Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

Going in for a lay-up that won’t go in because Pants is directly under the rim, he understands Dad was so mad that day because of Mom. The fights, the silence at dinner, all things he saw but couldn’t process, building up inside Dad, exploding against his boy’s body. What was said during the walk was what upset Dad, and because he couldn’t vocalize then, to her, what he felt, it came out against him. Why Mom allowed it he wasn’t sure. It was so unlike her. He’s not sure who is more at fault. He’s not sure what it’s like to be a parent, how difficult it is, all the mistakes made even though a parent is constantly trying not to make mistakes. But maybe that’s the problem.

He can’t make a single shot because his mind is in the bedroom.

He was lashed across the back of his legs and down his arms. Rolls of dirty underwear falling from his shirt in a strange and terrible magician ta-da! kind of way. One pair, from his left leg, wrapped around his ankle and stayed there for the remainder.

“I’m sorry,” he babbled.

Dad flung him into the ceiling when he tried to hide in the space between wall and bed.

“I’m saying I’m sorry why aren’t you stopping please why aren’t you stopping?”

Dad grabbed his hand and dragged him to the center of the room, the belt a blur, difficult for Pants to predict where the next hit would strike. The buckle landed in his palm and produced a rectangular welt.

“Enough,” said Mom.

Dad kept going. The belt discovered new skin to plant bruises. But Pants wasn’t trying to run away anymore. He was holding on to his father because he thought being close enough would make him stop. It appeared that he was trying to hug him, to get so close that the beating would have to stop and the only option would be an embrace. But it didn’t work because Dad couldn’t stop himself, everything emotional pouring through his swinging arm, his limbs buzzing with blood, everything coming out and onto his screaming son crumpled around his thighs, arms loosening with each strike down.

After Dad drove off in the truck Mom told her son to take off his shirt. She inspected his body. She was too shy to tell him to take his underwear off, but she never would have made it. His back was divided thirteen times in thirteen places. Stomach puffy and red, and in one area, split and bubbling crystal puss. All doors were shut now. Smelled like dead dogs, but mostly shit because his sweat had warmed the underwear that didn’t fall out. Mom just stared at his heaving and bloodied back, the back that had once unfolded out of her. She sat on the couch. She couldn’t stop thinking about his birth, the exact moment of it, and she connected it to this moment. He walked over and pulled her hands from her face.

“How many did I lose?”

She always told him a bedtime story about the sun leaving the sky because it had to visit the other side of the world and that night she told it to him in extended form, detailing villagers who ate light, rode crystal-armored horses, fought city workers in misty green mountains, until he fell asleep and she walked from the room, leaving him to the images, his recovery dreams. Mom stopped herself from feelings when Dad came home. They didn’t talk. She lay in bed pretending to be asleep and hoping he wouldn’t smell the underwear in the garbage.

The next morning his body was swollen. When he stood, his left hip slipped from the socket before finding its new place a quarter inch left. Both ankles were loose. It hurt to put clothes on. He was scared to breath, and when he did, deciding on a big inhale to see just how bad it could be, the air flowed over something sharp.

Days later in the mine he found black crystals during a strong rainstorm and odd day of extreme heat, and desperate to heal, willing to try anything, he accepted a double-dog-dare from Bob T. and ate three chunks. He brainstormed ideas on count when his brain unfolded and folded and unfolded again, the feeling of black crystal in his body a new machine to revisit. He had no anger toward Dad, only fear, and thought of giving him, not Mom, a black crystal as a gift, an apology for being the type of kid who embarrassed his parents, who deserved to be punished for the way he was, what he did.

The pain from the punishment has stayed. He moves in ways so he doesn’t feel it. For example, he knows not to lean too hard on his left hip. He forgets at moments, like playing basketball, when he drives the baseline and tries for a lay-up he’s too far under to make. He takes a step under, to the far side of the rim, and his hip makes a loud pop , turning the guard’s hamburger-head in the window. He launches three-pointers that force him to land hard on the heels of his feet. His foot throbs numbers.

He can’t hit a shot. Everything bricks. When the ball gets trapped between rim and backboard the guard with the hamburger-head who has a belly like a bag of trash comes in and knocks it free by jumping with his club, his keys jangling and pants sagging. He grabs the ball and continues shooting, trying to hit the simplest of shots and misses each one.

With every missed shot his body hurts and he can smell his shit coming in through the vents in waves, crashing into the fans above who spin the shit and flatten-out the shit. Guards crowding by the window crawl over each other and laugh as he misses. He stands two feet from the hoop and raises the ball with one hand. Push . And miss. A muffled yell from a guard against bulletproof glass says, “Gotta be kidding me!”

It’s my fault for hiding my underwear and it’s my fault she’s sick .

The steel white doors unlock and open, meaning the hour is up. He has one shot left. Flick the wrist . Swish.

Pants says, “I’m a winner,” with his arms raised, ponytail a dog’s tail, the ball rolling to a stop at the colored, padded wall. He thinks of Mom and the previous health meeting when he discussed the rape in the mine and how it dug up sadness, frustration, odd attraction, things no boy should witness or have to process. How he felt guilty for doing nothing. But now he has another chance. He will escape. He will see her again. He will find a way to add and make things better. He stops jumping, a sharp pain connecting his foot to his lower back.

When the guard with the hamburger-head puts a hand on his left shoulder Pants falls to his knees and grabs the guard’s hand which goes limp. The guard reaches for his baton at his belt. The shit comes down from the ceiling and Pants vomits blue slush into his right hand and the guard says to him they need more crystal. Pants tells him to stop, there’s little left, who are you, who is anyone.

A village myth says the sun will rage war on the earth. This is not a myth. Another village myth says the city will move into the village and crush it, that the city is alive, that it’s a creature who eats the small. This too is not a myth. A third village myth says the black crystals are reaching up and pulling on the sun’s flames, but no one knows for sure if that’s true or not. Could just be a myth.

Ricky and Bobby T. take turns shoving each other into the fence. The chain-linked metal absorbs their bodies before springing them back. Coating half the sky, the sun. There’s a theory that if you put a frog in water and raise the temperature half degree by half degree the frog won’t notice, that the frog will stay in the water and die in the water. The Brothers walk and Ricky and Bobby T. continue shoving each other.

“You know what I hate,” says Ricky. “Frogs.”

“So?” says Bobby T.

Z. tells them to be quiet and they nod. He’s trying not to act nervous, but this is the big day, this is the beginning of becoming remembered forever and his legs are shaking.