Chapter 4: Found Dead
Sadie Crane remembered pulling a sticker off the sheet, their fingertips sticky with frozen peach cream from Viola's party. They were twelve and the stickers kicked ass. Absolutely everything kicked ass when you were twelve.
Viola pressed one of her stickers--this one was a heart, banana yellow--to Sadie Crane's pack for keeping. They still had it, the yellow heart, on back of their denim jacket. Paled from bright funky banana to despondent iris yellow. They were never able to earn any of those Good Kid jacket patches. They had their own now, sewn with love. And her sticker.
Thought: Viola was attached to those stickers. Hurt to give you one.
"A train with stained glass windows passes through a silent forest," a sultry voice rumbled from the radio. "It is carrying everything you can imagine. And if you can't imagine things, just imagine the feeling of imagining things. Imagine having possessions and imagine some of those possessions swept away by train."
A pleasant voice receded into snow-white static. And with it, Sadie Crane was reborn. Into the real world.
Gods alive. The radio signal kept wonking out. The wonk had been a thing since before Sadie Crane was born. They kept fiddling with the dials. Didn't know jack about fixing the damn radio. Perhaps they should finally get that hunky-doried? There had to be someone who fixed radios, town small as this. Give them something to do today.
Thought: You already have something to do. You have to get Sybil's guitar from the farmhouse. Ain't that a way to start the week?
They rolled over and groaned. Living in the past and the formidable present. Whatever shape, it was time to get out of bed.
They rose and changed into something deeply unfashionable.
A coal-dark smear retreated quickly out their sight like a furl of smoke. They were getting sick of the coal-dark. It came to them in the waking hours and made their thoughts buzzy. Needed to figure what it was and why it was following. Maybe this would all start making sense.
Thought: We built the pieces anew, this world of ours. Maybe something came in through the cracks?
The radio huffed frosty static into their room. They checked to make sure it was in working order. The anarchist had a brief stint at the campus radio station, but never learned to work the equipment for real.
Thought: Not that it would've done you any good.
The anarchist swung the pack over their shoulders and hopped out of their room, the jackalope's foot batting side to side like a dead bird stuck in fishing wire. So much to get polished today.
Thought: Like it or not, you're in this now.
The Spinners Club? Gods alive. Gods stone cold six feet dead. They reckoned it was about time. A memorial to their best. They never thought anyone would get up the courage to say what they were all thinking. About needing to leave, about the hole sucking them in, how much every breath stuttered and slogged. They got out and came back, wasn't that just the bee's fuck?
They crossed the hallway quick as anything. They chewed at their bottom lip, sucked a breath through their teeth. Cripes. You don't speak to someone for years and suddenly it's an ordeal. You don't even know your friends anymore, sorry sack.
Sadie Crane bounced downstairs to meet with Viola and De'afi. They could handle this. Give them a minute to breathe.
Viola was balanced forward on an uncomfortable stool at the counter, her cheeks bulging with one last mouthful of honey cake. On their approach, Sadie Crane caught the scent of hibiscus flowers. She'd poured herself into another cloak. This cloak was a more sophisticated shade of black, onyx with undertones of coal gray.
De'afi stretched hir workman's goggles and slid them up the prominent peak of hir forehead. The unbearably cool hexagon lenses shone like stained glass. Those lenses were non-adjustable magnifiers based on an open source prototype. They differed from the sleek fashionable workman's goggles of Ru Divine's elite. Those babies would set you back about two hundred silvers.
Thought: All the world's for sale. In Ru Divine at least. In Arcadia, all the world is dead.
"Morning, babes," ze greeted.
Sadie Crane took the stool next to Viola.
"What's up today, sunshine?" queried the anarchist.
The journalist bent forward. She stayed like a good memory. She stayed like a song. She stayed like every poem Sadie Crane had ever spoken aloud.
"The farmhouse," she replied. "Gotta get Sybil's guitar. And you gotta clean it out. Ain't that what we talked about yesterday?"
Thought: You're gonna crumple like magazine paper the second anyone gives you The Look. Probably get into a fight.
O'anna violently swiped a tattered cloth down the countertop, slicing rivets into the wood with her eyes. She was purposefully not looking at Sadie Crane.
Thought: Deserved.
Viola took a small brown leather notebook from her bag, the pages bound with black twine and the corners beaten with age.
Thought: Oooh, a notebook. Very profesh.
"Very profesh," said the anarchist out loud.
A twitch of smile on Viola's lips, gone in a flash. No one had ever called her profesh with a straight face. At her other side, De'afi shook with barely held laughter. This tasted like old times.
She spread her leather-bound notebook, touching the inner spine. Where they were going. What they were doing. The working cranial fossae of travel.
"Why'd you get that idea in the first?" De'afi asked. "You ain't up to going all this time, so why now?"
"Cuz I thought," the journalist squared. "And I felt. And I had to. I tried missing people. Damn years of it. Started looking for anything that didn't feel bad. And this doesn't feel bad. Leaving."
"Doesn't feel bad, yeah," De'afi agreed. "Feels like we're all loosing the goose with our grief, ya get me?"
"Loosey-goosey," the journalist corrected.
Thought: You've heard this before. Almost beat for beat.
"Ain't you supposed to, like--wear gloves?" the anarchist queried.
They inclined their head at the graphite pencil and smudges of dark on her fingertips.
Viola worried the pencil between her fingers, the smudge fanning out to her nails.
"I like the stains," said the most oddest most beautiful person Sadie Crane had ever met their whole life.
A coal-dark streak shuddered through their peripherals. Those fuckers really didn't know how to take breaks.
Thought: It's in you now. You can't leave this at the door.
Her fingers floated down the page labored and elegant like a sparrow's wings under powdered snowdrift.
Thought: Get yourself one of those. A notebook. You'll look like the real deal. Promise.
The journalist flipped her notebook shut. The notebook helped reorient, kept her feet on solid dirt. She couldn't afford to go running off into the mesosphere. Her friends needed her.
"Think we're all gonna get found dead?" asked Sadie Crane.
"Yeah," the journalist replied evenly.
O'anna tugged at her corset belt. At long last, she butt into their conversation.
"We don't forget, you know," O'anna said. "The--all of it, everything. We don't forget. You think I sleep at night?"
O'anna's lips quivered and she swallowed the distraught. She had two more hours before Jandra showed up to relieve her. Gods alive. She was taking herself straight to bed, giving herself a long miserable rubbing, and sleeping for the next eight billion years. It was what she deserved.
Thought: O'anna doesn't want you to feel sorry. She'd rather be hated by you.
"Hurts real bad," Sadie Crane said. "Hurts. Got this burning, deep down my chest. Not going away. Ever. Kinda like that, isn't it?"
O'anna nodded her head--didn't need to answer that. They both knew what missing him was like, O'anna more than Sadie Crane could ever square. They'd lived the same grief, different fonts. They were still living it, maybe rest of their lives. Definitely rest of their lives.
The last time Viola saw Sybil Basalt-Eislane, he'd inhaled a mouthful of black tar smoke that stained his teeth a nasty pitch. The last time De'afi of the Mother's Land saw Sybil Basalt-Eislane, he'd passed hir a stack of fashion magazines on import from Ru Divine. The last time Sadie Crane saw Sybil Basalt-Eislane, his body had been broken as a bird in the dirt. A length of dim silk fabric had sprawled from him like the wings of a ghost monarch butterfly. He wore a dress, a shapeless thing O'anna made for him.
Thought: O'anna looks just like him.
They had feelings about the day they were having. But feelings weren't cardinal directions.
End of Chapter 4
Every school of thought leads us to the same question: who will be on the right side of our last great conflict? Will it be the anarcho-primitivists of Arcadia, having at last defeated the multi-headed beast of royalism? Will it be the the isolationists of Kat-Ari? Will it be the rationalists and math-heads of Turaq's universities? Will it be the bombers and communist pirates of The Shoals in their little cluster of islands? Will it perhaps be the Ru Divine capitalists or the revolutionists in their working cities? Will it be the radicals of Eudora, having come out victorious in the endless war between city-states? Who will start the conflict? Who will command the fate of All Creation?
--Excerpt from "Godkiller: The Politics of Life and Death" by End of All Things