by S. Gates
Your memory shifts, and the little shark at your feet takes on the strange boy's face and nibbles at your toes. A serrated tooth slices your skin, and with a start you jerk back to the present, with Ori's head rubbing against your chin. You bring your hand up again and feebly try to push him away. "Stop that. It's just a ring, and you didn't tell me why you're here."
He rocks back on his knees, resuming his initial gargoyle-pose. The grin fades to a mildly amused half-smile, and his eyes narrow just a little, as if he's studying you. "It's not 'just a ring,' though I suppose I can see how one might think so. It's my ring. A gift of goodwill. Wear it always, and it shall bring you luck, I promise."
"You keep avoiding my question," you say as you let out a short, aggravated huff. You regret it immediately when your ribs protest. "Augh, fuck."
Ori's smile slides off his face like oil running down a pane of glass, leaving him almost eerily expressionless given his animated features just moments before. "I am here, my most cherished Douglas, because I have always been here." His words are measured with more care than you thought he possessed. "You only see me now because of what has already happened and what will soon transpire, but I've been with you all along. I saw you be born, I've seen you grow, and, should it happen, I will be there to consume your bones when you die. If not before, with your permission."
The eerily somber moment passes, and he resumes smiling at you. "Do you think Amanda would like a ring? I think she might." He reaches into the air near his face and flicks his wrist. A ring, the twin of the one on your left hand, falls in your lap, weighty and glinting. You don't touch it, and neither does Ori.
Finally, your lips peel away from your teeth in a sneer. "You are really obnoxious, you know that?"
He shrugs, a quick jerk of his shoulders followed by a curious tilt of his head. "You'll come to enjoy my company in time, I'm sure. But that isn't why I'm here. I came to deliver a warning, a threat, and a promise."
"That sounds pretty melodramatic. I think I need to cut back on the trashy epic fantasy fiction before bed." You aren't sure if you're joking because you're tired of this weird boy on your bed or if his alien black eyes are starting to unnerve you.
Your flippant demeanor does not affect him. He merely continues staring at you, head listing to one side, eyes wide and shiny. "Oh, I think you rather should as well. But that is not what I've come to tell you. You see, if you are not very careful in the coming days, you are going to be slain in a manner more horrific than your pathetic human neurons can even consider bending themselves around." He pauses, that eerie sharkish grin once more spreading across his face. "That's the warning," he adds, a pronunciation as if you had no clue what the word 'warning' means.
Suddenly, you are struck by the idea that you may not be the only one who may need to lay off on the melodramatic fantasy fiction. You don't say it, though, instead stating, "That sounded kind of threatening to me."
Ori laughs again, and this time it sounds like the bubbling of water up from the ground. "Oh dear, no, that is not a threat at all. You see, it can't be a threat, at least not from me, because I have no control over that. What I do have control over, though, is this: you will be presented with a series of choices, and should you choose poorly, I will have no compunction about slitting you from stem to stern, bathing in your blood, and adorning myself with pieces of your hide." His grin widens to the point that you worry his face might split in half. Jesus, he's just made of teeth, isn't he? "Do you see the difference, Douglas? In the previous instance, I was telling you of something over which I have no control, to allow you to avoid a terrible fate. In this instance, I told you of what I, myself, would visit upon you should you fail me. That is, in essence, a threat."
The words are a little stilted, and the claims they make are definitely over the top, but the look of his shiny black eyes... The word 'unsettling' crawls through your brain again, leaving a snail's trail behind it. You shiver. "Fine, I get it. And the promise is...?"
With no warning, Ori surges forward once again so that his pointed nose is a mere hairsbreadth from yours. This close, you can see a vague reflection of yourself glittering in his too-black eyes, feel the warmth of his breath on your face. "This is my favorite part," he says, and having his mouth so close to you, you can hear a little distortion to his words, as if his teeth aren't where he expects them to be. "If you survive, and if you choose wisely, you shall be rewarded. Just as the depths of suffering you may endure would stretch the bounds of your imagination, so would your mind be hard-pressed to describe the rewards you will reap.
"Douglas, if you succeed, if you survive, if you thrive..." His whole body trembles, and you catch a glint of something swimming in his sclera. At first, you don't know what to make of it, but then you see the outline of Amanda's jaw. The image writhes for a moment, then stills, reformed as the gentle slope of her shoulder resting against something strange and organic. "We will be as gods, Douglas," Ori says. "We will be as gods. I promise you this."
* * *
You have no recollection of falling asleep, but suddenly it's daytime and the short dumpy doctor is checking your vitals and making notes on your chart. He tells you that you're doing fine, that you'll be discharged later that day. Then he calls in a nurse to help you navigate the task of operating the shower.
It's frustrating and painful, your limbs are like rocks jointed with broken glass, and you can count all of the bruises. Your chest is mottled black, blue, yellow, and green, and both of your breasts are sore to the touch, but you manage to get your body scrubbed and your hair washed out with the nurse's assistance.
Once you've finished and are clad in a hospital gown once more, you make your way back to the hospital bed. The dumpy doctor has once again left, but there's another person in your room. You don't need your glasses to recognize the lanky man; if nothing else, the way he keeps his shiny black hair spiked in addition to the low-rise black skinny jeans both tip you off to the fact that it's Simon. A black canvas bag hangs from one elbow, which he slings off his arm and onto the bed.
"Yo, Dougie," he says, spinning on his heel to face you. "'Manda told me you were getting out today. She hadda work, so I'm your ride, since the Jarethmobile got trashed. She told me to bring you some clothes and jewelry, since your plugs and shit got lost in the accident." He points at the canvas bag.
Upending the bag, you see that he's not lying (not that you expected him to, really, but sometimes he tends to embellish the truth). In the pile is a case with your spare glasses, which you pull out and settle on the bridge of your nose. While they aren't the most recent prescription, they bring the world into enough focus for you to see the lines on Simon's face. For all that he tries to pretend that he's an unfeeling douchebag, you can tell that he's been worried about you.
The next thing you pick up is a bag of jewelry, all of which fits into the various piercings you have. You put the plugs in your lobes first, then put hoops in the snakebite piercings in your lower lip, a stud in your left nostril, and a bar in your left eyebrow. At the bottom of the bag is a ring, a mate to the one you wear on your forefinger, etched with a design like a tangled celtic knot, but less elegant. You hold it in your hand for just a second before setting it aside.
You see that, in the pile of clothing Simon thought to bring, he packed your binder, bless him. Unfortunately, you're pretty sure your contusions prevent you from wearing it. You fold it back up and set it aside, instead pulling out your underwear, shirt, and jeans. "Turn around, asshole; you don't get to see my tits while I'm changing."
He scoffs, but he spins on his heel again, the rubber sole of his checkered Chuck Taylor's squeaking on the tile of the floor. "What the fuck ever, man. It's not like I don't know where you sleep." His words are teasing, devoid of all trace of meanness. "Not that I give a shit about titties. What part of 'gayer than a three-dollar bill' did you fail to understand when we moved in together, dude?"
It's a worn old refrain, one that you have become familiar with
in your years of cohabiting. It had never been necessary. You'd taken him at his word when he'd assured you he was quite enamored with cocks (and you simply fail to possess one, which removes you from the list of people he's likely to court). Still, it's some comfort to hear the familiar words, even as you shuck off the hospital gown and pull on a plain black turtleneck and a pair of panties. "All right, if you want to see my road-burned ass, you can turn around now." Not that you actually have any road-burn; you had remained firmly belted into your late car, as you'd been told by the nurses, Amanda, and your bruises. But you can't help but tease Simon in return.
You hear the chirp of Simon's Chuck's on the tile again, followed by a low appreciative whistle. "Oh, shut up," you grumble as you try to wiggle into your favorite worn pair of jeans. Simon just chuckles, a warm sound that is effervescent in his slender chest. Were you facing him, you know you'd see his shoulders shaking, and from the sound of it, he might be cupping his forehead in his palm.
With a little hop, you are able to pull your pants up over your hips finally and button the fly. You turn, and your initial estimation is true: he is hunched over, one hand to his face, laughing. "Fuck you, man. Fuck you."
You grab the ring and stuff it in your pocket, though you can't for the life of you figure out why.
"All right, take me home, asshole." You scrub at your face, knocking your glasses askew, before adjusting them so they sit straight again. "I have been in this hospital for way too long."
"Pfft, you haven't even been conscious most of your stay here, which, by the way, why the fuck have you not updated your emergency contacts in your wallet?" Simon is scowling, though you can tell his heart isn't really in it. "You still have Amanda listed above me, and you've been broken up for how long?"
"I don't know if you passed the first grade, Simon, but I'm pretty sure that 'Ebonlee, Amanda' comes before 'Glyndon, Simon' when arranged alphabetically. And if, for some reason, we were going purely on a first-name basis, Amanda still comes before Simon in most English alphabets." You cross your arms across your chest, regret it when you brush against the gigantic bruise there, and move your hands to your hips. "And by 'most,' I mean 'all.' So relax. You're still my best friend. But she's also a friend I'd count on to be there for me if I get plowed into by a drunk fuckwit, all right?"
This seems to mollify your roommate, and his body language loosens. "I'm just fucking with you," he says. You know he's lying, but choose not to say anything. It's not like it's any skin off your nose to change the order of your emergency contacts in your wallet when you get home and have access to a pencil.
"C'mon," you say, shoving your binder, the empty plastic jewelry bag, and your glasses case back into the canvas bag. "I want to go home."
Simon nods. "Of course."
* * *
It takes forever to check yourself out of the hospital, but you finally get it done before the sun sets, and Simon drives you home in his VW Bug. By the time that the local news is airing, you're settled on your couch with a nice TV dinner that Simon microwaved for you himself, and your roommate has disappeared into the nebulous never-never that constitutes his job at the strange used-bookstore-slash-coffee-shop downtown (the one that inexplicably stays open until four in the morning).
You eat the TV dinner, grateful that it isn't hospital food, and start surfing through the items Simon recorded on the DVR while you were away. It's still early, and you've been spending a lot of time sleeping or unconscious lately, but the pain pills you picked up from the pharmacy on the way home have a not-inconsequential kick to them. Which figures. You've always been susceptible to the cottony dreamlike quality of codeine.
By the time prime-time programming is gearing up, you're drowsy and fuzzy and sprawled on the over-stuffed sofa with your limbs at awkward angles, too opiate-drunk to mind.
It's been a while since you thought about your past with Amanda Ebonlee, about how the accident seems to have robbed you of your knowledge of your first date with her. As you float on the couch in a sea of co-codamol-fueled good-will, your mind reaches back through time and gropes for those lost straws. The opening strains of some prime-time drama impel it away from the present, but you still find nothing. There's just a ragged hole in your awareness where those memories should have been that you can't help but probe like tonguing a hole where a missing tooth should be.
A wet plopping sound drags you back to the present.
You don't recall falling asleep, but that's the only explanation your brain can provide for what's happening. Your trusty old CRT television still casts flickering light into the room, but it's subtly changed, as if the pane of glass in front of the screen had melted and rippled to distort the light that shows through it. The cause of the noise is not immediately apparent, your eyes having a difficult time adjusting to the room's dimness. The lamp that you recall Simon leaving on for you has been turned off, leaving the TV as the only source of illumination.
The fact that you don't scream when your eyes finally adjust to the eerie wavering glow only serves as a testament to the codeine's fingers still in your system. You think to yourself that, surely, you must be asleep, but the silver ring on your index finger burns like a brand at that thought, causing you to hiss and twitch in such a way that you nearly slip off the sofa.
The walls of the house you share with Simon look melted, like they were rendered by a drunken Salvador Dali. A film of slime covers the one nearest you, and it pulses slowly as if it were breathing. The wall behind the television looks clean and static, but it reminds you of one time Amanda had been working on a photo-manipulation and had taken the smudge tool and scribbled over the image in frustration. The ceiling, you realize, is the source of the sound that had drawn you back from Memory Lane. It bows ponderously under the weight of... something slick and dark and wet. Something like moss droops in ropes from the edges, creeping closer to sockets that once were light fixtures.
You put your feet on the carpet in front of the sofa, wincing when you feel not synthetic fibers, but something warm, moist, and leathery. The floor looks to be covered in a rug that is stitched together out of hides of varying shades of pink and brown, but they ripple as though still somehow alive under your soles. Squeezing your eyes shut, you dash for the kitchen, navigating by touch and memory alone. Your footfalls sound like dull thuds to your ears, almost indistinguishable from the lazy way your heart beats in your chest, until you cross the threshold into the tiny kitchenette. You open your eyes.
Other than the mess Simon left in the sink, everything is normal. Even the fact that your roommate is a little bit of a slob when it comes to dishes is par for the course, a battle that you long since decided to let slide in favor of training him not to hoard used dishes in his room. Steadying yourself on the door frame, you turn back to face the living room and find it to be exactly as it had been when Simon had left you to go to work: the TV is on, with the volume low, the lamp in the corner casts a pool of incandescent light that doesn't quite fill the room, the carpet is freshly-vacuumed and a little stained, but clean.
There's a knock on your door.
The carpet feels fine between your toes as you pad slowly toward the door; your visitor knocks again before you make it there. You don't bother with the peephole, instead unlocking the deadbolt and throwing it open wide.
Amanda shifts uneasily from one foot to the other, holding a generic plastic bag in her hands. "Hey. Thought I'd stop by on my way home to bring you some food and make sure Simon didn't accidentally strangle you with a blanket or something." She tries to smile, but it doesn't make it to her eyes. "Can I come in?"
You nod dumbly and step aside. As she brushes past you, you smell the familiar scent of her hair products combined with the aroma of cheap Chinese food, and you can feel some of your tension drain away. When you finally manage to get your voice working, you say, "Sorry. Simon gave me one of the painkillers before he left, and it kinda went to my head."
"Do you need to sleep it off? I can go..." Yo
u can't tell if there's relief in her words or disappointment. It doesn't matter, though: you're grateful for her company, and you can't bring yourself to send her away.
"Nah, stay." You check the clock on the cable box; it's after ten. "S'been a while since I had food. Let's eat."
She gets forks from the kitchen (which means she only brought solid foods), and you both sit on the couch to eat. She brought vegetable lo mein for you–which you eat with wild abandon–and shrimp fried rice for herself. After you've eaten half of what's in the Styrofoam, you set your fork down and lean back into the couch cushions, the eerie not-panic of earlier almost entirely forgotten.
"So, tell me what I missed while I was concussed to hell and back?" you say, finally tired of the silence now that you aren't shoveling food into your mouth.
Amanda sets her fork in the rice and purses her lips. It's an expression you are well familiar with, but not one that you can truthfully claim to be fond of. "Well, other than you almost dying, we've got a nightmare client, the stock market's down, Wal-Mart stopped carrying my father's shaving cream, and we nearly lost California to a tsunami caused by a massive earthquake somewhere in the Pacific."
"Wow, and here we've been thinking we'd lose it to the San Andreas fault." It isn't that funny, but Amanda snickers anyway. Even now, she still laughs at your crappy jokes, and that still makes your heart flutter.
Suddenly, you remember the ring in your pocket. Half of your brain remembers Simon packing it in a Ziploc bag with your replacement facial jewelry, and the rest of it remembers a strange cat-shark-boy plucking it from the aether. Before you realize what's happening, your hand is already digging in your pocket and pulling it out. "Hey, this is probably a little random, but I thought you might like this," you say as you hold the band out to her.
