The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 11 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Elena lowered her head, unfocused her eyes, and fell silent. I resumed my reading. When Kirochka left the psychiatrist’s office, she obscured her face by pulling up the hoodie, and tucked her hands into her baggy sweatpants pockets. She hurried through the space station’s hallways and corridors. To distract herself from the stormclouds of shadows, which thickened as more people gathered around her, she took deep breaths and counted to four. A pulsating headache blurred the vision in her only functioning eye. Sweat coated her nape and soaked her hairline. The shadows kept insulting, fondling, scratching—their hatred seeping into her pores like an acid.
Talking to the psychiatrist made Kirochka nauseous. That woman would write a bestseller about this parasite, and to mine that vein, she would stretch Kirochka’s psyche until it snapped. The narrator was plagued by an exhaustion that neither ten hours of sleep nor days of isolation could cure. Even when she abstained from booze, as soon as she collapsed onto her bed, she passed out, and hours later woke up tired.
The military and the psychiatrist would fill Kirochka with platitudes and empty hope. Why did she waste her energy and endanger her fragile mind to serve as a pawn in their farce? Merely to protect their professional pride? They had no clue how the artifact worked, and they never would. They insisted that Kirochka contain her dark impulses while reminding herself that her second consciousness was deceiving her. She’d have to trust in a future where she would accept hosting a malignancy in her brain. But even if the scientists developed a cure, could it ever free her from the guilt that left her sweating and rolling in bed at night, groaning into her pillows as memories of irreparable damage flooded her?
Kirochka was panting. Her body insisted she find a bench to rest on. When her functioning eye met the world again, a passing mechanic gave a startled glance at her scars. The man’s shadow reached out to her, its fingers stretching toward her face. How long until she could board the maglev train? Her head was spinning, her bidimensional vision pulsing.
She spotted a bench and hobbled towards it as if it were flotsam in a stormy ocean. Kirochka’s leg muscles burned as she collapsed onto the cold bench. Sweat dripped from her face, splattering onto a metallic floor grimy with dust, footprints, and chewing gum. Down the corridor, groups of shadows drifted by in a ghostly procession.
The scarred woman. Do we really need to endure the sight of her roaming the hallways as we come and go? What a way to sour our day. They should cage her in a hole far from people. Check out that scarred flesh. If it had happened to me, I would want to be killed. How can she go on living knowing herself disfigured?
Kirochka ran her fingertips over the rough, calloused texture of the right side of her forehead, of her right cheek. She scratched at the scars that marked her neck. She forced herself to stand up and continue. The floor and the passersby’s legs swayed. Panting and drenched in sweat, she arrived at the maglev station and sank into a vacant bench at the far end of the platform. Someone approached the bench, about to sit down, but then abruptly stopped and hurried away.
Who is this monster? She’s hogging the only available seat. Why do the brass allow such a ruin to share our space? She should kill herself.
I pulled my shoulders in. As the sunlight waned, a chill seeped into every crack of the afternoon.
“Those disembodied voices are awfully cruel.”
“I’ll answer your implicit question,” Elena said. “That comes from years upon years of seeing people’s smiles drop shortly after meeting me. Of realizing how uncomfortable I make people just by existing near them. I’m generally terrible at reading others’ emotions, but that revulsion always came through loud and clear.”
“Your story brings up that such thoughts are intrusive.”
“And therefore not real? You can tell yourself over and over the world isn’t as nasty as you experience it, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling that way. Soon enough you’ll want to steer clear of people who ellicit such thoughts.” Elena pointed lazily at the stack of printouts. “You’re almost done.”
Kirochka’s heart hammered against her ribs. She shot a glare at the man, who was walking away towards the throng of passengers waiting for the train. Mechanics, pilots, military couples, a solitary guard, families with kids—some sitting, some standing. They hogged most spaces, they violated the silence with their screeches. Why did so many of them exist? Within the universe’s walls, a colony of spiders proliferated, pouring through every crack and skittering over surfaces in black currents. At such a relentless pace, which corner of the cosmos could escape the encroachment of the human scourge? On every virgin planet, one of their ships would plunge through the atmosphere and settle on its soil. Some moron would leave his footprints, plant a flag and declare, I own this. They would flood the landscapes with their machinery, their engines, their weapons. They would rape every forest and jungle, laying waste to ecosystems that had persisted in equilibrium for thousands, millions of years. The seas would turn gray with oil and plastic. Humans multiplied to multiply, each generation following the unconscious programming of a robot trapped in a maintenance cycle.
After the next therapy session, Kirochka hurried along the corridors leading back to her apartment, until her path was blocked by a pair of thin legs clad in black stockings. The narrator halted, expecting those legs to shuffle out of her way. Instead, that woman remained rooted to the spot while dozens of passersby and their shadowy bodyguards flowed around them like a river’s current.
Kirochka looked up. A woman confronted her with venomous hatred. Tears welled up in the corners of her slanted eyes. The woman lunged and spat in Kirochka’s face. Spittle splattered across her left cheekbone and the bridge of her nose. A clump of phlegm slid down her cheek.
She awoke to the sight of faces looming above her. Claws clutched her neck while a spiked phallus rammed into her vagina, ripping her apart from the inside. Kirochka screamed and thrashed about. She threw punches at faces so close that their warm breaths brushed against her skin, and when they recoiled, she lunged at one of the shadows, knocking it down. She pinned its arms under her knees and pummeled its skull with her crunching knuckles.
Unseen hands grabbed her by the hoodie and hurled her aside. She rolled until her shoulder slammed against a bench. As she scrambled to her feet, a kick burst her ribs into searing pain. Her lungs spasmed, her breath came in ragged gasps, and her vision blurred. Someone’s weight pressed down on her back, pushing her face against a cold, metallic floor marred by footprints.
A crowd surrounded them. A few meters away sat a man wearing blood-spattered maintenance coveralls. His right eye was shut and purple, and that eyebrow had swollen to the size of a golf ball. A reddish gash cut across the bridge of his nose. Blood streamed from his nostrils, soaking the lower half of his face and tinting his teeth, several of which were broken or missing. The man convulsed with sobs and whimpers while someone crouched beside him squeezed his shoulder.
Kirochka had awoken on a bench bordering a recreational area. In another life, she used to frequent these bars and dance floors to get drunk with fellow pilots.
A guard snapped handcuffs around Kirochka’s wrists and lifted her up by one arm. They carried her off to the district’s security station. She was locked in a cell, her hands still bound behind her back, until two military officers came to fetch her. They dragged her to a well-lit room and sat her down at a desk for interrogation. Her ribs throbbed, her back ached. What did she remember? Nothing. An unconscious part of her had veered from the direct route home, and when she woke up, she realized she was being raped the same way she’d recognize the taste of a lemon or the scent of gasoline. If nobody had yanked her off that maintenance man, she would have beaten him to death.
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Shine a Light” by Spiritualized.
Elena lowered her head, unfocused her eyes, and fell silent. I resumed my reading. When Kirochka left the psychiatrist’s office, she obscured her face by pulling up the hoodie, and tucked her hands into her baggy sweatpants pockets. She hurried through the space station’s hallways and corridors. To distract herself from the stormclouds of shadows, which thickened as more people gathered around her, she took deep breaths and counted to four. A pulsating headache blurred the vision in her only functioning eye. Sweat coated her nape and soaked her hairline. The shadows kept insulting, fondling, scratching—their hatred seeping into her pores like an acid.
Talking to the psychiatrist made Kirochka nauseous. That woman would write a bestseller about this parasite, and to mine that vein, she would stretch Kirochka’s psyche until it snapped. The narrator was plagued by an exhaustion that neither ten hours of sleep nor days of isolation could cure. Even when she abstained from booze, as soon as she collapsed onto her bed, she passed out, and hours later woke up tired.
The military and the psychiatrist would fill Kirochka with platitudes and empty hope. Why did she waste her energy and endanger her fragile mind to serve as a pawn in their farce? Merely to protect their professional pride? They had no clue how the artifact worked, and they never would. They insisted that Kirochka contain her dark impulses while reminding herself that her second consciousness was deceiving her. She’d have to trust in a future where she would accept hosting a malignancy in her brain. But even if the scientists developed a cure, could it ever free her from the guilt that left her sweating and rolling in bed at night, groaning into her pillows as memories of irreparable damage flooded her?
Kirochka was panting. Her body insisted she find a bench to rest on. When her functioning eye met the world again, a passing mechanic gave a startled glance at her scars. The man’s shadow reached out to her, its fingers stretching toward her face. How long until she could board the maglev train? Her head was spinning, her bidimensional vision pulsing.
She spotted a bench and hobbled towards it as if it were flotsam in a stormy ocean. Kirochka’s leg muscles burned as she collapsed onto the cold bench. Sweat dripped from her face, splattering onto a metallic floor grimy with dust, footprints, and chewing gum. Down the corridor, groups of shadows drifted by in a ghostly procession.
The scarred woman. Do we really need to endure the sight of her roaming the hallways as we come and go? What a way to sour our day. They should cage her in a hole far from people. Check out that scarred flesh. If it had happened to me, I would want to be killed. How can she go on living knowing herself disfigured?
Kirochka ran her fingertips over the rough, calloused texture of the right side of her forehead, of her right cheek. She scratched at the scars that marked her neck. She forced herself to stand up and continue. The floor and the passersby’s legs swayed. Panting and drenched in sweat, she arrived at the maglev station and sank into a vacant bench at the far end of the platform. Someone approached the bench, about to sit down, but then abruptly stopped and hurried away.
Who is this monster? She’s hogging the only available seat. Why do the brass allow such a ruin to share our space? She should kill herself.
I pulled my shoulders in. As the sunlight waned, a chill seeped into every crack of the afternoon.
“Those disembodied voices are awfully cruel.”
“I’ll answer your implicit question,” Elena said. “That comes from years upon years of seeing people’s smiles drop shortly after meeting me. Of realizing how uncomfortable I make people just by existing near them. I’m generally terrible at reading others’ emotions, but that revulsion always came through loud and clear.”
“Your story brings up that such thoughts are intrusive.”
“And therefore not real? You can tell yourself over and over the world isn’t as nasty as you experience it, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling that way. Soon enough you’ll want to steer clear of people who ellicit such thoughts.” Elena pointed lazily at the stack of printouts. “You’re almost done.”
Kirochka’s heart hammered against her ribs. She shot a glare at the man, who was walking away towards the throng of passengers waiting for the train. Mechanics, pilots, military couples, a solitary guard, families with kids—some sitting, some standing. They hogged most spaces, they violated the silence with their screeches. Why did so many of them exist? Within the universe’s walls, a colony of spiders proliferated, pouring through every crack and skittering over surfaces in black currents. At such a relentless pace, which corner of the cosmos could escape the encroachment of the human scourge? On every virgin planet, one of their ships would plunge through the atmosphere and settle on its soil. Some moron would leave his footprints, plant a flag and declare, I own this. They would flood the landscapes with their machinery, their engines, their weapons. They would rape every forest and jungle, laying waste to ecosystems that had persisted in equilibrium for thousands, millions of years. The seas would turn gray with oil and plastic. Humans multiplied to multiply, each generation following the unconscious programming of a robot trapped in a maintenance cycle.
After the next therapy session, Kirochka hurried along the corridors leading back to her apartment, until her path was blocked by a pair of thin legs clad in black stockings. The narrator halted, expecting those legs to shuffle out of her way. Instead, that woman remained rooted to the spot while dozens of passersby and their shadowy bodyguards flowed around them like a river’s current.
Kirochka looked up. A woman confronted her with venomous hatred. Tears welled up in the corners of her slanted eyes. The woman lunged and spat in Kirochka’s face. Spittle splattered across her left cheekbone and the bridge of her nose. A clump of phlegm slid down her cheek.
She awoke to the sight of faces looming above her. Claws clutched her neck while a spiked phallus rammed into her vagina, ripping her apart from the inside. Kirochka screamed and thrashed about. She threw punches at faces so close that their warm breaths brushed against her skin, and when they recoiled, she lunged at one of the shadows, knocking it down. She pinned its arms under her knees and pummeled its skull with her crunching knuckles.
Unseen hands grabbed her by the hoodie and hurled her aside. She rolled until her shoulder slammed against a bench. As she scrambled to her feet, a kick burst her ribs into searing pain. Her lungs spasmed, her breath came in ragged gasps, and her vision blurred. Someone’s weight pressed down on her back, pushing her face against a cold, metallic floor marred by footprints.
A crowd surrounded them. A few meters away sat a man wearing blood-spattered maintenance coveralls. His right eye was shut and purple, and that eyebrow had swollen to the size of a golf ball. A reddish gash cut across the bridge of his nose. Blood streamed from his nostrils, soaking the lower half of his face and tinting his teeth, several of which were broken or missing. The man convulsed with sobs and whimpers while someone crouched beside him squeezed his shoulder.
Kirochka had awoken on a bench bordering a recreational area. In another life, she used to frequent these bars and dance floors to get drunk with fellow pilots.
A guard snapped handcuffs around Kirochka’s wrists and lifted her up by one arm. They carried her off to the district’s security station. She was locked in a cell, her hands still bound behind her back, until two military officers came to fetch her. They dragged her to a well-lit room and sat her down at a desk for interrogation. Her ribs throbbed, her back ached. What did she remember? Nothing. An unconscious part of her had veered from the direct route home, and when she woke up, she realized she was being raped the same way she’d recognize the taste of a lemon or the scent of gasoline. If nobody had yanked her off that maintenance man, she would have beaten him to death.
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Shine a Light” by Spiritualized.
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