The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 3 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I spotted Elena seated on a bench along the tree-lined waterfront promenade bordering the Bidasoa River, facing the grounds of Dumboa School. She wore a charcoal-gray zip-up hoodie with the hood tugged halfway up her head. Almond-blonde hair spilled over her shoulders. From the angle of her profile, I watched her right hand guide the pen in feverish strokes across the notebook resting on her thigh. She barely paused to flip the page, the motion seamless, as if her hand operated independently. Her pen kept scratching even as she reached for a one-liter carton of orange juice and tilted her head back for a hurried gulp. I pictured Elena as a child, sitting alone in a sandbox, eyes fixed on some invisible horizon beyond the gritty scatter of sand, her mind lost in a world of her own making.

I stepped onto the grass strip flanking her bench, and stood a few paces away. A voyeur trespassing in a museum of one. I wouldn’t startle her while she communed with the divine. Sparrows bickered in the gnarled plane tree overhead. Nearby, a pelota ball ricocheted off the court walls: whap, whap. Elena stopped writing. Her chin settled into her palm, the clicky end of her pen drumming against the notebook.

I crouched, plucked a pebble from the grass, then tossed it onto her notebook. Startled, her head jerked upwards. When she looked down, her gaze lingered on the pebble for a beat before she flipped to previous pages of her notebook. I threw another pebble, but this one hit her arm. Elena bolted upright and scanned the sky as if half-expecting a meteor to rip through the clouds.

With the caution you’d use to approach a stray cat, I edged into Elena’s line of sight. The afternoon light, straining through woolen clouds, gilded the alabaster oval of her face. She had sat with her back to three stories of balconies. Her hoodie was layered over a navy crewneck sweatshirt, and her black joggers bunched at the calves, revealing a slash of pale ivory skin. Her white sneakers, scuffed and worn, sported mismatched laces: one neon-green, one black.

“Nice seeing you again, Elena,” I said.

Her focus snapped to me. Near-translucent skin, bruised-pink lips like petals left too long in the sun. Her pupils dilated as if I had yanked her out of a trance. Her eyes—pale winter blue, adrift like ice floes in a sea of fatigue—held the somber, alienated gaze of someone who’d glimpsed the end of the world. She would haunt your story like the ghost of a tragic heroine, her face lingering long after the last page. She seemed less a person than an open wound: a thing of trembling nerve-endings and unstitched skin.

Her puzzled frown deepened as her stare sharpened, scalpel-like. She dropped her pen onto the notebook, then pulled out foam earplugs and pocketed them in her hoodie.

“Oh. You. That weird guy from the writing course.” Her voice emerged hoarse, as if she hadn’t spoken in days. “The one who didn’t join the lynch mob.”

“I wouldn’t call myself weird all of a sudden, but that’s generally correct.”

She reached down and picked up a pebble I’d tossed. Its dull grayness incongruous against the delicate curve of her fingertips, the fine-boned grace of her hand.

“Jon, was it? Did you throw these at me?”

“Yeah.”

“Throwing pebbles at disturbed writers… is that your thing?”

“I attempted a more interesting way to get your attention than just saying hello. Sadly it misfired.”

Elena studied the pebble before flicking it onto the grass. Her gaze darted between the river, the school grounds, and my face, as if trying to gauge how much trouble I was worth.

“An interesting way to get my attention? I don’t enjoy having things thrown at me.”

“I know you love a bit of dramatic flair.”

She cocked her head, her almond-blonde hair cascading across her cheek.

“You think I’m a drama queen, huh?”

“A connoisseur of the dramatic arts. A woman of refined tastes, who appreciates a little theater in her life.”

“Are you mocking me or trying to flatter me? I can’t tell.”

“Neither. Just saying that sometimes a girl enjoys a little pebble-tossing.”

Elena sighed, a weary exhalation that carried the weight of the day. She then rubbed at her forehead with a pale thumb.

“Sometimes a girl also enjoys being left alone,” she said, her tone dropping to an icy rasp. “But at least you didn’t try to psychoanalyze me or accuse me of lacking empathy. Seriously, what are you doing here, Jon? Are you stalking me, or is this just another cosmic joke at my expense?”

“I’ve been looking forward to bumping into you ever since the debacle at the writing course. And here you are, so I’m taking my chances.”

“What do you want, anyway? Do I owe you something?”

“Owing is not an accurate word for it. But if you feel that way, we can think of something.”

Her pale stare sliced into me. Irises like shards of glacier, sharp enough to draw blood.

“I’m tired of people. I’ve got no energy to spare.”

“I was captivated by your work, Elena. Powerful stuff, quite beautiful in an unsettling way. It has a visceral quality, a rawness that cuts through the bullshit. A shame what happened at the course. I feared that those differently-minded piling on your work would have discouraged you.”

Elena hunched forward and studied me as though I were an alien creature she couldn’t figure out. The sunlight caught her hair, turning strands of it to burnished gold.

“Powerful? Right. That’s exactly what everyone wants to read. Tales of mud, starvation, and eating salamanders. You’ll find that to survive in this world, you need to be sanitized. People want their little feel-good pieces about finding love in coffee shops or whatever the hell is considered marketable these days. They want to be told they’re good people and everything is going to be okay. But that’s not the truth. Truth is ugly. Truth is a woman eating a raw amphibian.”

“Who cares what people want? The whole thing is a hamster wheel.”

She leaned back, her hands gripping the edge of the bench.

“I don’t need your sympathy, Jon. It’s easier if people aren’t interested in me. I’m not like them. I don’t know how to act around them. I’m not good at pretending to be normal. I’m not good at pretending at all, I guess. But hey, since you brought it up… why did you defend me that day? Nobody asked you to play white knight for the class psycho.”

I could picture her as a princess in a castle of bones, her crown a circlet of thorns.

I leaned over the filigreed railing that bordered the promenade. Ferns sprouted from the cracks in the stone retaining wall, fanning outward. The opposite wall, moss-covered, darkened near its base like the stained bottom of an unwashed coffee cup. Below, the Bidasoa River, murky-teal and sluggish, carried twigs, bits of leaves, an orange peel. In the river’s dull sheen, wavy reflections caught the overcast white sky—a sheet of cotton wool pulled over a lamp. A trio of ducks glided over, their boatlike bodies corrugating the water in their wake. They stared expectantly like silent beggars. A silver grey mullet, open-mouthed and thriving even in the city’s sewage-laced currents, slipped into view, its gills pumping, then vanished into the murk. In the plane trees, sparrows chirped in a symphony of gossip over the whap, whap of a ball striking the pelota court walls.

I turned to face Elena, leaned back against the railing, and crossed my ankles.

“You read what you had needed to write, despite knowing it wouldn’t land well with that audience. I like bold people, those unafraid of getting their hands dirty. Who stand their ground. Too many bend their principles whenever society comes knocking. To be honest, I had wanted to quit the course for a while. Isabel is too much of a social butterfly for my taste. But I kept attending because I needed to know what you’d bring next. So after they lost you, I quit too. You can consider me your fellow deserter.”

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Author’s note: the scene will continue in the next part.