Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

Another chance to be remembered .

He digs until he can’t feel his body, just the pain of dirt and rock beneath his fingernails. He digs until he believes, because he has to, that he can find a black crystal with no rain.

A wet cloth is placed on her forehead and is warm within seconds. Remy feeds her a teaspoon of broken black crystal in applesauce, the black particles tweezed from the fabric of her bedroom rug. The applesauce and crystals mix with Mom’s saliva into a grim slush that glistens down her chin. Mom’s acting like Harvak did.

“We’ll check on you,” Dad says. “Sleep.”

When the door closes Mom throws her pillows to the floor, over the right side of the bed, and her body follows.

Reaching under the bed she grabs the red box. She drags herself across the floor, her legs motionless dead things, and into the sunlight triangle. She takes out the black crystal. Her hands have white veins, they look deep and faraway, drained. Little specks of flickering light swim through them. She angles the black crystal into the sun, and refracted high above and connected by thin bridges of light are the eight black crystal holograms. She smiles until her lips bleed. She plays the game perfectly. Miniature twin horses float in the air above her hands.

But it’s not enough. She needs the sensation again. She needs more. Mom considers eating the black crystal, all of it.

Horizontal bars of orange and pink stack inside each horse’s body and a river of creatures — snails, rabbits, birds, snakes — connect their mouths. In this family the loss begins with you . Above the horses the black crystal holograms form a dark field bordered by a pulsating heat. I don’t feel solid anymore . When Mom leans forward the horses squeal and their legs come down and into the back of her neck. Tell me there’s more than reality .

Mom, now sitting up, eyes crazy and filled with tears, lifts the box and smashes it on the floor between her legs. She raises it and brings it down again and again. She shakes her head from side to side and her hair tries to follow and blurs. She keeps smashing. Red arcs splinter the air. The horses disappear through portals. Gripping the black crystal like a pestle she grinds the box into the floor.

She slumps onto her side and lies gasping for air, covered in sweat, her gown transparent against her skin. She drops the black crystal. She moves her legs but her legs don’t move. Hundred barks, his paws visible in the space between floor and door.

Her face sideways, one eye open and tear-filled, the other dark against the carpet, she grabs the crystal and pulls it toward her.

She opens her mouth and closes her eyes.

Her teeth come down on the crystal so hard her lower jaw shifts an inch to the left and her mouth balloons liquid. She eats. She’s flooded with pictures. She looks inside her right lung and sees a garden inhabited by rabbits and a bear eating blueberries. Hidden in ragweed, a fox pops his head out and says she never was a very good mother, better to just leave and let Remy take her place. The bear walks with both hands outstretched, smearing blueberries on her ribs.

The carpet is rough as gravel and her face burns. She chews hard bits, not sure if it’s black crystal or teeth. She sees herself running from the garden and across a beach and Tock Ocki is there, running with her, telling her she’s one of the special ones, I told you, I told you that you’d be special, hey, slow down, look at that. For a moment, she sees numbers racing past a thousand as a road coming out of the ocean and connecting to the sun.

He is led down a blue hall by four guards. His body feels broken. When he steps down the flesh of his right ankle sinks into the heel of his foot, or at least it feels that way to Pants who is a total mess physically and soon-to-be mentally. With each step he takes he skips three. His right arm, in a sling, is signed by an inmate that says your perception is your reality so just make it be whatever . His head is wrapped in white bandages with a dark spot seeping through in the shape of a key. They stop at the end of the blue hall.

Jackson’s Hole is four feet by four feet with a fourteen-foot-high ceiling containing four lines of light. The door becomes a concrete wall when it shuts. Pants sits on the floor with his head throbbing. He wonders what the record length for a headache is, how much of his skull had to be cleaned off the floor. He’s not completely sure why he’s here, but he has a basic understanding.

The administration’s decision to place him in solitary is based on fear. Without black crystal they remove him from the population not to protect him from inmates, but from the guards who have become irritable and are acting strange. Yesterday a guard showed up to work in a gorilla costume spray painted in graffiti and another guard, seemingly drunk, held a dark-colored rock that he rabidly chewed while doing squat-thrusts. The guard with the gold cross has gone missing. His gold cross was found nailed to the mural of skeletons and roses. There has been talk of a riot not among inmates, but guards. They don’t want to be themselves anymore, they want to get back outside themselves, to the version with the black crystal inside them.

Pants falls asleep on the concrete floor. It’s probably due to the green medication they injected him with because his arm is covered in crystals and he tries to brush them away but they’re ghosts. He’s inside a white building. From a window he sees the prison and it’s pretty with the lights on. The crystals on his arm are different sizes, and in certain spots, a large crystal has small crystals consisting of smaller crystals. He digs his arm. They snap off, turn to pulp between his rubbing fingers, change to the color of smoke, rise. Looking under his arm he picks at gold colored rock hanging blob-like from his skin. He curls his fingernails in, pulls and tears away thick layers of gold alive in dream.

A bed lines the length of his arm. On the bed are hundreds of identical horses filled with colored bars. When he shakes his arm they fall. The horses land on the prison floor and flail their legs in a struggle to stand. Thirteen different versions of Mom from childhood — thirteen images of her from his favorite moments including playing with her in the rain, and lying in bed while she read to him, and standing behind her while she cooked at the stove — jump from his arm and dive into the flooding fog from the horses’ mouths. Then he runs across every floor in the white building, smashes out every window with a hammer, rides a coffin-sized and chain-powered elevator to new floors, to more windows that need smashing. He runs until he can’t feel his legs. He runs until he’s on the roof of the white building, the fog coming up and after him, horses squealing, guards fucking on white clouds in a million different positions above him saying to relax, it’s all going to work out, we’re all sky fathers here, grab a limb, join us.

It’s dark when he wakes. He’s torn the sling off his arm and also the head bandages. His arm, from inner wrist to armpit, is shredded like forked meat. Puss colored blue with weak sparkle drips from his elbow. If Z. comes back with black crystal he’ll be able to see the family he loves, dislikes, needs, wants to connect with once more before his body turns to husk. He can’t forgive himself. He can’t get outside himself.

The sun wants to swallow the earth not for reasons of expansion, but attraction to the black crystals. The universe will not miss the earth. There are billions of planets. The black crystals reach for the sun in a moving spider web, coming up from the earth’s center, ready to break through all dirt, rock, grass, and bone.