Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

Everything looks weird to Pants. The guard’s eyes are a horizontal slit across his head which is a grape and the lights on the ceiling slither and drool. The air is pixilated. Tony’s arm rash is raised and jellied. His chair feels hot and alive.

“Holy shit,” says Jug.

“…”

“I think,” says Crumb. “I’d eat the village cold.”

Pants speaks. The story is this:

When he was nine years old he followed Mom into the mine. He thought she was a witch because she wore a black robe. Seeing her without her usual gray gown reminded him of seeing Dad for the first time without a mustache — a cruel trick with paralyzing aftershock for a toddler. He followed her. She was a shadow in that black gown floating over the truck-pressed roads, past the vegetable stands, poorly constructed leaning shacks, homes with crude metal roofs, the loud-lighted bars with street corners gorged with drunks vomiting count. He followed her into the mine, keeping his distance in the dark. She performed a séance. Knees bent, body bouncing from side to side, she growled as she reached for the sky. She placed an invisible towel over the head of the moon and cleaned it. Years later he’d find out many mothers conducted séances to increase their count when they felt sick. It was normal. But what’s not normal is her wearing a black robe instead of a gray gown. What’s not normal is what happened to Mom and his reaction after and his following guilt.

“Well, okay,” says Jug. “Good start. Weird. But discussing your childhood opens you up to the person you are now,” he says repeating the words from a training manual. “Everyone see how that’s good? You build on that.”

Crumb and Tony check for more donuts and if the orange light is still lit on the coffee urn. With a swirling club the guard tells them to turn around.

Before Jug asks his first question, Pants says more. He speaks quickly, racing over the top-half of his words. Black robes walked into the mine. They tore the robe off Mom, and from where he was, his body flat, dirt in his mouth, trembling against the dirt, he watched them act in a way he had never seen before. He could have done something. He made fists.

Curl, straighten, curl, straighten . His big toe is a pumping valve. Concentrate with calm . The crystal sinks deeper and his ripped skin shrieks along a fuse behind his ears. Finally maxed out .

He sits up in the white plastic chair so straight it’s freakish. He describes a man’s measured punches through Mom’s hands which moved like they were cleaning fog off a windshield. They took turns falling on her, pushing her body into the dirt, fucking her into deeper plateaus. The first man went back. Pants floods the room with words, eyes wet, the veins in his neck worm-thick and making even self-proclaimed tough-guy-Tony wince. His body needs to move. Usually he can jog in his cell where he imagines the beach and Harvak at his side. The worst part wasn’t that he didn’t stop the men, but that his dick got hard against the dirt and he slithered and he screwed the ground. His fists became caresses. Pete whispers into his hands cupped over his nose and mouth What the fuck, dude and Crumb defense-mechanism-laughs while shaking his head no.

“I returned to the mine and replayed what happened to Mom who never reported or said a thing about what happened to anyone and I would lay in the dirt and rock and push into it and I was messed up back then because I thought, I really believed that I would die from such thoughts, like a force would reach down and yank every crystal from my body like a spine or something and leave me there like that and I’ve thought afterward and being here in the prison I could have done something, banner, banner, banner, that Mom is so sick now cause of what happened and I didn’t do anything, but I was a good boy, I didn’t do anything wrong, and now Mom is sick cause of me and I just need to help her cause I’m good.”

Pants stands and kicks the chair backward and it flips, the soldered metal glob where the legs sprout from hits the guard’s knees and he falls into a crossed-leg sitting position with a comical Uhf . Everyone else slides their chair back by extending their legs. Pants curls and uncurls his big toe. His foot is a puddle. Down the hall come extra guards. Pants keeps talking. He says he formed The Sky Father Gang to find answers on how to increase count, have Mom live forever, have Mom always be Mom, Mom as a god, until he stops, the inmates squeezing their fists looking back and forth, the guard rubbing his knees and standing with the cross in his mouth, the other, outside guards, wielding expandable batons turning the nearest corner, and Pants says to Jug who sits upright, eyes wide, a wet spot of sweat, or is it piss, it can’t be piss, jesus , pooling from his stomach and through his khakis, “I wanted to save her but I didn’t do anything” and tears stream from his eyes, “I could have done something but I didn’t,” and he readies, for the batons to open at the back of his knees, a ray of pain.

Behind rain clouds the sun looks like a giant daytime moon. The heat wave ignores the rain and refuses to leave. Holding old umbrellas, the elderly move through their daily tasks purchasing food from vendors and trading crystals they once worshiped for YCL, all the while worried — heads looking up, then left, then right, then down again and at their feet trudging through the muddy streets.

The truck drivers don’t care about the sky or sun because they can get more work done in the rain. They dress in slick green rain robes. They wear crystals around their necks that dangle so low under their work shirts the chain links knot in their chest hair. Their heads are hooded by their rain robes and they drive fast. Tires spin smooth spitting water backward, the rain glistening off metal hoods, doors, the roofs of the trucks that enter and leave the mine a dozen times daily.

Senior driver, Skip Callahan, drives shirtless. He wears a yellow crystal headband instead of a green necklace. He has plenty of chest hair. Today, he’s the lead truck in a line of ten making its return trip back into the mine. The first produced a few blue crystals, one green, lots of yellow, and a half of a dark red looking thing, all of it dumped in a field for workers to sift through. Men from the city once told Skip they’d be interested in buying the mine and Skip told them to get fucked. He slapped a fat face belonging to a politician named Sanders who rubbed his cheek while three others stood stunned. Skip knows other mine workers are potential sell-outs because of their personalities. They’re willing to sell to save themselves from some unknown crushing. The sky thunders and the rain falls faster from cracks of lightning.

Skip loves the rain. He loves to work. He blasts the radio — a country song picked up via a city signal with lots of banjo and violin — and smokes cigarettes he rolls himself. His truck is immaculate. On both driver and passenger side floors is a square of torn cardboard he replaces when muddied. The glove box contains homemade cleaning supplies that slosh inside mason jars and a spiraled branch of dirty cloths covered in engine grease. The wind pulls the rain to the side as his truck bounces down the road. In the pale light, royal disc of sun above, two hands gripping the steering wheel, he grins white teeth.

Last night Skip sat in the dark of his bedroom with his hands balled up against his chest, an all too common crippling depression. His mother, who was extraordinarily healthy for her count (such skin), recently died from a truck accident. The villagers stood around slack jawed and terrified (that’s going to happen to me one day) and watched her expel colors while Skip came running down the street, slowing as he saw the damage. He was told by a teenager that she was “hurt” in an “accident” and Skip thought he could help her, that maybe she had sprained a wrist or bruised a hip, anything but zero. He tried pulling her from the truck but that made her body worse, bend in unimagined ways, colors gushing from her chest. People winced and turned away. Since the accident he’s found it hard to function outside of work. Work is his everything now. In the bedroom, Skip tried to concentrate on an image that made him feel joy and that was driving. There, he could move his hands. Using two flashlights, he created headlights on his bedroom wall and pushed his right foot forward into a pillow.