Shane Jones - Crystal Eaters

“Last try.”

Something is happening in the city: sky-stretched screams, ambulance howls, rising smoke, breaking glass. The Brothers leave the mine by way of the dirt road and run to watch. The moon weakens from clouds. In a final attempt to find a black crystal Remy picks a random spot on the ground and makes a hole by kicking her heel downward. Dog Man barks. Nothing. Not even yellow. Remy hears the noises too, sees the trails of smoke above, wonders what it could be.

They run up the road and out of the mine and watch the fire in the city. Night-framed bodies leap from a burning building before ladders can fall against the roof. The moon pulls flames from the windows in ribbons of yellow and red. Six arcs of water extend from flashing lights positioned below. At this distance, in this moonlight, when a helicopter turns and slants itself when pouring dirt from above and onto the burning building the helicopter disappears and what Remy sees is a slit in the sky spewing dirt. She looks and wonders where the hospital is. Dog Man moans.

“It’s okay,” she says, holding him in her arms, his nose wet and covered in dirt. “That’s city fire.”

“You’ll let me die like Harvak.”

“I won’t,” says Remy.

“I’m not really talking,” says Dog Man. “I eat my own shit.”

“Will Mom die?”

A large temple-shaped flame spurts skyward from the roof and more people scream.

“That is exactly what will happen.”

“Then what’s the point?”

Trucks driving toward the fire drown buildings in flashing lights. Curious faces hang from apartment windows. Someone drops their phone ten stories and shouts, “My phone!”

Dog Man says, “They consume because they want to live forever.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

The chopping of the helicopter narrows to a distant and silent dot.

“I sleep under your bed and puke there. There’s an entire floor of puke and you don’t know about it.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

He laugh-barks. “A lake of puke.”

“Stop it.”

“Puke ocean.”

“Let’s go.”

“Puke city.”

“Come on.”

“Puke kingdom.”

“We’re going now.”

“You know what you are?”

“What?”

“The princess of castle puke.”

They run home with the smoke and clouds and heat a union above, following.

Remy wakes in her bed. She sneezes black gunk into her palm and wipes her hand on the flower-print bedspread. When she stands, she steps on her sleeping dog and immediately jumps to the side, raising her foot.

“Sorry,” she says.

“…”

“Hey, said I was sorry.”

Dog Man sits up, head angled.

“I’m not looking under the bed.”

“…”

“How is Mom?”

“…”

After washing her hands in the bathroom Remy walks downstairs. Smell of bacon. She trips on a bucket of YCL placed on the floor just around the corner to the kitchen entrance. Some of it sloshes out and spills on the floor and Dad yells because they need every drop. Remy cleans the spill up with a wet cloth from the sink and Dad watches her every move.

Dad attempts to get Mom to eat a sliced apple with honey. She eats with hesitation, little interest, her mouth caged with saliva. Her eyes say she wants the bacon on the stove, Remy sees this, but Dad doesn’t notice. He holds the apple to her lips. Dad prepares meal after meal to show he cares. He spends countless hours cooking only to rush through eating and then moving on to the next meal. He thinks time spent together at the table is important, family time, a duty and obligation that must be filled, but you wouldn’t guess it by watching his rushed movements that he cared, never asking what they would actually like to eat.

Sunlight sprays the kitchen window and everything from the wet cloth towels in the sink to the legs of the wooden chairs to the YCL in the bucket gets hotter.

“I figured out his name,” says Remy.

“Uh-huh,” says Mom. She smiles. She asks if Remy wants some apple. There’s honey near the breadbox. Again, she eyes the bacon.

“Hundred.”

“Come on now,” says Dad, still looking at Mom. He opens his mouth so Mom opens her mouth. It doesn’t work. Then his voice gets sharper: “Why’d you pick such a terrible name?”

“It means he’s full. A living creature who will never lose his count. Like a person. Hundred.”

Dad bites his bottom lip. “It means,” he says and then stops, composes himself. “It means,” he says, this time even softer, “that every time you look at him you will think about your count.”

“But,” says Remy.

“Change it.”

“I think,” says Mom, “it’s a beautiful name.”

Her voice is strong.

“It’s death obsessed,” says Dad. “It’s not a name. It’s not a name a little girl gives her pet.”

Mom stares at Dad and something shifts inside him because here is something Mom wants for her daughter, she doesn’t ask for much, and he knows it. Remy grabs the bacon.

“You can name your dog whatever you want. Hundred is perfect. I love it,” Mom says. “Hundred! Hundred! Hundred! Is beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful! Hundred! Hundred! Hundred! Is beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful!”

Remy starts singing along with Mom.

Hundred comes running so fast into the kitchen that he sweeps the length of the floor with his body.

She called him Dog Man. She wore red shorts and dug in the dirt for crystals. When she threw dirt at Bobby T.’s face he crouched in the darkness and rocks clanged off truck metal.

Arnold said, “Hurry up, Bobby T.,” so he did, he ran.

In the distance a building burned. Z. said the girl was Remy. Her Brother was the founder of The Sky Father Gang. Remy acting like a dog was normal, that when she stands she looks like any teenager. Her family has hellish problems so it’s her way of getting things out of her, don’t call her a freak-o. Bobby T. made an Ahhhhhhh sound while nodding emphatically and said, “That makes sense,” though he wasn’t sure it did.

Viewing the building illuminated with fire they applauded.

Then they walked to their favorite spot to admire the prison. They kicked wind-blown garbage at the holes in the fence. The night sky was starless and smoky with a full moon. Everything felt crushable, even the trees. Z. had a feeling he couldn’t define that rattled him, made his heart hurt. He wanted to be more than a person. He wanted to live through people’s memories and through history, something his grandfather once told him, to pass along stories and myths (some of which he wrote), that’s how you live forever, become part of another’s reality after you’re gone. This talk has never left Z., the words coming just before his grandfather went to zero, his parents screaming to not watch, leave the room, stop standing in the corner like that. Z. has the idea of a colossal performance burning into the minds of thousands, his name inked in books and scatter-dropped into computers.

The Brothers, about a dozen of them, ran until they leaned their chests into the fence and pressed their faces against the metal wire that left hexagons on their skin. Bobby T. played the song of the dirt and rocks clanging off the truck in his head and moved into a warm spot of good while the prison shimmered like a heaven.

Z. fantasized about the jailbreak in reverse and tried to untie the knot of what it was. All the images were murky, people running in and out of the prison without reason. Bobby T. faced him, the prison now at his back. Mouth twisted, Z. was thinking it out, pacing like a starved cat, mind on overdrive, mouth mumbling at high speed. He said they had to do more than protests. He stopped and jumped forward, leering at Bobby T., and said it involved breaking out The Sky Father Gang. His hand was a sleeping spider on Bobby T.’s shoulder and Bobby T. looked scared to move. “A j-j-j-jailbreak in reverse,” Z. said and stepped away. “A jail… break… in… r-r-r-reverse?” He scratched his head. “Breaking out of a prison, but twisted, reversed, inmates entering a prison in exchange for inmates already inside. Or maybe it’s… who knows what it is because I’m the o-o-o-one who can d-d-d-define it.”