The Day My Dream Died

58 - Concerning Retrograde

— 58 —

Concerning Retrograde

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Pain wakes Lise. The cart rattles, jostled side-to-side. She rolls half off the edge, catching herself with a flung foot. Pain transfixed in a precarious stretch to protect her chest. Her thigh burns as she strains to push herself back onto the cart without her arms. The cart is shoved again. Her leg caves. Spine grinding against the cart's edge, her knees hit the hard ground. Biting tongue.

"Let off me! Off me!"

"Eclait?!"

"Let off!"

"Shut up, dimmy."

"Ow! By Harmony, let off me!"

Lise interrupts the tumult with a bark, "Stop!"

It takes her a moment to register the silence following, half-expecting not to be heard. Another moment to collect herself. She struggles to her feet, a steadying hand on the cart, and turns to face the three. Their faces are too dark to make anything of them, backlit by the fire, and bodies a splay of limbs turned uncanny in silhouette—tangled in their jockeying for control of the one of them which had a hand on the cart opposite her.

She hobbles around to them, keeping balance by the cart, and by the fire's shifting light sees it is Bente who jostled it.

"Why?"

Her question apparently serving as permission to move once more, they come away from each other.

"I don't know, I just woke up and they were already fighting. I tried to stop them but–"

Bente cuts Pelanea off, "You!" He points a finger at Lise, "Yooouuu!" The anger in his eyes reverberates through his tremulous motions.

"Why?" Lise repeats—this time to him alone, tender.

His face undulates, flickering through pain and rage and despair in rapid succession, cycling back through before settling as a twisted compromise of the three. At this, she shifts, sensing his violence near. "You!" His voice comes forced out, and as his eyes trace confusion, his yet outstretching arm quaking, she sees the fractures. "You did this... to me! To me! Did this!"

Again she sees the conflict cycle his expression, and she thinks he is going to lunge. Eclait seems to think the same, moving forward to grab his arm. Instead, his knees buckle and he drops, weeping, and from his open throat a long, unbroken bellow rips. Watching, stricken, the three stand round him, trying to align an understanding. He bellows for help. From the empty night resounds harsh silence.

Collapsed between them, he curls into fitful sobs, finally coming to a sleep more restless than the last, leaving behind questions and the strained quiet he created. It is none of them but the rasping crackle and skitter of the char-black firewood caving which lances the silence like a tensed boil.

"I need to sit down," Lise sighs.

Eclait listens but doesn't speak as she and Pelanea puzzle over the Bente situation around the fire. Even when they cast a question her way she remains as she is, a slight shake of the head, watching with peculiar eyes. Lise notes it, but is too preoccupied with Pelanea's relentless questioning to make anything of it. Despite her refusal to contribute, in this, there stretches a strange, delicate line between the three.

Pelanea lets up when she realizes the limits of Lise's own understanding, having retread the path from cart to light and buildings, to their split ways, to what effect the malevolent structures might have done him. And the why. The same why Lise asked of Bente himself. Why target me?

"All I can conceive of is that he blames me for the buildings." She pauses to think over it. "I don't suppose we should expect rationality from him right now."

"What you say is true." Eclait speaks for the first time. "But the way you say it ain't."

Lise shakes her head, "What? I'm not sure I catch your meaning."

"He does blame you, and he isn't rational, but his blaming you isn't irrational."

"You're saying he is right to blame me."

"Justified." She corrects. The tone Eclait had taken is not hostile, but that of speaking plain. "You led him there."

"I didn't tell him to go into the buildings. I did the very opposite."

She shrugs, "I didn't say you did it on purpose. I said you did it. And there's still the man."

"The man?"

"The man who was there and then was not."

"I didn't see a man—besides Bente."

"Hm." Eclait purses her lips and says no more.

Lise is left with herself in the silence.