Scales 031
Warning; Scales is a body-horror serial and, at times, terrible terrain for the mind.
It was too late by the time that I had realized, I was safe. Wrapped up in skin unscathed, and warm as the natural sun. It shone, rather than seared in its impression as we laid twisted between each other’s limbs, unscaled. Safe and sound.
The spring greens of his shirt set the gold and bronze tones to ‘delight’ as I trace their glints in muscled lines with my eyes, holding his body like an oversized stuffed-animal. Shoulders stacked tall enough for me to pretend that as I hugged this prize bear, I am transported to a fort under a kitchen table—long forgotten.
The glimmer from the wall was less golden or bronze, but opalescent. Glowing naturally, but in the way that many things glow in nature—eerily. A warning.
“What do you think, girl?” I asked Lily. “Should I poke it?”
Blank stare.
“Helpful.”
Letting out a large sigh, I grab a book and hurl it at the wall.
The book makes contact, but it’s a silent shot.
“Well that’s fucking weird…” Suddenly, a pulse erupts from the wall followed by a disjointed thud. Confusing, like a record scratch played backwards. Intelligible, but wrong.
“Right, that’s still fucking weird.” I got up to grab a different book, one that I remember Bleu looking at from time to time.
Bleu and I didn’t have all the same things in common, but we got along well. We were both artists from before. We were used to surviving.
“If anyone is gonna make it, we will. I’m not worried,” they said.
So much for worry
What is it worth to worry, even if you’re wrong in the end?
I suppose it would depend on what I saw—at their end.
“Where did you put that book, Bleu?” I rummaged through my usual stacks and carefully took note of their stacks left behind in the main room.
“Did you eat the book, Lily?” I called out to entertain myself. “What do you think, girl?” I said walking back towards our new accent wall. Lily is sitting in the doorway of the bathroom. It was dark, I don’t usually turn the lights on in there. But, it’s the same as they left it. Their little cozy hiding spot in the ceiling.
We ended up reinforcing it into a small loft.
“How long have you been in here?!” I asked Bleu.
“8 months.”
“Fuck off, 7 months!”
“8 months.”
“Yeah, yeah. I heard you. 8 months and I didn’t notice. Jesus Christ, how the hell does that even happen…what did you do in here anyway?”
There was a surprising amount of space between the ceiling and what was once the subfloor of the unit above us. There were now a more surprising amount of trinkets and shiny, tiny things. Some of them felt precious, others were simple, all were discarded. Bleu had a knack for finding them.
Their piles were a specific, but foreign, system. It was extremely important that you didn’t move any of the items without explicit permission. I made the general choice not to touch their things.
I climbed the ladder with acid crawling up my throat and bile stirring in the bowels. Each rung felt like a punch to the ribs. Each step, a fracture.
Remembering the face of my friend in the water that I’d left behind.
My eyes blur with the static of a CRT television set, black and white pixels in blocks of smoke with notes of cyan and magenta. My hands feel loose, but claw back for the ladder.
Crack.