[87th] The Reaping - District 8
Feb 6, 2021 16:08:14 GMT -5
Post by heather - d2 [mylee] on Feb 6, 2021 16:08:14 GMT -5
K A N E
The sunlight streams in the wrong way this morning, hitting my face at a sharp angle that is nothing but disorienting. I run my knuckles across my forehead, digging in at the temples to encourage my brain to shake the static away, but I don’t recognize my surroundings. Not only is the window in the wrong place, but the bed is too large, the sheets a different shade of gray. I roll over, and the presence of another startles me into the realm of the hyperreal, the edges of my body tingling until the memories of the night before come flooding back.
I knew her from work, from the manufacturing plant we spent all of our hours together complaining about. Our loser of a boss, the way the machinery was bound to kill one of us by the end of the year (that or its cancerous fumes)—different variations of the same conversation, day in and out.
But yesterday, toward the end of our shift, she asked me if I wanted to join her outside for fresh air, and so we stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the brick wall, taking drags from a cigarette she’d stolen from her father. He’s bound to notice, she said. He treats these things like nuggets of fucking gold. I’d asked her why she’d taken it, and she shrugged, said she’d wanted to piss him off for the fun of it.
Working backward through the haze of the night hours that followed, I remember laughing at that. She’d asked what was so funny about it, and I’d replied, I just think it’s laughable that so many of us try so hard to piss off our parents when we probably wouldn’t have to work at it that much in the first place. At first, I thought she’d been insulted, but I saw the corners of her mouth turn up as she passed the rolled paper back to me.
On our way out the door, she stopped me before I made it to the main road and asked if I wanted to spend some time together that evening. What did you think I was going to do, decline that invitation? She was charming and smart and obviously not that averse to illicit substances. And hot. She was hot, too.
I’m not an idiot, at least not in that way.
So we did the things that teenagers do. She snuck me in through her basement window, and we locked ourselves in her room, smoking cigarettes with the window cracked and drinking the fifth of bourbon I’d stolen from my father’s cabinet on my way out the door. He’d miss it, sure, and of course there would be no questions as to where it had gone. It wouldn’t be Abel, tucked away safely in his bed as soon as the sun went down. It’d be me, and when he’d storm in at the crack of dawn to chastise me, he’d spot the empty bed and spit, curse just loudly enough that someone down the hall could hear.
I think of this as I start to shift my body off the mattress, trying to make as little noise and movement as possible, but she’s a light sleeper, and she stirs the instant my first foot hits the floor. Morning, she whispers, her voice scratchy and exhausted. She stretches, the muscles of her back tensing and relaxing as she draws herself up to sitting and pulls the covers around her body to protect herself against the morning’s cold.
She sits quietly for a moment, staring intently at me, and I’m about to ask her what she’s thinking, but I don’t get the chance. The reaping isn’t this morning, is it? she asks, and we both stare at each other in silence, her body swaddled in protection, mine bare and unguarded from the winter sun.
--
I pulled myself into my work clothes from the day before, despite the fact that the pants were wrinkled, one of the shirt sleeves ripped. She pushed up her window so I could leave without notice, and so I arrive to the reaping in a fitting state of disarray. By the time I sort myself to where I belong, the girl’s name has already been called. I didn’t hear the name for myself, and it’s not the girl from the night before. The desire for it to have been her name passes through me, and I wait for some instinctual guilt to follow. But it doesn’t, and I can’t figure out if this is some indication of my status as a bad human being, or if there’s something else I can’t place in my hungover mind.
I’m working hard for a solution—so hard, in fact, that I don’t process the name that gets called. The name will be repeated three times, but will only sound familiar on the last. Kane, only it’s her voice at first, from the night before as we sat on the carpet, our bodies pressed together, her head tilted back to rest in the crook of my shoulder.
I’d told her everything. I was stupidly not sober and told her of my brother, the hatred for him I buried deep in my chest, the way my mediocrity was something I despised, and, most importantly, that I had spent the downtime of the last two years figuring out how I could kill him. She’d whispered my name then, in almost exactly the same way, Kane, as if both thrilled and mortified at the idea of it.
I don’t remember what became of the rest of that conversation, but I remember the intensity with which she stared at me this morning the moment she snapped into consciousness. Perhaps she has no other recollection of the evening before, but there’s not a cent of doubt in my mind that she remembered that.
And suddenly, I think of what else exists—the papers strewn with equations, the fluctuations in my brother’s body weight, the scraps of paper with my handwriting summarizing the different effects of manufacturing chemicals on the body, what is easy to obtain, what is not. All of this, and perhaps more, stuffed into my pillowcases, folded away underneath my sheets. It is not difficult to prove intention when one leaves a paper trail.
They’re sure to find this, this life’s work of my last years. My mother has a nasty habit of deep cleaning when the weather changes, and it’s been a task in and of itself to keep things hidden for the time being. And besides, she may share my father’s opinion of my mediocrity, but she is a mother, and at some point she is bound to be, at the least, sentimental, believing that sorting through my things will somehow fix the longing.
I can see her kneeling at the side of my bed, tracing a finger over the stitched lines of the comforter. She will think I can see his body here, and she will be right. I’ve had the same bed since childhood, simply curling my body tighter and tighter to compensate for the way in which it grew. Perhaps she will lie down there, and, as she closes her eyes and leans back against the pillows, she will feel the papers shift, and it will all be over.
As the name registers again—Kane—a third time, I realize there’s no way I can return.
[ table: pogue ]
[ooc: kane maugham accepts the position of d8m]