A Most Spectacular Rift

Chapter 2

"They're dead," Huncho spat. Why are the beds empty? Why?

And he wanted to hit something - a vision danced in his head. It was his fist slamming through the wooden framework of the longhouse with vigor and velocity. Huncho huffed his chest down, and up, then began to pace back and forth in the longhouse, the dry, squalid particles that drifted around in the air like his mind right now; it was mushy, and stuffed, and he couldn't think right, and it vacillated too much. Was this insanity?

There used to be people in these beds. Dandy, jovial faces. Secor slept there, he always snored and dossed on his side. Dawyn used to be on that one, with one of the legs of the bed sharded, the wooden splinters dissecting each other like teeth. Cassio always slept weird; he was there; no, he used to. Used to. Used to.

Huncho tried a hoarse whimper but it turned out to be a raving laugh.

Tears brimmed his eyes like rheum.

"They're all dead."

The floorboards replied to him in failed violin, and his mind was not flowing right, it was muffled with pricks of pain. Why was his head so fluffy, so blocky? The sight around him blurred. The beds looked like one, two, three, four beds floating around each other, overlapping each other, glitching?

His head was still so blocky; he should hack it with something, hit his head against something maybe, bang it.

Huncho fell backwards, his head in molten fire, onto a bed, and it didn't bounce - it was rock. Rock hard. His elbows dug into the grooves, and with nothing to do, he stretched all his fingers outwards like webs, spinning them outwards, knurling them to the musty ceiling, green things dripping down like bilge water from a pipe. He groomed his eyes outwards, opening his eyelids till the world spinned on the tip of his pupil. He opened his mouth, and breathed lithely, strained with it, breathed like a dead man, and then curled his stretched, white fingers to a tight, knuckle fist, the veins bulging out one by one till they looked like vines on his rockened fist, and even though the terpsichorean manevillins of sleep made it painful to tighten his fingers so inwards, though he did it, he did it still, like a spring pushing downwards, though wanting to leap, like a bird preening its feathers for flight, not knowing that it was a hen unendowed with that aspect.

"Huncho, are you okay?" Enzo's voice drifted.

They're dead. It's just you and me. "No, I'm too tired." Taciturnly, he said. Enzo seemed to be as aphoristic, not his jocular self that bought laughs and won beers.

Huncho felt hollow inside as if termites fested on his living soul, eating him apart.

He wanted to scream. It was as if bundles of Listrun lights were blaring in his eyes and mind. He couldn't focus. A fever, that's what it was called. A fever. Why was his head so block-like? His ears, stuffed?

Was that Lior over there playing rustic tunes on his fiddle, dexterously using his fingers.

Fever?

No, it wasn't. It was just mental pain, the agony of bereavement. He need to go into apatheia, feel nothing, do nothing, rest a bit, then get a -

"I need to move to a new cabin right? Will you leave then?"

Enzo groaned, turning like an alligator's death roll, but much, much slower and instead of ridged scales, a linen sheet draped in sweat. "No, they shut em down. It's too dangerous, after what happened. We're jobless. How much Russells do you have?"

Huncho knobbed his eyes inward, then tilted his head to the side as if trying to get water out of his right ear. "I dunno. I dunno. Not enough."

His head was warm, but his arms, his body, his abdomen, his chest, his legs, they were cold. Ice cold as if the stuff under his skin that squirmed like live gristle was in fact streamy, chill-shotted water. Cold. And cold with slick sweat beads, like the dew on a leaf. Or like saggy, resinous oil on stone.