#aysk | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

massieh · 4 years

Text

Transfigure ( rewrite ; first draft ), Chapter 1. word count: 3,270.

The full moon illuminated the river, casting the world around us in black and white. The river, a sheet of obsidian glass beneath the glow, wrapped around my feet and begged that I join in with the current.

Just let it all go; be free.

Something hit my hand, hard and cold. At first, the feeling sent a chill down my spine, and reflex demanded that I throw it. Though useful in the field, that instinct was well out-of-place here. Carefully, calmly, I raised the object into the candlelight.

It was one of the bottles that Kane repurposed for a candle holder, an idea he had when we first found the place months before. The wax stick jammed into the top had already burned down so far into the neck that it stained the glass around it black. Even the wax seal could not hold back the smell. Whatever was inside, its stale scent gave the impression that it could only be useful for cleaning wounds.

I tried to push it back. How did he roll a square bottle?

“Nah,” he demanded, kicking it back over the short distance I had managed. “We had a deal.”

“Yeah, and I’ll hold up my end with or without yours.” In truth, I was sick of feeling stupid. It sounded fun to face the impossible, but that was before I found out that even trivial things could hold that title.

“Both ends are my end. Now go.”

“Fine,” I mumbled under my breath and raised the bottle again. I tried to ignore all the other details. The shape, the scent, the weight—anything that would be important under any real circumstances was useless now.

Words. I had to figure out the words.

With the old world gone and the city ripped apart, readers weren’t all that common. This place was built by a group of strangers, after all. Each was stripped from their home and dropped here to make a new life alongside the others. Some kept their families in tow; most came alone. This lack of community, alongside the shared goal of survival, led to an illiteracy rate that I didn’t notice until Kane moved in.

As a neighbor once told me, if the old world’s skills were so useful, we wouldn’t be where we are today. It didn’t make that much sense, but everyone else thought so. Who was I to argue?

Kane was one of the lucky ones. He came here knowing how to read. Though we were left wanting for books, he still managed to keep that talent sharp.

Both of my parents could read. My mother all but spoke in code, and it was holy texts that made up my father’s foundation. Both tried to show me their worlds; both kind of succeeded. Reading, however, was never included.

There were a few words scattered throughout the city that had been burned into my mind through recognizance. “Voodoo” and “girls” made the top of that list. Try to make sense of the Bible on that alone.

Three days after Kane figured it out, he came up with his greatest plan yet: he would be the one to teach me the sacred art of literature. His words, not mine. Boredom replaced his brilliant curiosity with a rabid need for purpose a long time ago. So, as any idiot would, I eagerly agreed. He dedicated our first week to the alphabet. I was to say it forward and back fifteen times every few hours to make sure it stuck.

Simple enough.

Then, we moved on to the next logical step: “Sound it out.”

Despite the roll of my eyes, I did as I was told. “J-aysk”

“No, no. Where are you getting the’s’?”

“What do you mean?” And after he hissed the sound back at me, “Right there.”

“That’ s—no, that one makes the same sound as the ‘k’.”

I changed my mind. This sucked. “That makes no sense.”

“The ‘a’ makes the sound like ‘at’, too.’”

“Jac-k?”

“Don’t pronounce them both.”

“Both what? It’s four—”

“Just, ‘Jack’.” He chopped at the air with one hand, but the motion’s meaning was lost on me.

My response was the forced sigh of, “Okay. Jack,” followed by another, meeker attempt. “D… e… nials?”

Kane snorted behind me.

As I shifted back to lean on my elbows, the bottle turned over in my hand, allowing me one last whiff of the foul liquid inside. “So, what. This Jack guy was so ashamed of this stuff, he had to say it on the label?” The bottle sang out an eerie scrape as I returned it to the slab of concrete at Kane’s feet, and its ring somehow made more sense than the next word from his mouth.

“Daniels.”

“What?”

He sputtered again. This time, it sounded like a laugh. “It’s Jack Daniels. It was whiskey. Alcohol, but not the kind you use on cuts.” And because I clearly didn’t get it, he added, “A drink for, uh… entertainment.”

It was exhausting how much he knew about the old world. Some would say too much. Though it was easy to agree, it was almost impossible not to be fascinated by it. At the compound, there were rooms dedicated to artifacts and treasures worth more than any ten men together could afford. It would not surprise me to know all of that, in addition to what was left of the natural wonders, paled in comparison to Kane’s collections.

“You’re stupid good at a lot of things,” I told him after an agonizing moment of self-debate. The added spice of his own slang would hopefully soften the blow. “But you might be the worst teacher I’ve ever had.”

This time, his laugh was flimsy. “Well, I’m not a Minister or a Control Chief, so that’s a weird corner to throw me in.”

Oh, good. No harm done.

Kane was always this easy. I could be a little bit mean, and he’d just be happy to hear himself talk in-between. The banter served as a low-effort veil between us and the void of boredom, sure. When things got deep, though, it was the true void that stared back. His teaching needed work, but Kane filled the silence with more knowledge and life in a single minute than any amount of time with my parents ever did—official, familial, or otherwise.

A second bottle clinked against the stone at my left, this one with some of the original contents still inside. I waited for the same set of instructions. Instead, what he gave back read something like, try it. One sip, and I spit it out instantly. “Oh, that’s disgusting.”

“It is what it is. You’re doing fine.” His shift in tone was so swift that I nearly forgot about the acidic film on my tongue. “It’s just been a couple of weeks. It took me like a month, I bet.”

“You’d also be six.”

“And you’re seventeen—“

“Eighteen.”

“The arguments make themselves.” I looked back, and his smile was as smug as his tone. “Like I said. You’re doing just fine.”

If the right response existed, it was lost beneath an awkward laugh and the gentle sound of the flowing river.

Even without many character references to place around him, Kane was odd in a way that even his sacred art of literature would have trouble capturing. Though he only stood a few inches taller than me, no room could contain his personality. His body was more weapon than temple. From appearance to mind to words—everything but his eyes, he kept sharp.

One of the bottles floated out from the cove and into the river without either of us noticing. The water tugged it one way and another. It was the flickering of the light that caught my attention. The flame rose and fell in the hot air, twisting as the bottle bobbed from side to side, and finally went out altogether when it tipped over and washed out.

The light was now too low to read, but both ends were Kane’s, right?

“Let’s go,” I mostly grunted just before scooting from the pavement’s edge and into the river. Wading beyond reach of the shore to where the cool stream rose high enough to combat the humidity, I turned back to face him.

Kane maintained both still and silence surprisingly well.

“I promise it’ll be less fun if we do this by force.”

Only the still broke. He slid from the jutting knees of a cypress onto the slab below to remove his boots, socks, and the sidearm he kept strapped to his thigh. After sliding those over to join my things, he moved on to rolling his tattered jeans until they threatened his circulation. Stalling was routine, same as the distance in his eyes and the occasional sighing.

In a lazy attempt to match his performance, my hand moved in slow, dramatic circles in a gesture to hurry up. By the time he touched the water, my arm was a quick snap away from falling off my shoulder and drifting out to sea.

It was by no small feat that he was able to reach me. Though the water gathered only at his hips, if even that far, he could only do so with his eyes clenched shut. It was impressive.

“Alright, I’m ready,” he told me once his hands were safely in mine. His stance was so tight that his grip almost hurt. Determined, he may have been, but Kane looked anything but ready.

“I won’t make you do anything yet,” I said. “Just stand there. Get used to the flow. Try to open your eyes, maybe?” They tightened at that. “Hey. If anything happens, I’m right here.”

The sentiment did little to calm him. At the very least, it did encourage the hint of a grin, fleeting though it was. When it was apparent that he couldn’t control his own breathing, mine became slowed and pronounced for him to mirror. After what felt like an hour of coaching, but must have only been a few minutes, his breathing began to fall smoothly in time with the steady sound of waves crashing in the distance.

Sometimes, when the fog cleared enough to see the endless expanse of the southern sea, and the river rose just a little higher than usual, he would mention his home sector. Not much more was given than what he wanted to remember. I knew it must have been somewhere west because he always mentioned how the morning sun blinded him on the move over. The way he marveled at our trees for the first three years said it must have been pretty dry.

When Kane spoke about it, he did so in hushed tones, as though home could be all that scary. Maybe it was. In some ways, I was less surprised by his aquaphobia than his decision to tell me about it.

Kane dropped my hands and took another deep breath through his nose, rereleasing it from his mouth in a tight stream of air. Not that his first thought would be the position of his face in relation to mine. A warning just would have been nice.

“Alright,” he repeated. With just enough bravery sucked in with a second, more generous inhale, he coaxed his eyes open.

Had I not been watching, I would have missed the literal instant regret set in. “What a face. Think you’ll live?”

His mouth pressed into a firm line.

“Dude. You have to breathe.” Maybe he wasn’t feeling talkative, but at least he was present enough to listen. “You’re doing way better than last time.”

Last time was a wrestling match just to get this far. It ended with Kane falling in and scrambling his way back before we could make any more progress. Victoria thanked me that day for forcing her son to bathe. This time, though fear was still evident in the way his eyes darted between the water below and the sky above, Kane was able to restrain himself.

It was a noble effort—one lost the moment he looked to the branches of the looming trees. “They’re gathering late tonight,” he noted, referring to the growing amassment of crows.

“You think it’s dogs?”

“Probably.” The commotion of subsong and wings replaced our voices for a moment before Kane turned his eyes on me again. He tried to grab my hands again and added a desperate, “I’ll walk with you.”

My hands were held up for him to see while I backed away. “Hold on, hold on. We have time.” Already, the soil of the riverbed pulled me down, seeping between my toes with each step. I’d seen panic drown too many in this river to join them. So I allowed the distance between us to expand instead.

We were only a couple of meters from the waters’ edge. Still, when I finally reached the wall of trees and turned to face him, he felt oceans away.

The collection of candles had melted over the bottles’ necks, their labels now impossible to decipher beneath the wax coating. It was as good a time as any to turn in. I raised the last, still burning, high for him to see.

“When it goes out.”

“You know, one pack took out an entire team last week.” His voice was soft, nearly inaudible over the water.

“So I heard.”

“I should really get you home.”

“They got a whole team. Having one extra body won’t keep me any safer. You worry about you.”

A distracted laugh, both forced and cautious, slipped past Kane’s worry just to free-fall into silence. No longer were the cicadas singing, the birds paused in quiet wonder, and for a moment, even the water fell into an uncomfortable still.

The sector grew quieter by the day, it seemed. Together, we survived war, famine, disease. I’m sure you can piece together what happened to the rest. My uncle always liked to say that book of Revelation didn’t prepare us for an after. Nine years old may have been too young for that lesson, but I understood all the same.

Over the past week, more stories from the Cage made it to the dinner table. My mother told us that one of the things inside had a wingspan twice as long as its own body. She said it tried to take to the skies, but its wings were too heavy. Instead of lifting itself from the ground, it destroyed three buildings and killed two people before being captured. Suits spoke in hushed tones throughout the Complex about how the webbed pinions left an ashen residue on their uniforms.

The rest was a matter of who told the story.

Kane tugged me from the thought by prompting from his position in the water, “Hey, Andy. Can we tuck in yet? No rush, but I’m starting to freak out.”

To get back to the road meant scaling the city’s deteriorated retaining wall and the roots that had nearly devoured it. Kane beat me to the top and triumphantly threw both fists in the air as if the effort were for glory rather than escape. It was the pair of boots, hanging together from one clenched hand as I remained at the water’s edge to lace my own, that gave him away.

The trees served as a veil between the southern wilderness and what was deemed before my conception as “civilization”. Once we passed through, our usual banter had to be capped. We stepped lightly, even slowing our breathing to a shallow and cautionary flow. The smallest sound could bounce through the empty streets and lead something much worse than the river’s wrath to us.

From the gaping mouth of an old storefront, the sun-bleached cast of a massive, toothy lizard smiled at us. Could you believe it was a real thing? Not the smiling part, but the creature itself. Kane told me all about it when his family first joined the sector.

They were big, sometimes twice as long as he was tall and three times his weight, he said. I asked if he knew all that because he had to kill one. Kane only gave me a strange look and said everyone knew what an alligator was. But that wasn’t true. I didn’t. For all I knew, they were no more real than his Mothman.

A time did exist where the buildings along our hike were beautiful. Time and the elements faded their colors, shattered their windows, and darkened their doors. Here and there, shop signs still clung to their rusted mounts. Due only to their current state, which was battered too far beyond recognition for even Kane to read, was I brave enough to look at them for more than a glance.

The path was so familiar that I could have walked it backwards with my eyes covered. Every step was as much a part of me as my own two hands. The shape of the street names, I had memorized before Kane joined the sector.

St. Peter.

Bourbon.

Bienville.

And at the end of Bienville was home. Well, it was my home. Kane’s family relocated so often that I stopped keeping track. At first, the frequent moves were quirky. Then, they were frustrating. While the other kids moved on to new friends, I knew there was a different solution. I just had to get good at finding him.

Home was a single cross-section of road, separated from the ruin and wilderness by tireless grooming. Even as we crossed over the threshold between broken asphalt and the intact pavement that bound the structures together, Maintenance took stock of tomorrow’s workload.

As always, they paid us no mind.

The Complex stood three stories high and only an echo of its former glory. Like the rest of the city, it battled weathering of its own. The Northwest corner and an entire block of the cemetery were swallowed by the earth four days after my twelfth birthday. Before was the contagion. And after? That was the Summer of Lights, which burned down more than half the city.

Yeah, it wasn’t that fun.

Kane led me to one of the clone doors and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. “Tomorrow’s a big one,” he told me.

“You ready for it?”

“Never am. Don’t sleep in.”

And I responded, “Get good sleep.”

He disappeared beyond the dim glow of our stoop light, leaving me to drown at the hands of anxiety. The Course—like I could forget. If I failed, then what? There was always the Ministry, but if I couldn’t read and failed a glorified physical exam, even they would have no use for me.

As my mind swarmed with thoughts of tomorrow, the still dark of the entry felt like a gift. It meant that my feet could make the weary climb to the second floor without the help of a conscious mind. Mine was too busy repeating the phrase, “Do you accept?” To the question, it shouted the oath.

Outside my window, the moon still shone over the city, either oblivious to its state of distress or indifferent. It lit the single-block cemetery there, and I could swear there was more life in those mausoleums than remained throughout the whole sector. I could see Kane perched on one of the roofs, thumbing through the pages he stashed inside an oven crypt.

Past him, past the concrete structures, past the contorted knot of crumbling highway, I could see the six points of the Cage reaching into the night sky.

This was home.

#; there are likely typos in this but again #; first draft of a rewrite #; i'm proud enough of where it stands #ooc.

1 note · View note