Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

He drives, cigarette in his mouth, a long turn downward, foot resting on the brake pedal. He squints through the rain and sees two shadows in the distance, small and blurry, and so low to the ground Skip thinks they’re either turtles or rocks. But as the truck straightens out from the end of the curved road, he notices it’s two animals, dogs maybe, running directly at him. He tosses his cigarette out the window. The left side of his body gleams with rain. He extends his foot into the brake pedal. Too hard and the tires will dig up the hard crust the hot rain has created. The driver behind Skip flashes his lights and another in the pack blasts his horn. Shitheads , thinks Skip, and tries to slow the truck more but the front tires lock and skid.

He eases off the brake as the two dogs enter the headlights. He turns the wheel to the left, toward the towering wall of dirt, and the trucks behind follow in a motion smooth and centipede like. Skip is having difficulty seeing through the windshield. The combination of heat and rain and truck speed turn the headlights into smeared pearls. His CB radio crackles with hey bud-e, we-with, you, every-thing okay, up-there-hey-oh-what-is-dat-whoa-um-Skip-easy-there-Skip-care-full .

Ugly is the sky above the wall.

“What,” says Skip into the rain-slashed windshield. He hits the wipers bar up but it’s already all the way up.

Out the passenger window a dog runs past, legs caked in mud, tongue out, exposed teeth. One eye looks yellow, the other black. Keeping up with the dog is a child on all fours. A girl in red shorts. Blond hair cascades the length of her arms. She’s incredibly fast and combined with how fast Skip is driving the dog and the girl blur past.

“Stop it or I’ll —” says Skip, momentarily looking into the side mirror to see them vanishing into the rain. Then he concentrates back on the road and says, “Holy mother wow was that what,” before driving the final section of the road down.

He reaches the bottom of the mine. The drivers circle around his truck. Crisscrossing headlights illuminate mine workers who wear black shorts, no shirts, and jog with wheelbarrows dirt-brimmed with crystals. Tonight’s late-night undocumented batch will be sold to the city and used for engagement rings, special occasion earrings, displayed in New Age yoga studios, given to the hospital-sick for positive energy. They have their own crystals, but they don’t have these crystals. Some will be sold to parents for their children who play a game called Lyfer, trade the crystals back and forth in a test of who can maintain closest to a hundred, the brightest colors worth extra. They hurry between the ringing bells of classes to lie about what they hold behind their backs and to trade furiously as teachers watch. Skip listens to the roar of truck engines shifting gears as he tries to comprehend what he just saw.

Ken Horgan, a rat-like man whom Skip has seen several times bleeding from the head after work shifts, rolls his window down. His neck turned back and up, eyes squinting in the rain, he says, “Whole-e-shit. Was that a werewolf?”

Skip drives a loop around the trucks. Gas pedal floored, the truck buckles through shifting gears. He heads back up and out of the mine on the road he just descended. Ugly is the sky coming over the wall. Skip wants to help because he is a person hardwired to help. He couldn’t help his mom. Tires roll over the hand-prints over paw-prints. Ken Horgan says from the pit of the mine, standing in the rain with eyes like a rat being flicked with water, “COME BACK AND TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS SKIP I’VE NEVER KNOWN A HALF DOG PERSON BEFORE LET’S HAVE DINNER AND TALK ABOUT IT BUDDY.”

Halfway to the house they stop because Hundred has something in his paw. He’s been running on three legs. Remy, covered in mud, sits in the road and cradles him in her lap. The rain lets up to a spit. Steam places the village in a cloud and the lower half of the city disappears. She pulls out a triangle of dark crystal from his paw. Blood splatters across her fingers in a Z. His eyes break as his spine twists. Remy tries to say something like, “stop” but it comes out as “hop.” He runs from her arms with impossible strength and Remy follows until they both enter the house.

“Hey, hop it.”

“…”

“Hop it now.”

They run up the stairs and down the hall, doors slamming shut behind. They jump into the tub. Remy turns the water on as Hundred play-bites her forearms. She laughs and can’t believe he wants to be in the tub, he hates baths, but he seems to be loving it, barking and leaping and smiling the way dogs sometimes appear to be smiling. She slaps his body with both hands. More blood from his paw, a stream of numbers entering the water. He acts wild, his eyes bigger than all dog eyes combined.

Thud thud thud on the front door with a three second pause before another thud thud thud . They ignore it.

As the water splashes over her legs, rises above her stomach, the mud from Remy’s skin and Hundred’s hair washes off in black goops that she finger-paints on the tub’s walls. Hundred eases into a calm state, but something is off. Remy has witnessed a transformation. Good, bad, she doesn’t know yet, but something has happened. He’s not acting happy anymore. She can’t stop staring at the way he’s moving, not like a dog, but like a bug on its back, trying to flip over and right itself. It’s like he’s trying to move inside himself or leave his own body.

“You okay?”

Hundred barks twice and turns his head to the thudding.

“Who’s that?”

Before the water reaches her chest, Hundred leaps from the tub and leaves a wet slide of mud and dark goo extending out the bathroom, down the stairs, and to the front door where the thudding just won’t stop.

“Hey, open up.”

Hundred stretches his front legs up on the door and barks.

“I don’t care what it is you’re doing. I’ve known crystal heads before and it doesn’t bother me, I just want to know if you are all right. Name is Skip and I work in the mine. I said, HELLO?”

Remy stays in the tub. Blood hangs from her feet. She sits back with the water at her chin and crosses her left foot over her right knee and inspects her foot. The air wobbles. She doesn’t feel like herself anymore and that’s a good thing. It’s her birthday and later tonight Dad will shoot a single firework into the sky. Pressed into her skin are dark crystals. Thud thud thud . She picks one out and blood pours down her leg. They look black. Scared, where is Mom and Dad? What is this? She squeezes the crystal back in. A flash of heat travels from her foot to her head followed by a desire to run. The liquid retracts back inside her. Lifts her. She breaths in bursts and closes her eyes where she sees a body being carried to the mine where burned. Mom cried at the kitchen table this morning because when you guess how many are inside, you guess how many days you have left. Remy doesn’t think about her lowering count because now she’s at the opposite end of that thought. Here in the pink tub, the discovery of black crystal is an escalating number widening her veins, making her believe, making her become everything — plant, bird, horse, dirt, sun, Mom — alive.

There’s one last series of knocks at the front door and then just Hundred barking, proud of himself for fighting off the knocks.

Skip Callahan stands shirtless in steam and rain. He only wanted to help. He turns and checks his idling truck. What was that? He walks back to his truck and looks at the fence. The city, like the sun, is way closer than yesterday. What’s happening? The buildings are fanning out around them like cards. I don’t want to die . People are walking the edge of the city. Some are using binoculars. Skip turns his back, lowers his pants, and jiggles his big body.