sent back. [day 7][oz/open]

sequential art

He pulls the hem of his shirt taut, a fraction of an inch away from his skin. A slight bulge protrudes from it.

The bulge grows.Takes a hook-like shape.

The fabric thins. Its threads unwind against the increasing pressure.

A knife-tip edges through the fraying. Then the blade. It tilts and cuts down.

Small, shallow slit.

The knife worms around to make another one.

He forgot to clean it yesterday and now the stuff on it is flaking off into the seams.

Lacerations

What, exactly, is the point in being happy? The concept is rooted in delusion. Most people are unhappy. Disappointment is expected. Those who rise above disappointment are quickly knocked down. One way or another, they are told: “You are not following the lemmings. Jump off the cliff.”

It’s been common knowledge, since before the first mass extinction, that life is suffering. And happiness – that little stutter of dopamine and serotonin – doesn’t really amount to anything.

“My life is good,” we tell ourselves. “The world is good.” As a little child gets gunned down.

A delusion similar to a tributes’ hubris. “Look, it’s just the Games,” they say as they shoot at you. “Look how loud I can laugh!” our minds whisper into us as we try to forget bad parenting. “I’m going to win, I’m proud to be a monster, I’m going to be the guy!” they say as their skulls split open. “Look how well I can dance!” they say and then go home to cry. “That crown’s waiting for me!” they say as the slit a twelve-year-old’s throat. “I want to see my friends today,” they say as their friends frantically run away from them. “Your friends will be dead soon, I’ll make sure of that!” they say as their eyes bleed. “That boy is so cute, should I talk to him?” they say, not knowing that boy will break their neck and ruin their children’s lives. “May the odds be ever in your favor!” they say as the child genocide goes on and on and on and on and on

Delusion to hide the fact of suffering. It all comes back to lies, half-truths. So we do not grit our teeth and brace ourselves against the suffering. But then again, we would brace ourselves against living if we did that, wouldn’t we?

He doesn’t know anymore.




Oswald Tove knows he’s about to lose someone.

The way their ships swerve around each other in some lumbering waltz. The way Orville’s land-dingy disintegrates around him.The panic in Ellis’ voice as it stutters and peaks over Frog-legs’ muffled comms.


He knows this is what he deserves.




Another slit.




“Oswald!”

Ellis’ voice is an electric shock, coursing up the spine, into the brain, jolting him. The deep pressure in his lungs eases and he breathes in starts that shake him. He’d not been aware of the coldness settling inside of him. How numb it grew within him. The heaviness had just seemed a part of him.

“Wait for me!”

The knife falls out of Oz’s hand. It clatters against the deck as he runs to the stern.

Wait for you.

Become a fixed object. An anchor, a magnet, a guiding light. Yes, yes, he can do that, if it means he could draw them both back to him. If it means that, for one more second, it can be him and Ellis again, talking as the anthem plays, bleeding into one another truths that mean absolutely everything to them; and him and Orville again, as a cloud of Nakom danced around them, and Orville can peer into Oswald and see the truth of him, and Oswald can look at Orville and know that this guy was special.

He’d never had friends like Ellis and Orville before, he realizes. Not even Snuff…not even Mya…They just didn’t see, like Ellis and Orville can see…

No. No. No. He could not think like that anymore. It was over, that time was gone, and look where it fucking got him.

Go, go, be with the lemmings.

But he is thirteen and quick to hate the world he lives in. Another one of his sins. It led to Canvas’ murder.

He pushes his hands out. As though to push away the air, then the desert, then the arena, the human evil that haunts it. The evil that is within him. The evil that surrounds Ellis and Orville. A ward of protection, of sorts.

He knows he’s a liar, and he cannot stop himself. It’s the evil inside of him.

“I’m keeping you. Both of you.”

Really, it just means "no."

Don't get hung on petty things

String the sinner by his wings

In his head, a brittle bone

Orville once told him, "I know they once told us at the First Aid station, like not to trust the pain. But who trusts pain, right? And is the absence of something trustworthy?"

Wise words. Truly, Orville sees the farthest and clearest out of all -- farther and clearer than Oz could ever dream. It wasn't until Oz met Orville that he experienced wisdom. Heard of it before, in Mrs. Priscilla's aborted slogans, but then he only heard wisdom, never experienced it. How it penetrates and breaks you down to your finest points and then rebuilds you from scratch. Even if you do not listen to it, it follows you. The humiliation of the experience, and then the ascendance afterwards. A gentle, firm reminder that you are not enough, there's still so much work to be done...Because Oz is the person who still trusts pain. Yet that wisdom lurks after him, as wisdom so often does, reminding him of what he is, for better or for worse.

Oz, he is certain, chose worse.

Because he realizes that he does not understand what Orville means. The words, for all their porcelain delicacy, have fallen down in shattered pieces and he does not know how to rebuild them. What should he not trust? Pain, or the absence of pain? At first, he had thought pain, not that he ever followed that advice, but now-- Is "who trusts pain" rhetorical, an actual question, is it meant to point out those who do, those who don't? The absence of something -- vague term, "something," why can't it be more specific; absence of light (they could use less light)? heat (they could use less heat)? absence of pain (there's plenty of pain to go around)?

But what should he not trust? Pain or the absence of pain?

Both.

But then what is there to trust?

Nothing.

But he doesn't want to live in a world like---!

But the truth--!!

He cannot lie to himself. But Orville doesn't lie either. And the last time he took a mentor's advice, he slit someone's throat--

Tell me, tell me, I don't know anymore!

But maybe he's just lying to himself again.

The world is full of fishes

But I trust you

But I trust you

But I trust

The sail's slackened rigging clangs idly against the steel mast, a shrill sound with the rhythm of a stuttering heartbeat-- cla-clang CLANG, cla-clang CLANG. The idled ship groans beneath the sigh of the wind; scattered sand hisses against its hull, filling in the slight hollow spaces human eyes wouldn't notice.

Beyond, the desert expands. It takes up the world. It is given strange dimension by the scrap spiraling from its warping shifting amber dunes. Yet it looks like eternity. It seizes every point of the horizon and thrusts itself up into the dome of the reddening sky.

A single ship cuts across the dunes, its wheels slashing scars into the sand, kicking up a cloud of dust behind it. Its sails tremble in the wind; the ship bucks and wavers with each dune.

Oz lowers his trembling hands. Watches.

It nears -- it is a silver blur of motion, but slowing, slowing...Oz can see the boy upon its deck. He rouses himself. A pain like hope pricks his chest. "Ell--"

The ship throttles past him, its momentum rending with it a stream of wind that flutters the folds of Oswald's clothes. The ship is slow enough that Oz sees the eyes, their intensity, their roundness. The ship is fast enough he won't let himself accept the meaning behind the eyes.

"Ellis, I waited!" he calls after him, running down the deck, chasing after him. For all his delusion, Oz knows exactly what he said -- reminding Ellis of what he owes. Oz's chase ends at the ship's bow, because that is how far Oz can run without having to leap down from the ship. He stands on the rim, clinging to the rigging, leaning forward, hesitating so he may consider jumping--

Ellis' ship shrinks. The cloud of dust becomes larger than the ship's own body, it seems. Becoming a blur, a silvery ghost fading into the meat-red sky. A shadow, swaying in the wavy distortion of heat radiating between the sun and the sand.

The wind sways the rigging clutched tight in Oz's fist, swaying him with it as he perches on the edge between somethingness and nothingness.

A small hand wavers up from his side. Palm exposed towards Ellis. A gesture between a "goodbye" and a "stop," swayed by the wind.

It wilts.

He steps back onto the deck, face clenched in either dread or shame, he's not sure yet what he should be.

Ellis' tracks leave a serpentine path that curls over the cresting dunes. The wind edges the dunes' peaks, and with a great sigh the particles scatter themselves in an amber-orange haze, reaching their disintegrating fingers over the tracks. Erasing it, cloud by cloud, breeze by breeze.

The horizon is empty and blurred. The sand-clouds swirl and veil like fog. A glint of light sparks through it -- sunlight flickering off the hull of Orville's ship as it hurtles over the dunes.

Oz raises his head. Looking on Orville's light, he is reminded of a beacon. A guiding light. What Ellis had wanted him to be -- but that had passed, too soon. Now, perhaps...

Tell me. I don't know what you meant. You have to tell me. I need to know.

But Orville's ship flails like a ship. It is wounded, and writhes as though in death throes. As it careens, it spins round and round and round and round and round, bow and stern slashing the air in a tornado of metal.

The milky white sun, huge in the red sky over the amber dunes, leans in close to take him away.

Oz already knows. He shouts "No!" because he knows.

He turns his back on Orville before it happens.

Stick your finger in the hole

A thousand watts but you're not sold

Make you hurt, we love you more

Ellis--

An explosion roars into the air, across the desert. Black smoke scars the red air quickly, slashing over the highest peak of the white-hot sun.

You were right.

His face is against his hands, his hands against Frog-legs, his body against Frog-legs because he can't hold himself up anymore.

All you had to do was take my hand.

The world is haze and cloud, the tracks are swept away, there is no path, only dune.

Why didn't you take my hand.

He is a wilting boy. He is on his knees, forehead bowed to Frog-legs' dented rusted metal.

ANSWER ME.

All that moves is his fist. Trembling over his head, elbow bent. It hammers against Frog-legs' carapace.

ANSWER. ME.