They were seven kids who dressed in identical red robes with black hoods and black belts. What they believed in was different from Brothers Feast who waste their time with stunts (the village is so accustomed to them that their last stunt, pretending to dig up the crystal mine road with comically large cardboard shovels while dressed as city residents in navy blue suits donated by Mob of Mary’s, everyone ignored). Remy remembered Brother being in The Sky Father Gang and she knew where he was now, prison. She remembered him with a duffel bag full of crystals, ready to leave forever, and she remembered how long his hair had grown down his back, and she remembered how distant he was to her, to everyone, to everything. It wasn’t him anymore.
Mom went into the bathroom and closed the door.
The Sky Father Gang wanted to live longer. They founded their belief based on certain blue and yellow crystals Twinning. These crystals shared a similar lattice structure and grew together, intertwined. If Twinning existed outside the body, why not in? Why couldn’t you double what you already had? These were the questions they had asked, were forgotten about with their imprisonment, and the questions Remy now resurrected and Dad tried to repeal.
She leaned into his words.
Experimenting with black crystal is what drove The Sky Father Gang into the city, wide-eyed and tongue-out. Boys and girls in undone robes showing crystal laced underwear screwed and bled in city streets. Brother didn’t wear any underwear, only robe. They took turns inserting crystals inside each other’s holes and created new openings in their stomachs, chests, and thighs. People took pictures on phones and uploaded them to websites. The city charged the village to remove the crystals, to repair the bruised bones and missing skin at a place called a hospital. Rumors in the village said The Sky Father Gang were close to finding a solution to increasing count. Brother wanted Mom to live forever. A news report showed them jumping in the courtroom, skeletal-lunging faces spitting on a pale-faced judge with thinning red hair. Cameras followed. The Sky Father Gang kicked a table over and laughed with their heads tilted back. Veins webbed their bodies. They tackled a guard, everyone falling to the floor in a crashing wave, and the Gang spun their bodies by kicking their feet against the floor. Brother howled in a fish-flop directly on top of the guard. Brother was the loudest. Brother was raw. Remy believed in what he was trying to accomplish. Why not try if that’s all there is to do.
Dad loosened the fur collar of his robe. He told Remy it was too hot to be wearing these but she insisted he talk more and he agreed, wanting, needing, to connect with his daughter who on some mornings he didn’t recognize. Sometimes, when she entered a room, the size of her startled him, as if a stranger had entered the house, and he’d jump in his chair and wonder where the biggest knife in the kitchen was.
In the bathroom, the porcelain clink of the toilet bowl raised by Mom.
“What about eating them?” Remy asked.
“Tried that. Very sick.”
“Was it red? Have you ever seen a black crystal? Kids at school say no one has seen one after The Sky Father Gang. Other kids say black crystals never existed at all, that it’s only a story made up by people with sad brains. The older you get the more you believe in it, kind of like what you said before about adults getting weirder. If I found one I’d probably try it. Yeah, I would. I heard people believe —”
“Hey, why are you thinking this?”
“Because,” said Remy, “I want to prepare myself so I don’t suffer like Harvak. I don’t want to feel pain. People remember your suffering and the last memory they have of you is your face and I don’t want mine to be hurting. I want to help Mom.”
“You shouldn’t spend your life worrying about dying.”
“Unavoidable.”
“Why?”
“To not think hm wonder what’s my count, while you’re alive? I don’t think you can ignore the thoughts of zero. It’s scary to be alive. Sometimes, if I close my eyes and clear my head and just concentrate, like just really concentrate on what it would be like to be empty, to not have to live, to not get out of bed, my entire body goes into a kind of shock. It knows. I can feel what it will be like.”
“City people don’t think that. They may not agree with us, but they just live their lives, I think. They just keep expanding and moving and, well, I don’t think they have time to think. Maybe it’s better.”
“I bet they don’t believe it until they are about to die and start apologizing on their death bed. I saw a fat woman jogging The Bend and I barked at her. I’m sorry, but I did it.” Remy laughed the same child laugh she’s had since having a hundred inside and for a quick moment, like a finger poke between his ribs, it breaks him.
“Don’t be scared by what you can’t control.”
He looked around the room. His daughter was outgrowing the space he once proudly provided. He should have built the room larger, with a deeper closet for her games, clothes, art supplies taken from Mob of Mary’s, books on count, dozens of blue and yellow pillows, a poster of the sun.
“Must be hard knowing there isn’t a way to help her. You just watch. Maybe Brother never did find a black crystal because if he did he would have given it to Mom and she wouldn’t be sick. There’s a kid in my school named John who says they were just dark red all along. You know what, I’ll find the solution so we’ll all live longer. I’ll do it.”
“What did you get on your spelling test?”
Mom vomited red slush, lost another crystal, and dabbed her mouth with the spitting cloth. The bathroom tiles on her palms were comforting. She stretched out and lay on the floor in front of the toilet, face turned to the side and smushed against the cool tiles. She thought about horses.
“Haven’t gotten it back. I know why they want to move in. Because we’re different. Because they want to see, and then they want to take, what they don’t understand. We’re living a life they think is silly. Sometimes I feel like everything is pushing inward. You said I’ll always have one crystal inside me as long as Mom’s alive.”
He wanted to say more and be comfortable inside the words to connect them. He couldn’t. His body carried him from the room. His body protected him. The imaginary conversation hurt too much. He stood in the doorway.
“She okay?”
“I’ll check.”
“Will this heat wave ever end?”
The universe breaths billions of worlds. The earth is tiny, but possesses crystals the sun is drawn to. The universe allows the sun to get closer, to create a heat wave across the city and the village, to become pulled by what is buried under the earth’s crust. This is another type of game.
33
Brother screams for Remy. With an arm three times longer than normal length he reaches through the circular door. His hand is several inches short from touching Remy who is crystallized in yellow light. He tries to extend his arm but the several inches short begin working backward until he’s being pulled over an ocean, fingertips spraying water, body dissected by a lighthouse. Somewhere near, Harvak is barking.
A cloud in the shape of a mouth leans over the bed and chomps away at the crystals in severe animal angles. Cloud-teeth splinter and fly like spit fingernails. The mouth destroys itself into a million clouds. Remy presses two yellow crystals to her ears, tosses and turns and screams Mom can’t die because Mom is Mom, Mom can’t die because Mom is a god, tosses and turns, Mom can’t die because Mom is a dog, Mom can’t die because a dog is a god, tosses and turns, Mom can’t die because Mom is my Mom and my Mom is forever, tosses and turns until blue slush sprays from her mouth in a bridge to the ceiling. When she sneezes, the yellow crystal dust inside her nose becomes pollen-colored mist and she is pulled up and through the mist, through the circular door, and from the bed. Crystals fall from her feet like a gown. The bridge crumbles to salt, then rain. Animal paws press down on her and she hears herself breathing in the otherwise silence of the room.