Shane Jones: Crystal Eaters

It’s difficult to move under the heat wave twisting the sky into something new. For weeks the temperature has only risen. There’s no relief in the forecast.

The heat melted a green crystal. Z. smeared the green across his forehead and laughed from the shelling sensation on his skin as they walked the fence. So many men with long limbs and goofy faces. Their name is Brothers Feast, and according to Z., they will be remembered forever.

On both sides of the fence are enormous dirt fields. In the distance — the city and prison. Ricky heaves a bottle over the fence and they run in the dark, laughing, back to their humble homes so unlike the city’s structures. They have technology. The village has crystals. Tendrils of turquoise from city pollution screen the moon above.

“We’re going to be someone,” says Z. “C-c-c-come on, back to the fence. B-b-b-back to looking at the prison.”

The city is a weed. It grows closer with buildings being built and will soon cover the village. The elderly watch closely like they do the sun and they preach it’s end times. Others believe the city moves because they want to destroy what is archaic. The village has nowhere to run. Their way of life doesn’t match up with the city way of life. They are bigger. Here it all comes, they say. Open up, they say. We’re fucked, they say.

The prison is located on an island of land built slightly away from the main city buildings, connected by a single-lane road.

“We’ll be r-r-r-remembered,” says Z. “Just you guys wait.”

The lights illuminate curling barbed wire and concrete walls so tall and smooth the Brothers often ask each other during meetings How did they build them so high without it collapsing? Is it magic? Must be magic . The city is navy blue suits, cafeterias, ham sandwiches, granite counters, several types of stop signs, mouth-mint dentists, blacked-out car windows, bottled water, eight-to-six office jobs, drywall. But the prison is different, something special, like magic.

“Is anyone listening to me when I say g-g-g-great things will happen?” says Z. “Anyone, anyone at all?”

The Brothers answers yes, they know, great things are coming. They dream of prisoners running wild with guards trailing, the air above the guards’ heads whisked with batons, lights exploding through their bodies, the air sticky and sweet with perimeter flowers blooming like smoke on the single-lane road as they run.

“Men have always been scared of the city, r-r-r-remember our lives in hiding. Depressing. We can’t hide anymore, the city won’t let us. Here it c-c-c-comes.”

For inmates, the worst part isn’t being locked up and having a shoebox-sized window to squeeze their face against, observing the city and imagining their loved ones eating cherry pie. The worst part is they can’t see the beautiful place holding them. They can’t see the lights spiking the night sky like Brothers Feast can, standing, at the fence.

“If you’re remembered f-f-f-forever, you live f-f-f-forever.”

The Brothers aren’t listening. They can’t concentrate on anything else beside the prison. They know Z. is talking, but they don’t process what he’s saying.

“Agree,” someone says.

“Doing it,” says another.

“The t-t-t-trick,” says Z., “is to become part of p-p-p-people’s memories, their reality.”

Dog = 40

Ant = 3

Bird = 10

Mold = 678

Baby = 100

Mother’s tear = half

Plant = 230

Remy = unknown

Cat = 39

Spit = partial

Cloud = 88

Horse = unknown

Moon = 4,000

Frog = 12

City = infinite

Village = always falling

Tree = 480

Fly = 4

Sun = 10,000

Rabbit = 8

Mirror = reflective of object

Dirt = infinite

Pinecone = 7

Lamb = 22

Air = infinite

Flower = 1

Crystal count is depleted gradually over time but can be drastically decreased by events. Getting hit by a truck would most likely erase a baby’s one hundred. If the baby survived, wrapped in a tiny full-body cast, her count would be similar to a rabbit’s. Her count would no longer be a shining triangle of one hundred perfectly stacked crystals inside her body because it would resemble scattered shale.

The village survives on myth.

There is the story of Royal Bob, a myth so old it is easily dismissed today, but a story that is still told. Royal Bob is the first person to find a black crystal. He boiled it down into dark syrup that he sipped for decades. Seen running at night in blue shorts, mouth open, grinning, head tilted back with his gray hair stretching twenty feet behind him, dogs weaving in and out. Royal Bob rarely spoke, never entered daylight, but the myth says he preached several times at night, in a mine tunnel lit with hanging lanterns, about the black crystal to the elderly. His body was never found. All the glass tubes were empty inside his home — the elderly slowly walking the halls, picking up the glass tubes by thumb and finger and dropping them into burlap sacks. Some say Royal Bob lives inside the mine where he runs endlessly through the tunnels. You can see his hair. Some say Royal Bob will never be zero because he’s forever filled with black crystal. Some say his soul is tethered to the gravity of all village dirt. Others say he escaped into the city so he could destroy it. But no one knows because a myth is a myth.

The oldest books advise worshiping the crystals excavated from the mine. Today these practices are limited, deemed antiquated and pointless by many. Most crystals, especially red and green, are for selling now. The yellow are melted and poured through machines. Red crystals become knick-knacks displayed on tables and mantels. Few believe in their healing powers. But the mining still continues at a high rate, day and night, because it’s what they’ve always done and they need the yellow (YCL) for their lamps, refrigerators, and generators.

Discussing your count in the village is like discussing the weather in the city.

Count is not a city belief. They want to take over the village. Those in the city have little understanding of the village and are comfortable with destroying it and capturing the crystal mine because it’s all so different from their way of life. The city believes in the new ways of progress, not the old ways of tradition and simplicity. Many use The Bend not only as a curved road to jog, but to look in at the village and wonder why they live the way they do. They bring binoculars and get drunk and stare. Legislation has been passed to install high-powered stand-alone “binocular stations” costing taxpayers fifteen thousand dollars, including the salary of a part-time “binocular attendant” and not one complaint to date has been filed. The city lives like it will never die.

Remy spends hours touching her stomach, trying to predict her count. She wants a hundred crystals shining like a campfire. When she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror she only sees the dark and wonders if she’d be prettier if she lived in the city, had lipstick, dresses, shampoo infused with rose oil, sunglasses to cover her face.

Once, she saw green crystals in the corner of her eye. Four of them hung like beads of water from her eyelid and when she ran downstairs to show Mom they broke into a pea-green pool clouding her vision.

“I swear they were there.”

“I know,” said Mom, inspecting Remy’s eye. It wouldn’t stop blinking. “I’ve seen them before.”

“Really?”

“As a baby they blinded you.”

“Scary.”

“The body is small then and the crystals are everywhere. Sometimes, they come out.”

“And now they’re gone?” said Remy. She touched her eye.