Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

“We can’t keep stopping,” she says. “Come on.”

Remy pulls the blanket over Mom’s head before running again. She’s incredibly fast, much practice in the mine. Dad runs several steps behind, to the side. He concentrates on the tails of blanket sweeping Remy’s feet and Hundred darting around them, biting them. Can’t have Remy trip and drop Mom so he yells at Hundred, feels like he’s doing something important when really the dog has never listened to him. The ground tilts again. Dad slows down, a sad little trot because he doesn’t want to stop but he’s tired and has that side/back pain he’s had since the truck accident. Besides, the ground is trembling, he’s sure of it.

“Hurry,” Remy says, nearing the fence.

“The ground.”

“I know, just, come on.”

Those in the village shield their eyes from the sun. Growing smaller in the distance — Remy, Dad, and Hundred. Standing at the fence is Skip Callahan, crouched and holding up a section of peeled open fence, a pair of wire cutters next to his boot, his hands covered in thermal burns, a giant grin plastered over his face telling them to hurry up, he’s always wanted to help, come on.

He sits with his knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs. He’s playing Mom memories. She let them play in the mud during a rainstorm. Pants laughed in his soaked clothes and Mom said she’d clean them up later. The sky was a feathery gray. Dad isn’t in the memory because Dad was somewhere else. Mom bounced baby Remy in her arms as baby Remy covered her eyes with forked fingers, partially protected from the rain, but wanting to see the outside world, the movement of raindrops, light. He can still smell the mud.

But he can’t avoid the later Mom memories. Dinner table fights. Slammed doors. All those angry clichés proving true and hurting. The evening when she went after him with flailing fists and he had to restrain her against a wall, and how that moment triggered the night he saw her with the robed men. He pressed her fists into the wall, the wall thudded , and Dad asked from his bedroom Is everything okay in there? but didn’t get up. He was in bed eating eggs. Mom said to stop and twisted her head from side to side and he couldn’t stop because he was so scared from what he had to do. He pushed her onto the bed and ran.

Then he plays the night he can’t process. The night he discussed during the health meeting. He sees her with the men in dark robes who at the time, at his young age, possessed a creature-like quality with pawing claws and freakish hip sways. Or maybe that was his imagination because in his revisiting of the memory he isn’t watching from a distance, he’s standing there as one of them. He puts his hand inside his mouth and screams. His eyes hurt from his voice. There is no key to life only doors. He rolls on the floor and watches Mom with the men so close he could comb her hair. When it’s his turn, when the men with their evil green grins tell him Get it, son, don’t stop, get it get it , Pants crawls to the corner of the cell and balls himself up until he can push his neck into the wall by extending his legs against the other wall. He wants to get back inside the memory of the rainstorm, of being a boy again, but each time he tries to focus on his reflection in the puddles, Mom’s gown soaked at the very bottom, his bare feet running through wet grass, the calmness he felt knowing nothing about death, it’s all shredded by the hands of the men. In this version they’re from the city, just dressed like villagers, just trying to make things worse for the village, just trying to make it feel unsafe so the city is a hero riding in, and Pants thinks yes, that’s who it was all along.

He can’t turn his head off. When his neck can’t be pressed further, his legs fully extended, his body goes limp and he rolls onto his back. For a moment, he sees nothing, and that feels good. Hands on his chest he breaths in bursts that raise and lower his chest in such a dramatic fashion that he screams for help even though he knows the guards can’t hear him or don’t care to. He thinks he should have been a better son, and should have been a better brother, but he did the best he could, and it’s only in this present moment, looking back, can he think such a non-helpful thought as I should have done better . In the past you can change yourself into someone better, or worse, but not in the present moment, no, that’s impossible because the memory can’t be molded yet into what you want it to be, and Pants thinks this, and laughs, and he moves his hand across the always cool prison floor imagining the dirt from the crystal mine as he breaks apart a layer of static.

After he hits something hard, the machine abruptly stopping, the back two wheels bouncing up a few inches and jarring Z., he jumps out. A cloud of dust and debris takes a moment to clear. He looks under the machine for broken machine parts. He’s a mud mask with white eyes. He swallows another bug, a lightweight thing consisting of only wings, and waits for visibility to return inside the tunnel he’s created. He stares at the wall.

In front of the machine he crouches at the wall and uses the flashlight to form a head-sized white circle around a protruding spike. Tilting the flashlight up, down, left to right, the spike gleams. One side appears mirrored, and Z. doesn’t even recognize himself. He licks his lips and tastes dirt. A triangular section of the spike is smooth as glass. Using his fingers, he digs a little deeper into the wall, around the base of the spike, and dirt pours around what becomes a crystal. The more dirt that falls away the wider it becomes. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He wonders what it tastes like, what it can do to a person, how is this possible.

He grabs tools from the machine. He moves faster now, trembling with excitement. Here he is, someone who has discovered something thought never to have existed. He picks and digs. The crystal is double the size of his torso and it’s an unmistakable solid black. The light from the machine flickers, makes a terrible short-circuiting sound, and Z. turns to the change in light like it’s a bottle breaking. He checks the flashlight propped up on a rock that he has aimed in his direction. It’s already going to be impossible to find his way out of here, he can’t have the lights go. He imagines driving aimlessly through the tunnels, a flashlight held in his mouth, the machine full of black crystal rumbling through darkness, dirt swells, bug colonies.

He raises the hammer.

He breaks off fist-sized chunks. Clanging echoes reverberate through his arms. There’s gunk in his nose and he blows it out on his right arm, then raises the arm, aims, comes down and breaks off another chunk. He only needs so much to bring back but the more he gets, the bigger the hero he is or something, or so he thinks in the moment, so he cracks off more ham-sized pieces and leaves the remaining black crystal protruding from the wall. He can’t stop smiling. He wonders how far the crystal extends, maybe a network of black roots covering miles.

He places the chunks in the back of the machine where the toolbox is. Then the light on the machine burns out in a burst. Everything goes dark. Z. makes a noise he’s never heard before.

He sits in the idling machine with a narrow path of light filled with dust extending from his mouth where he holds the flashlight. How deep am I? He hears footsteps. Why has no one come? He jumps from the machine again and walks to where the remaining black crystal is and puts his ear against the wall, one hand flat against a cool side of the crystal. Through the wall gritty and cutting against his ear there’s water rushing through sewers, cars accelerating under yellow lights.