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i want to try this
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Mar 14, 2023 00:09
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| # ¿ Sep 14, 2024 22:00 |
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Pirates! 1760 words Constructed atop, around, and within itself, the city’s angles and surfaces broke and rose an effortless and ever-evolving Möbius knot of cement and steel and glass and wiring, weaving a mesh that collected the lost, disappeared or disappearing, in a clot at the sieve where the districts tossed what they could no longer exploit. The metropole’s tangled fingers spread outward through the mountains, dwindling into the forest at such depths that sinking was simpler than, often preferable to, abandoning. So bodies remained. All roads out, it seemed, eventually led through their curves and meandering again inward and downward. Staying un-anything, a flickering shadow cast behind the hollow sockets of dead buildings, was easy in that sprawl. The census just made rough guesses anymore. Sunlight crept in through a lattice of rust-eaten steel and Magna’s eyes wrapped around the patchwork of another day. The chipped bronze hands of the analog clock, crooked on the sloped gas tank above them, said noon or near enough, so they rolled off the mattress, dodging vengeful springs in the slow push to waking. In a shattered rear view, they wiped the crust from their eyes and their nostrils and the corners of their mouth, studying how their hair faded its pink back to amber. Content with it all, they crawled out from their hollow beneath heaped cars into a junkyard heaped past full, blanched to dusty gray beneath the day’s blue expanse, all of it abandoned decades ago by the zoning department, left to chip and decay and sink another inch whenever the rains came. Scrambling atop a taller mound, Magna pointed their phone up, sweat already refreshing last night’s layer of grime in the day’s brutish heat, Swarms of doves dotted the sky in disintegrating clouds, migrating outward from the delivery center north of the yard, but Magna’s scans picked up no armed protection for the helpless birds. It was hunting weather. A rifle reported in the distance. A drone popped above. Phone plotting out the trajectory of its spiraling descent, Magna scrambled down in a cloud of clumsy dust, following beeps and intuition full-speed through the networks of passageways their size gave them access to, brash through warehouses and carefully through the broken glass of emptied storefronts, down through dry socket sewers and out into collapsed basements, scrambling up junked stairwells and across debris resting forgotten in the forgotten district. Taking crow’s nest in what had once housed a factory, Magna surveyed the dropsite: a notched lot between the backs of buildings, more an accident of the alleyways that fed it than a space itself. The shot had landed true, opened one of the bird's twin motors to the air, its dying propulsion softening the crash enough that Magna saw only a few dents in the package left stories below. Their phone was still, picked up no beacons whirring distress to the SOSes–shoot-on-sight security. It seemed then as clean a kill as any. Magna waited. Magna waited. Anyone capable of that clean a shot, they reckoned, wouldn’t be wandering around looking for the bird in slack-jawed “aw shucks” bewilderment. Even then, these things happened. A security detail maybe picked them up en route, or someone was hunting for the simple thrill of the sport, suburban kids racing fast cars down to where patrols didn’t patrol, far from their own green and manicured backyards from which they could offend powerful neighbors. Even the locals had gotten into the habit of dropping drones as practice or defiance, no intention of plucking their prey. The birds made good targets for the Blackbeards and the Robin Hoods alike, and some hunters would spend afternoons clearing the skyline without ever wandering near the existential threats orbiting the dropsites. Explanations existed. That did not mean Magna had to like them. They set their phone to scan for human life at a range the battery couldn’t support for long. Dragging a squawking bench to the window, Magna waited, sitting legs crossed, hunched forward, forearms over knees, heart settling until three dots pinged their screen. Sixty yards, give or take. Leisurely advancing in weaving skips. Definitely not SOS. They fired a message to a few friends who hunted the area: “out and about?” The dots paused. “36 x ironworks? that’s us.” Lennox, Wetherington, Rufus. Reassuring. “coming up on the alley now. how we looking.” Magna gave the all clear and watched through the pane of grease. Lennox, as usual, led. He was the youngest of them all by a year, but also the tallest and the widest by a head and an arm. Aside from a few scraggly locs held back with a weighted hoop, he’d shaved himself all but bald since Magna last saw him. Wetherington was second, average in every possible way, as though he had been allowed to design himself and hadn't diversified from shooting. Rufus, flouncy bob tickling the collar of a grease-stained overshirt, ripped sleeves flaunted the bulk of vascular musculature, brought up the rear. When Magna wasn’t around, she played spotter. All of the time, though, she tinkered, made sure that everything they needed worked and would continue to work. Lennox stopped in the alley below, though his chest’s imperious puffing-out seemed to take one extra step. Despite his youth, his size fingered him as the one that had to answer to authority, and he had, consciously or not, taken to inflating himself into the role. He tucked his head, disconnecting from the graffitied walls, the dumpsters, the broken glass, the abandoned car's burned-out husk. Magna tapped fingers to thigh, counting down. At zero, Lennox looked up, sun glancing across his brow, and opened his eyes wide above a wide and closed smile. “Caught you,” he mouthed. Jesucristo. Kid would have made it far SOSing. Magna pried the window open against dulled fingernails, waving down and shouting beyond the tumbling, drifting, clacking waterfall of paint chips, “Why’d you take so long?” “Why you just waiting? Carrion-rear end,” Wetherington rasped back. Lennos, with his officious air of vaulted and holy disconnect, crouched over the drone, hooking a finger into the blown-out shell where the motor once whirred to lift it from the dust and asphalt. He turned to Rufus for a conversation Magna had heard enough times to summarize what details the humid distance muffled: how’s it look, asks Lennox. Get it flying in no time, says Rufus. Let’s get to it, says Lennox. Wetherington wandered, as always, idly kicking oil cans between snapping his rifle to practice targets that existed only in his imagination. The open alley was an echo chamber and boomed Lennox’s voice. “Coming down?” “Meet up at the street if it’s anything good.” “Uh huh. Weren’t your bird.” Wetherington tapped his rifle over his shoulder, shaking his head. “I spotted for you kids. You’re just the gun.” “A rifle and a gun,” he thrust his hips. Magna held one middle finger high, spat accurately enough that it almost caught him. “If you shot that good, your scrawny rear end maybe be useful.” “Children. Children.” Handing the drone’s husk off to Rufus, who wandered away investigating her new toy, Lennox turned his attention to the shipping package, bouncing it back and forth between his hands, checking the distribution of weight, mass, within. From Magna’s view, it seemed light, either frivolous or extremely lucrative, but Lennox’s eyebrows arched as he examined the delivery label. He glanced back up to Magna with a curious grin before slipping the boxcutter from his belt and pointing it into the tape. Elevated though they were, Magna went rear end to concrete when the light pierced out. The sound came only as shockwave. Haloed in shattered glass, all full of nothing. A light without source or destination. A body adrift from body, thrumming only the district’s own dilapidated rhythm. Magna floated in that space, an ocean abyss absent all but a void which itself lacked boundaries or particulars. The world pulsing at their peripheries, Magna was not dead but contorted, host to the humming self-important suffocating negation of sound, and slowly realizing that lack of death, they sat upright, lightly decorated with glass shards and splinters from which trickled thin beads of warmth, rolling balls of hands against the aching in their back before perching, head through the gnarled mouth that moments before had framed a window. Char blackened the first few stories of the building opposite. The alley’s once-recognizable waste scattered ashen in the scorched radius where Magna’s friends had stood. Nothing noteworthy was left of Lennox. Wetherington’s rifle had embedded itself below Wetherington’s slumped head. The red leaked free around him. One of his arms, the endless possibilities that a gun within it offered, was gone. Simply gone. A trail of blood and black moved along the edges and Magna followed it to Rufus, scorched and leaking, either blown free or crawled to collapse against a squat set of steps below a door blasted from its hinges. Inhaling only when conscious of the hollow inside their lungs, Magna stared, marking three empty bodies until Rufus’s arm shot forward, gripping at the door frame. She tried to pull herself up, but her leg gave and slammed her to an angle that let Magna study it: what had seemed intact was not, was a thigh and a shin with no knee to connect their functions. She reached up again, clumsy fingers failing to grip, and tumbled to what remained of her side. Sirens swam through the concrete clotting Magna’s hearing. Not cops, not city. It was the trochaic wailing of the SOSes. Rufus pivoted, her eyes rising from the soot to meet Magna’s, to linger for a moment in silence, in confusion. And Magna fled, tearing over boxes and bags and overturned shelves and tools between them and the stairwell, down, tossing their body diagonal over railings to cut corners between flights of stairs, vision pumping tight nodes, spiderwebs of flashing lights that pulsed at every wall they rebounded from on their spree down, down into the sewers through caved-in bricks, out the way they came in, without the caution that buoyed them through the years, fleeing the constant whir, the two quick pops that punctuated it, and then fleeing the silence that flooded into the wake and beyond, into communities paved over and left to crumble, snagging on rebar used as ladders, leaving flecks of skin on the rough concrete in the tunnels used to construct the strata of the behemoth above, into unmapped darknesses where no life flourished, past where sound or light could chase them, Magna, Magna, Magna fled.
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Mar 18, 2023 15:41
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Prompt: Reusing title Pirates! (week 372) Goes with Pirates! above. my bad!
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Mar 18, 2023 20:04
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