the wind pushing her back, her will stronger and pushing her forward, facial expression not changing even as she peels, with finger and thumb, a plastic bag with a red smiling face with pigtails, from her own face, her other hand holding the grown man’s hand and seemingly pulling him along to an undesirable appointment.