LJIdol: 3 Strikes - Week 4 - The axe forgets; the tree remembers
The dual blades tear through the fabric of the old crone’s ragged clothes and pierce her frail body underneath. A muffled grunt escapes her lips as she tilts her head and peers ahead unfocused, not meeting the eyes of her attacker. Her scowl turns inwards as she lets out a low-pitched hiss, showing off a partial row of broken jagged teeth. Then she breaks into a grin, and begins to laugh.
--
^No. 1
The air around me tastes like burning metal. I look down, or rather up, to see my feet dangling above me. My right shoulder is crying out in agony. As am I. I am not yet seven years old, and my world has literally turned upside down. A blinding light dances across the glass beside me, showing off fractals that seem to never end. The distorted shape of a man’s head appears on the other side. He speaks muffled words I cannot understand, but I can tell they are panicked and rapid. I can just make out my name on his lips. Thierry! Then there is an explosion of sound and the glass shatters into droplet-sized gems that rain sideways past my face, scarring its surface like a meteor shower hitting the moon. I turn away and for the first time I see my brother, eyes wide, unblinking. Somehow, clear as a bell through the din, I hear it. Snip. I see you then for the first time. You are carrying a massive set of shears in your hands, and you are walking away. Before I can call out, I am yanked by my injured arm up and away, my brother’s lifeless body fading in the distance. I am screaming out his name. But it is you that is seared into my memory.
--
“Why are you doing this to me?”
I thought I had imagined you. Or, at least, they all convinced me that I had. Random synapses firing in an attempt to make sense of the senseless. Not that I understood how my brain functioned at that age, but by the time I could, I still hadn’t really come to terms with my brother’s death. Or with what or who you were. I tried to bury it. I tried to wipe you from my memories. But you haunted me in dreams. And then, in time, you returned to haunt me in my waking hours.
Six different psychiatrists put my family into crippling debt, and not one ever figured out the truth.
“I think you owe me a great big apology”
--
^No. 8
Hospitals are the worst of juxtapositions, immaculate yet constantly contaminated. This room reeks of iodine and antibacterial scrubs mixed with acne and damp feet. Machines overload the audio spectrum, not with small repetitive beeps like they show in the movies, but with loud scraping noises as pumps inflate and deflate and motors strain under too many years of overuse. The fluorescent lights, clearly frustrated by not being able to be heard, flicker wildly in an attempt to get my attention. The air is dry and cold, yet her hand is like ice in comparison. I shiver involuntarily, contorting myself in the straight-back metal chair, and squeeze my eyes shut to avoid crying.
My stomach growls, and I am startled awake, the echo of that sound ringing in my head. Snip. Somehow, through days of sitting and doing nothing, I am still tired enough to fall asleep, still scared enough to forget to eat. Still young enough not to understand.
You’ve come and gone. I missed it. And now my mother is gone too. I missed it all.
--
“I feel my hatred grow all the more extreme.”
Indiscriminate and unprovoked, you have wandered through my life, stealing everyone away, removing my support system. Cut down in their prime, not even a chance to see that movie or finish that book they were reading. It was the last in a seven book series, you know. You had to know. You knew everything about them, about me. How else could you have been so thorough?
“Can this world really be as sad as it fucking seems?”
__
^Nos. 32 through 49
War is no place for making new friends. Yet I have. Good ones. They appreciate me. I understand them. They are literally my brothers in arms. We are not family. We are something more. We are a single unit. We are hungry for action. We are raw.
And we get cooked.
I lie half buried in remnants of makeshift shelters and dislocated earth. Shell shocked.
And once again, here you are, my own personal delusion moving rapidly through the battleground, this time on our side of the line. I know what to expect now, and I fixate on your shears, slicing rapidly as a shower of threads fall to the ground in your wake. Snip. Snip. Snip. So many good men, their lives cut short in an instant. But not mine. You pass me by. You don’t even seem to know I am there.
--
“There's nothing left for me to hide / I lost my ignorance, security and pride”
You left me untouched, yet scarred. I never had a real childhood. I never felt safe. I had multiple adulthoods, yet I never felt grown up. I remembered every time. I remembered every face. I thought I was insane. I thought I was a god. I thought I was damned. I felt superior. I felt unworthy. I felt immortal. I felt abandoned.
Until one day I didn’t. One day, I finally felt complete.
“I'm all alone in a world you must despise”
--
^No. 64
Sabine. She is beauty and grace personified. Her light defines the darkness. Her voice reaches me through the discord. Her touch awakens my burned out nerves. Her smell makes me want to breathe once again.
Sabine. She refills an empty vessel I thought was too full of holes to ever be useful. She provides a new beginning, and a dream of a better future.
Sabine. The old faces fade. The memories forget to haunt me. Life has color and shape. And love.
And then I see you again, and I hear that sound. Snip. And my mind goes black.
--
“You made me throw it all away / My morals left to decay”
I’m on my way to you now. I am tired of being on your schedule, my life impacted by your whim. So I will bring you to me. If I kill them, you will have to come. If I kill enough of them, I will get my chance. And then I will turn this all back on you. One day, it will be your thread being cut.
“How many you betray? / You've taken everything”
--
The crone’s laugh dies out slowly, but the grin remains. She looks down at her own weapon plunged into her midriff and smiles a little wider, before turning her eyes back in the general direction of the old man who has attacked her. Her voice is harsh, but clear and powerful.
“And who, pray tell, might you be?”
“Really, Atropos? After all this time, you don’t know who I am?”
“Not just yet, I don’t.” And she doesn’t. She is looking around in search of his voice.
“You have been around me my entire life. You killed my brother. You killed my mother. You killed my enemies. You killed my friends. You killed everyone. You killed Sabine.” The man’s hand trembles as he screams her name and the shears nearly slip from his grasp. “Snip - gone, just like that. Snip - gone. Snip - gone. Chopped them all down like desert trees, leaving me isolated and lost. Merde! Even L’Arbre du Ténéré is less alone. Everyone I ever knew - cut away by your damn shears.”
“I have been the bringer of the end for billions. It is who I always have been. It is who I always will be.”
“I have been chasing you for decades now, seen you in the eyes of my victims. You come every time, tirelessly. Snip. Snip. Snip. Until there is no one else left alive. And yet, every time, you pass over me. You ignore me. You leave me there to pick up the pieces of my shattered damned life.” Tears come unbidden. Memories washing over him, making it hard to concentrate, hard to speak further.
“I see threads, and I cut them. I never know a person before their time, or during, and I rarely see them again afterwards. My siblings drew those tasks. And all for the better, I think. I cannot imagine what this job would take from me otherwise.”
“You knew… every… single… one… of them. Can you honestly tell me you don’t know me?”
“I never saw you before. You were not yet a part of my world.”
He pulls her closer, their foreheads nearly touching.
“How about now?” The question comes out in a guttural mix of anger and anguish.
Her eyes finally focus on his face and her expression softens. She pulls her shears out of his hand and then out of her own frail but ultimately unharmed body. She turns them around, grasping them in her right hand. He steps back and, for the last time, he sees a single thread laid out before him, draped across her left palm.
“Yes, Thierry. I do. I see you now.”
And finally, she does.
Snip.