Crystal Eaters

40

It feels good to believe in one hundred.

They walk through the village wondering how many they have left. Their land is homes and shacks lining seven dirt roads. Everything is hit with sun. Tin roofs glare. Wooden structures glow. The city appeared at the horizon like a mountain range decades ago but it’s close now — dangerously close and growing closer by the day — and believing in one hundred is a distraction. A long road connects the village to the crystal mine. A man named Z. mumbles his number and walks by the home of Remy.

Inside Remy’s home Harvak the dog is on the table. With each breath his stomach balloons pink skin. His left eye drips crystal (Chapter 5, Death Movement, Book 8) and his count lowers. Remy thinks about lying face down and entering a place where she wouldn’t hurt. She pets Harvak’s head ten times but nothing happens. She touches a Harvak hair on his leg longer than the rest. When she pulls the hair like a rope attached to an anchor, fingers over fingers instead of hand over hand, the end result is a hole with zero inside. She spins the hair into a wreath. With one finger she taps the hole ten times but again nothing happens.

Two gasps from Harvak are split by Dad yelling from downstairs that dinner is ready. Her hand bleeds from Harvak’s teeth. His body stiffens with cooled blood and fleas jump from the remaining fur so she covers him with the blue sheet and places the hair wreath on top.

Harvak lost his count in various ways.

One afternoon in the crystal mine he slipped, kind of toppled forward over his own front legs and fell down a sharp incline, jaw spooning black dirt outward, spine struggling to right itself with twists.

Remy accidently hit him with her bike and the snap, like a tree branch, made Remy look to the woods, not back at her dog with the broken leg twitching in the road.

The most damaging was the village-wide panic when the city came into focus, shadow-bodies grazing on the horizon. Everyone went into a panic, filling burlap sacks with canned goods and clothing, quickly clearing shelves. They sprinted from their homes after double-locking their doors with two-by-fours, and they slept in tents in the mine. Elders said to protect the crystals. Some held knives. The strongest took turns patrolling the perimeter, resting against the stilts of wooden structures while others read books and played a game where they tossed crystals into cardboard boxes from fifty feet away. What they forgot was Harvak. It was deemed too dangerous to return. Late at night Remy tried to sneak out and was restrained, full nelson, by a boy with a black facial scar in the shape of a key who told her the city is coming, get into the mine and hide. Harvak stayed pressed against a window where he waited for an approaching body, no food or water near, the sun warming the glass. Remy imagined his ribs rising through his fur.

Other punishments included being slapped for eating Dad’s boots. Put in a room for barking he couldn’t control because he was scared of the city. Screamed at for running in the house and wobbling a lamp that tilted the light from Mom who had fallen asleep on the couch holding a red box. Punishments created by humans and placed on dogs. Remy’s dog. Her dog. Harvak.

Looking at the blue sheet’s shape on the table she pulls herself through every negative moment resulting in a lower number. Harvak is far past the life expectancy of a dog (40 crystals) and his old age has quickly taken the remainder in the last week.

Remy asked her parents before if crystals could be added, life extended. Dad said no with the word tucked inside a breath over his forked potato. With the simplest questions Remy felt like she was bothering him. Mom said yellow were used for electricity, blue were common, red and green rare, and don’t mention black, because despite the rumors no one’s seen one. You can’t increase your count because your number only knows how to get smaller.

“Dinner,” Dad repeats from the kitchen, his voice hard, angry.

Remy once believed each pet on Harvak produced one crystal inside. Every day, falling asleep in bed, she made sure to touch him a minimum of ten times. She’s done this to herself before, while standing at the bathroom mirror, tapping her body in sets of ten, starting at her forehead, then to her shoulders, then to her heart, and finally ending at her stomach where the crystals shine.

If I walked away, got in bed, got into a position where I couldn’t see what was happening right now maybe my number wouldn’t fall.

In the kitchen Remy says Harvak is gone. Under the amber ceiling light they stand. Dad leans against the sink, water running over wooden dishes. He exhales and stares at his boots. Something more than Harvak’s death is wrong. There’s silence and dread stacked on top of previous silence and dread. Mom says she’s sorry into Remy’s head. From Mom’s mouth pressed into her hair Remy smells the sourness of dead dogs and she begins, with one finger, counting on Mom’s back.

39

With lips coated in glittering filth, dressed in red shorts with white trim, Remy mourns Harvak’s death by running like a dog in the crystal mine. Two separate roads — one for trucks to enter and one for them to exit — spiral down to a field with pyramids of excavated dirt. Remy as dog-child moves on all fours. On the dirt mine walls rest wooden buckets dangling from a pulley system built on the ground above. Idle work trucks with their gun metal paneling appear two-dimensional in the evening light glimmer while Remy’s left hand shines wet with blood from the rocks that pinprick her palm.

She imagines her count as a loose pile of yellow in her belly, not a stack of a hundred red. No combination of touching her body helps, it just feels good.

As a toddler, lying in bed on top of the covers, naked, with blond hair hooked around her shoulders, she asked Mom to place a hand on her stomach and to guess how many. When her hand touched her skin Remy puffed her chest and made a scared inhale. Mom said One hundred. She asked Dad, who was in the garage fixing the truck, his head buried under the hood, if she’d reach a day when her count would be zero. He pulled himself from the engine holding a wrench the size of her forearm. He crouched with the wrench on his thigh. At first he seemed irritated because she had interrupted his work, but then he said As long as your Mother is around you’ll always have at least one.

She knows now that everyone is losing.

Kids in the village have witnessed their parents vomiting blue and yellow slush into kitchen sinks, toilets, couch cushions, their laps. Remy has studied Mom’s lead-heavy movements, her shortened steps, her cough that turns heads at the market. Remy can help herself and Mom by learning how to add crystals to what is already inside, she just needs to figure out how. There must be a way to add. There must be a way to reverse the fall. Like the thought that Brother rallied behind so obsessively and look where he is now, city prison. The universe is a system where children watch their parents die. Mom loses weight with sunsets. Her skin dims with sleep. Remy tells herself that she’ll be the one to figure out what nobody else can. She’ll save Mom from experiencing the number zero.

Dad’s answer when asked what’s wrong: A disease has entered her and we can’t get it out.

Remy as dog-child rolls in the dirt. She runs on all fours toward a mine tunnel. The only color on Remy under the moonlight is her eyes and several streaks of blond hair the dirt hasn’t covered. A man in the city stands at The Bend using binoculars. There are two other men, one on each side of the man, and they take turns passing the binoculars and laughing and drinking from tall moon-reflecting cans. Remy barks into the mine tunnel until her echo comes back.

38

It’s difficult to move under the heat wave twisting the sky into something new. For weeks the temperature has only risen. There’s no relief in the forecast.

The heat melted a green crystal. Z. smeared the green across his forehead and laughed from the shelling sensation on his skin as they walked the fence. So many men with long limbs and goofy faces. Their name is Brothers Feast, and according to Z., they will be remembered forever.

On both sides of the fence are enormous dirt fields. In the distance — the city and prison. Ricky heaves a bottle over the fence and they run in the dark, laughing, back to their humble homes so unlike the city’s structures. They have technology. The village has crystals. Tendrils of turquoise from city pollution screen the moon above.

“We’re going to be someone,” says Z. “C-c-c-come on, back to the fence. B-b-b-back to looking at the prison.”

The city is a weed. It grows closer with buildings being built and will soon cover the village. The elderly watch closely like they do the sun and they preach it’s end times. Others believe the city moves because they want to destroy what is archaic. The village has nowhere to run. Their way of life doesn’t match up with the city way of life. They are bigger. Here it all comes, they say. Open up, they say. We’re fucked, they say.

The prison is located on an island of land built slightly away from the main city buildings, connected by a single-lane road.

“We’ll be r-r-r-remembered,” says Z. “Just you guys wait.”

The lights illuminate curling barbed wire and concrete walls so tall and smooth the Brothers often ask each other during meetings How did they build them so high without it collapsing? Is it magic? Must be magic. The city is navy blue suits, cafeterias, ham sandwiches, granite counters, several types of stop signs, mouth-mint dentists, blacked-out car windows, bottled water, eight-to-six office jobs, drywall. But the prison is different, something special, like magic.

“Is anyone listening to me when I say g-g-g-great things will happen?” says Z. “Anyone, anyone at all?”

The Brothers answers yes, they know, great things are coming. They dream of prisoners running wild with guards trailing, the air above the guards’ heads whisked with batons, lights exploding through their bodies, the air sticky and sweet with perimeter flowers blooming like smoke on the single-lane road as they run.

“Men have always been scared of the city, r-r-r-remember our lives in hiding. Depressing. We can’t hide anymore, the city won’t let us. Here it c-c-c-comes.”

For inmates, the worst part isn’t being locked up and having a shoebox-sized window to squeeze their face against, observing the city and imagining their loved ones eating cherry pie. The worst part is they can’t see the beautiful place holding them. They can’t see the lights spiking the night sky like Brothers Feast can, standing, at the fence.

“If you’re remembered f-f-f-forever, you live f-f-f-forever.”

The Brothers aren’t listening. They can’t concentrate on anything else beside the prison. They know Z. is talking, but they don’t process what he’s saying.

“Agree,” someone says.

“Doing it,” says another.

“The t-t-t-trick,” says Z., “is to become part of p-p-p-people’s memories, their reality.”

37

Dog = 40

Ant = 3

Bird = 10

Mold = 678

Baby = 100

Mother’s tear = half

Plant = 230

Remy = unknown

Cat = 39

Spit = partial

Cloud = 88

Horse = unknown

Moon = 4,000

Frog = 12

City = infinite

Village = always falling

Tree = 480

Fly = 4

Sun = 10,000

Rabbit = 8

Mirror = reflective of object

Dirt = infinite

Pinecone = 7

Lamb = 22

Air = infinite

Flower = 1

Crystal count is depleted gradually over time but can be drastically decreased by events. Getting hit by a truck would most likely erase a baby’s one hundred. If the baby survived, wrapped in a tiny full-body cast, her count would be similar to a rabbit’s. Her count would no longer be a shining triangle of one hundred perfectly stacked crystals inside her body because it would resemble scattered shale.

The village survives on myth.

There is the story of Royal Bob, a myth so old it is easily dismissed today, but a story that is still told. Royal Bob is the first person to find a black crystal. He boiled it down into dark syrup that he sipped for decades. Seen running at night in blue shorts, mouth open, grinning, head tilted back with his gray hair stretching twenty feet behind him, dogs weaving in and out. Royal Bob rarely spoke, never entered daylight, but the myth says he preached several times at night, in a mine tunnel lit with hanging lanterns, about the black crystal to the elderly. His body was never found. All the glass tubes were empty inside his home — the elderly slowly walking the halls, picking up the glass tubes by thumb and finger and dropping them into burlap sacks. Some say Royal Bob lives inside the mine where he runs endlessly through the tunnels. You can see his hair. Some say Royal Bob will never be zero because he’s forever filled with black crystal. Some say his soul is tethered to the gravity of all village dirt. Others say he escaped into the city so he could destroy it. But no one knows because a myth is a myth.

The oldest books advise worshiping the crystals excavated from the mine. Today these practices are limited, deemed antiquated and pointless by many. Most crystals, especially red and green, are for selling now. The yellow are melted and poured through machines. Red crystals become knick-knacks displayed on tables and mantels. Few believe in their healing powers. But the mining still continues at a high rate, day and night, because it’s what they’ve always done and they need the yellow (YCL) for their lamps, refrigerators, and generators.

Discussing your count in the village is like discussing the weather in the city.

Count is not a city belief. They want to take over the village. Those in the city have little understanding of the village and are comfortable with destroying it and capturing the crystal mine because it’s all so different from their way of life. The city believes in the new ways of progress, not the old ways of tradition and simplicity. Many use The Bend not only as a curved road to jog, but to look in at the village and wonder why they live the way they do. They bring binoculars and get drunk and stare. Legislation has been passed to install high-powered stand-alone “binocular stations” costing taxpayers fifteen thousand dollars, including the salary of a part-time “binocular attendant” and not one complaint to date has been filed. The city lives like it will never die.

Remy spends hours touching her stomach, trying to predict her count. She wants a hundred crystals shining like a campfire. When she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror she only sees the dark and wonders if she’d be prettier if she lived in the city, had lipstick, dresses, shampoo infused with rose oil, sunglasses to cover her face.

Once, she saw green crystals in the corner of her eye. Four of them hung like beads of water from her eyelid and when she ran downstairs to show Mom they broke into a pea-green pool clouding her vision.

“I swear they were there.”

“I know,” said Mom, inspecting Remy’s eye. It wouldn’t stop blinking. “I’ve seen them before.”

“Really?”

“As a baby they blinded you.”

“Scary.”

“The body is small then and the crystals are everywhere. Sometimes, they come out.”

“And now they’re gone?” said Remy. She touched her eye.

“And now,” said Mom, pulling Remy’s hand from her face, “they’re gone.”

She thinks about her parents, and Brother in prison, and wonders who is closest to exhaling their final crystal. Who will become a husk? Who will become zero? She thinks Definitely Mom. She thinks Then Dad. She thinks Then just me filling up their space.

Mom’s illness diminishes Dad because he is helpless against it and is forced to fall back on vague coping mechanisms of, “She is sick and losing, and it’s natural. Let the process be the process.” He crushes everything inside. Emotion comes in outbursts, the occasional closed eyes and biting-his-bottom-lip while standing over the kitchen sink, washing dishes with the sun seeping in hot and ugly. Remy hates the way he moves through the house — slowly and with caution — as if he knows, selfishly, egotistically, that he’s the one who will hear her last breath.

Dad shouted about count through every wall, floor, and ceiling in the house last night. “Doesn’t she understand you start with a hundred and then you lose them,” he said. Mom sat in bed, covered in dandelion-print sheets and used the spitting cloth to expel the color red. “It’s simple,” he said.

36

He keeps a box in the closet. The bottoms of hanging shirts cover the box like a hiding child. The box is white. Inside is a crystal with eight smooth sides, a sharp point, and a rough fire-burned looking end.

Gripping a sharpened spoon he uncurls a fingernail-sized piece from the black crystal. Tapping the edge with his thumb he makes sure there is a sharp edge to cut his mouth. More dangerous if the edge is dull.

He sits on his bed with the crystal floating in a pool of saliva beneath his tongue. His legs are splayed in a wide V. He throws himself back, aiming for the pillow, but bangs his head against the headboard. Moving the piece of crystal around the bottom of his mouth he inhales and exhales, feels a surge of expecting blood widening its cells. Sliding down on the bed he positions the pillow behind his head and gets ready.

Before the prison was erected there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony. There were pink-skinned politicians and a crowd of shoulder-shruggers and a pair of giant scissors an intern held for two hours. A politician named Sanders stood at a podium too short for his height and struggling to speak into the microphone said: “Ellsworth Correctional… we will treat inmates with respect and compassion here. They will live with minimal supervision. Cells will be similar to our own bedrooms at home. The idea is simple — those who break the law should be kept away from the general population, but in the community that lawbreakers create inside Ellsworth Correctional they should feel free and normal no matter if they are uneducated people with poor social skills.” And then later, near the end of his speech: “Inmates are not animals!” The crowd cheered but they weren’t sure what they were cheering for other than the sweaty enthusiasm of Sanders. Construction began immediately with men in orange hats and yellow machines zigzagging the grounds. Sanders pressed his suit jacket to his heart when a backhoe struck rock. For months the villagers watched the prison rise slowly, dangerously, blinking and craning their necks, wondering how something so large could be so real.

Head on pillow, box resting on his stomach, Pants McDonovan presses his tongue on the crystal until it’s angled against his gums, aimed at the roots of his bottom front teeth. He grinds it in. Ringing his head, the tearing of cheesecloth. He sees himself as a child kissing Mom goodnight, Harvak barking, when the family was a family. He played spit-tag with Remy in the mine and jogged with Dad through the streets and the family glowed, discussed their day over plates of pork and carrots. Before bed, Dad poured YCL into the generator and he helped with little nervous hands because Dad always corrected him, always told him he was either pouring too fast or too slow, he wanted to get it right, he wanted to pour smoothly, and sometimes, he did, but Dad never noticed with Pants holding the bucket just so with his arms trembling. This was a time of worship and prayer. The sun didn’t scream and spit a heat wave. The city was faraway and could be laughed at, could be mocked by thrusting your hips at it or turning and lowering your pants. He collected bugs in mason jars and hid them in his closet. He asked Mom for potted plants to be placed near his crystals. He wanted living things to always be in his room. At night he would listen to the bugs and position the plants in the moonlight.

Fire pools across his chest and drips from his ribs as he swallows. He sits up and inhales — eyes trying to escape from their sockets looking cartoonish — chest puffed in rash, arms stiff at his sides with fists punched into the mattress. His feet are numb with needles, but it’s worth it. Going to come alive, going to balance out now. He leans over the bed and spits a stretched glob of sparkling blood on the cement floor.

A dirt cloud from clapped together shoes (Friday, Tony’s job) floats by and a transparent Younger Mom hovers in the debris. She says hello then disappears, her gown becoming her then all becoming the dirt cloud becoming the air. Without moving his arm, hand at his side, he does a little wave.

More spit. The glob is a thick stream with no end. This is a reaction from eating black crystal that happens once every two hundred times. A cleansing. When the stream detaches from his mouth he falls to the floor and does 50 pushups — his ponytail wrapped around his neck hitting the floor before his chest. Turning his head, he spit-sprays the wall in the shape of Mom.

He stands. He touches the heat inside his forearms by way of his lips. His shirt, a ridiculously huge hand-me-down from Mom with a duck drawing that Dad once wore and made fun of, is saturated in sweat and he pulls the shirt off and whips it around his head before helicoptering it across the room. His right foot twists and slips left in blood.

He hits the peak.

Jogging in place, he imagines a sunset at his back and Harvak at his side. The black crystal is collapsing his veins. He runs his hand through the top of his buzz-cut before grabbing the rubber band holding his ponytail. Once pulled through he shakes his head and a flap of blond hair bounces off his upper back. He looks ridiculous and insane. He’s on a beach telling the tide to wait. He’s running from the smell of salt. The village is in the distance and there’s a forest to enter. He shouts that Mom will live forever. She stands under an oak tree with her mouth open, her lips highlighted in red crystals. His eyes rocket into clouds raining sparks. His right foot slides out from beneath him. Heel on sky, his left leg upright, he floats across the sky with the village and beach and forest below.

Then the prison gets real quiet. The PA announces lights out. A voice from the upper level, might be Jeremy, screams to be taken back to the village where things are simple and quiet, people love each other there, and someone says People might love you there but here you’re just annoying.

Pants McDonovan jumps into bed and is soon asleep and back on the beach. Mine workers dressed in mud wearing clear masks ask if he wants to die and he answers I’m ready. Harvak runs at his side. He says to him No illness that’s my fault will take Mom away, come on, we’re breaking out of here. The prison is quiet with only the night-shift steps of guards as Mom opens a door in the oak tree.

35

The heat wave continues. The elderly don’t wear their traditional robes anymore. Few possess air conditioners donated by the city charity group, Mob of Mary’s, who make bi-monthly runs into the village with clothing and canned meat. Those who do have Relief Gatherings where people take five minute turns in an air conditioned room where they smile in splayed out naked forms across a marble slab. At night they pray to their crystal collections for snow. Green crystals melt in direct sunlight. The leader of Brothers Feast, Z., finger-painted the green across his forehead in three bug-smeared lines. From the way he’s dressed, the heat doesn’t seem to bother him. The elders question his mental health.

Younger villagers who are against Brothers Feast, who have inherited land from the older generations, believe in selling to the city for reasons of safety. They believe the transfer of land will somehow spare their lives. The elderly have become conservative with their land, not wanting to give anything up. There have been secret discussions near The Bend with rogue mine workers willing to sell out and city politicians hungry to consume. The differences between the two cultures are absurdly obvious when a mine worker tells Sanders he has to get back to the mine to melt the yellow for the night’s electricity. Another mine worker asks what each of their counts are and Sanders says, “We’re good.”

Dad says, the only one smiling, “Was the stove left on over night? Remy, see if the refrigerator is overheating.”

Houseplants kept in shade and usually watered daily by Remy have wilted to cooked leaves of spinach because Remy is consumed with what is happening to Mom, not the heat, fuck the heat. But she knows it’s getting worse. The forks and spoons on the kitchen table burn to the touch. Remy imagines the moon as a bucket of water she kicks over, cooling the sun below. Parts of her body that never sweat like the margins of her lips, her ears, her nail beds, are now continuously covered in sweat. The day’s heat runs into the following day and the following day after that with no break, only a build-up, a layering of more. She sits at the kitchen table eating another meal prepared by Dad, taps her knee ten times while watching Mom doing nothing but staring into whatever she sees in the blank space before her. Remy thinks she hears a dog barking inside the house. She thinks about touching Mom. She worries about Dad, his decision making.

In direct correlation to Mom, Dad has lost several crystals. When he jokes in his passive-aggressive way See if the refrigerator is overheating Remy can’t look at his awkward smirk, his do-nothing ways with Mom sitting skeletal. Dad’s strategy is to let time make all decisions, but with Mom rapidly losing her count, he wonders if he’s wrong, wonders deep down if doing nothing will just end in a faster zero. But he still believes in time and nature and tradition. How Remy sees the world is something three dimensional and lit up, where Dad sees an endless and flat blackness.

Mom’s room is the coolest in the house. Disease moves faster in heat. She has a red box with a green felt top. Inside, a black crystal given to her by her son. He never explained its use and Mom keeps it a secret from Dad and Remy. Her son, not the myth of Royal Bob, is the only person to ever find the black crystals. Some of the desperate elderly, closing down, believe in what he and The Sky Father Gang were trying to accomplish but they’ve never seen something like a black crystal. Mom walks into her room.

She plays a game when the sun reaches a special height in the sky. She sits down. The sun splits the window in the shape of a triangle and from the doorway her spine is visible through her nightgown. Her body aches with no sleep nights because not only is her count well below fifty, Mom basically a cat, but the number is falling incredibly fast now and she can feel it leaving her body. The game helps.

From the box she takes out the black crystal and dips it into the sunlight. The triangle warps and skinny lines of light reflect off the crystal. Mom tilts her hand until a hologram of another black crystal appears above the one she holds.

During her best games she produces eight crystal holograms attached to the black crystal she holds by eight beams of light. The highest touches the ceiling, the lowest flickers near her ear, and once, she moved her head until half the crystal disappeared into her hair.

Last week she stretched her fingers into positions that burned her joints. Her heart skipped a beat. The illness scratched her skin, ran the slopes of her body. She stopped the game when she heard Remy and Dad arguing about Twinning.

Today she plays the game perfectly. She dominates the sun. Twin horses float above her hand. She smiles because horses are new. She’s 5’4 in height, her gown drags through hallways, but she feels like a giant creating holograms from the black crystal she holds and now, horses. Their bodies are a blue-black shine and they stomp their hooves and radiate six ribs of light across the room. For a moment, her life is a delirious and beautiful dream, something worth extending.

When she drops the black crystal from exhaustion, feeling sick, the floor seems to sink into the room below where Dad and Remy are looking up.

34

The baby slept in the shade of the red pencil Remy had used and the drawing took up most of the wall.

“That’s new,” Dad said and pointed at the drawing.

“Bored of blue and yellow so I drew a red, no big deal. Dad, what’s Twinning?”

“You drew a baby.”

“Just felt like it.”

“Does it mean anything?”

“Not really.”

When Dad walked into the room days before, Harvak was on a table under a blue sheet with a wreath of hair balanced on top. Walking from the room Dad had a terrible feeling, something like anger, that became sour inside him when he convinced himself not to process what he was feeling. Since he was a boy he always managed his feelings this way because it felt safer to live this way. It hurt to take the feelings, drag them up and through his body, twist and mold them into words that he had to force from his mouth. Besides, having those words interpreted by another person was dangerous. Language distorts emotions. What he did, even as a little boy, for example, standing in a dark room full of strange adults, was erase the emotions before they could exit him in words. He told Remy, without looking at her, that Twinning didn’t exist. A hard and simple no.

“You sure?”

He mentioned those who cut themselves with crystals. They believed in ascending count, and in a stunt similar to the things Brothers Feast does, marched into the city only to be imprisoned. They preached about Twinning and carried banners that read WE WILL BE REMEMBERED AND LIVE FOREVER. Dad didn’t mention his son participating because denial is holy. He stopped talking and stared blankly ahead, fighting the flickering images of his son walking toward the city, away from him, the sun nothing but a pinprick in the blue.

“Did it work?” Remy asked bouncing on the bed. “They add?”

He forced himself to look at her. “They are in jail. The point is, sorry, your hood is falling down and I can’t see your eyes. There, better. What I’m trying to say is, what is it I’m saying, yes, they went crazy with those crystals they found, trying to do what you’re talking about. Extending a life, come on now, you’re just a person and your life is special because of that.”

“Black crystal moves your insides,” said Remy. “Kids in my school say it changes your blood, and they’re still buried underground. What do you have to say about that?”

“I wouldn’t listen because who knows who their parents are. Adults get weirder and weirder as they get older. Everyone has their opinions but you’re mine, you listen to me.”

“Tell me again about the Gang,” she said, feeling embarrassed. “I like when you tell me.”

“Okay, I can do that.”

Remy knew the story about The Sky Father Gang to near memory but wanted to hear Dad talk, she wanted his words, his soft words, in the air surrounding her.

They were seven kids who dressed in identical red robes with black hoods and black belts. What they believed in was different from Brothers Feast who waste their time with stunts (the village is so accustomed to them that their last stunt, pretending to dig up the crystal mine road with comically large cardboard shovels while dressed as city residents in navy blue suits donated by Mob of Mary’s, everyone ignored). Remy remembered Brother being in The Sky Father Gang and she knew where he was now, prison. She remembered him with a duffel bag full of crystals, ready to leave forever, and she remembered how long his hair had grown down his back, and she remembered how distant he was to her, to everyone, to everything. It wasn’t him anymore.

Mom went into the bathroom and closed the door.

The Sky Father Gang wanted to live longer. They founded their belief based on certain blue and yellow crystals Twinning. These crystals shared a similar lattice structure and grew together, intertwined. If Twinning existed outside the body, why not in? Why couldn’t you double what you already had? These were the questions they had asked, were forgotten about with their imprisonment, and the questions Remy now resurrected and Dad tried to repeal.

She leaned into his words.

Experimenting with black crystal is what drove The Sky Father Gang into the city, wide-eyed and tongue-out. Boys and girls in undone robes showing crystal laced underwear screwed and bled in city streets. Brother didn’t wear any underwear, only robe. They took turns inserting crystals inside each other’s holes and created new openings in their stomachs, chests, and thighs. People took pictures on phones and uploaded them to websites. The city charged the village to remove the crystals, to repair the bruised bones and missing skin at a place called a hospital. Rumors in the village said The Sky Father Gang were close to finding a solution to increasing count. Brother wanted Mom to live forever. A news report showed them jumping in the courtroom, skeletal-lunging faces spitting on a pale-faced judge with thinning red hair. Cameras followed. The Sky Father Gang kicked a table over and laughed with their heads tilted back. Veins webbed their bodies. They tackled a guard, everyone falling to the floor in a crashing wave, and the Gang spun their bodies by kicking their feet against the floor. Brother howled in a fish-flop directly on top of the guard. Brother was the loudest. Brother was raw. Remy believed in what he was trying to accomplish. Why not try if that’s all there is to do.

Dad loosened the fur collar of his robe. He told Remy it was too hot to be wearing these but she insisted he talk more and he agreed, wanting, needing, to connect with his daughter who on some mornings he didn’t recognize. Sometimes, when she entered a room, the size of her startled him, as if a stranger had entered the house, and he’d jump in his chair and wonder where the biggest knife in the kitchen was.

In the bathroom, the porcelain clink of the toilet bowl raised by Mom.

“What about eating them?” Remy asked.

“Tried that. Very sick.”

“Was it red? Have you ever seen a black crystal? Kids at school say no one has seen one after The Sky Father Gang. Other kids say black crystals never existed at all, that it’s only a story made up by people with sad brains. The older you get the more you believe in it, kind of like what you said before about adults getting weirder. If I found one I’d probably try it. Yeah, I would. I heard people believe —”

“Hey, why are you thinking this?”

“Because,” said Remy, “I want to prepare myself so I don’t suffer like Harvak. I don’t want to feel pain. People remember your suffering and the last memory they have of you is your face and I don’t want mine to be hurting. I want to help Mom.”

“You shouldn’t spend your life worrying about dying.”

“Unavoidable.”

“Why?”

“To not think hm wonder what’s my count, while you’re alive? I don’t think you can ignore the thoughts of zero. It’s scary to be alive. Sometimes, if I close my eyes and clear my head and just concentrate, like just really concentrate on what it would be like to be empty, to not have to live, to not get out of bed, my entire body goes into a kind of shock. It knows. I can feel what it will be like.”

“City people don’t think that. They may not agree with us, but they just live their lives, I think. They just keep expanding and moving and, well, I don’t think they have time to think. Maybe it’s better.”

“I bet they don’t believe it until they are about to die and start apologizing on their death bed. I saw a fat woman jogging The Bend and I barked at her. I’m sorry, but I did it.” Remy laughed the same child laugh she’s had since having a hundred inside and for a quick moment, like a finger poke between his ribs, it breaks him.

“Don’t be scared by what you can’t control.”

He looked around the room. His daughter was outgrowing the space he once proudly provided. He should have built the room larger, with a deeper closet for her games, clothes, art supplies taken from Mob of Mary’s, books on count, dozens of blue and yellow pillows, a poster of the sun.

“Must be hard knowing there isn’t a way to help her. You just watch. Maybe Brother never did find a black crystal because if he did he would have given it to Mom and she wouldn’t be sick. There’s a kid in my school named John who says they were just dark red all along. You know what, I’ll find the solution so we’ll all live longer. I’ll do it.”

“What did you get on your spelling test?”

Mom vomited red slush, lost another crystal, and dabbed her mouth with the spitting cloth. The bathroom tiles on her palms were comforting. She stretched out and lay on the floor in front of the toilet, face turned to the side and smushed against the cool tiles. She thought about horses.

“Haven’t gotten it back. I know why they want to move in. Because we’re different. Because they want to see, and then they want to take, what they don’t understand. We’re living a life they think is silly. Sometimes I feel like everything is pushing inward. You said I’ll always have one crystal inside me as long as Mom’s alive.”

He wanted to say more and be comfortable inside the words to connect them. He couldn’t. His body carried him from the room. His body protected him. The imaginary conversation hurt too much. He stood in the doorway.

“She okay?”

“I’ll check.”

“Will this heat wave ever end?”

The universe breaths billions of worlds. The earth is tiny, but possesses crystals the sun is drawn to. The universe allows the sun to get closer, to create a heat wave across the city and the village, to become pulled by what is buried under the earth’s crust. This is another type of game.

33

Brother screams for Remy. With an arm three times longer than normal length he reaches through the circular door. His hand is several inches short from touching Remy who is crystallized in yellow light. He tries to extend his arm but the several inches short begin working backward until he’s being pulled over an ocean, fingertips spraying water, body dissected by a lighthouse. Somewhere near, Harvak is barking.

A cloud in the shape of a mouth leans over the bed and chomps away at the crystals in severe animal angles. Cloud-teeth splinter and fly like spit fingernails. The mouth destroys itself into a million clouds. Remy presses two yellow crystals to her ears, tosses and turns and screams Mom can’t die because Mom is Mom, Mom can’t die because Mom is a god, tosses and turns, Mom can’t die because Mom is a dog, Mom can’t die because a dog is a god, tosses and turns, Mom can’t die because Mom is my Mom and my Mom is forever, tosses and turns until blue slush sprays from her mouth in a bridge to the ceiling. When she sneezes, the yellow crystal dust inside her nose becomes pollen-colored mist and she is pulled up and through the mist, through the circular door, and from the bed. Crystals fall from her feet like a gown. The bridge crumbles to salt, then rain. Animal paws press down on her and she hears herself breathing in the otherwise silence of the room.

Remy opens her eyes, shakes the strange dream away, and pets a barking dog at her side. It’s young, shorthaired, brown, with floppy ears that she pinches and rubs. One eye is yellow, the other black. She’s not sure where the dog came from, but she can hear Dad running through the house slamming doors. She hides the dog in her closet and listens to his nails scratch the door.

“Shhhhhhhhhhh,” she says to the closet.

The dog lets out a small yelp.

“Shhhh, be quiet.”

When Dad comes in he’s covered in sweat and his face is roasted. He doesn’t say anything, looks mad at first, then takes a deep breath that relaxes his jaw and he sits down on the bed the way all Dads do. But there’s a weakness to his posture that wasn’t there before. His left hand is stained yellow. Every home is using more YCL because of the heat wave and there’s been talk amongst elders of stockpiling yellow. Dad believes that the value of yellow will rise until it’s equal to red but no one else believes him. In his closet he has three denim jackets, twelve pockets total, all stuffed with yellow crystals.

“Remy?”

“That was the weirdest dream ever. It was like, more than a dream. Like I was sick or something. My foot hurts. I’ve been running in the mine and, I don’t know, it was more.”

“I’m not angry,” he says looking around the room, “just tell me.”

“What?”

“Remy, come on now.”

“Seriously, whaaaaaaaat.”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

The dog barks.

Dad leaps from the bed and in three steps reaches the closet and opens it. The dog jumps out and runs circles around his legs.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. He just came into my room after my nap. On my test I got a C minus.”

“We were going to try and hide him until your birthday. It was your Mother’s idea.”

In the presence of Dad, in the way the dog is revealed to her, Remy feels like she’s done something wrong, feels guilty, and she’s not sure why, other than this is how the family operates. He doesn’t acknowledge hearing her test score and she doesn’t wait for it to register.

“Dad,” she says. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Anything?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you hurt Adam?”

“Because.”

“Dad?”

“Anything.”

“Are you dying because Mom is dying?”

“What kind of question is that?”

She sits up. The dog jumps into her bed and licks her face. The yellow eye is dull and the black is shining. His gums look black and pink and chewed up.

“Last night I saw Mom crawling across the floor.”

“He likes you. She’s resting and everything’s fine.”

“You said I could ask anything.”

“And you did.”

“What do you name a dog after your first dog dies?”

32

All prison cells are decorated with the exception of Jackson’s Hole which is located behind the laundry room and has no lights, no running water, is four feet by four feet, and smells like chemical lavender. Imagination by the inhabitant is encouraged. The administration is proud to promote this fact to curious city residents who skim glossy magazines and blogs for prison gossip. Reports of creativity make the inmates more human to workers in cubicles who spend their days living in screens. When they read about a prisoner painting a mural of skeletons wrapped in roses on a wall in the courtyard where the inmates exercise, it’s not with fear, but relief and an odd sense of comfort and admiration.

Guards interact with the inmates in a friendly but reserved manner. Fights are occasional. By the low night level noise it seems everyone sleeps well. The administration is also proud of this detail and reports often to the press how calm the prison can be because a calm prison makes the inmates seem less capable of the terrible acts they are guilty of. For example, there is a man named DeWeese, housed on the upper level, who is Grade A. DeWeese is polite, rarely speaks, and volunteers shelving history books in the library. He gives blood every Monday, both drunk-tattooed arms exposed, his face a big warm smile blasting the nurse. Multiple pool owners watched from inside their homes as DeWeese performed what he is guilty of: drowning squirrels in paint buckets.

Pants McDonovan lives on lower level east, and from his cell bars sees the upper level where more than fifty villagers are mixed in with hundreds of city prisoners. Many of them wandered into the city because they were attracted by streetlamps, big buildings, festive music, a new way of life, a way to start over, but they couldn’t adjust. They slept nude on street corners, dipped their toes into crosswalks, pawned crystals in trash-lined bricked alleys without permits. An elderly man with long gray hair wearing blue shorts prayed for ten hours to a storefront of televisions on please-stand-by. At night he smashed out the glass and threw the televisions into the streets, the colored bars on the screen cracking to distant lines the color of iron. How many villagers are in the prison isn’t widely known, especially not to Pants who occasionally recognizes a depressed face hovering over macaroni salad during cafeteria hours, but he’s never tried to keep track. The village knows about their people being imprisoned. Makes them suspicious about the city’s intent.

New inmates are stuffed inside a briefing zone on the upper level covered with blue mesh before being moved into their cells. Often, they are heckled from the lower levels by everyone except Pants who only watches, feeling awful about seeing men being placed in here, sometimes unconsciously tapping his thumb and pointer-finger together in sets of ten.

Upper level inmates complain about the temperature. In the current heat wave sleeping is pretty much impossible and the administration has poorly addressed the problem by installing cooling vents to offset what is a serious design flaw. Prisoners throw cups, food trays, books, spoons, their shoes, their teeth, whatever will learn to fly, at a window they hope will one day break. The lower levels are cool, dry, a design-flaw-mystery, which agrees with Pants who consumes so much black crystal his body temperature runs ten degrees above average. Because the administration considers him an agreeable and mild-mannered inmate who possesses a crystal that the guards have taken a liking to (Grade A) he’s in charge of laundry duties three days a week and allowed an extra shower with the heat turned up to a skin-reddening temperature.

Your cell is a reflection of your inner self.

McDonovan spent more time decorating his cell than all currently housed inmates combined. His mattress is cradled inside a hull of plastic branches. The headboard becomes an octopus when he’s on black crystal, and the ceiling a forever green that welcomes him in moans. He enters it. He peels back layers of forest as the ceiling breaths and he goes inside, splitting ferns. But as soon as he enters, he’s back on the bed. Drawings of black crystals on white paper hang on the walls all signed Love, Remy. The cement floor is the color of the dirt in the crystal mine — painted in an unusual, but allowed by the administration, “Universal Black.” White lights caged-in on the ceiling polish the floor with glare. A toilet is in one corner, a square sink adjacent extends from the wall, and a two-foot-deep closet without a door containing clothes and a white box completes the living quarters, the reflection.

A window allows Pants to view the ugly blocks of the city and a curved road called The Bend where people the size of fleas sweat and jog. Below The Bend, the cliff leading to the village.

You have done wrong, but you are an individual with choices and we allow you to be yourself here. You are an individual constantly becoming a better individual.

Tonight he studies his reflection in the window. If he concentrates hard enough he floats through his head and home, into what is childhood-him playing spit-tag with Remy, jumping on his bike as motorcycle, finger-shooting Remy as he pedals away in a dust cloud with Remy running, falling several times, crying, laughing, spitting on herself, Mom watching, standing with her arms crossed and clutching at her throat a necklace of ten yellow crystals. After the childhood him smokes into the sun, the bike turning to blue gas beneath him, everything becoming a runny liquid hiss over the ground, he’s brought back into his cell and wonders when Mom will write next, how is she feeling, how many does she have left.

He looks forward to her letters. Remy’s been asking about count, his involvement in The Sky Father Gang, if a black crystal exists or not, does touching your body in sets of ten do anything or does it just feel good. He tells Mom the only black left is the one in her possession. His gift to her when he was scared and didn’t know what it was. When he first found the black crystals during the endless rainstorm he made sure to hide them from everyone, even himself, because he didn’t believe what he held. The rumors of it spread. People just need something to believe in. It turned out he was no different. He wanted Mom to live forever so he gave it to her.

He opens his mouth and stabs a sliver of black crystal inside his cheek. In the window a blue honeycomb-hexagon frames his mouth, eyes, every joint, tooth, fissure, nerve, and canal. The human skull stripped to bone is smiling. A fire rises from his stomach and when he coughs is blown across his chest. Ears hurt. Throat constricts. Hair echoes Mother. He stands looking at his head, his big ugly head that is even bigger today on his narrowing, via the black crystal, shoulders. When he stomps his feet the boom rattles his teeth. He grins and sees not the reality of the blood in his mouth but a thousand red crystals. Then, he sees something new. Mom’s patting a cut on his knee with his own shirt, the injury from falling off his bike, his motorcycle, after the game of spit-tag with Remy. She’s discussing the concept of pain. It’s when the crystals inside your body go out. She explains by touching the cut with a press of the shirt. They are trying to turn back on, that’s why it hurts. She stops pressing. Trust me, they’ll come back on, here. She pushes the shirt deep into the cut and he wants to be strong for her so he holds back tears and grins while grabbing fistfuls of grass. Your body is getting brighter, I see it. He smiles and a cry escapes. She presses again, this time lighter, and he shuts his eyes. You’re at a hundred again.

When a guard passes his cell McDonovan reaches into his pocket and drops a mini plastic bag filled with black dust through the bars. The guard says, “Thank ya, business man Pants,” and skips off to tell four more guards that the bags are ready.

Back in the reflection he tilts his head to the left and the hexagon doesn’t follow. He moves more, then a little more, and then a little more, until he’s standing to the side of the window, slightly below, crouching. He craves it but knows it’s not true — the black crystal increasing his count. When he reaches up and places his palm on the hexagon it morphs to fit the twenty-seven bones in his hand. Pants laughs, his head turtling into his shoulders. Inmates are yelling from above.

Tony throws a sharpened spoon and it bounces off the window. Everyone goes AHHHHHHHNOOOOOOOOOOO. The noise snaps McDonovan to the right. The hexagon is gone. The prison gets quiet. Pete, from the upper level says Next time instead of a spoon use, like, your own body or some shit and he realizes that doesn’t make any sense at all so he follows up with a vague just use a really sharp spoon, okay. The heat wave is killing them with sleep deprivation. They can’t think straight. Pete rubs his face with both hands and goes dizzy. Someone coughs and Pants turns again. His head feels like a microwave heating spoons. Four guards stand in a row with their right arms extended through his cell bars, hands open.

31

It’s time for a crystal mine search.

They find yellow nuggets and blue shale. The sun fell hours ago but left its heat pinned like a dress in the sky and everyone moves slow beneath it. Remy wears dirty red shorts and her blond hair hangs over the front of her shoulders. Her dog, whom she calls Dog Man because she can’t settle on a name — seems impossible to move on from Harvak — digs up a green crystal and she grabs it and slides it into her pocket.

“Keep looking. We’ll find it. Keep going, Dog Man.”

Brothers Feast walk past discussing a jailbreak in reverse. A hairless man slows and smirks at Remy as the others walk ahead shoving each other and laughing on the road out. The man smells like dead dogs and Remy instinctively begins tapping her finger on her thigh. Moonlight filtered through trees forms a birdcage around his head. Remy throws dirt into the air and he ducks, not sure where it will land until it’s heard raining on a truck’s hood and he stands back up with a jump.

He says, “Freak-o,” and walks backward three steps before turning and catching up to the group, tripping once and falling to his knees before picking himself up and running again even though he’s hurt and badly limping.

“Smell you later,” she says, remembering the saying from a city show she once heard from the family radio while sitting in Brother’s lap. He had new hair on his arms and she had no idea what the phrase meant but she loved it and wrote the words several dozen times in her school notebook around and inside of previous drawings of crystals.

Remy tells Dog Man that if she can increase her count she will possess the power to reverse Mothers. She pictures Mom gathering crystals by the valley-full with flowered fingers, light radiating in tunnels from her mouth and eyes, green looping inside her body from throat to stomach in an endless U. A tunnel of light from her left eye connects to Brother and guides him across a bridge built from prison to her. Just for her. Brother comes back to the house and into a seated position with Remy in his lap pulling his hairy arms over the front of her body. The radio shouting cartoons. The family at full count forever. Mom says, making eye contact with Remy inside the dream, cartoons blaring rain and cars and speech bubbles We have one person to thank and it’s Remy!

“Come on, dig more.”

He looks up at her before churning the ground with alternating paws, nose down.

“I know they exist.”

Yesterday Mom spent the afternoon in her room. She dropped something heavy on the floor that moved the house. Inside the drawing on the wall of the red crystal, the baby moved, and suddenly, Remy hated the drawing and wanted it gone. Dad was with her, and they both looked up before looking at each other, no idea what causes a thudding sound like that — dense, sharp, centered. Remy asked for paint. Later, Dad walked out of the room and ran to the bathroom to see if Mom was okay. Remy waited and waited, nothing to do with her fingers but tap her knees until falling asleep, only to be told when she woke from the weirdest dream ever, a new dog on her lap, that yes, Mom was fine, nothing to worry about.

But she took forever to descend the stairs that night for dinner which was pork chops seared gold with garlic potatoes prepared by Dad who was wearing the same stained clothes. When Remy asked what was wrong he spoke with food mashed in his mouth, said she was sick, an illness, old age, How about we don’t talk about it right now, we went over this before, okay? Play with your new dog. Several times during dinner Mom was given the spitting cloth for the red drizzling her chin and throat. Her face looked scared, almost childish, and pained in a way that made Remy tell herself she would do anything to help, even sacrifice herself.

A loud bang and Remy says, “Buildings coming from the city? Dig around more, hurry.”

Dog Man doesn’t look up, his nose buried inside a cone of dirt.

Remy has had nights where she can’t sleep, thinking about her parents, Brother, the family pulled like puppets away from each other, strings severed by stars. Disease cuts all. Remy wonders when she too will catch an illness and rush toward zero. She wonders what it feels like to have nothing inside. What will she see in those final seconds? Will there be colors?

“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.

30

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.”

“We’ll do it,” Bobby T. said, not knowing what he meant exactly but feeling uncomfortable with Z. and thinking he had to say something, anything, to break the strangeness. He looked at Ricky and shrugged and Ricky shrugged back.

“I’ll do it all right,” mumbled Z. more to himself than to Bobby T.

Z. wore a green robe in the old style. The collar and wrists were white and fur lined. His feet were covered in dirty white sneakers with fat tongues. Extreme heat didn’t bother him. He randomly shouted, “This heat wave is a joke!” The robe belonged to his grandfather and held memory and magic. His eyes were the color of truck exhaust. His stutter came and went, but the closer he got to defining the jailbreak in reverse, the less it appeared. He would erase it. He would become smooth and living forever in people’s memories. When he spoke, the Brothers believed and followed every word, sentence, idea, believing that Z. was powerful and special and would eventually change their lives too.

“Question,” Z. said. “Your attention, please.”

They turned their backs on the prison, joined Bobby T., and leaned into the slight give of the fence. Bobby T. tongue-clicked rock noises and stopped when Z. gave him a real serious look.

Arnold said, “Let’s do this thing,” to which Z. rolled his eyes and allowed a moment of shame. “Sorry,” said Arnold.

In the breeze Z.’s green robe fluttered open. He wore a white t-shirt and had a belly that he quickly covered up. “How many of you are w-w-w-willing to go into the prison with me?”

Everyone raised their hands and their upper backs fell into the give of the fence.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, and again began mumbling the phrase “jailbreak in reverse” while pacing back and forth as the Brothers breathed in nothing but the hot air of their doomed land.

“Let’s do this thing,” repeated Arnold, and this time, Z. nodded and pointed with both hands at the prison and wouldn’t stop nodding until Ricky asked if he was okay.

29

On a typical morning he spends three hours in the laundry room, which is fifteen degrees warmer than the second-floor cells. The laundry room is a miniature warehouse of cleaning in the color gray. Hot air hangs like a curtain on a movable track. Metal tables edge-lined with machine-drilled dimples hold clothing pressed in stacks. Washers and dryers built into ten towers shake in front of windows covered in blue X wire. The sun creates bars of light through the steam and the outline of McDonovan’s body is visible while he irons a heap of shirts.

He silences his ears with toilet paper. In the afternoon part-time workers from Open Skies Cleaning Service arrive and finish whatever he didn’t get to. Having someone the administration can trust, like Pants, is cheap, allows them to pay less to Open Skies, and he does an exceptional job (Grade A, extra shower time, full heat), resulting in his nickname which makes him feel belittled, like when Dad called him “tiny man.” Not “little man” like some fathers lovingly call their sons, but “tiny man” in a tone that cut. The way he runs a crease from the thigh to kneecap before dropping to the ankle the guards can’t figure out. When Pants tells them he was an artist of sorts, in Sky Father, they nod, not understanding what participation in Sky Father has to do with working an iron like a seamstress. He says when he was a boy his parents made him clean and iron his underwear until they looked new, the fabric thin and stretched, because it was part of a punishment, maybe that’s where he gets his talent from. The guards smile, don’t respond or ask about the punishment, and they walk away, which makes Pants feel worse, makes him feel like “tiny man.”

After the laundry shift, a guard, one of the few who don’t use, escorts him back to his cell where the weekly letters sit on his bed. The guard discusses the heat wave and the politicians debating whether to move in to the village or not.

“When the lord speaks his decision will echo through the politicians, like Sanders,” says the guard who sports a gold cross on a gold necklace. “The village doesn’t believe in a god and that’s what’s wrong. You believe in rocks.”

“The yellow ones are power,” says Pants. “You melt them into YCL. It’s important. Please stop talking. Thank you.”

“God wants civilized people to move into the village, which is godless. You see what I’m saying? Us moving in is a good thing for you people. We trust Sanders. It’s an opportunity to become educated in the ways of god and learn what actual medicine is. It’s impossible for you people to keep living the way you do as time moves forward.”

Pants says that the city gets what the city wants because of chaos, not god. He says they don’t want what they have to offer because the village has always been fine without the city. He again tells the guard to please stop talking, thank you.

The guard sneers, touches his cross. He’s heard the rumors before about the city nearing, buildings randomly sprouting up. The guard prays nightly. He doesn’t necessarily believe that a city can grow on its own accord, something alive and wanting more. What he believes in is god doing all things right, for him.

“We’ll see,” says the guard, but Pants is already not listening, thinking about Mom and home and the letters waiting to be opened in his cell.

Correspondence with Mom concerns crystals. She describes in pencil drawn diagrams what the holograms look like that extend from the black crystal he gave her. The last attempt, she writes, two black horses appeared. Twins. I call this Horses Hologram. Do you know this? I’m not crazy. Don’t tell me that. If he writes back asking if she’s eating black crystal, she never answers. He knows nothing about horses. He doesn’t think his Mom, whom he loves deeply and painfully, is in the slightest, crazy. He only wants to help her, but questions if his need to help is a way to lessen his own guilt because of what happened to her, and now, her sickness. Not because he’s a good person. He ignores this question as quickly as it arrived.

His letters discuss the effects of black crystal and how the guards are hooked. They believe in immortality under a universe that will silence them. What he has will run out. He’s convinced the guards that it increases longevity. They are good to him because he controls it. They don’t steal it from him because they don’t fully understand what the black crystal is besides village voodoo and aren’t sure they want the responsibility of its possibilities, so they keep this game going with Pants and it’s working out just fine. There is an understanding and a structure and that’s what people need. Besides, what the hooked guards believe is this: the city will eventually take over and then they won’t need Pants McDonovan ever again. They can study the mine and what the village lifestyle is like and finally be comfortable with what they now don’t understand. They can bring the village into modern living with god, carpeted cubicles, televisions, dishwashers, tooth x-rays, nuggets, yoga, babysitters, meat, car washes, air conditioning with floral scents, jogging, speed dating, screens, cat-shaped headphones, keyboards, raw juice, leather interior coffins. The guards like getting high, feeling new and different, on the black crystal.

Black crystal just feels good he once wrote to Mom. It makes the blood jump inside your body and nothing else. They are going to need more and I’m scared about that day coming too soon.

He knows Mom is ill, she’s mentioned it prior in letters, but he doesn’t know how bad it’s gotten, the layers of ache peeling up from her tiny screams, the rot expanding inside the tunnels inside her bones inside her body. If he could see her. If he could stand before her, he’d feel like a boy seeing her cry for the first time. How he watched hiding from the doorway his mother sob and shake under the bedsheets, and afterward, he realized while sitting on his bed and poking his stomach hard ten times, that she wasn’t invincible like he had previously thought. He wanted her to live forever after he witnessed her and the men in the mine that night, shortly after seeing her cry. He could have done something, but he didn’t. The men went back. You could have done something is a black mantra he repeats daily, an endless banner of You could have done something wrapping around his thoughts and getting tighter and tighter.

The cell door slams shut and distracts him from the memory. The guard tells him to believe in the power of god, the values of Sanders, and smooches his cross.

“Makes sense,” says Pants with a goofy grin.

“Inside your body is a number of crystals.”

“Not as ridiculous,” says Pants mimicking the size of the guard’s smile.

The guard wants to say something back, but decides to continue smirking, that’s his answer back, and he walks from the cell, whistling, strutting, but feeling a little defeated.

In his last sent letter Pants described eating crystal. Cold and sharp under my tongue before pressing it into my gums where it bleeds warm. Tastes pretty good. He discussed the need to jog in place, the gelatinous sweat that rings his neck, the stench of damp crystal mine dirt evaporating from his skin, all his childhood memories burned in amber then stretched into the present positive to make the universe and his life seem less awful. He often wonders why, when he was a boy and he fought endlessly with Dad and in return Dad and Mom fought, did no one ask anyone else one obvious and critical question: are you happy? Once, while on black crystal, he had a dream where he stood behind Mom’s legs as she stirred a cast iron pot rimmed in little green crystals on a stain-crusted stove. They were alone on a beach. The sand was cold. The delicate fabric of Mom’s gown against her calves, his hands. He could taste salt blowing in the breeze. When he began to leave the dream, when he became aware of where he was, prison, the space between his cell’s bars filled with waves.

I placed my tongue on a crystal I found in Remy’s room, Mom writes. A yellow. I was scared to try the black. A metallic taste, lemony, and I pulled the crystal from my mouth and wiped it clean by dragging it over her mattress which I now feel guilty about. I didn’t have the spitting cloth, but I wish I did because I vomited red and probably lost another, but you don’t need to worry about me, I’m not crazy, don’t you worry while you’re in there. Do you remember when you and Remy played the tapping game?

On the second floor a fight breaks out between inmates and guards over the heat. A bottle shatters. The comically high-pitched Al LaValle, says, “Shake me but don’t make me,” as he’s dragged to Jackson’s Hole. Pants sees LaValle’s limp body being wiped horizontally across the floor. Alarm bells ring and guards run. Some of the inmates are singing “Bye Bye Mr. Bad Guy,” and LaValle, still on his back, still being dragged by the guards, is waving both hands to the rhythm.

He replies in his letter that he once wedged broken crystals under his toenails. Each nail on his right foot shined a different color: yellow was the pinkie toe, then blue, red, green, and black for the big toe. Throughout the day he scrunched his foot inside his boot and walked on the tops of his toes in ten-yard clips. People watched him walking odd from shack to shack and they shook their heads, pitied his strangeness. He sprinted across a busy street of mining trucks pumping their breaks and screamed and laughed, the feeling of coming alive through pain and crystals, before collapsing against a store wall and shaking, his feet ballooning with liquid as the candle maker himself told him to hurry along while poking him with a stick.

He opens the second letter on the bed. It’s from Brothers Feast. He’s received these letters before, a kind of fan mail from those following in the footsteps of The Sky Father Gang:

1) What’s a jailbreak in reverse look like?

2) Would you like to leave the prison?

He grabs the white box from the closet and takes out the black crystal which is changing shape with use — in his palm it looks like two small intertwined pinecones. A passing guard who already appears maxed-out, eyes not looking like eyes, stops at his cell and stares. Pants picks off a crumb-edge that the guard takes. The guard smiles, places the crumb-edge under his tongue, and crab-walks away to the sound of ringing bells. Pants knows what’s going on because he’s seen it before: guards getting sky-high are messing with the alarms and jumping and laughing inside an office with bullet-proof glass. They are taking turns pressing their faces against the glass and blowing kisses until they pass out. The crab walking guard on his way back to the office is having too much fun, grinding his pelvis against the walls as he goes.

Pants sits back on the bed. With his front teeth he shaves off a layer of black dust from a flat side. He catches the dust on the top of his pointer finger, raises it to his nose, inhales, poof.

He writes back that a jailbreak in reverse would be criminals running into jail. Or no, a jailbreak in reverse would be criminals or people who belong in jail running into a jail and freeing everyone who doesn’t belong in jail and the criminals staying in the jail. He rips the paper with hand speed. He’s excited with the possibility of leaving as the thoughts, ideas, spin and tear at the You could have done something banner. He draws a square with arrows running in and bubble-lines running out. The arrows are labeled Brothers Feast and the bubble-lines The Sky Father Gang.

Answer to question two, this answer written with more control: Yes and I will help you. He’s heard the prison looks real pretty from the outside, and who knows how much time is left before the city moves in. Is it true the heat wave is only getting worse? From my window the sky looks faded from too much sun. Beneath this he writes Pretend to be inmates. One of you will play the role of a newbie transfer guard. Say it’s for a transfer to a holding tank called Willows Bay. I’ll leave with the others. Brothers Feast will remain inside the prison until they become legends in the village and then set free when the administration realizes what’s happened. They won’t, they can’t, keep the foolish innocent. If there’s a problem, just act insane. They never keep the crazies in here. If you can pull off breaking into the prison, you can later pull off breaking out of a psych ward. Just follow these guidelines…

Pants McDonovan dances with black crystal inside him and the thought of leaving the prison. He closes his eyes and pumps his legs and sees himself running from the beach with Harvak at his side. The family stove floats in the ocean. I’m going to see you again. I’m going to leave and get a chance to start over. At the horizon the prison melts like stomped mud and a ring of light expands outward igniting the ocean in shark-fin flames. Harvak barks looking backward and leaps to the side from the following light. Mom stands in the front yard holding the cast iron pot rimmed in little green crystals. When Pants looks up, the sky is a mirror of all this, and he sees himself and Harvak become encased in light.

28

When Mom was a child she had an imaginary friend named Tock Ocki who only appeared in the corner of the bathtub when she was in the bathroom. He had a toddler’s body and the head of a rabbit. Mom said the kids at school threw dirt in her eyes during recess and at lunch they said she would be alone forever. Tock Ocki told her that special people are destined to do special things. He stood in the tub, folded and unfolded his ears, and danced. She became so happy when he did this that she felt like she wanted to live forever.

27

It’s a brittle corner soon to be dust. Pants shoves a sliver under his big toenail until it knifes the flesh. Pacing in his cell, he bends his toe inside his sneaker, the crystal cracking and cutting, slitting open skin. He prepares this way for the health meeting because he has to talk during the health meeting. It’s difficult enough to listen to hundreds of words exiting a guard’s mouth about god, but to return them sober among peers and the supervisor is nearly impossible. It’s hard to look at people who have faces. Besides, he thinks he’s leaving this place sometime soon and one last health meeting is doable.

The meeting takes place in the administrative wing, in the feet of the large L that is the prison. It’s been quiet lately, inmates on the upper levels succumbing to the heat and whispering rumors that the city is moving mysteriously toward the village. No one, not the guards, not the prisoners, not the administration, knows what to believe, so they wait and stick to their schedules, which include the meetings.

A table with a coffee urn, Styrofoam cups, a cube of napkins, and a box of donuts is placed against the wall in the meeting room. In the center — eight white plastic chairs with metal legs. The floor is a smooth and slippery cement. One wearing socks could run through the open door of the room, glide to the opposite side, and bump into the guard who stands ready for the meeting, arms crossed high and tight, his expression absurdly serious.

Pants is ushered into the room by a guard who tells him to get up on it. Pants faces the cement block wall so close he smells the crystal fungus of his own breath. He stands in a wide stance with arms reaching for the corners of the ceiling, fingertips pressed into the stucco’s dimples. Behind him, chairs arranged in a circle, the plastic boom of each put into proper place, metal legs scratching the cement, a guards keys jangling as he paces. The donuts are opened. A gravel-voice says, “Nice, donuts.” The urn’s orange tongue is flicked up, coffee rushes along styrofoam, and another voice, this one scary deep says, “Nice, coffee.” A guard states there is a strict two-donut limit. He repeats himself, holding two fingers in the air while pivoting back-and-forth 180 degrees, because Tony, with his massive hand grabs five at once. The guard signals with his eyes to put the extra donuts back but Tony manages in one bite to taste all five.

The other guard squats, and holding McDonovan’s calf with two hands, moves up his leg. His hair is inspected by a two-hand tousle that reminds Pants of Mom checking for lice — bugs they heard about from the city and never would have cared about but a panic ensued. They react to the policies of the city, especially if on television. He curls his big toe so the crystal touches the bottom of his shoe and the shard sinks in, hurts. When he extends the toe, blood and liquid crystal warms his foot, feels real good. When he closes his eyes, the guard’s hands patting his hips (ten times quickly, what are the chances of that), he sees a beach with Remy running into waves colored night.

Goon-bodies plop themselves into the chairs. Everyone settles in. Everyone gets ready.

“Turn,” says the guard who is the guard with the gold cross necklace, which appears several times larger than before, the gold cross now covering his chest and stomach.

“You got it, sexy hands,” Pants says with his now usual goofy smile. He wants to make the guard feel uncomfortable and “sexy hands” does the trick.

“Op-en,” says the guard. “Don’t sass me. I said it before, the lord will decide and speak through Sanders.”

“Touch me, hurt me, love me.”

He opens his mouth and it’s so clean that the guard takes a step back and peers up into the mouth. Those who eat black crystal are known to have black worm spirals rotting their inner cheeks. The tongue a block of coal. If the guard could see down McDonovan’s throat he’d see pink fleshy walls draped in sheets of watery fungus, a symptom of a capable body flushing out the black after each use. Pants shuts his mouth, swallows, and the watery fungus washes away. He smiles without showing teeth. Has the smile of his mother.

“Good to go,” the guard says. “Wait and see.”

“That’s what we’re all doing, right?”

“Move.”

“I mean, seriously, we’re all just waiting for something to happen, to end us? That’s what this life is?”

Sitting down, he rests his forearms on his thighs, slightly above the knees, and clasps his hands. He’s dressed in orange pants and an orange top with a flimsy collar and two white buttons. His arms are long and skinny and losing muscle. His legs are thin too, not much below the knees swimming inside the orange material. His chest hurts when he coughs. The lights in the room suck up all space.

The supervisor is a big white guy with a block head and a military crew-cut named Jugba Marzan, commonly known as Jug, who wears high-waist khaki pants and a white button down shirt with the sleeves twisted sloppy at the elbows. He smells like hot dog water and mouth mints.

Not a guy who is completely out of shape, but looks like he played football and juiced and then let it all go. Sad.

Jugba says they will speak in an open and non-judgmental forum. The rules are simple. Everyone needs to say something about their past. Jug is allowed to ask two questions, after which, he will move to the next person.

“You. Say what you want, anything at all, this is a safe place where everyone, everyone right, will keep their opinions to themselves until everyone has had a turn. Things should run smoothly today. I’m under supervision myself,” he looks up at a moving camera in the corner, “and the last thing I need is an incident like we’ve had here before. I’m in control. We’re going to learn.” Jug smoothes the chest of his shirt with two hands. He’s incredibly nervous.

“…”

Everyone wears orange with white sneakers, black Velcro straps replace laces. A man named Crumb — small, mean — pinches the ashy tattooed praying hands on his neck while leaning back in his chair until the front legs hover off the ground, his cheeks puffed with air, his eyes blue and distant. There’s Pete with his forearm tattoos inked in arial black — left arm: Everything I Kill I Fuck, right arm: Everything I Fuck I Kill — who chews watermelon flavored gum and crumples the tent of orange fabric at his crotch with a bouncing finger. Tony sits slumped, his arms larger than most men’s thighs, folded over his chest, his left shirtsleeve rolled up above the bicep revealing a rash of raised skin in the shape of a key. Others sit looking at their shoes waiting for the health meeting to just end.

Jug has donut powder on his face. “All right, gotta play,” he says, chewing his lips.

“…”

Pants shuts down when attempting to externalize emotion. This fact he’s learned from these meetings. Something about family systems or was it family of origin. He stares at Jug. He leans forward. His big toe rubs the bottom of his shoe and his entire foot feels wet, hot, but he can’t get moving. Not here. Not like this. He can’t enter the high because of their faces. The black crystal isn’t strong enough for him to escape this time even though he’s done it before on less. The obligation surrounding him is suffocating. Jug’s question is drawing him out. Reality has a way of breaking you.

“Donut,” says Jug. “Now speak.”

“…”

Two invisible chambers floating in the center of the room are this: Jug asking Pants to talk, his chamber filling up, and the reaction chamber is Pants shuts off, the chamber emptying. They are connected. He knows this. Things learned. Basic Distancer vs. Pursuer. His emotions are hidden under crystals. He wants to flip the chambers and come out with so much hiss and words that Jug will blow back through the wall and dissolve. The black crystal rushes through his veins and creates bumps on his skin. There are no bumps on his skin, Pants just imagines them, but he starts rubbing his arms. He needs to get on the beach. It’s getting stronger, he can feel it.

“Crystal shithead,” says Crumb. “Go and we get this over with.”

“…”

A guard circles holding a club in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. He’s eaten three donuts, smells like clean laundry, and has a chicken dinner waiting at home. He’s one of the few guards who doesn’t eat crystal and is against the other guards taking it. He’s friends with the guard who wears the gold cross and together they pray in a room located in the prison used for nothing but praying. The praying room is labeled Praying Room. There’s an oil painting of an illuminated Jesus and a carpeted kneeling bench in royal purple. They really love to pray. The other guards who are hooked on the black crystal dislike them for what they interpret not as personal belief, but a moral judgment on their souls. The guard looks around the room for something to attack.

Everything looks weird to Pants. The guard’s eyes are a horizontal slit across his head which is a grape and the lights on the ceiling slither and drool. The air is pixilated. Tony’s arm rash is raised and jellied. His chair feels hot and alive.

“Holy shit,” says Jug.

“…”

“I think,” says Crumb. “I’d eat the village cold.”

Pants speaks. The story is this:

When he was nine years old he followed Mom into the mine. He thought she was a witch because she wore a black robe. Seeing her without her usual gray gown reminded him of seeing Dad for the first time without a mustache — a cruel trick with paralyzing aftershock for a toddler. He followed her. She was a shadow in that black gown floating over the truck-pressed roads, past the vegetable stands, poorly constructed leaning shacks, homes with crude metal roofs, the loud-lighted bars with street corners gorged with drunks vomiting count. He followed her into the mine, keeping his distance in the dark. She performed a séance. Knees bent, body bouncing from side to side, she growled as she reached for the sky. She placed an invisible towel over the head of the moon and cleaned it. Years later he’d find out many mothers conducted séances to increase their count when they felt sick. It was normal. But what’s not normal is her wearing a black robe instead of a gray gown. What’s not normal is what happened to Mom and his reaction after and his following guilt.

“Well, okay,” says Jug. “Good start. Weird. But discussing your childhood opens you up to the person you are now,” he says repeating the words from a training manual. “Everyone see how that’s good? You build on that.”

Crumb and Tony check for more donuts and if the orange light is still lit on the coffee urn. With a swirling club the guard tells them to turn around.

Before Jug asks his first question, Pants says more. He speaks quickly, racing over the top-half of his words. Black robes walked into the mine. They tore the robe off Mom, and from where he was, his body flat, dirt in his mouth, trembling against the dirt, he watched them act in a way he had never seen before. He could have done something. He made fists.

Curl, straighten, curl, straighten. His big toe is a pumping valve. Concentrate with calm. The crystal sinks deeper and his ripped skin shrieks along a fuse behind his ears. Finally maxed out.

He sits up in the white plastic chair so straight it’s freakish. He describes a man’s measured punches through Mom’s hands which moved like they were cleaning fog off a windshield. They took turns falling on her, pushing her body into the dirt, fucking her into deeper plateaus. The first man went back. Pants floods the room with words, eyes wet, the veins in his neck worm-thick and making even self-proclaimed tough-guy-Tony wince. His body needs to move. Usually he can jog in his cell where he imagines the beach and Harvak at his side. The worst part wasn’t that he didn’t stop the men, but that his dick got hard against the dirt and he slithered and he screwed the ground. His fists became caresses. Pete whispers into his hands cupped over his nose and mouth What the fuck, dude and Crumb defense-mechanism-laughs while shaking his head no.

“I returned to the mine and replayed what happened to Mom who never reported or said a thing about what happened to anyone and I would lay in the dirt and rock and push into it and I was messed up back then because I thought, I really believed that I would die from such thoughts, like a force would reach down and yank every crystal from my body like a spine or something and leave me there like that and I’ve thought afterward and being here in the prison I could have done something, banner, banner, banner, that Mom is so sick now cause of what happened and I didn’t do anything, but I was a good boy, I didn’t do anything wrong, and now Mom is sick cause of me and I just need to help her cause I’m good.”

Pants stands and kicks the chair backward and it flips, the soldered metal glob where the legs sprout from hits the guard’s knees and he falls into a crossed-leg sitting position with a comical Uhf. Everyone else slides their chair back by extending their legs. Pants curls and uncurls his big toe. His foot is a puddle. Down the hall come extra guards. Pants keeps talking. He says he formed The Sky Father Gang to find answers on how to increase count, have Mom live forever, have Mom always be Mom, Mom as a god, until he stops, the inmates squeezing their fists looking back and forth, the guard rubbing his knees and standing with the cross in his mouth, the other, outside guards, wielding expandable batons turning the nearest corner, and Pants says to Jug who sits upright, eyes wide, a wet spot of sweat, or is it piss, it can’t be piss, jesus, pooling from his stomach and through his khakis, “I wanted to save her but I didn’t do anything” and tears stream from his eyes, “I could have done something but I didn’t,” and he readies, for the batons to open at the back of his knees, a ray of pain.

26

Behind rain clouds the sun looks like a giant daytime moon. The heat wave ignores the rain and refuses to leave. Holding old umbrellas, the elderly move through their daily tasks purchasing food from vendors and trading crystals they once worshiped for YCL, all the while worried — heads looking up, then left, then right, then down again and at their feet trudging through the muddy streets.

The truck drivers don’t care about the sky or sun because they can get more work done in the rain. They dress in slick green rain robes. They wear crystals around their necks that dangle so low under their work shirts the chain links knot in their chest hair. Their heads are hooded by their rain robes and they drive fast. Tires spin smooth spitting water backward, the rain glistening off metal hoods, doors, the roofs of the trucks that enter and leave the mine a dozen times daily.

Senior driver, Skip Callahan, drives shirtless. He wears a yellow crystal headband instead of a green necklace. He has plenty of chest hair. Today, he’s the lead truck in a line of ten making its return trip back into the mine. The first produced a few blue crystals, one green, lots of yellow, and a half of a dark red looking thing, all of it dumped in a field for workers to sift through. Men from the city once told Skip they’d be interested in buying the mine and Skip told them to get fucked. He slapped a fat face belonging to a politician named Sanders who rubbed his cheek while three others stood stunned. Skip knows other mine workers are potential sell-outs because of their personalities. They’re willing to sell to save themselves from some unknown crushing. The sky thunders and the rain falls faster from cracks of lightning.

Skip loves the rain. He loves to work. He blasts the radio — a country song picked up via a city signal with lots of banjo and violin — and smokes cigarettes he rolls himself. His truck is immaculate. On both driver and passenger side floors is a square of torn cardboard he replaces when muddied. The glove box contains homemade cleaning supplies that slosh inside mason jars and a spiraled branch of dirty cloths covered in engine grease. The wind pulls the rain to the side as his truck bounces down the road. In the pale light, royal disc of sun above, two hands gripping the steering wheel, he grins white teeth.

Last night Skip sat in the dark of his bedroom with his hands balled up against his chest, an all too common crippling depression. His mother, who was extraordinarily healthy for her count (such skin), recently died from a truck accident. The villagers stood around slack jawed and terrified (that’s going to happen to me one day) and watched her expel colors while Skip came running down the street, slowing as he saw the damage. He was told by a teenager that she was “hurt” in an “accident” and Skip thought he could help her, that maybe she had sprained a wrist or bruised a hip, anything but zero. He tried pulling her from the truck but that made her body worse, bend in unimagined ways, colors gushing from her chest. People winced and turned away. Since the accident he’s found it hard to function outside of work. Work is his everything now. In the bedroom, Skip tried to concentrate on an image that made him feel joy and that was driving. There, he could move his hands. Using two flashlights, he created headlights on his bedroom wall and pushed his right foot forward into a pillow.

He drives, cigarette in his mouth, a long turn downward, foot resting on the brake pedal. He squints through the rain and sees two shadows in the distance, small and blurry, and so low to the ground Skip thinks they’re either turtles or rocks. But as the truck straightens out from the end of the curved road, he notices it’s two animals, dogs maybe, running directly at him. He tosses his cigarette out the window. The left side of his body gleams with rain. He extends his foot into the brake pedal. Too hard and the tires will dig up the hard crust the hot rain has created. The driver behind Skip flashes his lights and another in the pack blasts his horn. Shitheads, thinks Skip, and tries to slow the truck more but the front tires lock and skid.

He eases off the brake as the two dogs enter the headlights. He turns the wheel to the left, toward the towering wall of dirt, and the trucks behind follow in a motion smooth and centipede like. Skip is having difficulty seeing through the windshield. The combination of heat and rain and truck speed turn the headlights into smeared pearls. His CB radio crackles with hey bud-e, we-with, you, every-thing okay, up-there-hey-oh-what-is-dat-whoa-um-Skip-easy-there-Skip-care-full.

Ugly is the sky above the wall.

“What,” says Skip into the rain-slashed windshield. He hits the wipers bar up but it’s already all the way up.

Out the passenger window a dog runs past, legs caked in mud, tongue out, exposed teeth. One eye looks yellow, the other black. Keeping up with the dog is a child on all fours. A girl in red shorts. Blond hair cascades the length of her arms. She’s incredibly fast and combined with how fast Skip is driving the dog and the girl blur past.

“Stop it or I’ll —” says Skip, momentarily looking into the side mirror to see them vanishing into the rain. Then he concentrates back on the road and says, “Holy mother wow was that what,” before driving the final section of the road down.

He reaches the bottom of the mine. The drivers circle around his truck. Crisscrossing headlights illuminate mine workers who wear black shorts, no shirts, and jog with wheelbarrows dirt-brimmed with crystals. Tonight’s late-night undocumented batch will be sold to the city and used for engagement rings, special occasion earrings, displayed in New Age yoga studios, given to the hospital-sick for positive energy. They have their own crystals, but they don’t have these crystals. Some will be sold to parents for their children who play a game called Lyfer, trade the crystals back and forth in a test of who can maintain closest to a hundred, the brightest colors worth extra. They hurry between the ringing bells of classes to lie about what they hold behind their backs and to trade furiously as teachers watch. Skip listens to the roar of truck engines shifting gears as he tries to comprehend what he just saw.

Ken Horgan, a rat-like man whom Skip has seen several times bleeding from the head after work shifts, rolls his window down. His neck turned back and up, eyes squinting in the rain, he says, “Whole-e-shit. Was that a werewolf?”

Skip drives a loop around the trucks. Gas pedal floored, the truck buckles through shifting gears. He heads back up and out of the mine on the road he just descended. Ugly is the sky coming over the wall. Skip wants to help because he is a person hardwired to help. He couldn’t help his mom. Tires roll over the hand-prints over paw-prints. Ken Horgan says from the pit of the mine, standing in the rain with eyes like a rat being flicked with water, “COME BACK AND TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS SKIP I’VE NEVER KNOWN A HALF DOG PERSON BEFORE LET’S HAVE DINNER AND TALK ABOUT IT BUDDY.”

Halfway to the house they stop because Hundred has something in his paw. He’s been running on three legs. Remy, covered in mud, sits in the road and cradles him in her lap. The rain lets up to a spit. Steam places the village in a cloud and the lower half of the city disappears. She pulls out a triangle of dark crystal from his paw. Blood splatters across her fingers in a Z. His eyes break as his spine twists. Remy tries to say something like, “stop” but it comes out as “hop.” He runs from her arms with impossible strength and Remy follows until they both enter the house.

“Hey, hop it.”

“…”

“Hop it now.”

They run up the stairs and down the hall, doors slamming shut behind. They jump into the tub. Remy turns the water on as Hundred play-bites her forearms. She laughs and can’t believe he wants to be in the tub, he hates baths, but he seems to be loving it, barking and leaping and smiling the way dogs sometimes appear to be smiling. She slaps his body with both hands. More blood from his paw, a stream of numbers entering the water. He acts wild, his eyes bigger than all dog eyes combined.

Thud thud thud on the front door with a three second pause before another thud thud thud. They ignore it.

As the water splashes over her legs, rises above her stomach, the mud from Remy’s skin and Hundred’s hair washes off in black goops that she finger-paints on the tub’s walls. Hundred eases into a calm state, but something is off. Remy has witnessed a transformation. Good, bad, she doesn’t know yet, but something has happened. He’s not acting happy anymore. She can’t stop staring at the way he’s moving, not like a dog, but like a bug on its back, trying to flip over and right itself. It’s like he’s trying to move inside himself or leave his own body.

“You okay?”

Hundred barks twice and turns his head to the thudding.

“Who’s that?”

Before the water reaches her chest, Hundred leaps from the tub and leaves a wet slide of mud and dark goo extending out the bathroom, down the stairs, and to the front door where the thudding just won’t stop.

“Hey, open up.”

Hundred stretches his front legs up on the door and barks.

“I don’t care what it is you’re doing. I’ve known crystal heads before and it doesn’t bother me, I just want to know if you are all right. Name is Skip and I work in the mine. I said, HELLO?”

Remy stays in the tub. Blood hangs from her feet. She sits back with the water at her chin and crosses her left foot over her right knee and inspects her foot. The air wobbles. She doesn’t feel like herself anymore and that’s a good thing. It’s her birthday and later tonight Dad will shoot a single firework into the sky. Pressed into her skin are dark crystals. Thud thud thud. She picks one out and blood pours down her leg. They look black. Scared, where is Mom and Dad? What is this? She squeezes the crystal back in. A flash of heat travels from her foot to her head followed by a desire to run. The liquid retracts back inside her. Lifts her. She breaths in bursts and closes her eyes where she sees a body being carried to the mine where burned. Mom cried at the kitchen table this morning because when you guess how many are inside, you guess how many days you have left. Remy doesn’t think about her lowering count because now she’s at the opposite end of that thought. Here in the pink tub, the discovery of black crystal is an escalating number widening her veins, making her believe, making her become everything — plant, bird, horse, dirt, sun, Mom — alive.

There’s one last series of knocks at the front door and then just Hundred barking, proud of himself for fighting off the knocks.

Skip Callahan stands shirtless in steam and rain. He only wanted to help. He turns and checks his idling truck. What was that? He walks back to his truck and looks at the fence. The city, like the sun, is way closer than yesterday. What’s happening? The buildings are fanning out around them like cards. I don’t want to die. People are walking the edge of the city. Some are using binoculars. Skip turns his back, lowers his pants, and jiggles his big body.

25

Lying under his sheet, he lifts his pelvis and builds a tent with his knees. He’s coming down from peaking on black crystal and the beating he took at the health meeting. They hit his legs with sticks until he fell. He thinks about the letters from Mom and with his right hand rubs his stomach and shoots a beam of light from his bellybutton. Through the sheet and around the prison bars and into the village the light travels until it rests in triangular form on her bedroom floor. She dips the black crystal into the light. Twin horses rise on their back legs and kick holes in the ceiling.

24

As they struggle to position the table Z. stands on it and shouts at the sun. His face is dark with shadows and sweat. His green robe is strapped tight by his arms. Everyone is excited by this new project. Once the table is in proper place, according to Z., they sit down.

Trucks, wagons, bicycles, the few cars in the village, become a fat U shape of traffic forced to flow around them. A man driving a truck who is shirtless and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette lays on the horn. He reverses his truck and accelerates before stopping inches from the table. Arnold tells Skip easy, says to keep his cool. He reverses and accelerates again and again. It’s a tactic to psyche the Brothers out that doesn’t work. Skip is drenched from the rainstorm, his eyes crazed, his hair matted to his forehead in the shape of a bird’s gray wing.

“Easy, Skip, easy,” says Arnold. “Look like you’ve seen Royal Bob!” Arnold waits for someone to laugh but no one laughs.

Red globs stretch then drip from the rim of the sun.

“Skip, come on now,” says Ricky. “No need, no need.”

“I got this,” says Z.

Everyone stops and looks at Z. who somehow appears more natural standing on a table as opposed to sitting. He runs the length of it, huffing dramatically, moving his arms robotically, legs like pistons, and everyone leans back as he leaps from the edge of the table and lands in a crouched position on the truck’s hood. His feet crumple metal. He screams at Skip with a pointed finger and says he’s trying to enjoy his dinner and Skip, head down, head filled with images of a dog-child, and not really looking at Z., he hates Brothers Feast, but still looking up slightly just enough to see him, dislike him, holds up a hand and mouths okay. When Z. walks back across the table he glances in Bobby T.’s direction, shrugs his shoulders, and smirks like a child reaching into a drawer.

“S-s-s-sorry, Bobby T.,” he says. “I’m s-s-s-stressed.”

He dance-walks, hips humping in the direction of the sun, and the Brothers, not knowing what to do exactly from this new behavior, drum the table.

“Hey,” says Bobby T., “it’s been hard.”

Which is true. Z. has wrecked his mind trying to define the jailbreak in reverse. He’s close. They’re close. The time spent defining the jailbreak doesn’t matter because once it’s completed no one will ask how long they spent working. You’re remembered for your actions not your planning. People who are remembered are remembered forever because they travel in memories, from old to young, and what’s greater than that. What’s greater than living forever and not being alive to see the consequences.

“I’m this close,” says Z. and holds his thumb and pointer finger a quarter inch apart before sitting back down. “That means really close,” he adds.

A bag of hot air in the sky moves like an ameba. The Brothers have dinner by candlelight at the table in the street. Inside the bag, the ameba, thousands of tiny things are moving and it’s only Z. who looks up, smiling and admiring the strangeness of this sky creature.

“SMART ASSES,” someone says. It’s one of the mine workers. “We should sell and be done with this nonsense. They will take over no matter what, just look at the buildings, you dolts.” A crowd of Brothers Feast supporters including Ken Horgan shoves the mine worker away, down the street, as he continues to shout backward over his shoulder about the end of times, their imminent destruction resulting in nothing but city.

Another mine worker says, “Nice… reeeeaaal nice. They are laughing at us every day and this, what does this do to help?”

The Brothers have no reaction. They enjoy their dinner in the street.

A man outside a bar reaches into a rusty barrel and extracts a turkey leg. With a big swinging arm he launches the leg skyward, toward the stretching bag, the ameba in the sky. The turkey leg lands on the table and wobbles their plates. They thank the man and portion off the gristle-rot. Men and women in their traditional robes, their backs hunched from mandatory years working in the mine boo the Brothers with spittle.

“Just working on our public image,” Bobby T. tells the crowd.

“Quiet and obedient is what we need,” says Ricky.

“It makes sense to be disciplined,” says Z. “Don’t act weird, right, right.”

They all smile and nod and eat. They drink coffee from a metal urn kept hot by the air. The sweat on their skin thickens to a clear goo that traps lightweight bugs. Z. takes a long drink from his mug. He notices one bug has a sucking mouth and he leaves it there, sucking, on his wrist.

A woman in an orange robe runs up and slaps the cup from Z.’s hand. The coffee paint-splatters Ricky’s sleeve. The cup rolls across the table and falls to the ground while Z. sits frozen, mouth open, pretending to still hold the cup until the woman walks away mumbling, calling him a lost child.

“The s-s-s-service here is awful,” says Z. and everyone laughs. He heard the “lost child” comment and it hurt. He just needs to define the jailbreak in reverse and his life will work out. Everything that has become before will be nothing.

Daylight wastes to dark. Residents retreat to their homes. The Brothers stay at the table in the street, candles flickering, the bag of hot air in the sky, the moving ameba, pops and pours millions of locusts, black bugs, bugs with sucking mouths, invisible tiny things with just wings. The Brothers barely notice, they look at the city. Another building is on fire. Village radicals known as Black Mask are trying to stop the city’s growth by burning sections. This has happened several times and no one in the village is sure who is doing it exactly, but it’s most likely two or three mine workers. Some think it’s Royal Bob, running in his blue shorts, his long gray hair burning and swatting the base of the buildings. But no one believes burning buildings will stop the city. For every building burned to the ground, three more rise in its place.

Full dark from above. They stay up with the heat figuring out what the jailbreak in reverse is. Z. reads over the letters received from the prison. There’s a new one that he somehow missed and Z. blames Arnold for the letter being placed in the old, already read piles. Arnold’s skin burns so bad from the heat he thinks he’s covered in biting bugs and he slaps his arm. There are bugs, tons of them, on him. He apologizes. Z. reads the letter once, twice, then three more times, holding it up with two hands. He cross-checks it with several letters and notes, then goes back to this new letter. Arnold notices, his nose practically touching his arm, that little bugs, barely visible, are burrowing into him.

Z. shouts, “I GOT IT,” and startles Arnold and the others.

He’s covered in glistening sweat.

He’s shaking and smiling and holding the paper with two hands like he’s looking through it and into the sky and he screams again, “I–I-I DID IT I GOT IT I ACTUALLY DID IT Y-Y-Y-YOU FOOLS DID YOU HEAR ME I–I-I GOT IT.”

They finalize the plan that will free The Sky Father Gang and make Z. forever known. It’s all he’s ever wanted. As a child he spent eight days looking for a turtle because he heard they existed, came from the city. He never wanted something so bad. His mom ended up getting one from Mob of Mary’s and it died three days later. When he stands on the table again it’s not with anger, but joy. He carves circles in the air with his fingers and gyrates his hips. Streams of burning turquoise rain down a curve in the sky. Arnold slaps the table and Ricky and Scotty and Bobby T. mouth-fart a beat and shout, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” They dance and celebrate and swat bugs from their faces until the sun comes up, the temperature rising, the future as them in it, forever.

23

With a screwdriver from Dad’s toolbox Mom chisels off a piece of black crystal, why not. She listened for years to her son speak about increasing count (life, longer). He once walked home with the first black crystal and gave it to her. She didn’t know he had others. She didn’t know he would experiment and form something as dangerous as The Sky Father Gang. She should try something, anything, even if she doesn’t believe in it, yes, even if she doesn’t believe in it because the meaning of life is to feel some good even though what’s inside you is a waiting zero. She moves the screwdriver.

Mom has okay days and bad. At her worst, she stays in bed where she coughs crystals into the spitting cloth (Chapter 2, Death Movement, Book 8). Her number skims a green lake, dives, and tadpole-swims away from her. During her okay days Mom sits in the triangle of sunlight entering her window and warms her face for hours. At the dinner table she acts in a way that doesn’t turn Remy’s head in the opposite direction. But most days are bad. Under the covers at night she traces with her finger the sharpness of her hipbones and imagines a man fitting both hands around her as if she were a clay pot, lifting her up, and drinking what liquid is left.

She moves the screwdriver over the black crystal trying to peel it apart.

The family has broken apart over the years in a honeycomb hexagon of ways. That’s how she sees it — a solid shape but with separate pieces inside. She remembers the night in the mine, the men. They were dressed like mine workers. She didn’t speak to anyone about what had happened. The distance between herself and her husband is an endless black field, their bodies as shadows inside the black field moving away from each other, neither able to see the other. She didn’t want to be touched after it happened and Dad’s hand-on-hip move in the kitchen was viciously swatted away. She told herself, or was it Dad, she could push the experience away, and with time, destroy it.

She places the piece, which is the size of a clipped toenail, under her tongue. It’s sharp and with any movement will sink in. She sits on the floor in the sunlight triangle. She considers trying for the Horses Hologram again, and in the thought, doesn’t realize she’s chewing the crystal, breaking it into specks, and swallowing.

It’s a good amount of black crystal to take. When a hot flash blankets her body she inspects her arms because they feel swollen. There’s the tadpole-swimming-away-from-her feeling again but this time it’s pleasant and warm. Her body is at first underwater, then exploding out of the water and into the sun. Heat, a hard ball of it, rolls up from her stomach and clogs her throat. She screams, laughs, sees herself running the circumference of the earth. She swallows and the lump in her throat flattens. Mom thinks she’s added and with one finger she taps her chest and counts to fifty. She smiles into the sun with her eyes open, blinding, not caring. On thirteen pieces of paper she writes

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

I’m not sick anymore.

and throws them into the air before she feels an insatiable need to move.

She walks from her room and through the hallway with beige paint peeling and family portraits with green crystal-studded frames melting. It’s impossible to lose her balance, she feels so good, so she skips on one foot for several steps, laughing, until walking again, hands tracing waves on both walls. She stops at his room in one big jump.

Dad sits on the bed, pillows propped up behind him, his legs extended. He wears a pair of white underwear with blue trim. His body is sprouted with black hair, his skin tan and cracked. He is sad, quiet, tired. From the uncovered ceiling light his body glistens. She asks why things are so difficult. He sighs dramatically. Mom isn’t acting like Mom, asking him more questions, brimming with energy. What can she do so Remy doesn’t grow up to be like her Brother? Is she bad? Tell her she’s not. Tell her things like bathing her children in the kitchen sink, and breast-feeding them every hour, and walking them for miles inside their home to sleep, and comforting them through endless cries, and trimming their nails while they squirm, and massaging little constipated bellies, and walking slanted from exhaustion, bruising her arms on doorways, and not bathing for a week, and eating all meals over the kitchen sink, eyes and mind always on her babies, everything for her babies, never putting herself first, tell her it meant something.

“Talk,” she says, not sounding like Mom. “Say anything.”

Hundred barks through the walls and Dad smiles thinking how they tried hiding him.

“Please,” says Mom. “I need you to.”

She moves her weight from one foot to the other, her heavy blood shifting inside her from leg to leg. She can’t stop her twitching fingers. Her eyes burn undiscovered colors.

“Did you actually have the energy to make that cherry pie?”

“Cherry,” she says. “You bought it days ago at Sheperds. Do me a favor.”

“You’re a good mother,” he says getting up from the bed. He doesn’t want to be bothered with words. The worst thing you can do to Dad is trap him and only allow an escape by conversation. He’s so limited. It’s unfair to him and more unfair to Mom.

“One favor,” says Mom.

“She’s smart, she’ll be fine. Not everything needs to be discussed all the time.”

“All the time.”

“See, right there.”

“This isn’t about you. Can you do something for me?”

He stands in his underwear, and she stands in her gray nightgown, both under the light. Paint is peeling around the edges of the window where the heat enters. Even the floor feels heated. She puts her arms around his body and rests her head on his chest. He can’t remember the last time they touched like this and the gesture, after sending an initial shock through his body that makes him move one step backward, then seems to soften him, his body going back against hers, makes his hands move up and through her hair.

“What is it?”

“Just move a little,” she says.

He squeezes her gently around her upper back and swallows her smallness. He envisions a life without her, living in this heat with Remy, and thinks how a family isn’t a family with just a daughter and a father. You need higher numbers. He’s going to lose her. Each strand of her hair is coated in sweat. He hums, and together their hips sway and he says yes, her children remember everything, that’s their job, to keep remembering.

22

He found a bird with a broken wing. He stepped on the broken wing with one foot, and stepped on the good wing with his other foot. He moved his toes away from the bird’s body until a bone cracked. Remy told him to stop. He smeared her wings across the dirt. This was the worst thing he ever did as a child. The bird exhaled her final crystal in a circle of knotted smoke.

21

Remy walks into the mine before the workers arrive. Her bare feet slog through mud created by the heat wave rain. Steam rises from the ground in a prehistoric kind of way. Over her dirty red shorts with white trim she wears a purple nightgown taken from Mom’s closet. Smells like old person. She imagines walking through younger ghost-versions of herself (how many times have I walked into this mine?) and swats them away, sprints, shouts at them, plays spit-tag with them. She’s at the mine for one reason and one reason only.

In a plastic bucket she collects a dozen black crystals. They exist. Dug up by a truck’s tires during the rainstorm. They’ve been here all this time, beneath everyone’s noses who never looked close enough and just needed the perfect combination of temperature and rainfall to unlock the mud. Her bare feet helped, the workers with their thick boots are useless. Black crystals slide around the plastic bucket Remy holds. The sun is a bully on her shoulders, pushing her head down, face to chest. The sun highlights the black crystals and she fills the bucket and runs home.

In her bedroom she breaks them into shards with a hammer taken from Dad’s toolbox. On the floor she forms a black box. She steps in barefoot and marches. It don’t hurt. She shouldn’t be doing this, but ever since running in the mine with Hundred and cutting her feet, sitting in the tub and getting sky-high, she’s been craving the sensation. Remy believes she’s discovered a way to live longer. Each crystal inside me births a twin. The broken crystals slice her feet until her legs end at the ankles.

She jumps up on the bed and pulls her left foot up to her mouth and picks each crystal out then puts them back in. She does this foot, then the other, and goes back and forth in a blur until she can’t do it once more, her arms sore like lifting buckets of YCL, helping Dad and Brother. Under her bed it smells like vomit. She stretches out and goes giddy with anticipation. Her body hums. When she places her hands on her stomach she ascends and the black crystal drawn on the ceiling inflates with light. Mom says something from her bedroom. Her body is kept together by disease. Her wrists are the diameter of a broom handle. Remy has had a repeating nightmare for a week of a game show where Mom is a table made of slush she has to carry down a staircase. The surrounding audience, wearing raincoats and green casino visors, hold signs that read ZERO MAMMA. Remy always trips and launches table-Mom skyward to the audience leaning away.

Remy remembers those who came from the city — meaner looking compared to the soft faces of Mob of Mary’s — selling stolen televisions, the white price tags still on, dangling in the dark. They had heard of these machines before and the box of light in person was real seductive. Dad said okay, wanting to do something special for the family but hating having to engage in these kinds of forced interactions. They bought one with a long metal antennae the sellers seemed to mock. They tried to get him to buy a more expensive one. But it worked just fine — Dad adjusting the wire V into a position so you couldn’t leave the room without knocking it over. The shows they watched didn’t relate to them at all but the colors were pretty and the actors’ voices always loud and stories engaging. For a full year, once a week, they watched a show about a family living on a beach near a forest. The family used their stove as a boat to catch fish. Remy and Adam couldn’t stop asking Mom and Dad what an ocean was, why couldn’t they have one, what’s a turtle, why does the moon pull the ocean, what’s a jellyfish, does sand burn.

Black crystal doesn’t last long in teenagers. It’s leaving her system but she’s still seeing the new.

Sensation reenters her feet as Remy floats down from the ceiling draped in dogs. Hundred is wrapped around her neck like a scarf. Harvak, sinking into her chest, tells her no one will live much longer, this life is constantly ending, it’s her job to save Mom. Remy says she knows, it’s what she’s going to do, stop choking me, if this life is constantly ending, then it’s constantly beginning.

20

Driving in his truck at night, thinking about treating Remy with more kindness, don’t be so short with her, she’s just a girl, you understand how hard she has it, she can name her dog whatever he hits something that crumples the hood into a pile of tents.

The sound of the accident can be heard in the city and some run to The Bend with their binoculars.

His body hugs the steering wheel. His head touches the windshield which is the hood. Smoke rises from the headlights and the engine hisses. The tires on the left side go flat and Dad leans. When his arms slide off the steering wheel he jolts up with a loud gasp.

Hands on his chest, he exhales and coughs blue slush. Dad inspects his arms, chest, stomach, and thighs. No sign of blood or crystals leaking out from these parts, but from inside, yes, some organ split open. On the rearview mirror is a honeycomb hexagon in thin black marker with the words THIS IS WHAT OUR FAMILY IS LIKE written across it. Remy how dare you what’s the matter with you. She’s been acting strange, someone not Remy moving inside Remy, someone not the same daughter he sat with wearing floppy robes, talking his heart out.

He rolls his neck and practices breathing. His ribs are sore at each inhale and he’s reminded of the last time the wind was knocked out of him — in the only fight of his life — by a kid in The Sky Father Gang. Dad wanted to talk to his son before he went into the city. Dad wanted to tell him not to go, maybe it was his fault he was acting this way, how about we try talking this out. The kid with the black crystallized facial scar in the shape of a key said his son didn’t want to talk and aimed his fist for the backside of Dad’s heart and landed.

When he opens the door, his knees and hands hit the ground. He crawls to the front of the truck. What he drove into is a table with dinner plates, melted candles, and a turkey leg with little meat. Dad massages his calves. His jeans are covered in dirt and some YCL from a mason jar that was to be added to the home generator. They’ve been running low lately and Dad is worried they will run out. It takes him ten minutes to stand.

“Hey, you. What you doing out here?” says a girl, a runaway, in purple spiked shoes. She smokes a cigarette awkwardly, her T-shirt looks shredded, and she stands in the glow of a break light.

“What am I doing out here?” says Dad. “What are YOU doing out here?” He spits up more blue slush and the girl steps back. “GET. NOW. OUT OF HERE.”

The girl runs toward the fence, back to the city.

“NO ONE FROM THE CITY BELONGS IN THE VILLAGE,” shouts Dad. “STAY AWAY.” Then, even though he knows it’s impossible, “I’M TELLING YOUR PARENTS ABOUT THIS.” His chest hurts from the words coming out and he imagines a jagged crystal now lodged across his lungs.

He leans inside the truck and turns the key, his breathing sharp and painful. Nothing. Key frozen. His hand slips in blue slush covering the key. The mason jar with the YCL is empty and shattered and he notices another patch of blue slush where he sat. He calculates he probably lost several. For a few minutes he sits sideways in the truck, his legs dangling out, not sure what to do, how to explain this, how to lie. Maybe just be honest with her. What was he thinking. He could run into the city, it’s so close, but the accident is a red flag indicator of worse things to come. Besides, now he’s remembering the history of those who have entered the city, all those consequences, that prison. What was he thinking. That he could seriously drive in, sleep in his truck, eventually sell it, and start over as a man who wore a suit? He stands up and slams the door closed but it doesn’t fit anymore, appears to be the door to a much smaller vehicle, and bounces right back into his hand.

Dad looks for the moon as he walks home but sees only a massive black circle with a thin white border.

You can’t help someone who is too sick for help. There is no meaning in the offer when you should have done something before. You should worry about yourself and Remy now.

He walks into his wife’s room. She sits on the floor holding a red box.

“I had an accident taking a drive,” he says, undressing. “A table, in the street. I’m okay. I’m not hurt, so no need to worry, no need to get worked up.”

Mom stands and needles pour down her legs (Chapter 3, Death Movement, Book 8). She rubs his arms. She appears shorter. The bedroom has taken on more of a grave-yellow hue, like the bathroom, from the heat.

“Why were you out so late?”

A black smudge left by the steering wheel horizons his forehead. She touches it and he moves her hand away. She goes back again and he lets her.

“Wanted to clear my head. Isn’t it strange that a table, a table, was in the middle of the street? I’m not talking about a piece of junk someone threw out. I’m talking about a full size dining room table. Kids. Brothers Feast. Black Mask. Royal Bob.”

“You ever talk to Maggie next door? She told me the buildings are moving closer with the sun and it’s the end of times. I know, she’s old, don’t listen to her with that voice of hers. But everything moves inward. We okay?”

“I’m fine. What’s in the box?”

“Where were you driving?”

“A really big table.”

“You were driving to where you could see the prison, weren’t you,” says Mom, stepping closer, voice lowering a little, forcing eye contact. “Like we used to do. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t be the hard you, you were so gentle with me before, be like that. Remember sitting in the truck and watching the lights turn on at the prison and imagining that our thoughts were matching up with his thoughts? I do.”

He looks at his boots dotted with specks of blue. He immediately becomes worried that he’s lost more than just a few. He immediately becomes conscious that he’s moving toward zero, and as fast as the thought arrives, he rejects it. “Truck is wrecked.”

“I remember thinking I was kissing his forehead and hoped he was thinking of me kissing his forehead.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Nothing has changed.” He studies the gauntness of her face and tries to locate the past her with his finger.

“Nothing has changed,” she repeats and shakes her head away from his hand. Outside there’s that sound bugs make when it’s too hot and another building burning. The firemen wear pearl-colored heat-resistant suits and shine like soap bubbles as they fire hopeless streams of water from long hoses kids stomp on. “Can you say how you’re feeling? Why has it been like this for years and years and years and I just put up with it? I know that look, you don’t want to get into this. And don’t tell me it’s because of the separate beds thing. It’s always been this way. We’d drive out and look at the prison and I cried and said everything I felt but you never said anything. You just kind of sat there. Numb and cold.”

Then Dad blurts out, “Okay, I considered leaving.”

It’s difficult for her to stand without the black crystal fully in her bloodstream. Her legs are stilts. She’s taken more of it, but it’s leaving her system again and she’s losing the energy for everything. She’s not fully shocked by what he says, but it still hurts.

“I was going to drive as far away as possible. I wanted out. I couldn’t take it anymore. Sometimes it all feels so unlivable.”

“Would have been easier to leave than watch me die. Where’s my cloth? I have the worst dreams now.”

Dad speaking at her back as she moves around the bed: “I thought that. I’ve thought about a life by myself and thought how much easier —”

Mom lies down in bed. Dad stands next to the bed.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I?”

“Why didn’t you walk in? You could have made a life selling crystals, running back and forth and grabbing the best ones.”

“Did you just say there’s a problem with your dreams?”

She spits on the chest of her nightgown. The goo shines with red crystal or thick blood. Dad circles the bed, an ache in his lower back developing from the accident that will only get worse from now on. He wants to change the subject away from what he’s feeling. She seemed so much stronger before, when they held each other and he hummed that song.

“Remy talks about dying.”

“We’ve talked about it,” says Mom. “The city, the sun, but she can’t discuss death?”

“She’s small.”

“Not thinking about dying is living in denial,” says Mom, touching the liquid on her chest. “My legs hurt.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You were.”

“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have come back.”

“You know those television shows that go really fast to zip through a scene, and it’s funny? Like that show we watched with the family who lived on the beach? I see us like that, but it’s not funny. It’s just the two of us moving to opposite sides of the house and the house is shrinking. His imprisonment changed us but we never talked about it enough. I saw it in you the first time we sat in the truck, watching. You were damaged. You should have gotten it out of you back then but you didn’t.”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to respond to that? Anything I say is going to be unhelpful. I don’t have anything to say.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I care about you and Remy more than anything.”

“I think the most selfish people are the quietest.” More spit, a deeper shade of red. “Promise you won’t leave again. I need you here. We do. What do you think it’s like to be zero?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s like the city.”

“Concrete and endless noise?”

“Wonder if I’ll feel anything.”

“Phones, politicians.”

“Wonder if it smells like anything.”

“Does that matter?”

“They have a hospital.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” says Dad, and comes back to her and sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her legs in long deep strokes that she doesn’t notice. He loves her, but can’t handle what is happening because he can’t control it. Later, he’ll walk to the kitchen for the spitting cloth. It will be the last time — the cloth the texture and color of smashed cherries disintegrating over his hands as he rinses it out. He wants to ask her again about her dreams. He wants to know what’s wrong with them.

“I can’t feel you.”