The Gambler //Cricket&Zboi

I can feel it in the pit of my stomach, like an angry growl, escalating, growing in sound. It isn’t anger though, more of a roar of something else. I’ve never felt it before, I don’t feel much really. I’m not certain I like it very much. I feel like I’m going to be sick, and the shaking won’t stop. I’m on the verge of something. I have been something else as of late, not quite the dead corpse I know. It’s like I’m standing on the deck of a ship, and the world keeps tilting back and forth. I’m on dry land though, and the day is flat. There are no waves, only layers of dirt like skin. She’s under mine, I think.

When I saw her last, she was a pillar of beauty, a goddess and the light of the sun made the dust in the air around her dance. I miss that, watching the world dance for joy around her, just because she was there to stir it up. I haven’t been able to rest as of late, and I’ve been prowling around the tents. You learn things that way, who’s a heavy sleeper, who still prays. Once I heard a young one crying softly. For their mother or for something else, I don’t quite know. Last night I went around to my own mother’s. Just for a peek in the window, maybe a short chat if she’s feeling up to it. My father, he buried me a long time ago, in his head at least. There’s a tombstone still from when I finally left home and they stopped searching. According to them I’ve been dead these past six or seven years.

I have never felt alive yet, not enough to be counted as the living. Something smaller in me, that I thought was long dead sparked last night when I went around to my mother’s and found the place empty. No furniture, no light, and no warmth. The window was unlocked, when I jimmied it open, dust attacked my senses, and emptiness. Emptiness everywhere, like an overwhelming force, and I missed her then, for a short moment. Just a second, I missed the sound of her voice, and the taste of the cookies she’d place on the window for me. She’d always tell the old man that they were cooling there. I’d find little messages, short, ‘Are you warm?’ and ‘Are you eating well?’. I’d swallow down whatever she’d made, not that I needed the nourishment, and be on my way.

Last night, when I walked through there, nothing was placed, and there was no message. They were gone, and they’d finally left me behind too.

I don’t blame her, for wanting to perform for the thousands. The thrill of the audience, even a small one is always wondrous. She just had the eyes of the world on her. I don’t know if anything will be as good as that. If I will be as good as that. I suppose that’s what’s been keeping me up since I watched her in the finale, since we watched her performance end. I didn’t stay for the bows that night, I left early, and that’s poor audience etiquette I know, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t just stand there, clapping and cheering when I felt like I was watching a ghost.

She’ll be different now, I know. Not in a bad way, it’s just that more people know what she is now. She’s more than that though, what they see when they look at her. For some it will be admiration, for others it will be hatred. I see her image now, plastered all over the District, and I can’t look at her. I can’t look at that face, and see her there. She’s always been something else, but she’s never been so far away, untouchable, and I’m reaching out and I don’t know if when I do she will want to take my hand.

She knows death now, properly. She said she knew me, but I don’t think she could even imagine before what I am. I’m just here, not there. I’ve never been anything else, just the mystery of what is beyond in a corporal state for others to oggle and fear. I have never been anything but what I appear to be, and what I don’t appear to be. I have not promised anything else. I think she has expected it though, she looks for it, not realizing. Now that she knows it though, will she still want it. Will she want me?

How could she.

That is what I fear. I stand on this platform, in line to look at her face, to see her. There are ropes to keep us apart, and everyone, the whole district is here to see her come in, but they keep away from me. They fear me, as they should, like she never has, like she may now. I don’t want her to. I want her to go on loving me, if she ever did. I think she did, I hope she did and I wasn’t just imagining things. I sometimes know that maybe I made our romance up in my head, and she never loved me at all. Quite right too, who could love a thing like me? Neither here nor there, never wanted, and always disliked.

Yet still, I am here. I will wait for her, and the train is pulling in. My stomach has begun to swallow it's self whole and I'm not sure if that is a natural decay or if I am imploding. I thought she was going to be gone from me. I still think she will be gone from me, that I will wake up one day and she'll be dead on the television and all her mattering would be nothing. I know that if she had died there would have been a sigh of regret, maybe a curse or two for a lost bet, but nothing more than that. From me, I would have gone on being dead in the only way I know how. I think I would have died further though, let flowers creep through my rib cage and leave this body behind because the worth would be gone without her.

Her train is stopped now on the platform and I am twisting a napkin to pieces between my bone hands, and there is a door sliding open, and I shut my eyes, childishly afraid. If she doesn't want me, if she doesn't need me anymore, there will be no one but the ringmaster and the mutilationist to remember me and I might just disappear but no one would notice. I need her like a moth needs a flame, She is the light that I dance around.

When I open my eyes, she is there, on the platform, smile wider than a cheshire's tugging at her lips. She is beautiful there, wherever she stands the world changes, alive completely for the space she consumes. She smiles, greets her circus family, and I should be up there but I held back, weary. What if she doesn't want me? Something feral nips at my ankles, pulls at my bones and I am running. My feet move, my hands shove, and I'm not thinking, I'm thinking I'm not thinking. I can't compute, can't contain the horrible joy that lights my nerves on fire. A growl grows from between my lips when a peacekeeper tries to get in front of me, but he loses his nerve and it doesn't even matter because I've scooped her up in my arms and I am running.

I am running and running and her legs are draped over my arms, her breathless laugh filling the air, and I won't stop until we are far and farther away. I won't let go. I cannot. Her scent fills up my lungs whenever I breath and I will run for years and years. She is life, and the dead will always wish for it. They cannot have her. She is mine, and I will love her, even if she won't love me. I cannot stop.