Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  Before I can reconnect with him, the mob slams me hard from behind and I drop to my knees. Staying on the floor for even a few seconds could mean being trampled to death, so I find the strength to fight my way out from under the riptide of human beings and back to my feet.

  The inferno has already covered the front of the house in a curtain of fire. The old wood and plaster might as well be rags soaked in kerosene, because the fire chews right through the aged walls. The heat is almost unbearable. I scream Troy’s name, but I can’t find him in the fog, smoke, and human chaos.

  It won’t be long before the havoc turns deadly. The culprit must have barricaded the front entrance, because a boy at the front of the crowd is desperately screaming to be let out. In a blind panic, the crowd continues to push him into the fire of the immovable door, which will not budge.

  With the flow to the door backed up and the flames creeping toward the ceiling, some of the students start to change direction toward the staircases. If all the doors are still locked, that means the hundreds of partygoers will get funneled into that narrow hallway, with the sole exit leading off the second-floor railing.

  The scene before me is horrible. In the rush to get upstairs, the stairway balustrade collapses under the pressure, sending a number of people tumbling off. A handful more on the second story get bumped off the edge of the Abyss. Some fall onto the volcano and roll toward the spreading fire; others drop into the space around it, breaking bones as they hit the floor twenty feet below.

  I stand frozen, watching in paralyzed terror as the macabre scene unfolds. One student tries in vain to extinguish his friend, who writhes on the floor as his clothes burn. Another screams as he fails to pry open one of the tiny, fiery windows, his fingertips melting. Either the heat from the flames must have spontaneously welded it shut, or Osiris nailed it down from the outside.

  I push my way toward the volcano. A handful of students lie on the floor, unmoving, trampled under the feet of the mob. Through the smoke, I spy one of them, a young brunette girl slumped by the base of the volcano, facedown in the soot, not moving.

  “Ivy!” I scream. Even the tight, screaming crowd can’t keep me away.

  I’m still a few steps from her when I hear a chilling sound:

  Wood splintering.

  I stop and look up. The fire that’s been chewing through the ceiling eats away the last of the house’s supports. The roof caves in over the volcano first. Lumber, and shingles, and plaster, and fifty years’ worth of forgotten furniture packed in the attic come raining down on all the students stuck on the stairwell. The devastation rolls my way, and I have only a few seconds to dive on top of Ivy and shield her unconscious body with my own.

  The icy chill in my body is replaced with a liquid warmth, bubbling up from some place primordial within me. That panic, the same gripping panic I’ve come to fear, knocks on my door, and this time, instead of fighting it, I let it wash over me.

  Amidst the screams and death knells around me,

  And the distant wail of sirens, too late, too late,

  And the crumbling plaster pouring down,

  With a thousand pounds of splintered lumber falling down to skewer me,

  I feel something else in the tight skin over my back, not raining down on my flesh, but blossoming out of my shoulder blades as I arch my back to protect Ivy.

  Whatever these strange wings are take flight with my soul and rip me away from the earth.

  In the darkness between, I hear the whoosh of the world caving in and the clattering of mangled wood and flesh and death.

  Blood and Foolishness

  Osiris’s Book of Riddles, 1204 A.D

  Today I killed for the first time

  in the midst of a Holy War

  where no one would notice

  another corpse

  I cornered him in

  the great library of Constantinople

  And while the city burned around us

  I ran my blade through his neck and

  Took in the stench of his phoenix soul

  which reeked of figs and lemongrass

  earthy and fresh and arrogant

  Like he wanted to change the world

  Ignatius ignorantly dreamed that

  he could reverse time far enough

  To undo the violence of the holy war

  But man made religion, and

  religion made tension, and

  tension made war, and

  Man must suffer the consequences

  For what he has created—

  Without the penance of

  death and ruin

  Man will never learn

  never evolve

  In the end, I watched as the phoenix’s blood

  seeped into the library’s ancient tomes,

  Because I wanted to see what it looked like

  when knowledge soaked up foolishness.

  Patchwork Scorched

  When I manifest back in Patchwork, I’m pinned beneath a small mountain of rubble. A wet warmness spreads across my back where a falling board must have sliced me open in that final second before I crossed over. My first breath of air is a cloud of plaster dust. I cough convulsively as I wriggle free and start moving away the boards at my feet, praying that my body successfully shielded Ivy from the cave-in.

  Of course, when I dig until I see the floorboards below, Ivy is nowhere to be found. Nor are any of the other partygoers, living, maimed, or dead. The roof overhead has completely caved in, revealing the star-cluttered Patchwork sky above me. But I don’t have time for stargazing as I climb out from under the debris.

  Because when the dust clears, I see that the frat house walls are still writhing with fire.

  Because the ground trembles, indicating that this memory will soon “unravel” like the others.

  And because the “fake” volcano inside the frat house is starting to very realistically erupt.

  Blood orange lava gushes up out of the crater, spilling over the brim and oozing down the craggy surface. The molten fire quickly engulfs the staircase and cascades down the steps. As I stagger away from the base of the volcano and through the obstacle course of debris, I realize that I’m now completely trapped within an inferno, with a fiery end waiting for me on all sides—the blazing walls of the frat house and the ever-approaching flow of volcanic rock, which is about ten seconds from incinerating the lower half of my legs.

  With time running out and no options remaining, I grab the pimped-out throne where the team captain had been sitting. The base smokes where the lava has already begun to melt away the clawed metal feet. It’s heavy, but no match for my adrenaline and survival instincts. I spin around and hurl the chair as hard as I can at one of the windows.

  The throne smashes through and clatters onto the burning porch outside. The lava is nearly lapping at my feet now, so with a short running start, I leap for the broken window.

  Even with my limbs tucked in, the aperture of fire licks at my flesh as I pass through. I land hard on the porch, and by the time I roll off onto the yard, I have to flop around on the lawn to extinguish the fire that ignited my grass skirt.

  I’m not out of the woods yet. As the rumbling picks up, the yard itself buckles and cracks open, magma bubbling up through the fissures. I channel my inner Olympian and hurdle over the rotted picket fence, out onto the road. The neighborhood in front of me is quickly deteriorating into a series of islands on the rising tide of lava. I hop between islands, trying to get past the row of fraternity and sorority houses in front of me. One by one, the lava flow swallows up the houses, tearing them apart like they’re built out of Popsicle sticks.

  For every few strides of progress I make, the ground around me tilts backward a little more, angling toward the edge of the world as Patchwork unravels. Ahead of me, I spy a lip where the grass has visibly folded in half—that’s my target, where the fraying of the world ends and a different, sturdier memory begins.

  The slope grows steeper with each passing s
econd and I have little time to reach the top before the angle goes vertical. At that point I’ll tumble backwards and either be boiled alive in a crockpot of lava or otherwise cast into the oblivion.

  When the lip is almost within my reach, I feel the world open up beneath me. I close my eyes and kick off the crumbling earth in one last incredible leap.

  I don’t know that I’ve cleared the edge of Patchwork until my knees strike earth. My body rolls to a stop in a familiar yard that I can’t immediately place. For the immediate present, I’m more concerned with what’s below Patchwork—the fate I just narrowly avoided. I crawl closer to the edge, and even though I know I shouldn’t look down, morbid curiosity gets the better of me. From this high up, the falling molten rock looks like a sea of dying embers as it plunges into the clouds below. Lightning flickers as the oblivion devours another one of my undone memories. One misstep and that could have been me plummeting into the vast nothingness.

  I should be grateful that I survived. I should feel victorious that I escaped from reality before Osiris’s latest death trap could kill me. Traveling back to Patchwork means that I’ll be sent back in time once again, which in turn means that my friends and all the partygoers who were trampled, buried in the rubble, or burned alive should be resurrected upon my return.

  Instead, I feel isolation and exhaustion digging their hooks into me. How many times must I watch the people I love die? Am I going to keep jumping back, a month at a time, again and again, until I’m a goddamn kindergartener? Until Osiris comes to murder me and my friends at the My Little Pony-themed birthday party my parents threw me when I was four?

  There also must be some significance to these memories unraveling here in Patchwork. From what I can tell, it’s only the most recent life events that are breaking apart one by one. The prom cruise, the Vermont roads, the frat house. Although they remain vividly etched in my memory, they cease to exist here as I hurtle back through time.

  I press my face into the grass. If this place is a collage of my memories new and old, then maybe it’s also susceptible to my hopes, my insecurities, and my fears. Maybe Patchwork is lamenting how all these events are slowly being erased from my reality—and maybe I should, too. Clearly I’m happy that Osiris’s killing sprees have been stricken from reality, but what about all the happy memories in between? Almost three months of my life have now been chewed away, three months with Troy that no longer exist to him.

  If I get sent back far enough, maybe my relationship with Troy will never have happened at all. Then he’ll never get to experience or even remember the nine beautiful months of ups and downs we spent together.

  I shake my head and peel myself off the ground before my brain can go any further down that road. If Patchwork really is some twisted manifestation of my subconscious, the last thing I should be doing right now is feeding it more of my doubts and fears.

  The yard where I landed belongs to one of my old neighbors. I recognize it now because I’ve spotted a familiar landmark: the rotting stump my friends and I used as home plate when we would play Wiffle ball years ago. If I trace my obsession with softball back to one place, it probably began here with a plastic bat and too much time after school. Back when I was more interested in striking out the neighborhood boys than making out with them.

  Things were simpler then.

  My nostalgia deflates when I wander out onto the road. The old matching colonial houses, the towering oaks—this is my street. The one where I grew up. The one where I used to live right up until I moved into the Daedalus dorms last September.

  The street I’ve been avoiding for almost a year, since Dad died.

  Dad …

  Even though I know it’s madness, a little voice in my head is saying that if I let the clock wind back another year, I might actually get to see Dad alive again. Wasn’t there a time, right after he died, when I’d wanted to scream to the heavens that I’d give anything to see him again? I touch the whirring locket around my neck, imagine the rapidly spinning hands of the clock inside. All I’d have to do is go back far enough …

  The ambient light in my neighborhood wanes to almost nothing as I move down the sidewalk. The stars in the sky fade to embers as though their filaments all burst at once, and the gaslights flicker on around me. Is this how I remember my neighborhood? A brisk but hopeful chill, the yellowed street lamps lit like a line of glowing poppies? Shouldn’t I remember this place on a cloudless summer day, piping hot pool weather with the smell of barbecue wafting down the street and the tang of lemonade on my tongue, and happy songbirds decorating the trees with streamers?

  Then it strikes me. The reason it’s so damn chilly is because this is the way I’ll always remember it.

  Because my father died last year on a starry April night like this.

  I stop in front of a brown colonial house, the one with the sagging wreath over the front door and a lonely electric candle in one of the upstairs windows.

  My house.

  The porch swing rocks back and forth with an invisible passenger, the same way I was riding it late one night when I got the call from my mother.

  The call when she told me that my father had been harboring a terrible secret from us for months.

  That the cancer we all thought was in remission had metastasized to his brain.

  That, on his drive home from work, he’d suffered a sudden, deadly stroke.

  That his car rolled off the road into the woods.

  That by the time someone spotted the bumper sticking out of the trees it was too late.

  I had to hear all that on the damn phone while I stared off into the sky hoping it would rain. Because I’ve always loved the early spring and the weather isn’t allowed to be this crisp and beautiful on the night you didn’t get to say goodbye to your father.

  That’s how he’d wanted it though—no goodbyes. He’d refused treatment and withheld the doctor’s ominous news from us so we wouldn’t worry about him. So he could live out his remaining months as normal as possible, right up until death quietly snatched him from us on the most seemingly ordinary of nights.

  As I gaze forlornly at the rocking porch swing, something flickers behind me. At the farthest end of my idyllic hometown road, the street lamps go out. Then the next pair. One pair at a time, moving toward me, the gaslights each extinguish until I’m left in darkness in the middle of the street.

  Well, not total darkness. I can see now what I couldn’t before with the glare in my eyes: an otherworldly crimson glow emanating from the windows of the surrounding houses.

  The red glow belongs to the eyes peering out at me, a hundred pairs of them. I can just make out the reptilian, oval-shaped heads of the creatures inside, studying my every move.

  I should probably feel threatened by them, but from the way they’re patiently observing me, it’s almost as if they’re waiting for something else to arrive …

  “Renata, come quick!”

  My heart palpitates in my chest. I slowly turn back to my house.

  “… And bring the tiniest stretcher that you can find.”

  It’s a deep voice that I haven’t heard in over a year, outside of the home movie footage that I sometimes watch when I really miss him. Yet I hear him now, calling to me from the backyard, like he’s back, like he’s truly back.

  I take off running around the side of the house. Over the hose that’s unspooled in the grass. Past the wooden trellis that the ivy is strangling. Across the patio with the weeds creeping up between the stones.

  When I reach the backyard, Dad is crouched in the grass. His long graying hair, the relic of his hippie days which I always called his “mad scientist do,” hangs in a curtain in front of his face, like the fronds of a weeping willow. Look up at me, I silently plead him. Look up at me so I can see your face again, to know that you’re real. Only he’s not real, of course. Even now, the whispers of light writhe off his body, just another memory brought to life on Patchwork’s living canvas.

  He urges me ove
r with an impatient “come hither” wave of his hand, but his attention is fixed on a baby bird with a broken wing, which is flopping about in the grass. It’s the same bird that we took in and nursed back to health.

  Even though I know it’s futile, I can’t help it. My voice breaks as I whisper, “Daddy?” and I rush across the yard. I outstretch my hand toward his fleeting apparition, hoping to see his face one last time before he vanishes, that he’ll look up and make eye contact, rather than gazing straight through me like the other memories do.

  Right before I reach him, the grass starts to sink. Then the earth gives way altogether.

  I only have a second to wonder whether I’m about to tumble into the oblivion before I land hard on my back. The pain that explodes along my spine serves as a good reminder that whatever happens in Patchwork is as real and dangerous as anything else in reality.

  I pick myself up from the mound of earth, grass, and rock. What I discover when the cloud of dust settles makes my skin crawl.

  I’m standing in the middle of a windowless chamber. Torches flicker against the walls, illuminating three rows of cloaked figures seated in the amphitheater in front of me. They’re all peering down at me.

  No one is smiling.

  It’s just another memory, I try to tell myself.

  Only this isn’t my memory. Until now, the jigsaw pieces to Patchwork have been fragments of my life, my history.

  This is something else. Something ancient.

  Something literally buried in the deepest recesses of my memory banks.

  Finally, an elderly man in the middle speaks in a foreign language—Italian maybe? Deep wrinkles cascade down his cheeks to his saggy jowls. I open my mouth to stop him, to say that I don’t understand.

  A lance of heat sears through my brain like a blow torch. A high-pitched whine erupts in my eardrums like feedback from an amplifier. Before I can fully process the pain, the burning sheers through a locked door submerged in my memory. And when the door to that vault melts off …