Warning; Scales is a body-horror serial and, at times, terrible terrain for the mind.
I’ve never liked the idea of a desert. I suppose that’s why I live here, in this swamp. An overcorrection, it seems, at the abject fear of overexposure.
The Sun and all of her devices.
Deserts offer few places to hide. Less places to hide means that, unless you’re underground, you’re cooked. And even then, I imagine cracked beds of old water basins. I can see the ground squeezing itself of what remains. Dry, brittle bones.
What is left.
Bogs tend to have different properties. In fact, they don’t mean to let go of anything, if it can be helped. A kind of consumption that leaves nothing, and everything, behind. Frozen, preserved, and congealed.
Sometimes possessed.
Every few hours of rest and comatose slumber, I jolt up in bed and shine a flashlight on Lily to check on the mummified, but still breathing, companion. Currently in costume, but not yet ready to play the part of a bog body coming up from the depths.
“Hey girl, you still with me?” I ask her. Her reply is a small head shake.
“Okay, more time.”
When I dream, I drift on the ocean floor like an octopus. Lonesome, but adaptive and agile. I slink and slither over sand and sediment. Capturing crabs along the way in a menacing vise-gripped beak. Terror served on a half-shell, as I’m sure my fate will not fare better for far longer.
Something is coming for me too.
No matter where I go, the bodies follow. Bodies fall. They drop and they fail. They disappear and abandon. They die. They all die.
I look over at Bleu’s old reading spot. Their candles were arranged haphazardly. Their books stacked precariously and their piles of ‘stuff’ carefully curated and not to be touched. And so I did not. Deciding that it would be better to leave it, better to wait. Better to not face it, not yet.
Today, however, reality breaks into my mind’s eye like a bullet burrowing into a skull. A tiny mole ready to reveal his secrets, whispering between their shoveling paws:” ‘you ssawww.’
A raspy, but clear, the voice gnaws at my ear.
“What did I see?” I asked the voice.
‘You ssawww them jump.’
“I ‘ssawww’ nothing except the lack of them.”
‘You lie.’
“That makes two of us.” I replied, turning over in the damp bed. The light smell of ‘old basement’ permeating the air. An ancient dirt-smell.
These things have a way about them, a seeping. A promise and a truth to reveal.