Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

I could taste it before

  even with an ocean between us

  but now that I’m finally this close

  so close

  I can savor all the different flavors

  in her ethereal soup

  Her youth tastes like marmalade

  her uncertainty tastes like black licorice

  with traces of garlic

  where her innocence has melted away

  and a splash of whiskey for her sins

  But before I can sample

  her raw, smoldering nectar that

  my body so longs for

  I’ll have to ignite the inferno within her

  with terror as my accelerant

  turning the life she holds dear

  into an unbearable crucible

  Fortunately, the harder they struggle

  the more savory they taste

  Just like all the others before her

  she will fall

  and when she does

  I’ll be there to drink her soul up

  Every last drop.

  Patchwork Unveiled

  I don’t explode back to life until my limp body crashes into the rocky shore.

  The impact shocks me awake, like someone injected an adrenaline-filled syringe directly into my heart. I’m floating face-up in the shallows. The tide slams me against a cluster of jagged stones, time and time again. My bleary eyes struggle to regain focus, but the stars overhead bleed together into one luminous kaleidoscope.

  I weakly drag myself out of the harbor. Hand over hand, I pull my way up onto shore, until I finally collapse in the sunburnt grass at the water’s edge. A familiar stone monument looms over me. As my eyes adjust, I realize that the granite wall belongs to Fort Independence, the centuries-old embattlement on Castle Island. The fort and the grassy knoll on which it sits overlook Boston Harbor, which means I couldn’t have washed up far from the wreckage.

  The wreckage! The memory of the explosion aboard the Harbor Ghost and the shooting afterward resurfaces through the hazy film coating my brain. I open my mouth to scream for help, for someone to save my friends who could still be out there in the harbor drowning in their own blood, being sucked down into the depths along with the capsized ship.

  Only instead of a scream coming out, I vomit up a gallon of seawater. Even before the floodgates fully close, I crawl back over to the shore’s edge on my elbows and knees.

  As I peer out over the water, I find the smoldering vestiges of the Harbor Ghost being swallowed by the sea. I sob into my hands and watch in horror as the explosion-ravaged hull drags my friends down to a watery grave.

  But through the horror of it all, there’s something not quite right about the scene. At first my eyes can’t quite comprehend what they’re taking in. With each passing second, I can actually see more of the ship than I could before.

  It isn’t sinking into the harbor.

  It’s rising from it.

  The fires that the water had extinguished ignite back into existence. As the boat rights itself, I hear gunshots and screams all over again, but fast and distorted, as though someone pressed rewind on a cassette tape. A geyser of fire erupts from the starboard side, but then rapidly retreats into a pinpoint of light, and the mangled hull magically mends itself where the blast had torn the ship asunder.

  When it’s all over and the lights on the deck flicker back to life, the Harbor Ghost appears exactly as it did when I first boarded earlier tonight—just a trim vessel of steel and sleek glass, sitting out on the placid waters, which stretch from the shore out into the darkness beyond. I hear the distant twinkle of music from the DJ’s speakers and the carefree chatter of students, as though the whole episode of terrorism had never happened.

  And as the ship quickly sails off into the distance, stern first, that’s when my brain finally processes what I’m seeing:

  I just watched the last ten minutes of my life unfold in reverse.

  Logic tells me that this is impossible, that the Harbor Ghost shouldn’t be floating serenely out on the bay, completely unscathed, but I still bristle with excitement. Troy could be on the ship. And Wyatt, and Ivy, and Slade, even Marcie Graham and the Skipper—hell, I’d be happy to see any familiar faces at this point.

  At first, I can’t take my eyes off the boat, like if I stare long enough, someone might magically pop up over the railing and wave at me. As I further emerge from my half-drowned delirium, though, I begin to notice strange details in the environment around me. Like how if my gaze drifts past the Harbor Ghost, across the bay, I should be able to see the lights from the planes on Logan’s runways, or the control tower that looms over the airport. Like how the Boston skyline should rear up over the piers and shipping crates that lie to the west.

  Instead, there is only more space and stars, like someone draped a curtain of endless night over the world around me.

  The ground trembles. The sudden earthquake catches me by surprise, and I nearly topple down the stones, back into the harbor.

  Then the water begins to drain from the bay. It’s like someone uncorked an invisible funnel below. The harbor bleeds out slowly, until all at once, it pours down into the oblivion, leaving a gaping void in its wake.

  The ship goes with it. I watch the Harbor Ghost plummet into nothingness, through a dark bank of clouds that obscures everything below.

  I’m left sitting at the abrupt edge of this strange world, and as I stare sullenly into the clouds beneath me, I’m finally ready to acknowledge that I’m no longer on Earth.

  That this is too real and tangible to be a dream.

  That I most likely drowned in Boston Harbor.

  And that there’s a very good chance I’ve woken up in hell.

  It’s not like I think I did anything wretched enough back on Earth to warrant damnation. I mean, I wasn’t raised religious so I’m no expert on the afterlife—Mom is an ex-hippie, and Dad was a “buffet Catholic” while he was still alive, so they always let me pick and choose what I believed in. But as far as I know, juvenile pranks, high school infidelity, and rejecting marriage proposals weren’t the kind of sins that landed you in the fiery bowels of the afterlife.

  On the other hand, it’s really hard to believe this might be heaven while I’m sitting on a shard of the world I once knew, cold and alone, watching fragments of my life plunge into a stormy abyss.

  Maybe this is all karma or cosmic irony. You spend your final hours throwing a mannequin into the harbor, and you wake up in the afterlife a half-drowned mannequin yourself.

  The feelings of aloneness and “I might be dead”-ness last until I hear the girl’s voice behind me.

  “Oh come on, Renata. Like you really expected me to wear a dress to prom?”

  Ivy! I stagger to my feet and spin around, searching for her. Her voice seems to be coming from Conley Terminal, the sprawling seaside lot next to Fort Independence, where massive ships drop anchor to have their cargo unloaded. The shipping yard is a labyrinth of colorful containers that tall blue cranes pluck from docked ships and stack like gigantic Lego blocks.

  And sure enough, in the space between two stacks of the metal crates, I find Ivy adjusting the suspenders of her zoot suit. Something’s off, though. The outline of her body squirms with light, like she was drawn in watercolor and the paint is bleeding off into the air. She’s not even looking at me; she’s clearly checking out her reflection in a mirror that only she can see, turning side-to-side to admire her suit.

  My first thought is that she must be a ghost, until I realize I’ve seen and heard this all before, three short days ago, while we were out shopping for prom.

  I’m not looking at a ghost.

  I’m reliving a memory.

  Even more bizarre, I hear the softest shadow of my own voice. It’s little more than a murmur, but I don’t need to make out the words, because I remember them, too. “I can’t wait to see Slade’s face when you climb into the limo wearing that.”

  Ivy laughs, growing more indistinct by the
second. She shrugs on the long suit coat, which materializes out of nowhere, then adjusts the hat on her head. “When you ask an unconventional girl to the ball, expect unconventional attire. And count your blessings when she doesn’t show up in a teddy bear costume.”

  I rush forward into the terminal, needing to touch her spectral image, desperate to feel even the most fleeting of contact with a friend.

  Before I get to her, Ivy’s body dissolves into a swarm of embers, swept away by the wind. Once again, I’m left completely alone, shivering as the breeze whispers past my wet dress.

  I lean against the orange shipping container. Rust flakes rain down on my hair and I start to cry. I must be dead … although if that’s the case, there’s something important missing.

  My death.

  There had been no drowning sensation in the harbor, no moment when I could feel my brain dying and my heart stopping as my lungs reached out for oxygen that wasn’t coming. I was alive, ready to give up, sure—but then I was just here.

  It was as though my panic had finally reached a critical point, and my body and soul had been suctioned somewhere else altogether.

  No, this can’t be death, I tell myself. It’s all too real. I grasp for the locket around my neck. I’ve touched the timepiece a thousand times, to the point that it’s almost become a nervous tick, but as a result I’d recognize it by touch even if I were in a lightless room. The grooves where a smiling moon is engraved in the silver. The half-broken clasp that causes it to spring open unannounced. This world may be a facsimile of the world I once knew, but this clock is the real deal.

  Well, almost. The one thing it’s lacking is the familiar tick. The timepiece’s telltale heartbeat has been replaced by a whirring, the gears within gone into overdrive. I flip it open.

  Not only are the hands spinning far too rapidly, they’re spinning counterclockwise.

  And as they pick up speed, the watch grows hot against my skin.

  Slam.

  Something pounds against the inside of the crate that I’m leaning against. I shriek and collapse to the dirt in my attempt to get away.

  Slam. Slam-slam.

  These hits are so powerful that the metal buckles out where my head used to be. Something hisses against the inside—a nail scratching along the corrugated walls. And then a voice, this time one that I don’t recognize, rasps from within:

  “No matter how far the clock winds back,

  No matter how far your little legs carry you,

  Osiris will always find you …”

  I stagger away. I can definitively say that creepy voice coming out of storage crate does not belong to any of my earthly memories.

  Slam.

  This one comes from the shipping container across the row. Then more pounding from inside the crates ahead. I take off running in the opposite direction from which I came, my legs fueled by an all-consuming dread. The shipping yard is a maze, and I am the rat. As I flee, the shipping containers rattle and shake as unseen creatures within attempt to escape. The terminal transforms into a cacophony of inhuman voices growling the same things over and over.

  “Everyone you’ve ever touched is doomed.”

  “Osiris will take everyone from you.”

  “He always does and he always will.”

  Meanwhile, the ground begins to tremble once more. When I chance a look over my shoulder, I watch as first the fort and then the yard behind me succumb to the same fate as the harbor, granite and asphalt and grass and steel all crumbling and cascading into the nothingness below. The skin-crawling voices continue to utter horrible, cryptic threats even as they go over the edge.

  “Run fast as your legs can carry you, little phoenix”

  “Let’s see you rise from the ashes now!”

  “Let us out and we can help you.”

  “Yes, Renata, set us free …”

  In another few moments, I’ll be joining them on the long drop into the all-devouring death clouds.

  Or at least be crushed by the shipping crates, I think as they moan and shift around me. The containers ahead, stacked five high to either side, tip precariously over my running lane.

  No, no, no, I chant silently. Even though my waterlogged lungs burn like napalm and my shins ache from pounding on the pavement, I try to clear my mind. It’s just like running the bases. You can beat the throw home.

  I inject the mental nitrous into my veins and turn up the heat. My body flies forward with what little energy it has left. The stacked crates ahead utter a horrific groan as they prepare to come crashing down, and I can practically feel the asphalt already unraveling beneath my feet.

  I don’t look up as I sprint beneath the falling containers. Their shadows swallow me, as though a giant finally plucked out the right Jenga block, and the whole tower’s collapsing. I lower my shoulder, charge forward the last few steps, and let a guttural scream roar up from my belly.

  Boom. The containers rain down behind me, and their impact rattles the earth so hard that it launches me up into the air. I go flying, expecting not to land at all, but to go tumbling into the hungry hell clouds.

  So it’s to my immediate surprise when I fly over a chainlink fence and land on a forgiving patch of grass. I immediately clamber to my feet, ready to keep running.

  But the earth goes still as suddenly as the quake had started. On the other side of the fence, the ground ends in a jagged line where the oblivion reclaimed Castle Island and all the demonic crates. And on my side …

  I’m standing on my high school’s softball field. The dugouts lie empty, except for my favorite bat, which leans up against the cement half-wall. It has my father’s name—Walter—carved into the wood. The bleachers are devoid of the normal cheering fans, but the scoreboard in the back with our minotaur mascot has been turned on. The red, backlit numbers read:

  Home: 1

  Visitors: 0

  As if this bizarre world weren’t governed by enough impossibilities already, the Daedalus campus is in Reverie, Massachusetts … which in reality lies a hundred miles west of Boston and the shipping yard I just narrowly escaped.

  Here, the two have been stitched haphazardly together like two squares on a living patchwork quilt.

  As I wander exhaustedly out into the diamond, all I can think is, I just want to go home. With any luck, I knocked myself out on the dive into the harbor, and the explosion and the gunfire and my vacation to this patchwork world have all been some comatose dream. Best case scenario, I’ll wake up in a hospital bed with my Mom and Troy and even little Toto barking next to an IV bag to welcome me back from Oz. Only in place of ruby slippers that I can tap together to get the hell out of here, I have only the dirt that’s stuck to my wet feet. It doesn’t feel particularly magical.

  On a whim, I close my eyes. I’ve practiced, played, and sweated on this field for two years now, and made a mountain of memories. This strange instinct awakens in me, bubbling up from my subconscious. It’s telling me that if I can somehow reach out and grasp one of those memories …

  I let my skin feel the touch of the mountain breeze.

  Listen to the echo of the Daedalus fans, chanting my name.

  Curl my fingers around an imaginary softball.

  Revel in that unsettling but gratifying moment of release at the end of my windup.

  The memory begins to coalesce around me when it’s interrupted by a man’s voice.

  “No memory is safe for you, phoenix.”

  My eyes spring open. A man in a chainmail hood and some sort of medieval white garb strides through the grass. His sun-seared face tugs at something lodged deep in my brain. The memory stays buried, but when I pull at it long enough, I filter out two things:

  I know this man. Somewhere deep in the cosmic expanse, I’ve met him before.

  And he sure as hell isn’t a friend.

  He draws closer to my position in the field. “No day shall provide shelter for you,” he goes on.

  I back away, frantically searching for the so
ftball memory he interrupted. But it’s hard to concentrate when I spot the hidden blade slide out from beneath his sleeve.

  “And when you realize that there’s no haven from the sphinx’s deadly touch, then you shall truly know torment.” He raises the blade, which shimmers with a liquid coating, right as I lock onto that feeling of releasing a softball. The cheers from my invisible teammates echo from the dugouts.

  I trip on the lip of the mound and fall backward—but I never land in the dirt. The world around me slows and brightens, and I experience that familiar tearing, panic sensation in my chest.

  This time it’s much more painful. It feels like my consciousness, my soul, is being forced through a cheese grater, and a painful heat erupts around my body. I scream. I cry. And as the invisible fire consumes me from within, I have a final, ridiculous thought:

  Please blow my ashes away to a better place.

  Ravine

  April

  There is the nausea.

  There is the blistering heat over the surface of my skin.

  There is the world snapping into place.

  There is the green grass around me, and the cheering beyond that.

  Then there is a crack like a gunshot, and a spherical white missile sailing right toward my heart.

  At the last second, the softball dips low. It slams into my stomach like a boxer’s fist. The pain is so sharp and intense that I actually forget about the slow burn of my flesh. I drop to the pitcher’s mound, curled up in the fetal position with my hands wrapped around my stomach and my cheek pressed into the white rubber strip.

  As my bleary eyes stop watering, I realize that the horizon over the dugout isn’t the star-crowded sky from the purgatory I just escaped. It’s the rose-tinged violet of morning. Of dawn. On earth.

  I’m back.

  I’m alive.

  If that softball hadn’t laid me out, I’d tap dance my way around the bases out of pure joy. Then again, maybe it’s too early to celebrate—this could all be just another visceral death dream.