Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

Jug smiles. In a way, he respects him for being disrespectful, and what Pants says is true. “Okay, some structure. A prison is a place to hold people who didn’t follow the law and to help those people recover. The word is re-ha-bil-i-ta-tion. Nothing wrong with that I don’t think. The way I see it, I’m part of helping people. Hey, you feeling all right?”

Pants hasn’t had crystal in days. Besides, he’s leaving this place soon. He’s heard a rumor about the failure of the jailbreak in reverse, that some of the men are now in the prison for good. But he hasn’t seen anyone and his closest gossipers — Tony and Pete — haven’t said anything. He scratches his head and the sound is amplified and migraine producing. His forearms have blue-black veins like tangled wires. He imagines his count — 74, 55, 39, 28, 16, 10 — as actual numbers, three dimensional, falling in rain.

“Mom?”

Jug looks around the room and so does a guard. “Huh?” says Jug, leaning forward. From where Pants is sitting, combined with how Jug is sitting, Jug is two spread legs and just a head, a confused face in the middle, and Pants smiles, looks haunted.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“I’ve had enough too. Got in a lot of trouble for what you did before. What I want to tell you is that we read your letters from Brothers Feast and the ones to and from your mother.”

It’s hard to say who is more shocked by his reaction — the guards who have their hands on their clubs, their fingers tracing the metal rings in the wood, or Pants himself, who feels the few muscles left in his body tighten like anchored rope. Even Jug is uncomfortable, his eyes zigzagging around the room as he ignores Pants who is crying the type of crying where the eyes are bloodshot and filled with water and the upper body shakes.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” says Jug, regaining his role as the one in control, his voice getting deep and serious, professional Jug acting quickly now, the guards wondering how he’s going to handle this situation (a man crying!) after the last health meeting mishap. “Your friend will bring back the crystal or you’re never going to leave this prison, never going to see your mom, never going to do a thing . Do you understand what I’m saying, a thing .” He leans back and sneers, then leans forward again. The guards smile at each other and one tries to hold back his laughter by biting his bottom lip but exhales an odd half-hiss half-fart sound.

“I can’t control what he does and doesn’t do. If he comes back with it?”

“Everyone released,” says Jug, proud of himself, relaxing back into the chair with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s been able to handle Z. and the Brothers and now Pants. He’s on top. He’s in control. “Your poor mom.”

Pants stands and jumps up on his chair. He grabs the back for balance before standing tall, arms outward.

“Hey,” says Jug.

Everyone watches, not moving, not sure what to do.

Shuffling his feet, Pants turns so his back faces the guards. The plastic seat of the chair blows a bubble at the floor. He says he’s going to fall backward. “Your choice to catch me.”

Jug looks at the guards and shakes his head no.

But from instinct, maybe it was the trust-fall they did months ago, the guards begin to form two lines behind Pants. They disband when Jug says to them, “Stop, stop it. We can’t let him tell us what to do. We’re the ones in control.”

Pants says to the wall, his feet a little shaky on the small surface of the chair, “Mom is slush.”

The guard wearing the gold cross, which looks tiny now, says to another guard that it’s because Pants doesn’t believe in god, that’s the reason he’s unable to get over his guilt with what happened to his mother in the mine and the other guard says, “Frank, just stop.”

“Better make your move, boss man,” says Pants, and he pushes back on his heels.

Everyone watches as his weight shifts into the empty space of the room and into the odd frozen picture of a man tilting in the air, the body long, towering, insane.

The chair slides.

The guards have to react even if the reaction is not reacting.

Maybe you gain control by losing control.

The guard with the gold cross runs to the opposite wall and palm-punches a red button.

Maybe you’re never in control and knowing that is gaining control.

“Shit,” says a guard.

The chair hits the concrete wall, bounces backward and upward, spins and falls as Pants floats horizontal in the air. His face is flat and serene. His eyes are closed and all he sees is the blurry rose-tint of his eyelids, imagining the lights above are the sun.

Alarm bells ringing.

Guards running.

Jug shouts garbled letters. The power of his voice is one hand on each guard’s shoulder, pulling them away from the body about to hit the concrete floor. They aren’t prepared for the landing. They aren’t prepared for the clean-up. What’s about to happen is a horror, a body meeting an unmovable object, and it isn’t the sound when his head cracks which is so horrendous, it’s their voices.

Z. crawls under the fence. The air itself looks red, the wind a punishing speed, everything dusty, villagers walking in bent-over forward angles with eyes shut, hands as fists. There’s a howling. The sun is trying to burn everything up and the buildings are moving closer. Returning took Z. a shorter amount of time than reaching the prison. Dirt fills his eyes but he doesn’t care. He runs by a destroyed table and a crashed truck with flat tires. The tin roofs are blinding in the sun.

Everyone moves around the truck and table. Street vendors sell yellow crystal earrings, blue crystal necklaces, and green crystal headbands to a group of city tourists who have snuck in. There’s a gold pin with a red crystal triangle inside. Drawings of what a black crystal would look like are also for purchase. Someone points at an old woman who kisses a green crystal she wears around her neck. They look at the village and think it’s disposable, undesirable in modern time, something that can be washed away, or better, fixed. Z. moves past it all with the warning words of Jug ringing his head.

He runs to the mine dodging trucks. He jogs down the spiraling road. He passes little pyramids of dirt and mounds of yellow to be melted. Air conditioners from Mob of Mary’s have been running on max, dripping gray water, trembling in too-large windows, poorly secured by old wadded up blankets. He runs unnoticed into a tunnel.

He scratches at the tunnel walls in random places and dirt and rocks rain on his shoes. He picks at silver flakes in the dark, truck headlights crossing him. He’s been in the mine before, but not like this, not as a worker trying to find the impossible. He remembers the crystal Jug held and he still can’t believe it because he’s lived through the myth. No one, absolutely no one, has seen one up close. He has to discover something that doesn’t exist. His mind buzzes, collapses, races. In the near distance the screech of a drill the size of the moon is terrifying, is some kind of machine at the edge of the city, is some kind of machine designed to build buildings impossibly fast. He saw them shooting up from the soil. He saw them moving closer. A man in a dress gave him the middle finger, what does that mean. They will bury the village in drywall, coffee shops, and wifi. He pulls off the dogtooth whistle and throws it behind him. They will bury the village in their future. He claws his hands into the wall of dirt and uses the weight of his body to drag his nails down until he lands on his knees. The city gets what it wants but so does the sun and one will destroy the other. He twists and turns his fist into the dirt until his knuckles tear.