what they did, who they did it with [ isaac & izzy ]
Mar 4, 2022 16:42:38 GMT -5
Post by heather - d2 [mylee] on Mar 4, 2022 16:42:38 GMT -5
I S A B E L L A
[ Izzy knows they should be searching more fervently for Bowie and Kareem, but she’s afraid to admit to Isaac that, in this moment, she’s not entirely sure she could pick them out from a crowd, though that means little here, as in the time that’s passed since Izzy pulled herself from the ground and declined Isaac’s offer to carry her across the land once again, they’ve not truly seen another person, just flashes of bodies desperate and quick through scraps of underbrush. ]
~
I haven’t said much to Isaac since he peeled me from the ground, and I don’t think it’s shame that’s made this, but I can’t wager what it would be instead. I remember being taught that it is impossible to make a claim about anything on the basis of intention, even when you’re thinking of yourself, which I think we always are, so that it seems impossible to know anything’s cause or anything else’s effect. Maybe it simply doesn’t exist—causality, I mean—and all it’s useful for is consolation.
~
[ Izzy plods alongside, and sometimes behind, Isaac with her head down, hugging the hatch to her body while the few items she collected in the midst of the bloodbath jostle around inside it. When he draws her attention back up to a straight line of sight, she sees the domed structure Isaac had mumbled words about just moments earlier, though Izzy only caught the first: Look. She does, but before she sees the structure itself, she sees the walls, pocked with bullet holes. ]
~
The whole time we’ve walked I’ve been replaying the moment in my head: Isaac’s hands, once fists, turning open as they might to receive and hold the hands of another, and then, they did, received the hands of the girls neck and would not give them up. It’s like this, though, our bodies conditioned to hold on.
But maybe it’s just the question of causality again. I can’t see the connection between Isaac’s white knuckles and the girl’s body falling, can’t reach out and touch what holds the two together in the fabric of space and time. So maybe it never was, and maybe Isaac isn’t to blame.
~
[ By the time Izzy and Isaac reach the arch of the dome and are close enough to read the letters scratched crudely into a plank of wood—scrapyard, it reads—Izzy’s convinced herself that Isaac, though he did maybe have something to do with it, hadn’t killed the girl at all. She reels in circles like this as they walk slowly and silently through the dome’s entrance and into its center, which is not truly a center, which implies some clarity of a point, at all. Instead, it’s all littered and graveyard, cages strung up by chains and swaying, softly, in a breeze that would be otherwise undetectable. ]
~
It’s almost music, isn’t it?
~
[ At Isaac’s suggestion, the two work alongside each other, attempting to piece together the parts they find in light of the language scribbled onto the worn pages of manuals that both she and Isaac had grabbed before they fled. By the time half an hour has passed, Izzy hasn’t truly read a single word. Instead, she casts glance at Isaac every few moments, trying to discern what he is thinking while he works in a way that, at least to an initial eye, seems pointed and intent. Izzy holds pieces of metal in front of her face and knows they are different, knows that they somehow fit together but doesn’t have a clue how that might be. Sheepishly, she eventually hands them over to Isaac after he offers her assistance, and she watches him with a feigned interest that she hopes comes somewhere close to how she had seen him working before. ]
~
When we’re done working, there sit before us two metal suits, imperfect and functional. Isaac looks around him and then up, as though he means to rise and keep us on our way. I place my hand on his wrist to stop him, and when he looks at me, I see myself reflected back in the thin layer of liquid that coats his eyes. Isaac, I start, I don’t want to think of you as a murderer.
[ table: pogue ]
[ collects scrapyard items ]