Satan’s rollercoaster. Shivers burrowing under the flames charring his body. This isn’t the first time that thought’s dragged itself across his brain this is it day or night.
His head is thunder. Everything, anything, else has slammed to a stop. He could swear rollercoasters are meant to stop. So are storms. Aren’t they?
Cold teeth sinking into the back of what was once his knee. Can’t be some orphan splinter of mirror. There isn’t one. Mirrors are stupid, spiteful things...taunting him with nothing he ever recognises.
Needle. Probably. Not worth flailing his hand around to look at. Any lifeline it ever had on it was bled dry months and days and minutes and how long has he been lying here ago. The tiny bruises trailing his veins tell him so.
It's so cold this summer.
Drips tumble through the ceiling, always tracing the same path along the arm thrown over his eyes, the all too flesh-and-blood one. Where’s the other one. It doesn’t matter now.
Whenever it gets too quiet, the ones who aren’t here howl his name. Its letters drip poison through his skull.
He lies, and lies, and lies. Half past dead and stone cold sane.
The Woman doesn’t reply. Doesn’t move except to press yet more slabs into the sludge. Cracked-clay hands. She still reads The Woman’s answer in her taut neck as if it’s tattooed there. Stop talking about it. Do your work. Please. Another thing left hanging in the cool air between them.
So she turns and shuffles away through the crackling cloud in her brain, the million pinpricks biting at her blistered feet. Grey. From the human-shaped shadows hunched alongside walls to the bloodless mist smudging treetops.
She has tried, hasn’t she? Dunking herself in the lake that the houses turn their shambly backs on, eating what vaguely herb-looking plants there are to be found...peeling skin off her fingertips to prove she can bleed red. Nothing breaks the fog. Nothing can.
Windowpanes show her a patchwork. Wiry hairs straggling over a neck, then an arm of wax or a cheek of paper, jumbling into ashes, half-shadows. Sometimes that’s a mercy, for the parts that feel alien and unwanted. And there’s no mirrors here, just nicks and stains and creeping mildew. She wouldn’t meet their gaze if there were.
They say she’s supposed to stay away from strangers.
Everything between her ribs and feet sighs as she sinks back down to her task. Now it’s only a sprawl of stone bricks, but it’s going to be a road, like They ordered.
They order everything. Ever since- she named it the Night of the Red at some point, though she isn’t sure when; if she lets her leaden eyelids drop, she can still make it out, flaring, flickering, inching closer. That’s when They came here. Bringing the Red, all of it, while she lay in the last peaceful sleep she can remember. When the thunder of footsteps and cracks wrenched her out of it, The Woman stood over her, face draped with the softest look to ever exist on it.
The two of them hid beneath her bed in a night that lasted a year. The bloody streaks of dawn showed them a shattered window and the gleam amid gleams of an imposter: the bolt of a crossbow lying in the shards.
Nobody’s ever talked about it. Maybe those anaesthetic clouds - the ones that gathered as daylight brimmed over the water tower They seized - snatch their tongues if they try.
It doesn’t matter now. She doesn’t know who The Woman is or why she was there, leaning over her pillow - there might be a word that fits, but it vanishes whenever she tries to latch onto it. Most things do.
All the same, she still has the bolt. It sits under a loose floorboard in her and The Woman’s fragment of the house now, like some sort of keepsake. Testament that it happened, or a key to answers.
But really, she knows nothing.
Nothing at all.
Bolts are good for cutting.
In the water’s trodden-leaf surface, a reflection’s eyes watch as the projectile is pulled from a tatty pocket. As wiry strands (and red droplets when the tip strays too close) fall like feathers and its lips form a new name for him.
Ziv.
*
It’s no easier to be Ziv than it was to be...her. Sometimes he thinks he’d have been better off crushing it down. At least there wouldn’t be so many lifeless eyes boring into his face.
Most are too bone-weary to whisper, though.
The Woman looks at him when she thinks he won’t notice, just looks. You look like Lucian, she says once, cobwebbed gaze trailing to his raw hands shifting and shifting those blocks of stone. It’s my curse.
Whoever that is, this name he can’t place, he hopes she finds him. He can sense the longing shoring up those six letters.
The road grows. Its builders wither.
*
That crossbow bolt, that disgraced agent of death, is lodged in his cabin now. Deep in the wall, to be exact. Splintered with age, like everything around it. Including him.
Between titanium fingers, he lifts his crack-veined glass to her - that person he can hardly remember, who no longer exists - and to a time he could still feel bad.
