echo Here’s the thing:
The world isn’t fair. It’s goddamn adversarial, if you stop and think about it. Loud and messy and it rankles like sandpaper sliding across bare skin, grinding bones into fragmented dust. Huff and puff, and the whole house crashes down. Lights out. Scream and beg all you like, but you’re still stuck inside the ruins, impaled against the oozing floorboards, limbs askew, pinned as thoroughly as a butterfly in a display case.
Hush. Words now. You can try.
What a tragedy. What a waste. What a distant sadness that sweeps over you and then drifts away in the next instance, the brush of smoke spiralling off to the horizon, the dissipating wisp of a fog that was never there. I’m sorry. I wish I could have helped. Maybe if I had– never mind. God? Everyday I think it can’t get any worse but it does. The hole grows deeper, wider, and the chasm is opening up beneath my feet. The second I look at the shadows, I can never see the light again. I want to go back. I mourn, for myself. Do you know what that feels like?
It’s gibberish. They don’t understand until they’ve lived it. Most never will. So it rots in your mouth, souring every cell in your body, and you become like spoilt milk kept long overdue in the fridge. Something forgotten. Something despicable. Something handled with sterile gloves and distaste, glad for the moment it is out of sight.
But there are the eyes. Through the windows, the cracks in the walls, the scars in your skin. Gaping, gasping, a plethora of whispers and exaggerated angles, as if, as if anyone would care even if they know. The taste of breath is rancid– an ocean of cheap liquor and that same sand clogs in the cogs of the throat. Choke, and there’s no one to bail you out. Fall, and no one to pick you up. Die, and there’s no one to care.
And it’s funny, because–
Despite the odds, Rook finds himself alive.
He always did find peace with the night.
It’s a primal blip in the grand scale of things– a moment of reprieve where the dark is a blanket and the stars are the same as the pattern projected against his bedroom wall back when he was a child, awake underneath the blueish-white flicker of haloed LED lights. It hid the ugliness better. It hid the monsters breathing under the bed and the one sleeping down the hallway, the one that had left a belt of bruises and welts across his upper back. It pressed him into the folds of its nothingness and evened out his breathing, holding cool rags to the back of his eyes squeezed shut.
He preferred constants. The permanency of the ground beneath his feet, solid– rocking like the cradle of a boat out at sea, sometimes– but at least he knew it wouldn’t splinter or crumble into plaster.
He had a routine now. He’d wake up and gargle his mouth in the basin, wash away the taste of copper marinating his gums. He’d shower in the cold water of the early hours of morning, spend a solid ten minutes watching the grimy rivulets of sweat and scabs run down the drain. He’d shrug into his jacket, tuck his curls beneath a cap, and stare at the mirror until a passable smile greeted him back. His keys in hand, jangling in tandem with the neighbour’s windchimes, he’d leave the apartment and take the bus to the loading dock of the company he’d worked at for the past fifteen years.
The roster of the guardhouse would rotate.
It’s all the same to him. It’s not that difficult to maintain the lie, because one is as interchangeable as the next. Same interests aligning into place.
He’d stretch a grin and say, “Hey, did you see the game last night?”
And the answers would be more or less the same.
As was his day– hands planted on the wheel, the bulk of the truck rattling over uneven roads, working through the yawn of a long night.
Columbia was nearly two decades ago now. He still had the offer letter tucked away carefully between the plastic of the folder. It’s with everything else he’d dismantled, arranged into neat little boxes, and put away where the light of day never touched. He’d learnt not to linger on it, not unless he wanted to indulge in self-pity. The night had passed, and here he was. Here he became what he was. The sum of all his parts rebuilt but lacking fundamentally.
Knock knock.
And the man in the mirror asks, curiously, who’s there?
There was a roadside diner near the start of his route.
It’s a low structure– if he stood on his toes and stretched his hand, it would hit the ceiling with a resounding thud. Stepping inside perpetually made him feel like a rat in a cage, squeezed through the embrace of brick walls and suffocated inside the stench of grease and pine air fresheners. In fact, there was a whole string of those, cutting across the diner in a parody of cheap festive decoration. Outside, there was a gap where the rusted metal of an old exit lay ajar, and that was where he usually parked the truck.
He sure as hell didn’t come for the charm, but he stayed for the food. He could ignore the broken playground outside, the stuffed display mascot with its glassy eyes and torn stitching, padded guts spilled and covered in ketchup stains and cobwebs. Actually, the milkshakes were not all that bad. Neither were the pancakes. He slid into the seat closest to the window, enough to keep an eye on the truck in case anyone was stupid enough to try something.
“Mr Reyes!” It was a delighted sound.
That would be Erica Jones. Her mother’s daughter all the way down to her tiny bones, from the wavy frizz of dark hair to the crystal lake-blue of her creased eyes, the dimple in the corner of her cheek when she was happy. He’d gone to school with her mother, been sweet on her at one point, and god, didn’t that feel like millions of years ago. Kid had apparently picked up a shift all the way out here to waitress, and after freshly graduating at that.
“Hullo.” He said, turning his voice soft, trying to swallow down the itch of raspiness scratching at the underbelly of his throat. “Same old for me.”
She flashed him a billion-watt smile, indulgent, as if he didn’t already know they’d prepared his meal in advance, confident enough to anticipate his arrival. “Of course. Anything for our best and favourite customer.”
“Hmm.” He said. “Laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?”
She asked interestedly, “Is it working?”
He chuckled and gestured for her to shoo-away. “Go on, you.”
She came back in less than a minute, balancing a strawberry milkshake and a plate. She set the scrambled eggs and sausage down in front of him, and after casting a surreptitious glance around to see if anyone else needed tending to, she slid into the seat opposite him. She folded her arms across the table top. He let her stew there for a while, knowing that look that meant she was gathering up the words in her mind before speaking them. Her tongue darted out to lick the cracks of her lip, still adjusting to the sweltering midday heat.
Finally, she said, “Mama’s got a friend in Tennessee. Said I should move to there, get a proper job with her help.”
He sucked in blended ice through the straw, “And the problem?”
“I don’t know. I should be glad, right? But I keep thinking about it, and– yeah.”
“Well,” He said, “That sounds like there’s a part of your mind already made up. That you don’t want to leave.”
“I can’t stay here forever.” She admitted shamefully, and scrubbed her hands over his face. “Mama has debts we still need to settle and she had a bad fall last month, properly messed up her hip bone something awful. I’ve got a degree and no job. The money from here’s not enough.”
He thought of the past then, remembering a glimpse of that little girl on her Mama’s lap, a cherubic doll, sitting on the next pew over during Mass. Grown up in the blink of an eye. He set his knife and fork down. “I know that look. In your eyes.” He said quietly. “Like the whole world’s pressing down and you’re trying not to drop under its weight. Atlas, holding up the sky. But there’s a whole lotta Atlases out there. If there was one thing, he wasn’t alone.”
She sat quietly for a moment. “You think I should go then? Take Mama’s friend’s help.”
“I think you should talk to your Mama.” He said, point-blank.
It earned him a startled laugh. “Right. Of course. Sorry.”
“Now what are you apologizing for?” He scolded.
“For bothering you.”
“It’s not a chore, Erica. I care about your Mama, and I care about you. Lord knows that.”
There was a glint of wetness in her eye. She asked suddenly, “You’d miss me if I was gone, right, Mr Reyes?”
“Like a limb.” He found himself promising, and was startled when she hauled him into an embrace, reaching across the gap. Her heart was rabbiting wildly, pulse racing where her arm lopped around his neck, and the warmth radiated steadfastly. He tentatively returned the gesture, patting gently with the flat of his palm against her back.
She was gone the next week, and he quickly realized he hadn’t lied.
It’s about a month later that he adjusted the side windows of the truck, inclining the seat to accommodate his height, and found an envelope of cash tucked behind the steering wheel. He wouldn’t have pried, but the seal was open and he saw the rubber-banded wad inside. For a moment, he just sat there, frozen. He was about to march right over to the office and turn it in, when his phone started to ring to a shallow tinny rendition of Johnny Cash.
He answered right away.
Five minutes later, he set down the phone. His jaw ached with how hard it was clenched. He pulled out the maps stuck underneath the dashboard, and compared it to the route on his phone. He saw that his superior was right– cutting through that particular stretch of backroads would steer him clear of every police roadblock. He didn’t start the truck.
The air carried with it the oversaturated scent of cheap cologne. There was something not right about the whole thing, and he knew it. He knew. Slowly, he went back and did another check– this time, opening the lock and pulling the shutters the whole way. Nothing inside was out of the ordinary. Just the usual crates. Delivery parcels stacked up to the back. He listened quietly for a moment, half-expecting to hear the faint wheeze of human breath or the rustle of movement. There was none of that.
Just him, and approximately five hundred dollars in that envelope.
“I need this quick.” Henson had said. “Some idiot screwed up the process and now I need this shipment dropped off in half the time. There’s an envelope with money in the truck. Take it as a bonus.”
The Eyrie route. Carved off about eighty miles from his regular trip, blipping the glare of headlights right through the rural thicket of maize fields and dry land. It was a good place to simply disappear, as deftly as a card in a magician’s hand. The name came from the birds that nested there– high in towering trees, tiny scarlet creatures that travelled in hordes. It was tradition to believe in those stories. That once you’ve been caught within the milky specks of those beaded eyes, it was over. You were a dead man.
And hell, those sounds they made. The bizarre honeycomb trill of a whistle, reverberating within the chasm that was the uneven bone breast of those creatures. A synchronized cacophony of hunting calls, like wolves howling in the dark.
That was the other thing, of course.
He chalked it up to superstition. The canvas of his mind running wilder than usual. A whisper here, an odd chill there. A mercurial breeze. Lights flashing in between copses of trees as the miles dragged on. He’d seen it all before.
Maybe that’s why he accepted the money, in the end.
It was 2 a.m in the morning, and it’d been that way for hours.
The digit display on the screen hadn’t changed, not even a flicker. He did wonder if the blue tint was duller than usual, the wash of the headlights feebler over the asphalt. Or maybe that was the fatigue of his own mind playing tricks as usual. It liked to do that. The radio had devolved to an incomprehensible stutter of white noise about twenty miles back. He turned the wheel with an expert grip, following the curvature of the road as it delved further on.
The path ahead was lit up with the faintest margin– the dampened, dappled torchlight of distant stars, the thick shrubbery and yellow grass suffocating as it narrowly twisted the road into an asp. He left the tar black expanse behind him, that vast and irrevocable stain of ink, the longer he travelled. He watched every one of those great lights wink out, one by one, as the world shrunk down only to the range of vision afforded by the vehicle lights.
There was an intersection he’s meant to take. He must have missed it in the blink of an eye, because what the next half an hour taught him was that he had lost his entire sense of direction. Even the steady thrum of the engine was gone, swallowed by the oppressive stillness of what lay outside. He rolled down the window a thumb’s breadth wide and immediately the wind was sucked into the truck, rattling and whipping around the interior as it emptied out. He hastily shut it again, cursing, and tucked back the strands of hair blown all over his face.
His ears felt underwater. He clamped his nostrils and breathed out, shaking his head like a wet dog.
Eventually, the backroad cut back. He shifted the gear and eased back onto the route that had been charted for him. What was more surprising was the light of a structure up ahead. He slowed enough to recognize the makings of a small gas station and restroom stop. The signs were weathered and illegible, the walls stained coffee brown and filthy. Dried splashes of oil against the ground. He wouldn’t have stopped even if his life depended on it.
But he did. Stop, that was.
A pale thumb extended out of that shroud, fingers curled into a fist. A small grimy figure stepping towards the shoulder of the road, trying to flag him down. Too-wide pupils and irregular limbs, skin that hung off the facial rack. And–
God. It was a child.
A young boy. If pressed, he would estimate the age to be around eleven, twelve at the oldest. Evidently, the growth spurt hadn’t even had time to settle in. For a moment, he sat absolutely still, his heart pounding within his chest. His head spun, the threads of opposing thoughts unravelling all at once, leaving him breathless with indecision. He heard the shuffle of feet outside, sneakers kicking against the dust, as the brim of a matted head of hair came to a rest on the rear side glass.
He cleared his throat. “Need a, uh, need a ride?”
The answer was so soft, he could barely hear it. “Yes, please.”
The first time he picked up a hitchhiker, her name was Nina and she was a thirty-year old migrant travelling to the next state over to meet up with family. Her brother and uncle were in a travelling cuadrilla, on rotation for the town plantations. She studied him the entire way, and he pretended he didn’t feel the glare of her eyes bouncing off the front view mirror. But she was polite. She spoke little about herself. He wasn’t sure if she trusted him enough to take the bottled water and extra sandwiches from the petrol station. He hoped so. The last he saw, the plastic bag was clutched in her hands, her knuckles white, as she thanked him profusely.
Not many people had good reason to be up in the middle of the night. But it was dangerous for them too.
There was soil in the boy’s fingertips.
“Got a name?” Rook asked.
The boy wrinkled his nose, shifting crooked bone. “Do I have to?”
“No. Might make it easier to call you though.” He was surprised at how steady his voice still was, “Mine’s Rook.”
“Like chess?”
Huh. He hadn’t thought about that before. “I guess so.”
“Oh.” Marble grey eyes peered up at him through narrowed eyelashes, hidden beneath hair falling forward. “I’m Jack.”
He kept his tone light. “Like Jack-in-a-box, or Jack of all trades?”
“In a box.” The boy answered firmly.
“What kind?”
“Worms and wood.” Then almost shyly, “It wasn’t very fun to play in there.”
He took a shuddering breath. “Right.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I’ll stop by and get you something to eat, okay?”
“Okay.” Came the obedient answer, thick with childish lilt. The boy leant forward, pressed his open palms against the windshield. There was an expression close to awe, and a giddy sort of happiness that stretched the grin impossibly from ear to ear, then up to the tips of the forehead. “How fast can you go? I flew, once. It was fun but it was over so fast, I didn’t get to enjoy it.”
“Speed limit rules.” He thumbed the back of the truck, where the packages and parcels were jostling audibly against the loose pebbles and tar. “It’s my job to bring those to people, so I have to be careful not to break anything.”
It earned him a look of bewilderment. “But everything breaks.”
“I know.”
“Crunch. Smash. Itty-bitty pieces, like Humpty-Dumpty on the wall.”
He wasn’t thinking when he asked, “Did you break, Jack?”
The boy fell silent. When he looked up again, his tears were the wrong colour, ruby-red and stark against his bruised skin. Pupils cloudy white and a concave crush to the cheekbones. “Are you scared?”
“Yes.” He admitted.
“How did you know?”
“Your face.” Rook said gently. “You’ve forgotten what one looks like.”
Written By: Trishta
