Dante's Butterflies [WIP - Revised]
It is the same murky water as yesterday, and the day before, and the week before, and the month before.
The same dirty laundry they've had you washing since the first day they shoved you past those steel doors you, and maybe everyone in this place, will never see again.
Still, you do not fight the chalk white hands effectively cutting the circulation out of your biceps as the guards lead you to the pit, as if there were anywhere but the concrete walls of the prison to run to. Here is everywhere and there is nowhere - how can it be that these men who've been here since the beginning of time haven't realized that yet? You wonder about this while they lift you by the arms over the splintered ledge of the pit into the icy water on the other side. Ankle-deep in the monotony of the days of this isolated world, warmth that comes from nowhere spreads through your chest and brings tears to your eyes; makes you think, ah, yes, within this nowhere-prison we are all the same.
But the tears dry up faster than they can fall and all too quickly the warmth plummets into the pit of your stomach, a breath of ice. Those kinds of thoughts are the love-children of the prison's trickery and man's own naivety, because you are all not the same, really. Only what you do is the same. What they make you do.
The guards release your thinning flesh and retreat - no, dissolve - into the shadows surrounding the pit. Bit by bit the blackness swallows them; first the toes, then the ankles, the knees, the torso, until only the faint glitter of stray light reflecting off the white paint on their faces is left. Then nothing. They are there, though, always there, always somewhere, dragging their batons over the walls. Muttering incomprehensible things in their clown languages.
A long time ago it may have bothered you. Not anymore, not really.
Today Luz is already there marching in place and digging his bare heels into the the laundry that has been there since before you were incarcerated, and he doesn't look at you. Not yet. Not while the yellow rags on your shoulders, billowing down your legs, are still caked dry with the grime of yesterday's wash. He thinks you haven't suffered enough for the day to warrant any acknowledgement of your own existence - but what does he know about suffering, you ask yourself, turning your back to him to toe your way through the cloth on your side of the pit, what does he know when he hasn't existed in this nowhere long enough to have ever seen the spring rainbow winking down on him through the open ceiling above them?
His suffering lies only within this place. Luz knows nothing.
As you trudge at a snail's pace through the water, you dip your head back until you're dizzy from the view. The hole in the ceiling is as wide as the pit itself, no more, no less, as if it had been built that way - made to shine light over the circumference of a pool of forever, forever; torturous on the clear blue days when the rainbow comes out of hiding to tease you from above, comforting when it rains for weeks and the water from heaven, or maybe space, beats down on your shoulders, your back, until you're cold down to the marrow of your bones.
Usually the butterflies are there hovering centimeters from the ridge, their coal-colored wings dropping slow-moving clouds of ash that always make their way into your nostrils. Into your lungs. Into your pores and through your veins. Someday, you think, you'll have swallowed so much ash that it'll have built walls in your blood stream and your heart will turn to porous rock. If you're lucky enough, then, maybe...
But today, the butterflies are not out. They are hiding in the water which laps at the bottom of your calves, underneath the clothes no one will ever wear; someday soon they will emerge dripping and take their place on the border between this place and that place, watching you, and Luz, wash the laundry in ashy water.
Painted onto their wings will be the vibrant yellow numbers of the book of Christ and Newton. And Dante. Dante's numbers.
“Gabe, man, s-stop that already, would'ya?” Luz says suddenly from the side opposite of yours, tossing you an involuntary glance over his shoulder as his neck ticks, twitches. “It's b-bad enough I can't, I can't hardly see a foot p-past this damn t-tub, I don't need y-you wiggin' out on me again.”
“It's not a tub,” you respond, bringing your eyes back down to level, watching the sweat and pit water glisten over the bare skin of his back where his yellow sack of a shirt has been torn open - maybe by him, maybe by the others. “A million years ago they built this whole place in the middle of nowhere and they dug a big hole where the butterflies like to bury themselves and lined it with wood and threw in a bunch of clothes no one wanted and filled it with water and called it 'prison work'.”
“Damnit man, this ain't w-work. They wanna' try ta, ta, make our s-skin soft so we'll fall to pieces like those f-freak ass guards-those fucking-those-” he kicks his legs over the surface of the water, hurtles handfuls of it over the ledge of the pit out into the shadows, where the guards in their clown faces might still be scraping their batons across the walls; you don't know, you stopped keeping track when they let you go. “-fucking freaks!”
Luz does things like that because he hasn't realized yet that it makes no difference what any of you think or say anymore. They say those things about you all, too. Sometimes you still find yourself wondering if all the guards in this place take shifts like normal people; if they have a kitchen-full of clown-faced babies to be fed. Perhaps one of them owns a clown-faced dog that makes stains on the couch. Maybe another of them has a litter of balloon animals to care for after work.
Luz is choking on his tongue and tears, staring hard into that dark spot on the other side of the ledge that swallowed up the water he tossed.
“I'm just so s-sick of this, man, s-so sick of this. What the hell is this place? W-Why this place?”
Why this place?
Why this place?
You drop your head to watch the thin layer of suds forming around your ankles ripple as you march in place - feet already numb from the cold, knees aching, and every time you lift your legs you carry on the curve of your heels enough moisture to dampen the back of your pants. Every once in a while you pause until the water on your side is still enough that you catch a glimpse of your reflection, however dark and distorted. A glimpse of your ink black hair, curling at the fringes against your forehead, where sweat has formed. A glimpse of your thin chapped lips. Finally a glimpse of your eyes - colorless, like holes, bottomless pits. Pits. The pit.
Dante had said it a long time ago, when you were both young and people thought that you, and he, were a phase - but especially him. When they get older, your mother had said, when kids get older, they stop being so mean. They grow out of being bullies. She had clutched the silver cross hanging above her heart - her hands, already aging, pale like yours, but pink beneath the surface, not yellow like hers - when she'd said that. Pray for that boy and someday, someday you'll see...
What? What is it she'd said you would see?
The room echoes faintly with a curse; the soles of Luz's feet are tender like his sanity. The chemicals the prison calls 'soap' don't take well to his skin. Or maybe the butterflies have started nipping at his rotting flesh.
But what was it your mother had said?
You can't remember now, really. It had been of no consequence at any rate. Dante had been the only one to look at you and be able to see the wrongness of you. The disease festering, molding around your heart. He'd looked you in the eyes the first time he confronted you alone on the playground and said, with the voice of a man trapped in sixth grader's body, you have the devil in you. You're the fucking devil.
He took it upon himself to torment you. Beat the devil out of you.
And then, your mother told you to pray.
The irony of it all now hits you so suddenly that you laugh before you realize it's even coming; by the time the fit is over your ribs are sore and your eyes are wet with tears you won't let fall. You don't want to cry, really. There's nothing left to cry about, but sometimes when you laugh like that, your body does things it shouldn't. When you turn around and lift your head Luz is staring at you from where he is stomping, stomping, scrubbing with his tender feet.
His eyes are the color of thirsty grass in the wintertime - dead rust with the occasional fleck of green, fleck of gold. They're just like Dante's eyes as you remember them, but not like them at the same time. They lack the the shadowy suction his had, the endlessness like your own - Dante's eyes had always looked like the eyes of a dead man even before that night. The way Luz is staring at you now makes the hairs on the back of your neck prickle with fury.
Maybe sometimes he looks like Dante, but he is not Dante. Yet you are repulsed by the mere sight of him, by the dried mud smeared across his fishy white skin, his yellow hair as yellow as the prison uniforms and the numbers on the butterflies' wings. If the world were to end tomorrow and all that was left was this prison in the middle of nowhere, this room, this pit, just you and Luz, you would crush his skull and eat him down to his very bones.
And then you would vomit him up, into the water, and eat him again, and again, until there was nothing left to digest. That's how much you hate him.