u/SyeniteFractured

1366

Elodie Loon propped an empty moleskin notebook against her pale thighs and balanced a fountain pen between her index finger and thumb. It had no ink, but that wasn't important. What was important was appearing intellectual. Clive Hornbill pointed his chiseled jaw in her direction—a wide maxilla cut a strong figure—and she could feel his eyes tracing up the long line of her legs and lingering on the notebook, her thighs, though, of course, his were not the only pair of eyes tracking her. No, Elodie counted at least a dozen men in this courtyard. They leaned against trees, knees angled nonchalantly, posed on benches, sprawled on the grass. The girls they were with didn't capture their attention, not when Elodie was nearby, but she only cared for Clive. She gazed up at him from under long lashes. Pinked. Sylvie Boobie elbowed her in the ribs.

"I can't think of a time when you looked less alive," Sylvie said. She smacked her lips to punctuate each word that escaped from her mouth and, still, no one glanced in her direction. "What even happened with Clement? He liked you. You promised you'd tell me all about it and I never got any tea, girl. Spill."

"There's nothing to tell. Clement was just like all the others, looking to brag about conquering me. I'm calling a moratorium on dating. No more boys."

Except for possibly Clive, who crossed the green space on a crash course with the bench she and Sylvie shared. Flowers leaned toward him as he passed, petals turned up to his face like he was the sun, conversations dropped off mid-sentence then picked up again as if nothing special had happened, and Clive remained oblivious to it all. Goosebumps blanketed Elodie's legs when he drew near, but he didn't stop to acknowledge her.

"Stare harder, why don't you?"

"What? I wasn't looking...I was just—"

"Say that you're in control and I will slap you. Anyway, Clive never talks to anyone. He's a lost cause...unlike Clement. You should give him another chance to impress you with his stalker-like tendencies."

Elodie snorted back a laugh. "He did follow me around for weeks before I said I'd go out with him."

"Exactly. I can't believe you have absolutely zero—nada, nil, zilch—spicy details to regale me with. Not even a smooch? Is his skin as soft as it looks? He has such nice hands."

#

"I cannot abide you consorting with that Boobie girl." Mistress Crane towered over Elodie in the spire of the castle. The sound of her tapping foot bounced off the stark white of the marble walls that somehow blackened at all of their nighttime sessions. Elodie should have paid attention to her lessons, but her thoughts were absorbed by the thought of Clive's plump lips meeting hers, of smooching, and she couldn't focus on anything with the heat circling her core. "She's a bad influence."

"Yes'm."

"Now, you need all your wits about you, sweet girl, to handle what I'm about to demonstrate next." Elodie nodded distractedly. "I will only say this one time. To sense..."

Mistress Crane droned on for what seemed like hours, the light flickering and changing against the marble, until she finally stopped to demand Elodie demonstrate what she learned. "Wait until night," Elodie answered by rote. "That's when the hum of the Earth is the strongest and your words can heal even the grandest of slights."

"Good enough. Hope you never need to practice what I've shown you. Dismissed."

Spiral stairs unwound down the spire and Elodie tripped down them, grabbing at the railing and gripping until her knuckles turned white, because her feet never wanted to cooperate with her. She sighed with relief when she reached the bottom, no longer afraid of falling, but then a shadow darkened the edge of her vision. What had Mistress Crane said, again? She shut her eyes tight and tried to bring up the recollection. In this moment of distraction, a sharp pain lanced through her shoulder and she snapped open her eyes and grasped at the pain, only to come away with fingers coated redly with sticky thickness. She kept her feet for a moment, staring uncomprehendingly at her hand, before collapsing into strong arms. Clive. Clive had...saved her?

His eyes were like the night sky, not a bit of white at the edges. A shiver ran down Elodie's spine. This wasn't right. He pulled her against his hard body and ripped the sleeve off her shirt then leaned down and licked up her blood. His teeth sparkled with crimson when he grinned down at her. This wasn't right at all.

600 265

This is meant to be the next section of the draft. It might make more sense to read them both together but follow your heart.

Part I: Keys

The solicitor waits in front of me with a pen clasped in his bony fingers, held out to me, bouncing in a gesture of what I’m sure can only be concealed frustration. He’s been talking at me for minutes while I contemplate keys and switches. The doctors talked at me, too, about flat lines and brain death and machines breathing for someone and living for someone and whether I knew if. Well. They said I could turn the switch off at any time. It was my decision. They couldn’t make it for me, but the paperwork was in order for when I did decide and I could be here when they did it, but did I have an opinion on organ donation and, if I did, I would need to decide quickly. And I wondered what it would be like to take one of grandfather’s keys and open you up. Flick the switch back on.

“Michael. I need a signature.”

“Sure.” I unroll the papers in my hand, flatten them against my thigh, reach for the pen but the solicitor pulls back. “I’ll need that.”

“Do you need me to explain again?”

I shake my head, barely moving a fraction of an inch to the left and the right, and grab the pen. The ink is black. The nib pokes at the pages as I scrawl my name on the lines marked signature and the solicitor clears his throat, a quiet ahem, and gestures me over to a harder surface, which I ignore. A few holes in the paper won’t hurt. The solicitor takes the pages back from me with a grimace and flips through each one to verify I haven’t missed adding my name to all the lines and then he nods. With that acknowledgement, I push out of the chair, steady myself against the sudden static that takes over my vision, and I’m not even blinked back to normalcy when the solicitor’s hand grasps my shoulder and his lips are at my ear, breath hot and too close.

“Check the safety deposit box. Don’t let anyone see you.”

And then he’s pushing me out the door and into the hallway and I’m still dizzy and blinded. I plant my hands and touch my forehead to the rough paper bathing the walls in bland cream and blink until colors return. You never mentioned a deposit box. Was it written in those sheaths of paper plastered with my name? Or had the solicitor told me and I’d simply not heard? Either way, the door was shut and I’d rather not knock to ask, so instead I stumble away and out into the light and let my mind unravel.

Once, when I was still very little, you told me a story about keys. A magician locked them away in a box, to hide them from his rival, for the keys opened a great many things that were unsafe to explore. I asked you what kind of things and you told me about the box. Crafted from wood, it was sealed on all sides with intricate carvings winding around the top. You thought they were flowers. I asked if you’d seen the box, held the keys. You answered by tucking the sheets around me so tightly and kissing my forehead. I dreamed of gardens.

Every night, I would ask again about the magician and you would caress my cheek and say it was just a story. Just make believe. And then one day, you got so tired of hearing me ask, you gave me grandfather’s keys. One of these carries a secret, you said.

crit

I wish there were a switch to turn off my brain. Someone could make a key, small and golden, which would slot into the shell of my ear, the jaw would be the hinges, and my skull would open up onto the pinkness controlling all my thoughts and feelings and, in the middle or somewhere more prominent, there would be a switch or a button that anyone could activate, if they only had the key. My thoughts, they get stuck, sometimes. I think I need a way to reboot them, clear out my memory files, delete the storage—I mean, scan through the good ones and keep those and clear out the bad ones.

I’d keep the key somewhere safe. You wouldn’t want to keep it in a pocket or wear it on a necklace or put it anywhere too close to you because what if someone figured out what it did and decided to open me up and look inside? Would my thoughts unfurl in a reel of film playing out the movie of who I am? Because I don’t want anyone else to see inside. They would find all the not nice things I think and then the thoughts—the ones always getting so stuck—they would latch onto whoever dared to venture onto my garden pathways and forever trap that someone else who dared to look.

My grandfather left me a giant ring of keys. Where do they go? Probably nowhere, anymore, but I pull out the ring and flick through the metal and imagine fun destinations. The little one cast in bronze with its teeth so ornately carved belonged to a French woman who met the guillotine during the revolution. This one that’s all black would open up the head of a serial killer confined to death row and his victims could have the confession the courts never wrenched from his teeth. After all, the black one would have to belong to someone pretty bad. There’s a gold one that never seems to lose its polish. I’ve created the most stories around that one, when I wake up in the middle of the night with all of the stuck thoughts, because it’s so perfect and, try as I might, I can’t conjure anyone who would fit that perfection.

Once, I met a guy who worked at a funeral home. I asked him how many sets of keys the families delivered with the bodies. He got a little cagey, like that was an unusual question to ask, and said he’d never seen a key in his life then ran off. I think about it sometimes: the sweat beading at his temple; the wrinkles on his shirt he smoothed out when I mentioned the keys; the clop of his shoes when he turned and hurried away; how his jacket splayed out behind him and how I could have grabbed on instead of letting him leave; how the jacket would shrug off his shoulders and I’d be left with the remnants of my questions and no answers. It’s those kinds of thoughts, I’m sure everyone has them, that I’d like to delete, if I could.

Because the last thing I need to be thinking about is keys. Not when I’m sitting here, all decked out in black, curling paper back and forth in my palm, letting the swoosh-swoosh of it calm my nerves and drip into my brain, drown out the thoughts. A key would be a nice thing to have. I’d rather get a look at the perfect pinkness inside me than be here, swoosh-swooshing.

“Did you hear me, Michael?”

“I’d rather not.”

I would delete this moment, too.