Tatemae

Day 4 - Mid-Day - Chalk fire

The cell reminds me a little bit of a room in my house. Ash's room.

He was in there so rarely that I guess one really couldn't call it his house. It had more in common with a camp ground maybe. Ash's real home was the Void. The Void was his home. The sun was his mother and the moon was his father, and they were all he really needed to survive in the bleakness that is life beyond the city.

When the earth had smiled upon him, he'd come to our home with hearts stuffed into mason jars and maybe a scrap or two he'd found in the Void for Mom or Dad. There was a lot of weird junk out there from people past. Old technology no one knows how to fix, scraps of cloth, or sometimes something like wood. He would place all his found and hunted treasures on the dinner table and we'd gobble at them until it was time for him to go. This wasn't a home to him. It was an apartment he was paying rent at in the form of food and exotic bribes.

His room looks just like this cell. Dark. Abandoned. Unlivable. He rarely slept in the thing except maybe once or twice a month. Most of the time he was out in the Void sleeping under the corpses of dead trees or within the cold grasps of caves carved out of the earth. He had many rooms, but the one at my house was not one of them. It wasn't really his.

It was ours and we gave it to him only when he paid for it in food.

I guess that's why Dad always had a grudge against me. How can you pay rent when you can't hunt for the currency?

My cell is just as dark and empty as his room is. It has the same tired shade of gray and muck where the walls are beginning to crack. The slabs of rock are too thick though for there to be anyway to break the walls apart. How did they get Matri out? How do the Fos plan to get me out? How did they even get me in?

Oh god! It's so hot now! The mid-day sun pours into the cell in such a way that even the farthest edges where the shadows settle seems lighter. Just this morning I felt I would freeze to death, but now... now I feel like I'm melting.

I fall.

What's the point of standing? I'm too tired for standing.

The ground makes me feel a little colder, but not by much.

My arm hits something. It's a white rock that feels chalky in my fingers. Powder rubs off on the tiny black flecks where Kurosaphir is still imbedded in my fingertips. How have I not noticed it before? I grip it in my hand and feel something within it shifting.

It's left a tiny white mark on the floor. It's like the rocks they sometimes pull out of the mines. The type of rocks that cause cave-ins and kill men. They're too soft to be used for anything, so they get scattered behind and eventually stomped into white dirt.

White dirt...

I take the rock and press its pointed tip onto a side of the wall. I look at the piece of white chalk from below on my back and gawk as the edges I draw form a white Fos heart.

Food.

God I'm so hungry.

I just want to draw food.

I move around on the floor like an animal, outlining the entire bottom of the cave with pictures of soft tissue, aortas, and frying pans. I'm so hungry that the only possible thing I could draw is food.

And someone to eat the food. Scooting to the other side, I draw a family of four sitting down at a dinner table. There's a mom like my mom, and a dad like my dad, and a boy about my age (though arguably it's hard to tell since he's only a stick figure), and a forth. I'm not sure who they remind me of. Together the two dimensional family sits at a table made of pretty white marble and eats a three course meal with Fos hearts steamed, grilled, and fried to their heart's content. I'm drooling now. God, I'm so hungry!