Pentimento: a dystopian Beauty and the Beast

by Jace, Cameron

  35

  Iris didn't eat. She didn't comb her hair and left it as stiff as it used to be when she was a kid. She didn't brush her teeth or change her clothes. If she could have taken off all her clothes and walked naked through the streets without embarrassing her dad, she would have done it.

  Iris didn't speak to anyone. She had nothing to say, and her words would not have come out as sweet and polite. Her phone was locked. She slept the days away and cried silent tears at night, only getting out of bed to use the restroom. If it weren't for Charles feeding her, tolerating her, she might have starved to death by now.

  Charles made sure no one saw her, not even Colton. His daughter needed to grieve, a situation hardly appreciated in The Second, as everyone had plastered happy smiles on their faces. At such a young age, grieving was like cutting through one's flesh with a razor. No human being should be grieving at seventeen. It was too early for such deep cuts.

  Each day Iris came out of her room and asked her father if the Beasts had used their horn again. Her father told her “no.” Then she would go back to her room, walking like a living zombie, and saying nothing.

  Then one day, she opened the door and walked to her father who'd been reading. For the first time, she didn't ask about the Beasts. She was dressed to go out.

  "What do you have in mind, Iris?" Charles asked calmly. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  "Did they catch the 'Beauty' yet?" she said, her eyes dry, void of moisture or light.

  "Obviously not," Charles pointed at her and tried to sound playful.

  "Are they still searching for me?"

  "Every day," he said. "They never stop talking about the Beauty who gives roses to the Bride's parents. Why are you asking?"

  Iris said nothing. She pulled out two roses from under her jacket. Actually, it was Colton's jacket, the one he'd left with her the night they kissed. Although unable to talk to Colton, she loved to feel its warmth on her.

  Charles winced at the sight of the red roses. He'd never been a coward, but red roses had become officially illegal, a sign of the uprising. Teens who drew red roses on the walls of The Second were arrested and jailed by the law. Those were the teens who didn't know how to get a real red rose, because they didn't know anything about the Ruins. They only wanted to express their anger towards the Beasts. Iris was boldly holding two roses in her hand in the middle of the room.

  "Where did you get those?" Charles said. "You haven't left the house in days."

  "I realized I had kept two last roses in a vase under the bed." Iris said. "I hadn't watered them, but still...they refused to die."

  "And here I thought you had some perfume sprayed in your room. What are you going to do with these roses, Iris?" Charles tried to choose his words carefully. He was torn between what he'd taught his daughter about the Pentimento, and her own safety she was risking by holding the roses.

  "The roses always had a purpose, dad. One purpose." Iris said, her lips pale.

  "You know you can't do this anymore," Charles shrugged. He'd taught her to do this, and now he was stopping her. A huge pet peeve of parenthood.

  "I need you with me, dad." Iris wasn't bargaining. She had made up her mind in the time she'd spent alone in her room. "I can't do it alone. Please, dad."

  "They will catch you, darling," Charles took off his glasses. He only called her “darling” when he needed to ask her favors. This time he was begging her to stay safe and not do it.

  "So what? I'm no different than all the other Brides," she shrugged her shoulders.

  "You are different. You're special, and ending up hurt by the Beasts won't help anyone."

  "I owe this to my best friend, dad," Iris insisted. "You taught me that. You taught me about the Pentimento, that if I dig deep enough, I will eventually see through. You haven't taught me though what happens when I look deep enough and still don't see the truth. What do we do when we scratch the surface of the painting and still don't figure out what it was originally meant to be?"

  "I don't know, Iris," Charles shrugged. "Any ideas?"

  "We do what we only feel is right, dad. And I feel I need to honor my friend, so I can find a way to live with myself after her."

  36

  Charles stopped his car in front of Zoe's parents’ house. Iris walked to the main door with the red rose in her hand. She turned around facing her father, and wrote her words on the snow: Zoe Peterson. You're not forgotten.

  Iris stopped for a moment, reading the words she'd just written. She knelt down and signed it: the Beauty.

  When standing up again, she read them one more time. She wasn't satisfied. “Beauty” was a term given to her by the Beasts. Standing up to them, she didn't want to use the name they had given her. Iris knelt down again. Wiped the snow clean, and signed: Iris Charles Beaumont. No Beast's Beauty.

  Iris saw her dad fidget in his seat, worried someone would see them. She gave him a thumb’s up, and turned around to ring the bell. Like always, once she pushed the button she would run back to her father's car. At least, this was what Charles was expecting.

  Iris rang the bell and couldn't move. She stayed fixed in her place, waiting for Zoe's mother to open the door.

  Charles began sweating. His daughter was exposing her cover deliberately.

  "Sorry, dad." Iris mumbled, and felt the warm breeze from the house touch her face as Zoe's mother opened the door.

  "Iris?" Zoe's mother didn't understand what was going on.

  Iris raised the red rose to her. Zoe's mother's eyes widened, with unborn tears forming behind them. "It's you?" she said.

  "Zoe deserves to be remembered," Iris said. "I'm not going to hide anymore. I wanted to let you know I'm barely going to live half a life without her next to me." Iris couldn't help it and threw herself in Zoe's mother's arms. The woman embraced her, unable to resist the tears anymore. This was a motherless child and daughterless mother, finding peace in each other's arms. Even Charles couldn't stop the tears from rolling down his cheeks while sitting in the driver’s seat.

  "I'm sorry the Beasts will arrest you now." Iris said. "Once they know you took the rose."

  "It doesn't matter," the woman said. "Zoe deserves to be remembered. What about you, Iris? What are you going to do?"

  "What I had to do from the beginning." Iris wiped her tears away. "Please tell my father I'm sorry too," she whispered, and turned away.

  Iris ran into the dark of the streets, in the coldest of nights, away from everyone. It was a surprising move her father couldn't keep up with. She ran and ran, her heart pounding so hard, she thought it'd burst out of her rib cage and color the snow in red. Red as in red roses, the color the Beasts hate the most. Iris still had kept the other red rose in her jacket. Colton's jacket. She knew exactly where she was heading.

  37

  Once she slid Colton’s father's card in the slot, the metallic door to the enormous Sinai tower opened. Iris dashed in, running toward the nearest elevator. On her way to it, she pushed the emergency button that would alert all police forces in The Second. It was showtime, but on her own terms.

  She jumped into the elevator, pushed the button to the roof, and then picked up her phone. In a flash, she sent a message through all her networks; to Colton and Cody whose networks should spread the word to others too. It was a simple, yet unbelievable message: “I am on top of the Sinai tower.”

  She tapped her hands impatiently on the inner doors of the elevator until she reached the top. Stepping out into the cold, the wind slapped hard at her, as if trying to stop her from the insane thing she was about to do.

  Iris stood in the middle of the rooftop, staring at the beautiful stars above. She craned her head up, wondering if she could glimpse the Beasts' ships beyond the stars.

  "I know you're up there watching us, whoever you are." Iris shouted against the wind. "I know I am not crazy and I need you to respond back to me."

  She got no reply but the wind swirling around her like a ghost. In the distance
, she could see everyone in The Second waking up. She could hear the faint sound of the approaching police sirens. She'd managed to catch everyone's attention. Things were going as planned, except that no Beasts answered her from above.

  "I know you're there," she said one more time, as she put her phone's camera on and connected it to a live feed on the internet, so everyone could see her breaking the rules by standing on top of the Sinai tower and challenging the Beasts to talk back to her. If they were actually up there. If they really existed. If they weren't an illusion. "I, Iris Beaumont, challenge the Beasts to take me as a Bride," she shouted.

  The police force was closer now, probably in the elevators. She glanced at the news on her phone and saw everyone in The Second was broadcasting.

  "You always pick one of us," she shouted at the sky full of stars. Those beautiful stars. "You never explain why. Don't you think we deserve to know why?" She took a deep breath. It was too late to back off now. "We're always afraid of you. We never get to see you, and yet you rule us, saying that taking one of us is for our own good. Now it's time one of us asks to be taken," she shouted from the top of her cold lungs. "I challenge you to take me as a Bride!"

  The world gasped at Iris's request. In her mind, all she could think about was the Pentimento. Beyond this beautiful sky lay the truth about the Beasts. And if she couldn't figure it out here on Earth, then she'd better go to them, even if it were the end of her.

  "Talk to me!" Iris shouted as the elevator doors opened, the police circling her with their laser guns pointed at her.

  No one talked back to Iris. The sky was just as dark and dead as it always had been. But Iris wasn't going to give up. She made sure the reporters had arrived. Everyone was getting this on camera.

  In a flash, Iris pulled out her last red rose and raised it in the sky. "Uprising!" she screamed, knowing the rose was the ultimate offense to the Beasts. It was the only thread to whatever happened in the past. It was the one thing that refused to die or grow ill in the Ruins. The perfect symbol against the Beasts.

  "Please put down the rose," a police officer, pointing his red laser at her, asked her. "Possession of a red rose is against the law, miss."

  Iris didn't care. She tiptoed, still holding the red rose.

  "If you don't comply, miss, I will have to shoot you," the police officer warned her.

  Iris knew she was out of options. She thought she'd try this last phrase to provoke the Beasts, “Humans only see what they...!” she shouted.

  Even the police officer squinted at the strangeness of her sentence. "Don't shoot," another police officer said. "She could be insane. Maybe she needs medical treatment. Shoot her with a sedative."

  Iris saw another officer aim at her. It was over. She must have been wrong. It was all in her head. There were no Beasts up there. All she could do was hold onto the rose, look up, and grit her teeth. “Take me as a Bride!”

  Her last words echoed, as the police officer didn't pull the trigger to sedate her. Not because he'd changed his mind, but because of the massive light that shone suddenly down from the sky. It was blinding, as if an enormous pearl was looking down upon them on top of the Sinai tower.

  Even Iris couldn't stand the light with its heat, melting the snow around her. All she knew was that this was the same light the Brides walked through. Iris took a brave deep breath, knowing it might be her last, at least on Earth, and stepped into the light. She was the first girl in history to walk into it willingly.

  38

  Whatever happened after Iris entered the light was beyond her perception. She felt like she was entering a dream while awake. Nothing made sense, and nothing quite lingered in her memory. This was a new world, so unlike The Second. How different? She had no idea.

  All she could see was that glaring white light. It conjured blackness to her soul, blindness to her senses, and irony to her eyes.

  She wondered if this was how it felt right before being exposed to the final Pentimento of things. Maybe in order to truly see anything, we had to experience a temporary blindness.

  There was an enamoring scent of flowers in the distance. It compelled her to walk farther. Underneath her, the ground was getting colder. Marble floors, she thought. She lowered her head, but couldn't confirm her assumption. The floor must have been white. The greatest trick the Beasts ever pulled was imprisoning humans in the illusion of clarity. She wasn't even sure if anything she saw was real.

  In the end, the flower smell turned out to be another devious trick of the Beasts. Its scent was definitely mesmerizing, but its effect was deception in a white dress. Iris's head felt heavy. The dizziness crawled up her veins and saturated her head. She ended up falling to her knees and then tumbled to one side, sleeping on the cold floor wherever she was. Before she totally lost consciousness, she thought she saw an endless number of stars underneath her.

  39

  Iris woke up in the middle of ugly monsters surrounding her. Her body trembled at their sight. She had never seen ugliness like this. Their features were so grotesque, her mind refused to even comprehend it. Ignorant to her surroundings, she was about to close her eyes and wish they'd just disappear. But she couldn't. The Beasts were closing in.

  Weakened, she looked for a weapon around her, to protect herself. She found none. Was this how things would end, just like that, without explanations?

  Dying seemed so miniature all of a sudden, compared with not knowing the truth.

  She found that something had been tucked in her hand while she was asleep. A brush. A painter's brush, like the ones her dad used on the portraits when she was young.

  Iris looked puzzled and wondered if the Beasts were still mocking her, controlling her dreams, and giving her a useless tool, instead of a knife or a gun to defend herself. What use was a brush or a pen in facing the evil in the world?

  The Beasts trotted closer. They were slow and bent their backs like gorillas. It was as if walking on two legs was something new to them, something too evolutionary. They growled as if they didn't know the words, drummed their chest and drooled from between their sharpened teeth. Iris doubted the girls were really Brides. She leaned to the idea that they were food for the cannibalistic Beasts.

  In her defense, Iris did the illogic, and waved the useless brush at them. Her last resort. Maybe the brush possessed magical powers. She certainly hoped so. But she was wrong. It wasn't an enchanted brush as she had hoped.

  Something else happened though. Whenever she waved the brush in the air, a part of the world around her disappeared, as if she were holding a magical eraser, wiping away reality, and changing it into some white void.

  She could not believe her eyes. This was insanity itself. As the Beasts closed in, insanity didn't seem like a bad option anymore. She bet she could use the brush on her predators. Brush them away, like a bad dream. Erase them the way historians demolished the truth about the past. Maybe the Beasts will disappear.

  She took a deep breath and slashed the brush in the air as if it were a sword, and then...

  40

  Iris woke up panting from the dream. There were no Beasts nearby. In fact, she was in a place she'd never expected.

  She found herself in a luxurious room that looked as if it were cut right out of fairy tale books, where she'd play princess and wait for her Prince Charming. A safe and enchanting place.

  The room's ceiling was an enormous vault, engraved with writings and scriptures foreign to her world in The Second. They were beautiful. Otherworldly. Ancient, she guessed. The designs were like what she could have found in the Ruins before they'd been ruined. Everything exuded the feeling of time and significance. Things that had been created years and years ago, built by men and women who insinuated feelings and meanings into their creation. Nothing here was designed without reason.

  Iris felt happy in her heart for a moment. The drawings looked as old as the core of the Earth, or the flames of the sun. The vault itself was about three stories high and showed the stars behind t
he inlaid glass on top.

  This wasn't just a room. It was some kind of mansion in space.

  Lowering her head, she saw all kinds of ornaments on the walls. Gold and blue were the dominant colors. The colors looked natural, unlike the metallic feel of The Second. Real organic paint. Everything looked as if crafted with keen hands. It almost looked as if it was made of some elegant clay, but it wasn't. The furniture and everything surrounding it was simply made by hand. No machinery was involved. Each piece of art showed slight flaws that men imprinted on things. That beautiful flaw that differentiates human from machine. It felt absurd to be experiencing humanity in the chamber of the Beasts.

  Iris assumed the Beasts made the girls do the decorating and designs. Was this why most of them were talented?

  Iris saw a window right in front of her. It looked upon a great wide blue sky, filled with stars as well. She craned her head forward to make sure. There were stars, real stars, right outside her window, twinkling like silver fireflies. Swinging slightly, as if hung with fine threads from a higher sky. They were beautiful.

  There was a pool, the shape of a huge heart, separating her from the window. Its water was a mesh of beautiful light-green and blue. Golden feathers twinkled right above its surface. And a golden fish sprung out momentarily, then sank back again. She thought the fish were rather curious, peeking to see who she was.

  Finally, Iris had to look at the bed she was now sitting upon. It was humongous, with four Corinthian columns on each corner. She knew they were Corinthian because she'd seen similar in the Ruins. A sign of how the world looked in The First.

  All kinds of fine dresses were laid carefully around her. There was a basket of the finest fruits. She sat in the middle of the bed. If she wanted to get off of it, she had to crawl on all fours to reach the edge.