Fiver Rair District 4 Wip

Come one, come all, to gaze upon the wretched sight. Don’t safeguard your eyes through sympathy or sorrow, but turn to face it; brothers, sisters, Mother, Father laid upon the soil like so many stones cast asunder towards the endless, ebony ocean. Follow us, strike up a haunting melody, pile high the funeral pyres and set the world ablaze. Our family is gone, we are the bones of its remains and soon we will all be dust. A curlicue of crimson still dances on Youngest Sister’s pure white pinafore, catching the light like flickering captive fireflies in mason jars before they slide the blanket over her prone form like a thick red curtain on a dance’s final act. Shoulder to shoulder they lie prone and obscured, cotton dolls of indistinctly indiscriminate human form- smallest to tallest, the golden haired infant, cherub cheeked and rosy in the flush of life swaddled one last time in a neighbour’s dish cloth, held tightly in the bosom of the earth.

They verbalize in familiar obscurities, lapping tongues whirling deep carmine and puce through the spaces between their lips, lazily slanted like knife wounds. “Gas, boys,” comes the pronouncement, Mother’s flaccid alabaster wrist falling from the grasp of skeletal digits. Gas; the twisting, stifling fingers of his nightmares filtering into consciousness and waking dreams, indiscernible, invisible and noxious to the scent, the touch, the taste. Like creeping vines along dilapidated walls, the malignancy swelled; through fretting , threading knots of veins to the fleshy mass of lungs- took up dagger and tooth and claw and wrought ragged holes. Filled their throats with blood. The way he’d said it would.

No familial resemblance remains for the engorging horde like so many flies swarming around a carcass to see beneath the funeral gauze of maudlin grief and blankets, but through the protuberance of polyester comes the shape of Father’s nose. Father’s nose and Fiver’s nose. Large may perhaps be too strong a term, but the feature is (was?) certainly flagrant upon the young man and the dead man’s faces. Like a great white cliff face it sits proudly, unweathered by time or sea air and crashing, churning waves- piercing the sky, naturally proceeding Fiver wherever he goes. Eldest Sister called him Rabbit for the convulsions of his oft-flaring nostrils, it’s movement animated during times of extreme emotion, be it fury, fear or melancholy…see how it twitches now? The Family came to distinguish the symptoms of some otherworldly foresight when they watched Fiver tip his head up towards the sky and sniff. Bad things coming…the way the earth smells before a rainfall. He’d smelled and not smelled the lingering odourless coils of death for months. Bad things coming, Hazel, bad trouble. Choking my throat, splintering my lungs. It was there wafting through the air of the house and curling through his dreams. Gas, boys.

Fiver’s ears are Mother’s, shared with Youngest Sister and the Infant; long and large, pulled back and flat against his head like smoothed grass flat against the ragged mount atop a cliff-face. Unassuming ears, unremarkable as ears so often are. But Fiver hears what other’s do not. Far off at the edge of the district a woman is crying as the broken fragments of a boat washes up onto the shore, dead driftwood warped white like bones that will never be found, a bloated corpse drifting to oblivion; the buckles of a belt clatter like a wind chime in the sea breeze, the snap of leather and the grit of a young man’s teeth- I will not show them that I am afraid, a man in a bar cracks his knuckles and knocks his teeth against a glass- he laughs and tells stories of his youth, but inside he is sighing. Don’t you hear it, Hazel? The whole world is crying.

He’d tasted the blood on his tongue in his dreams, felt it on his lips in the dark hours of the no man’s land between waking and oblivion. A small, plump mouth, cupid’s bow curve stretched along its surface, tipping upwards at the outer edges and into nervous…wip wip wip