Fiction: Scabs
She remembers smoke and the taste of ash, she remembers hot liquid bones and the empty night sky, she remembers screaming and nothing more. Then there is only cold water, the pain in her bones, the scalds on her shoulders. One where it entered, and the other where it rests.
Someone is thundering on the bathroom door, but she can't really make out the words.
This is the bathroom in her house, that much is certain. It's familiar. She knows the curves of the tub, that the cold tap needs a little work to force it open. It's darker in here than it ought to be. She can see the cruft typical of share-house bathrooms - dead razors, expired shampoos, the one lone empty bottle of which no-one will claim ownership long enough to discard - and it seems that little time has passed. Territorial markings, spoor. It seems much the same as she remembers it.
There's a candle on the rim of the bath, sooty and damp.
The voice at the door is insistent. The skin on her shoulder is burning, even under the rush of icy water, and she sees the flicker of a tail curl around her ribcage, sear its way over her breast. Her whole body is a tangle of muscle pain, unfamiliar aches, her skin itches, her fingers and toes are curled into painful knots.
The voice has given up, and is retreating. The light is creeping in. Dawn? Maybe the voice was complaining about the noise, she remembers noise -
scream like the sky being torn apart, shatter of glass, howl of twisting metal, triumph!
- but it's quiet now. The faint suggestion of birdsong, somewhere far away.
She turns off the water and slithers out of the tub. The floor creaks and bows beneath her as she moves, a small woman on floor-boards that have been sodden for decades. The palms of her hands are raw, her nails ragged and torn. She salvages what is possibly the last clean towel from the rail, wraps it over her protesting skin. A grey towel. One of Michael's, an old flatmate. He doesn't live here any more, so he can't take a stab at her about the blood.
She palms the candle.
Wet footprints to her room. Small, a part of a porch that was part of a laundry that was part of a stairwell back before the wars. Tiny windows painted shut a generation past, milky with dirt and fragile as eggshell. Old house. They cannot even say that its bones are good anymore. She feels it moving, subtly, under her feet, shifting gently in response to the settling soil and the moving air. The quiet hours of the morning are punctuated with its sighs and the rattle of leaves and wildlife on the tin of the roof. It will be wretchedly hot in here by noon.
She has a mean little bed, a narrow little cupboard, a straight-backed chair and a tiny ancient desk, covered in clothes, makeup, sheet music, books, makeup, dust, leaves and hair. Debris. Her bed is a nest of coats and blankets and sheets and flat brown pillows in floral cases so faded they are a uniform shade of yellow.
She drops the towel on the back of the chair, clears a spot on the tabletop. Books in a pile on the floor, everything else brushed to the edges. A palisade of cotton and paper. There's nothing to be done for the greasy smears of makeup on the tabletop. The candle in the centre. Her skin is already dry, her hair beginning to steam.
They'd gone out, gone out to drink and dance. They'd gone to a party in a paddock, piled into a van that belonged to a friend of a friend, someone she vaguely knew. Driven hours out of town. There were bands there was beer, brewed on the property by people she knew. Some sort of coming-of-age, a twenty first birthday.
The world is quiet and slumbering and she perches on the edge of the chair, runs her finger on the dirty rim of the candle. She has no idea who it belongs to, if they even still live here. The wax is beaded with water, the wick is damp. She feels the thing on her skin moving, coiling in her lap like a cat, seething, its wings unfurling on her thighs.
She'd taken something experimental that one of her housemate's boyfriend's uncle's best friend had cooked up, a little pill red as sunset and emblazoned with wings. Something perky. She never liked the sodden feeling of being truly drunk, and this was going to be a long night. They were so far from the city lights that the sky was dusted with more stars than she'd ever seen, a townie with no real connection to the countryside. She'd stared for too long, till her neck hurt and someone she knew pressed a paper cup of punch into her hand and towed her away to the music. Too loud, too grating, too many people, and she beat a retreat out past the circle of the light, into the trees, a grotto of eucalpyt, sharp and fragrant.
She pinches the wick, squeezing out the moisture.
It was a big property - a great flat spread of scrub-land peppered with trees. There was a small copse, dark, quiet, away from the thunder of the band and the press of unfamiliar human flesh. It had to be quiet. She found they'd lit a fire there, in a old oil drum surrounded by scavenged car seats, somewhere comfortable, calm. Not alone - one figure, too close, hands gripping the metal rim of the drum, knuckles white in the firelight. Shouldn't he be burning, she thought, why isn't he burning?
Just the smallest wisp of steam.
Just the smallest wisp of steam, the pop and crackle of old branches in flames, and she reached out to push him away, surely he's just too drunk for this, too high to know, and she saw something black on his skin, and he does not even make a sound, just rests his hand thankfully on her back, and something boils out of his flesh, tears its way from shoulder to shoulder, opens her skin to the sky -
Ignition.
Just a little mote of light, behind its sooty glass.
- thousand thousand stars, the wide empty sky, and broad columns of smoke, hot and buoyant and fragrant with blood -
She remembers claws, wings, scales. She remembers transformation. The thing on her skin - her avatar, her focus, her new little primal switch, her dragon - is calm. Sated.
She folds herself onto her bed and sleeps.
The candle burns down, but doesn't go out.