Chapter 8: The Left Behinds
Thought: What if you've already been left behind? Dead walking.
Cripes. Am I dreaming again?
Thought: No. Sadie Crane is awake. They lie on a blanket under a quilt of starshine. See that thing up there, fat and marble death white? That's the moon.
Fuck, okay. So what is this, if I ain't dreaming? Tell me that.
Thought: Don't know. Sleepwalking?
Real nice. So how do I get outta here?
Thought: You have no idea. There's a light sweep of breeze across your skin, brushing a single loose curl of hair from your forehead.
Wait, wasn't I doing something? Something real important?
Thought: Yeah, you were checking the motorbike. Making sure the engine's not fucky. This is the longest you've had it out.
Cripes, for real? Better get back to that.
Thought: Yes, it would be better for everyone if you got back to it.
You got something to tell me?
Thought: You are not just one living thing. You are millions, you are a tapestry of names. Mitral Valve, Cerebellum, Metacarpus. You are four million lives in one body. You are an Ecosystem.
Okay, thanks.
Thought: He was too. Every breath made for your lungs belonged to him first.
Sadie Crane vaulted up on their mustard yellow blanket. They did not feel like four million lives in one body. They felt like one sack of hard-boiled shit. Or a mangle of parts with no good meaning. Sadie Crane, Machine. Sadie Crane, Child.
They'd been asleep outside, feet from the barn. Fell over about an hour back, watching nighttime birds dip and duck through the sky like wind-snatched kites. It was too damn late now. No good for bird-watching.
They rubbed at their sweaty face. There was a radio in the grass. Some kinda late night talk show. The guy was droning on about finches. They did not give a single damn about finches. Not since they left university.
Sadie Crane missed being a kid. They missed school. The schoolhouse. Couple of floors and tiny porthole windows. Foraging, hunting, gathering, gardening, basics of living, gross sticky math equations, morning prayers. They had to recite the Saints and their blessings. Sadie Crane and Sybil got in trouble damn near every morning for mumbling through prayers. For not taking the faith serious. Least it wasn't as bad as the detention centers. They would have gotten beaten or worse for disrespecting the old gods.
They hung their head and retreated from the bike. They hardly remembered jack about the months after Sybil's death. But they remembered the cops. They remembered O'anna running. Frantic heel slaps against the high garden wall. Pounding fists into the wood, dirt and blood caked under her fingernails. "My brother's dead! My brother's fucking dead!" O'anna was screaming like a wounded deer. The cops took her like it was nothing, took her yelling and kicking from the wall. She'd been disassembling motorbikes--cop motorbikes--and trading the parts with sellers at the night market. Getting caught was a matter of time. They could almost believe she wanted it. It was a way out of this nightmare and into another.
Thought: All this reminiscing about old times is doing you no damn good, space cadet. You ain't getting better. He's not coming back. You gonna let go? You gonna hold on 'till I say you can let go?
Viola emerged from the cottage with two mugs of hot chocolate. Her smile hung the moon on gold braided thread, sweet nothings sticking to her lips like dashes of honey. She'd broken her wrists and ankles when Sybil Basalt-Eislane left for the six feet under sleep. The bones struggled to heal and she kinda didn't want them to.
"Gods, O'anna fucking hates me and I deserve it," Sadie Crane said.
She handed a mug to Sadie Crane and kept the other for herself. More of her nails were chewed almost to bone on her right hand.
Thought: She's anxious. She'll always be anxious.
"Yeah, who in hell's bells doesn't hate your sorry ass?" Viola said.
The anarchist took the offered mug. Couldn't argue with that.
"Think I can make it up?" the anarchist queried wistfully.
"No way in All Creation," the journalist said back. "You seen the stars, space cadet? You see how far away they are? We're never gonna make it up there. We're stuck to ground and all the beauty's just outta reach."
The wheel, ever-turning, spoke to them now in streaks of coal-dark. They were getting a sense of what the future held. Lotsa hurt. Lotsa stuff they couldn't take back.
Thought: The world without us isn't a world. It's a nightmare.
"You hear about them fires out near Ashenelm?" said Viola. "I heard it's cuz of the student protests. The fash are setting the whole damn place alight. Heard the woods out near Water and Wind University got torched real bad."
Thought: You know Water and Wind. It's a teeny tiny little university, barely larger than your thumb.
"Cripes," Sadie Crane growled.
"Yeah," Viola agreed. "Damn fucking shame. Heard it was Lord Belmonte who gave the order. Said he was gonna be real mad if they didn't clean it up. Feel like we gotta start cutting heads off, huh?"
"Nah, too slow," the anarchist mused. "You gotta build a big fucking machine that gets them all at once."
Viola rolled her eyes and gave her dreads a toss.
"Oh yeah, everyone says they're gonna build the big machine that beheads all the royals at once," Viola said. "But no one ever does."
"Maybe we will?" the anarchist suggested hopefully.
"You better damn well hope," the journalist sighed.
She sucked a little on her hot chocolate. It tasted like the cocoa milk drinks she got at the night market with her folks way back when. But those had cinnamon and cream and something something tree root extract. This just had the cocoa powder and sugar to make it sweet.
"Saw a frog," she said.
"Oh for real?" the anarchist said back. "What was it like?"
"Froggy," the journalist replied.
They downed the rest of their hot chocolate and talked real long about frogs.
The outer skirts of Crow's Nest.
The homestead was damn near invisible from the roadside. There was this skinny dirt trail headed off from the main. Naked earth transitioned into stick grass. Might see the big red barn if you squinted real bad, but no chance you were getting a shot of that house. Sadie Crane almost missed the trail. Cripes almighty. They had to go back around and lead the others.
They eased their motorbikes real careful into the high stick grass. Their mama called it stick grass cuz of how it grew up all straight and fine like that. Real tough and hard to part through.
Thought: It's where lost things go to sleep.
"Damn, this is grim," Viola remarked.
De'afi got off hir motorbike and nodded. Ze saw the barn first, the house second. Weird how people could do that. Got real used to beach-side row houses where dozens of families lived together. Folks who wanted privacy lived in shanties or mud cottages. Living so far back from the road without another house in sight seemed real grim.
Thought: Looks like him. The house looks like him.
Sadie Crane scrunched their eyes at the house. The rickety slope of roof. The glass orb front window marked by a dense webbing of cracks. Cracks from arguments into screaming matches into O'anna grabbing Sybil's favorite mug and hurling it with her toughened right arm.
Thought: He never talked happy about home.
Behind the house, woods. Past the woods, caves divvied up the mountains.
"Getting a bad feeling," the aviator said. "Like a sign from Above?"
"I'm like that all the time," the anarchist shrugged. "You get used to it."
They didn't get used to it. They got bored with it. They got bored with feeling like it was all gonna come crashing. Maybe it was. Lotta skin off their back if true. Low stakes if not.
Viola made quick up the peat-stone path and went straight for the porch. She was less interested in these tight little discussions about Big Picture shit. It was all small to her. It was all postcards and popping candy. Did she even like popping candy? Or was it something she did because he liked it? Did Sadie Crane like that jacket of theirs or did they like Sybil Basalt-Eislane? Did De'afi like sewing those patches? Gods. Just listen to her. As if she knew anything.
Thought: Problem is, she knows too much. And so do you.
Was that a constriction in Sadie Crane's throat, a crinkle in their breathing like they'd taken a mouthful of popping candy and it went down wrong? They were blowing this already. If this was a game, they would have lost two hundred points right there.
Thought: Popping candy, this rare treat Abakris got from a stand at the day market. From Eudora or some-such place. It was like eating fireworks. Your tongue tingled like an allergic reaction.
The house. Oh, how to describe the house? Sadie Crane was looking right at it and they couldn't. They supposed if this house was a person, he would have had a nose, a mouth, and a pair of eyebrows thicker than Sadie Crane's thumb. They supposed his eyes would be some color, a light sepia maybe. They supposed his skin might be this mild copper, his forehead and cheeks blotched with freckles. They supposed he might wear dark breeches with suspenders and a white linen shirt silver-buttoned up his throat.
Thought: Can you stop being a poet for five seconds? Please? Just talk normal.
"Wonder if he always thought about getting gone," the aviator mused aloud. "Even here? You think it was always on his head, even here? You think he ever got peace from it?"
Sadie Crane ran their eyes past the sloped roof and onto the sprawl of night sky. They could hear wolves howling, frayed and distant. They felt something, something not exactly like the coal-dark but real enough to make them shiver. It was a mutual feeling, shared deeply.
"Cripes," they said. "Holy holy cripes."
"Gods stone dead," Viola hissed.
"Fuck," said De'afi.
They were all shaking now, like branches snatched by icy wind. Viola had to move first. She could be brave when she wanted, she could do things when she wanted. She wanted to do things. She wanted to matter.
Viola made it to the porch and knocked three times, hesitant and bird-like. She already knew there wouldn't be anyone home. This place was avoided by travelers, perhaps after word spread. Funny how stories get around.
"You don't gotta be scared," said the aviator. "We're here."
Hir encouragement was much needed. God knows how long they would have stood there.
Thought: One million years.
She placed her hands on the front door and pushed forward with all her weight. The hinges shrieked like a wounded jackalope, the wood struggled against her and she almost fell. De'afi moved around her to push on the door with hir shoulder--the damn thing didn't stand a chance.
Sadie Crane lit a lantern and made slow into the house.
The immediate living space made them think of watercolor paintings. The old ones, the good ones of post-war Eudora. After what they called The Dumbest Shortest Revolution of All Time. Seven whole days of freedom dealt a crushing blow by dozens of well-organized warlords. It still grated on them. They were too young to remember and too on the other side of All Creation, but it grated on them just the same. That the people of Eudora could have something so perfect for not even a full rotation.
The inside of the house looked exactly like those watercolors. Lined wall to wall with tables, tables stacked with wooden and glass figurines. Gods, royals, and every saint you can think of.
Thought: The Royal Family, the Badeers, claim to be prophets of the Old Gods. You have doubts.
The paintings up on the walls were quite something. More Saints of course, because no one ever got tired of Saints--no one except Sadie Crane. Big sad eyes, necks strung with emeralds and sparrow feather necklaces. A lady in a white gown, her honey brown skin patchworked with white blotches and one hand gripping the severed head of a jackalope. Cripes. The one next to her was worse. Two people standing together with their faces pressed and mouths gaping open. You could mistake the scene for intimate if you ignored the blood striping their cheeks. The Suffering of the Saints was about right. The Penitent belief system in a sentence.
Thought: Killer album covers though.
Ze took from hir rucksack a box of paper matches and struck one. Ze lifted the match to light candles, flame to wick and wick again and wick once more. Every light solved more of the large front room. More grim on the inside.
The space between a pair of tables had been cleared out, a shrine to one of the Old Gods in a small glass enclosure. A little wooden guy presided over the house. How's that song go? Black silk and lover's milk, from soil to sin, do not run from Them? Damn. They should know this. They had to sing it every morning with the blessings.
This god was skinny and human looking, pitch dark skin and great big raven wings. It didn't have a face--Sadie Crane reckoned gods didn't need mouths or eyes or noses to be gods. It had been painted to resemble a cracked marble statue, lightning rivets and breaks running through its chest and face.
They steered away from the shrine and put their lantern out.
"This a church?" queried the anarchist.
"A worship house," the journalist corrected.
Thought: Sybil loved these, the figurines. O'anna thought they were creepy.
Ze blew air through hir puckered lips, extinguishing the match.
"Who worships a house?" asked De'afi.
"It's a Penitent thing," the journalist squared.
Half of Arcadia worshiped the Old Gods. What were Old Gods for, if not worship? If not something you could lean into when things got tough? De'afi couldn't rightly make fun. It was all relative. And ze'd never met these Gods. Perhaps they were smarter and kinder than stories made them out to be.
"You ever met a god?" ze asked.
"Yeah, a dead one," Sadie Crane said back. "Cuz they're all dead."
They put their lantern in front of the shrine.
"Gonna use the shitter if I can find it," said the anarchist. "Real quick."
Viola and De'afi searched the main room, while Sadie Crane went in search of the bathroom.
End of Chapter 8
And you've gotta see The Culminate of course, if you're ever in Arcadia. It's where the body of a long-dead god is said to have been buried for the last however-thousand-many years. They say you can even hears its voice, you go down deep enough. Kinda like an old song.
--Excerpt from "Way Down Deep: A Traveler's Guide to All Creation" by White Veil