Brought to You From Leo and Gali's Antechamber
by Sandhya Barlaas
Sounds—like fireworks going off in daylight. Two bodies drop on a bed of ashes. Red blooms on grey. It’s wet, but there is no rain.
Two hands reach toward each other, grey as the ground beneath. Two hearts hover between one world and the next. A click, and they’re locked mid-beat. Something has come in. Somethings. They will stay.
We will stay.
Welcome to the antechamber.
THE BEGINNING
“She must’ve swallowed ash. I’m telling you, Headmaster. It’s a fine illusionist; it sends you tripping—fast. My sister ate her man’s ashes and went raving mad…”
“The girl’s delusional. All women are, really. Hysterical. They make up stories in their heads and think them real. What’s a man to do?”
“By god,” said the headmaster, “womankind will be the death of—”
“Uncle, why don’t you return to Mount Ujil?” the boy said, cutting into the men’s conversation. “You need to make sure the students get home safely. I’ll deal with this.”
The crowd left, one by one, until only silence remained. Silence and the two of them. She, slumped on the floor in a yellow dress stained with mud, wrists bound behind her. He, standing above her with the brass key.
She yelled a single word after the receding figures, “Bastards!” As if she could still hear them, see them through the closed door, sliding into the headmaster’s blindcar. The Vool 900 came out last year, 3020, and was so expensive, only a handful of people owned it. Not hard to procure, though, if you ran the most expensive private school in the city and sat on the Lawmaking Council with a gun glinting at your hip in silent authority.
The girl saw the gun and much more. To the boy, she said, “He knows it’s real, they all do. That’s why they tied me up. Because I remember everything.”
“There is no portal,” the boy assured her once again. “What you saw was a glance of the broken sun. It smolders somewhere behind the clouds in a thousand fragments. That’s what you saw. No magic, no portal.”
“Leo—”
“Unless you want to go to the madhouse, I’d counsel you against perpetuating your childish story. It is all well and entertaining when you’re seven, but a seventeen-year-old girl… a woman…” He shook his head, pacing the room like a rat in a glass tank, thinking itself a king.
“Leo,” she began, “Have you ever been asked for CAPTCHA before?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That your uncle has programmed you well! Do I need a screwdriver to dismantle you?”
“He should’ve taped up your mouth. I will do that.”
“If you want my mouth shut, you’ll have to open my wrists.”
“My uncle restrained you for a reason.”
She saw his jaw tighten, saw that he would not be unscrewed with mechanical instruments. Reason would be needed. So, she reminded him, “I will have to eat at some point. Your uncle won’t be back for a while. As inconvenient as he finds me, don’t you think he’ll find me even more so dead than alive?”
ANTECHAMBER
In the spring, trees rise from the grey earth; color returns. Instead of flowers and leaves, what grows is sickly looking worms, thorny reptiles, insects in the shape of branches, their sound fatal.
And bloated fruit. At the height of summer, it leaks a sugary syrup that can kill if swallowed. In autumn, the trees catch fire and burn away in flashes of bright reds and oranges, a mockery of the season.
In summer, it smells of rot. In autumn, death.
In winter, there is nothing left but ashes.
The tale we tell takes place in winter.
***
The moment the boy unlocked her hands, there came the sharp whistling of a blindcar, and he panicked. He went to the window to make sure it was not his uncle’s Vool 900 rumbling back into the ash-strewn driveway to take away the mad girl in case a spot opened up at the asylum. A second later, when he turned back around, he found her gone.
He should not have freed her. That is what he thought when he walked into the only bedroom and found her on the floor, stark naked, covered in swirls and smudges of ink. She scribbled something into a notebook, her hand shaking.
She didn’t notice him at first. She craned her neck to look behind herself, but then she saw him standing there. One second, a horrified face, then turning right back around the next.
The girl sprang up and pushed him down onto the floor. He swore—a knot of colorful words aimed at the female species—the telltale sign that, under his chiseled air of chivalry, he was his uncle’s perfectly programmed robot.
She asked him, “Do you now see the message from the portal? It’s all over me.”
“You…” He shoved her off of him, “… are all over me!”
She knocked him back down, then threw herself at the door. “Not so fast, prude! You will help me transcribe what I can’t see.”
He had his back to her. Pinching the bridge of his nose, in a tired, restrained voice, he said, “Do you have no shame?”
“Not since I saw the portal, no.”
“This is why he tied you up.”
“Your saintly uncle, you mean?” she laughed.
The headmaster discovered her shedding her sweater in the freezing air of Mount Ujil. He descended on her in a blind rage, armed with curses and an alcohol-smelling beard. He hit her with the back of his gun in a way only a practiced man could; a man practiced in patriarchy, having learned it from the cradle. Whether his nephew was as skilled was yet to be seen.
The pen she dropped, she kicked toward him with a bare foot. “You will not escape… till the message is written down.”
Sandhya Barlaas is a Pakistani author with a BA in Creative Writing and a wide range of literary interests. Her work, which spans fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, has been published by Oxford University Press, Zoetic Press, and Dawn Media Group. Outside of her writing, she has worked as a marketing intern and assistant editor with Kinsman Quarterly. When not creatively occupied, she loves reading books, learning new languages, and exploring different cultures.
コメント