Hope is Descending like the Sun // Slip x Orville

S L I P  K N O T T E
"I MAY FALL"

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His mother died when he was six, half a needle sticking out of her arms and foam clinging to the edge of her lips. It hadn't been him who'd found her. No. He was too consumed in the stars that called to him in the night sky to force himself to recognize the path which his mother had chosen. It had been his father that had stumbled into their bedroom, heavy breaths (laced with the smell of the void of a bottle) and beer gut spilling into the room before finding his mother head over heels for a drug that had done nothing but hurt her.

He cried at her funeral, but it wasn't for her. He cried because he felt the expectations of the dark dressed figures around him digging into his back, gnawing through every criss-cross wire that made up his skeleton. He cried for them, for what they expected, not for the woman who had birthed him. Slip had been born with a heart of tin, not gold, after all.

Every first Sunday of every month, he'd lace flowers in between his fingertips and abandon the forests he worked in to visit her grave. Sometimes, the roots and the branches and the trunks and the trees call to him, shoot their shadows at him in an attempt to try to mangle him, in an attempt to return him to the lost state that he'd fallen into during his early teens.

"No." He'd call back, tipping his hat to the forests and promising to return the next day. His heart of tin belonged to the ocean, not the trees.

The first Sunday of every month. Today was that day.
He holds flowers in his hand but it is not out of love that he brings them, it is out of expectation.

Mourning is a touchy subject for the boy with a tin exterior, because he feels no sorrow nor regret no sympathy for the morphling infused bones of his deceased mother. Rather, as he stares down at the half wilted flowers that rest between his two palms, he wonders if they'd look better in a vase on the windowsill, rather than in the cold, mourning the loss of a woman who'd been gone from the start.

He shrugs off the thought, pushing metal legs forward and cringing at every creak that shatters his eardrums.

The first Sunday of every month. No one ever visits the cemetery on the first Sunday of every month.
Until today.

A lone boy stands with his feet frozen to the crunch of the snow, and as the eyes of a tin man follow his movements he watches him suddenly drop to the threat of a coughing fit.
He makes no movements to help. Not here, not yet.

When he straightens, his red eyes bore deep into the metal skin of Slip Knotte.
They look through him, it feels like. And looking through metal is not easy.

"I've got an echo in my head."

Wariness overtakes his bones.
So he's crazy.

"Is it today? Are you supposed to give me a slip?"

Metal gears turn and churn in his mind and wires connect and tangle, electricity courses through his veins as Slip looks the boy up and down. Crazy as he may be, the boy with eyes who can peer through metal is not threatening. Creak. The legs of a tin man push his body forward as he walks towards the boy, breath fogging and cooling in front of him.

"Only slip I could give you would be my name. By all means, you can take it if you want."
He throws the words to the wind, watching them cool before plummeting to the snow below.

He glances behind him and admires the path his footsteps have made, before turning to the boy again.
Eyes drop, before moving sideways, towards the grave that lays directly in front of him now.

Sue Tate

"Sue Tate, huh? Tribute in the 70th.."
He lets his words hang, if only for a moment.

"You know him?"