9.04
I guess I’m starting from the beginning.
It wasn’t a memory. More like a stage play, an act, the objects around me were props, not replicas.
The Drains were telling me I wasn’t out, maybe. Or tainting my memories with some twisted version, to make bad memories worse.
A light rain fell, and it was dark. The sky above me was pitch black, and I stood in the middle of a field of grass. It was blighted. The lighting was strange, without source, but sufficient to give me a glimpse of a landscape that extended from horizon to horizon. Flat, checkerboard patterns where the dirt or grass were in different states. Here and there, I saw animals in the distance. A gaunt horse, a cow with some prolapsed uterus or intestine dangling from its rear end, a goat with blood on its snout.
I was shirtless, shockingly skinny even to myself, my arms smeared with mud, scratched and rubbed raw here and there. My body wasn’t my own. It wasn’t the body I’d worn before I was sent to the Drains, and it wasn’t the body I’d worn in the Drains. I was lean, eighteen, skin, muscle and bone, with barely a half-pound of fat on my body.
I’d never been stronger, yet exhaustion had a firm hold on me. Not just the tiredness of a hard day’s work. The tiredness that came from working oneself to the point of collapse one day, sleeping five hours, then doing it the next, for days on end. A simple push could have laid me flat.
I was okay with it. I took in a deep breath, and even the taint of the Drains that marked this place didn’t take away from that essential experience. The air of the outdoors. Of cow and horse shit, wet grass, and oxygen.
I felt that peace. Brief and fleeting, but peace all the same.
I recognized it, in a way. This was where I’d stood, a little more than two years ago, when I’d first been okay. Maybe okay for the first time I could remember. No stresses of family, or school, or ambient hostility, no pressures, no watching people I cared about tear each other apart…
It was okay, but not perfect. I did have worries looming on the horizon, but it was a damn sight better than it had ever been, and there was hope it could better.
It was a heady feeling, a scary one, because of how fragile and how very surreal it was. The alien nature of this landscape only enhanced that surreal quality.
My grimy hands pulled a rubber band free from my hair, then pushed that same long, damp hair away from my face. I tied it back with the simple elastic, so the hair was against the nape of my neck.
The fact that I could do that much of my own volition meant I wasn’t limited to being an observer here, like I had been in the visions Laird and Conquest had bestowed on me.
My heart pounded.
“What are the rules here?” I murmured. I wasn’t sure if I expected a response or not. What form would that response take? An ominous voice?
I grabbed the poles to my right, jutting out of the ground, I recognized them as part of a post hole digger, and I slammed it into the earth.
Eerie, to have two functioning hands, a working leg. I could see out of both eyes, and the vision out of my right was somehow too sharp, the outlines too defined, as if my brain was overcompensating after the recent lack.
Hole dug, I had to walk ten feet to the pile of wooden posts and boards. I grabbed one post and a few boards, gathering them up in my arms, and waddled back. Post into the vacant space… I checked it was secure.
The wood wasn’t supposed to be such poor quality. It looked like the sections of a post I’d be replacing, not putting up.
All the same, I carried out the necessary steps. Rotate the post until the slot was in the right place, then move the boards into place. Nail them in. I unrolled the length of wire fencing to run along the new section of fence, and I stapled it in place.
I looked at the post hole digger.
I knew what came next. I’d reach for it, pick it up, but I wouldn’t get to the point of digging the hole.
I bit my lip, and I kept my hands where they were. I watched the field instead.
Intentionally breaking from pattern.
“Everything alright?” the voice was deeper.
I turned to look. I didn’t flinch as I saw the old man.
An actor, so to speak? He looked Other. His face was pale meat, eyes invisible in the midst of puckered, infected flesh, his mouth a slash across the lower half of his face, the vague hole that was his nose was off-center.
“Everything’s great,” I said. The rain was falling harder, the light not so expansive, if I was noticing right.
Was that the result of deviating from the script?
He put one hand on the post, giving it a test for stability. The fingers were all blurred together, like a burn victim’s. “You’re doing good work, Blake.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve paid people who weren’t as quick to get their heads around what they were supposed to be doing. You’ve got a knack.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Now that I wasn’t so active, the cold drizzle was starting to get to me. I headed to the treeline and grabbed my shirt from where I’d hung it. The trees seemed too bright and green, given the darkness of the sky, the branches jagged and gnarled. I pulled the flannel shirt on.
In the midst of the silence, my response was halfway second nature and acting the part, halfway to remembering the line I was supposed to give, “I like having something to do.”
He turned, looking toward the house in the distance. “Stop what you’re doing, come and eat?”
“I don’t have much more to do. Can I-”
“I insist,” he said. His voice was serious. “I want to chat.”
“Should I bring the tools or-”
“Under the trees,” he said. “You can get back to it this afternoon. If the rain’s too bad, you can just pick them up. Don’t forget.”
It took only a second to move everything from the fence-in-progress to the shelter of the treeline, a matter of feet away.
We walked through the field to head to the house. A minute passed. An awfully quiet minute, considering the ‘I want to chat’, a moment before.
I felt trepidation. Not for the same reason the me of then had. The me of then was worried about getting fired. The me of now was worried about what was coming.
“You’re planning on staying the winter?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“Um. Given the chance, please,” I said. Then, the me of then felt compelled to add, “I was hoping to have a guaranteed warm place. It was sort of the point of doing this.”
I remembered how I’d felt guilty about guilt-tripping him.
“Thought so,” he said, festering meat hole of a mouth opening and closing.
I hated to see someone I’d looked up to made into something so disgusting. It was a slap in the face.
Fuck me, I’d been so relieved then. Now it was just one step further along the path.
“I was talking about it with Chrissy,” he said. “We’re kind of in an awkward place. Wanted to figure out where you stood before we got ahead of ourselves.”