Skyglass: Chapter 3

MOSS

The front door to my apartment shook as someone kicked it. I could hear the pounding through my headphones; I turned them up and kept my eyes away from the entrance.

It would be Marko, of course, returning with his arms full of the specialty beer he’d gone off to collect. I didn’t care. I was planning my second escape of the night, this time to my room. It had a lock–a physical, needle-proof lock. The key was in my pocket. If I could just get the door shut, I’d be safe.

From the corner of my eye, I watched everyone heap food onto their plates, then dim the lights and settle in to watch some flashy Blowup on the VR system. It was Phoenix’s doing, obviously. A band of purists would never have chosen to engage in such an interdisciplinary activity on their own. I wasn’t synced up, but there was still a two-dimensional version twitching on the wall, all candy-coated and bloated with naked people prancing around in glowpaint. I could feel the sweetness rotting my eyes, and I wasn’t even looking. My gaze was on the skylight’s broken glass further down the hall.

I tossed the gummy bear I’d murdered towards Phoenix’s room. Maybe she’d get drunk and step on it later.

I glanced back at the main room–everyone was distracted with food, and drinks, and the flashy Blowup. Now was my chance. I started to rise, even made it to my feet, but froze when a shadow loomed out of the kitchen, wild ginger hair rimmed in pink light.

“Hey, don’t leave. I promised you that album, didn’t I?”

Piss it. Marko. I sagged back to the floor.

“What a load of rotting piss, right? Getting their brains sucked into a Blowup?” He nudged me in the ribs with his foot, aiming his jaw at the rest of the group. He sighed, and slouched beside me.

“Y’know,” he said, ducking his head, “we could listen to that album. Now, if you wanted. ’Cause, uh…don’t you still have that exear in your room?”

“It’s rotten,” I muttered, then added, “But it works.” Because I’d take any excuse to make it to my room.

“Mind if I bring this?” He lifted his bottle.

I shrugged and crept down the hall. Peeking my head in, I was relieved to see Phoenix had left my room unblemished. Inside, I didn’t turn on the light. Green murk hazed in through the overgrown window. It was enough. I went to my bed, because there was nowhere else to go, and nothing more I wanted.

“Uh.” Marko was standing awkwardly at the threshold.

“Door,” I said.

He closed it. I collapsed on my bed with my boots still on.

“Exear?”

“Windowsill.”

He nodded and crossed the room. “Hold this, please?” he asked.

I sat up a little, and took his beer. Marko lifted an armful of vines away, found the exear, slipped in the disc.

Gently, my room began to tremble. Deep chanting followed–slow bellows that crawled down the walls from the mounted speakers. I winced as I took a tiny sip from Marko’s drink. Vile and bitter. Just what I’d been hoping for.

“Hey,” he protested. But as I pushed the drink back into his hands, he said, “It’s okay, though. Have it, if you want.”

I was too uncomfortable to keep talking, so I just held it out till he took it.

Tightness clenched the back of my neck as I thought of all the people stuffed into the living room. My apartment was already small; sticking it full of people made it a noose. Even in here, I could smell the glop they were eating, pungent with the musk of goat cheese and butter. And then there was Marko, here, on my bed. It made me want to throw up.

But at least there was music, and shadow.

“Your boots are still on,” Marko said. Liquid sloshed as he took a drink.

Air escaped my lungs. Barely a sigh.

His fingers crept to the top buckle. “Can I?” he asked. Too quiet.

I made a noise. He could decide what to make of it. At that point, I didn’t rotting care. I wanted to sleep, before I thought too much about the many and various forms of goat fat.

Slowly, Marko loosened each buckle, then tugged the boots free. He didn’t touch my feet, and once he’d set the boots on the floor, he stood. “I’ll go now,” he said.

I said nothing. The door clicked shut behind him; Scabs and Leaves rumbled on in his absence.

“I’m so rotting starved,” I told the empty room. When nothing bothered responding, I stuck a hand in my pocket.

The key felt cold, even so close to my skin. I wanted to get up. Lock the door. Instead, I rolled onto my side and slept.

Sometime later, I woke. The album was starting again, probably not for the first time. I sat up.

The apartment felt different–better. Emptier. Had everyone left?

I rose and trudged to the door. Stress built in my jaw as I creaked the door open, then released when all I saw was rain glittering on the skylight’s broken glass, still spread across the floor at the end of the hallway.

“Tempted?”

It was Phoenix, standing just outside the entrance to my other room. The fire in her room behind her gave her a demonic edge. She wore what appeared to be one of my shirts, though it looked far smaller on her than it ever had on me.

“Leave,” I told her. Rain plunked against my neck and ran the length of my spine as I stepped toward her, over the glass and the impaled gummy bear, trying my best to be menacing.

“Hm. No,” she said.

“Leave, or I’ll…” I trailed off. Stupid. Some people could make silence into a threat. I just sounded uninspired.

“You’ll get the law? Oh, sweetling, what can the law do for someone like you? You’d call them to get rid of me, and they’d take you away instead, because we made a deal and you’re trying to annihilate it.”

I gaped at her like a water-deprived fish. Like rage had kidnapped my vocal chords.

She clucked at me.

I glared back. She disapproved of me? What right did she have–invading my house on the anniversary of my parent’s death, redecorating just days later, and partying with my friends?

“Would you like me better if I looked like this?” she asked. Her skin slithered to the ground, smelling of fire. The cat shook herself free, vanishing her molt in a puff of ash.

She sauntered toward me, meowing persuasively, and piss it, I bent down and scratched her ears–but only for a second, which was all the time it took for me to realize my folly and trip backward, scrambling in reverse. Mashing my hands into the broken glass as I did. Of course.

Rot and piss on it. Her. Everything.

I scrambled to my feet. Away from her. Like she was some giant, furry, red spider. Only creepier. She batted at my feet and I resisted the urge to kick her.

Then her skin was back and she was horrifyingly naked, and gently lifting my hands. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

I drooped against the wall. I was. I was bleeding.

And I was exhausted–all the socializing, all the sad-vocalist-comforting. All the awkward friends crawling in bed with me and taking off my boots. All the cat-women pissing all over my perfect life–and, to make everything far, far worse, I was hungry. But food was the last thing I wanted.

No, that was a lie. I wanted food. The actual last thing I wanted was a sleepless night of self-dissection and hate. Which meant that food was out of the question–as it always was.

Dully, I wished for my coffin. Not the coffin of my future, presumably-dead-at-some-point self, but the broken astro-coffin I’d found abandoned in the Gut a couple years back. It gave me peace, and quiet, and a certain vacancy of mind I couldn’t find anywhere else. I had always retreated to it when I couldn’t find that silence at home, and that was long before home had been invaded and destroyed and rebuilt around me. My coffin’s black void made a better numbness than anything else I’d found in this world–but it was far, far away right then, and I was weak. And bleeding. Which made me weaker.

So I let Phoenix take me to the bathroom. I didn’t care. I let her pull out the glass, wash the cuts, glue them up. I let her steal my extra blankets. I didn’t care. She could sleep here all she wanted. I’d already had one unwanted person in my room that night. Why not another? I could pretend she was a piece of furniture–a broken lamp, maybe (not that her redecoration rampage had left me with anything remotely dilapidated).

Halfway into sleep, I realized that my hands hurt too much to grip my sticks. Rot.

I almost didn’t care. There was already so much I couldn’t hold on to; they were just another thing to add to the list.

***

When I got up, Phoenix was gone, but there was expensive Heal-All on the pillow she’d been sleeping on. I didn’t think–I just sat on the floor and smeared the piss all over my hands. I stamped my feet into my boots, resolutely not thinking about why I wasn’t already wearing them, and headed down into the Abyss for band practice.

I paused for half a moment outside our space. I took a deep breath. I was shaking a little. Not from nerves–it was just the walk from the vus stop that’d gotten to me. I leaned against the wall for support. I had eight ounces of lemon juice and half a small cucumber in my belly. I’d eaten. Why was I so pissing weak?

At least my hands felt better. Another breath, and then I opened the door to the practice room. I was hidden in my hood, hoping–as usual–that my bandmates would ignore me, except for the drumming bit. But–as usual–luck had abandoned me.

Devin whooped at my entrance and yanked my hood down. I grabbed his blue top hat and hurled it over my shoulder and out the door, which bought me enough time to replace my hood and slouch behind my set.

Everyone was ready (minus Devin, still scrabbling outside for his hat), so I counted off on the snare. Devin tumbled back into the room just in time to let out a scream that was half orgasm, half murderous-rage. This was normal for him. Had been for the past eight years we’d known each other.

I shut my eyes. They wouldn’t open until we had finished. No need to watch for eye contact, a smirk, a jerked guitar neck. I knew these songs, I knew these musicians. Maybe I’d quit and rejoined them just days ago, maybe I still avoided them with stupid desperation, but when we played, we communicated at a level I could still understand.

In my head I pictured Zinn, cross-legged on the floor as he always was, head bowed loose in his flow, throat song rumbling from his amp, his fingers sometimes high-fretted, as fast as a thousand candles thriving in the wind. Then there was Devin, of course, who I could never quite imagine. He was too unpredictable, but I didn’t really need the visual, since his sonic presence was too big: echolocation chirps to gut-seductive drone. Weird, beautiful, and creepy–though not as creepy as Sable. Her voice was so banshee-like I was always surprised to be alive after each time I heard it, and her guitaring was similar: rapid bedlam and disturbing. She played straight-backed, her face bent stringward and hidden in her hair.

Our set was tight; we churned through it twice in quick succession. Nothing to worry about for our upcoming show–except for the fact that it was a show–but even so, we were purists, which meant we were obsessive. So after the second run-through, we gulped down water (and Peeps, in Devin’s case) and started again.

I played with unpolished sticks, but they still felt slippery in my sweaty hands. There was an uncomfortable stiffness in my wrists and legs, but I pushed. I pushed, fire carving down my arms, as we crested the second song of our set.

Everything went numb. Dark. My sticks clattered against the rim of my snare as I dropped them. Lost them. I tipped sideways, off my stool, onto the ground. Above my head, my floor tom buzzed a little with a forgotten note from Zinn’s bass.

“Moss?” Voices, but they were so far away…

 

I opened my eyes–dizzy, coughing. Something squishy and sweet had been stuffed in my mouth. Devin had me pinned on my back, a firm hand around my throat, preventing me from swallowing–which was fine with me. I didn’t want one of his rotting Peeps, anyway.

Weakly, I tried shoving him away.

“No,” he said. He pushed me back down, following with his face until our foreheads touched. I met his eyes; they were too close, double static orbs of pale, barely-blue lightning. “Never again,” he hissed. “This isn’t okay.”

He got off me, released my throat, and I sat up, spitting out the glob of marshmallow. His gaze was lethally serious.

“So?” he pressed, once I’d struggled into a half-slump.

I glanced at my other band mates, all gathered around my set, and tried hard to avoid their stares. I was dead cold and unbearably warm all at once. Ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. I didn’t want anyone to see me.

“Promise,” Devin growled, leaving the rest unspoken: Promise me you’ll eat. Promise me you’ll stay awake and functioning. Promise me you’ll never piss on this band ever again.

“Okay,” I lied. “I promise.”

Proceed to Chapter 3, page 4–>