Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

— 4 CRYSTALS FROM DAMAGING PARENTS’ WORDS ENTERING MY BRAIN.

She continues the game until her skin turns blue and she needs a tiny black crystal flint to regain strength. She stabs her mouth. A freckle expands through her cheek in a red circle that covers one side of her face. The following visions of all things negative she sees awake: Harvak dying, Brother leaving, parents fighting, sun killing. Then, there’s the beach again and the clouds are slowly coming down and each one holds a cop holding a baby under an arbor rung with flowers.

Black crystal dissolves everything.

Black crystal is everything.

Here she is with limbs shaking, lungs sky-up and filling with the good kind of pain, head all air, Remy with eyes glazed-over and wanting everyone she loves to live forever.

+25 FROM BLACK CRYSTAL.

“Mom, I need to speak to you, Mom,” she says, knocking on the door and not waiting for an answer, flinging open the door and walking into the bedroom where Mom sits on the floor in a hunched lotus position. Her spine is visible through her nightgown (Chapter 4, Death Movement, Book 8) in the sunlight coming in through the window. When she turns and sees Remy, she slides a red box under the bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I ran the mine during the rainstorm. I know, I know, I shouldn’t, but I did, and it happened.”

“You’re sick?”

“With Hundred. A truck almost ran us over. I have to tell you something.”

“I saw the mud. Come here.”

Remy sits in the folded angles of Mom’s lap and it’s the first time she thinks maybe she’s too big for this, but being so close to Mom is comforting, even in the heat. She places her head on Mom’s chest and there’s no heartbeat. Wait. There it is.

“Black crystals,” says Remy, looking up at Mom’s chin. “They exist. They cut my feet and I felt a rush. I know, it’s wrong. But Mom, I’m sorry. I’ve done it again and I’m telling you it adds. I have some left and I don’t think there’s more left in the whole world.”

Mom moves Remy’s head and body facing forward toward the window so Remy can’t see her skin. Last night, Dad found red scabs in the shape of a door on the back of her neck. “Your Brother talked about this.”

She couldn’t remember the last time Mom said the word Brother or his real name, Adam. Remy never saw him use black crystal for sure, but she assumed he had it. There was a night when she walked past his bedroom and he was in there with three kids and they were taking turns eating a dark-colored rock. Brother used one side of his mouth to gnaw on it while the others jumped on the bed and told him to keep going, eat it all. It was a dare. Then he acted funny. He ran in place and dripped sweat and slapped his face. He fell to the floor and barked. He rolled over and looked up at Remy and screamed to close the door. After one of the boys slammed it closed they laughed forever. They ran and threw their bodies against the door and she could see little slivers of light around the doorframe and she stepped back thinking the little slivers of light were forming a box around her.

“It could help you. Or what about the hospital?”

“You’re still doing it? You have some left?”

The lace curtains pulled open are singed black at the edges.

“No,” lies Remy. She can still feel the black crystal inside her. Her feet keep moving when she doesn’t want them to move.

“Remy.”

“Just try?”

“Do you have any left?”

“I said no.”

Mom rubs Remy’s shoulders. “Children replace their parents.”

Remy stands, her legs momentarily tangled inside of Mom, and stomps her feet. She marches. Mom pushes herself backward trying to avoid getting crushed. Remy’s face is all knots, and her cheek, where she placed the black crystal flint, is swollen. She gives one more monster stomp and the sunlight triangle shakes.

A fire truck’s siren can be heard in the distance and they both look at the window. More city buildings are burning, flames mending seamlessly with sunlight.

Mom looks up at Remy, a shifting adult-to-child perspective that saddens Mom. “This is what happens.”

Remy asks, “How many?”

“It’s something you don’t need to know.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“I’ll feel better knowing what’s inside you.”

“Remy, please.”

“But how many? If I have to accept it, I should know it. Mom? Please?”

“Two.”

He sits on the roof in the midnight dark. New lights shine from the city. Buildings built in hours. One building shoots up so fast that Dad closes one eye and with his opposite hand finger-walks the sky with each level completed. Windows with workers’ flashlights open to his touch. The sound of hammers fold inside the sound of saws.

City inspectors are told to sleep outside and report back to Sanders if the city is growing. The inspectors wear white helmets with flashlights and one-piece jumpers the color of pearl. At night they patrol the fence with their lights crisscrossing as they examine the ground. They measure the dirt between the fence and the nearest buildings, and each time the measurement shrinks a quarter-inch.

“What’s going on?” says one inspector to another, in a concrete stairwell that rises with each word spoken. “We losing our minds from the heat?”

“Beats me.”

“We have to report something, Jim.”

“I told you, it beats me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means I don’t know.”

“How can we not know?”

“Just don’t.”

Later: “Well,” says Sanders, who is aging quickly, not the young buck who once gave a speech at the opening of the prison. He’s balding. In his closet in his office, worn under a suit jacket and pressed between two suits, is a blue dress. Only his wife knows about this fetish, and one day soon, his son.

The ten dirt-encrusted inspectors stand in the room and their jumpsuits crinkle with movement. Sanders stares. One inspector has his flashlight on. Another inspector pulls the helmet off his head and with the heel of his palm knocks the batteries out and onto the floor. They do their best to stand silent.

“We don’t know why, or how,” says an inspector. “Also, the sun might be getting closer, but our reports say it’s an optical illusion.”

“And how, exactly, is that supposed to make sense?” says Sanders.

“What? The sun, or the city? Or both?”

“Let’s start with the city.”

“It doesn’t,” says the same inspector. His black mustache is saturated with sweat. “It doesn’t make any sense at all, that’s what we’re trying to tell you. Not sure if the land is retracting or these buildings are new buildings. I know what that sounds like. We orange-tag them and the tags disappear. Is someone, maybe a villager, taking the tags off? I doubt it. Could be the guy who keeps lighting our buildings on fire. What I’m saying is that one of us sleeps in a building only to wake up with a building in front of that building.”

“Ghosts are working the night shift?” asks Sanders.

The inspector without a helmet says, “I touched the sky where the sun is and burned my fingers.”

“No, well, not exactly,” says the sweaty black mustache. “We can’t prove that. We can’t prove that because we have no physical proof of seeing the buildings going up. Yes, we see, we understand, there is less land between the village and here. Yes, there seems to be more random buildings, but, I, we, just don’t know.”

“Did you ever think,” says Sanders, rubbing his face with both hands, “to have one, maybe two people, stay up for a few days and just watch, or, I don’t know, take a few pictures? We have so much technology, use it.”