NaNo 2006: Machine Break 02
“HEADS UP!”
Cielo threw the can over everyone’s head, the aluminum object headed at Allen’s general direction, and she was hoping the other teen had the presence of mind to catch it before it hit the wall.
Woe and pity, it didn’t make it to Allen’s hand.
Rather, it ended up on someone else’s face.
Cielo winced; can to the face wasn’t exactly the nicest thing in the world. “Ouch, Ary, sorry for that,” she apologized, though she had a laugh set to her mouth, ready to burst out at any moment. “I really didn’t see you come through the door.”
Arashi - a blue-haired youth given the rather effete nickname by the not-exactly-effete Cielo - was leaning against the counter, pressing a hand to his forehead and holding a can of sardines on the other. He looked pitiful, in an adorable way, but that might be due to the fact that Arashi was as poor as poor can get in the neighborhood, and his ever-present dog tag pendant - pendant, as it was nothing more than a rectangular metal plate with a hole and the letter A etched on it - hanging around his neck, reflecting the fluorescent lights. He was the neighborhood’s errand boy, and he was fond of working at the shop, more so, recently, as Allen would always comment over their shoulders. He was a pleasant teen, a year older than both Allen and Cielo, but he was accident prone and he had a very bad sense of timing his entries.
Like now, for example.
Allen, who was tending the cash register, laughed at Arashi. “Set the can down, yeah?” He said, mock-punching Arashi’s shoulder. “You’re gonna live.”
Arashi frowned at them both. “I hate you both, making fun of me like this. Have a little heart for my dignity, you asses.”
They continued on in this vein, making jokes and playing with words as most teens their age would do, but then Arashi went quiet after a while and sat back on his heels on the floor. This often meant something was wrong, and when something was wrong enough to make him act sad in front of people it meant that things were very wrong indeed.
“What got you?” Cielo asked, setting the cans she was lining up on one of the display racks down. ”You being quiet means there’s something you don’t want to tell us.”
The awkward silence settled a little more before Arashi finally said something.
“You’re both grave kids, aren’t you?” He asked.
That was it. Allen and Cielo exchanged looks, knowing that this wasn’t something they talked about everyday, or even at all, because “grave kid” was the softest term there was for was they had. The so-called illness of the recent generation.
Graveyard children.
“What if I am?” Allen asked, his countenance defensive. “What if we are?”
Arashi tipped his head back, making it thud against the wooden panels of the counter. He was frowning, his hands clenched and the knuckles white. “I’m not saying there’s something wrong with it, okay? It’s just - people are going on about cleaning things up. Cleaning people up. You know how that goes.”
He went silent again, his expression dejected though he was looking up. Cielo leaned against the display rack and sighed.
“We’ve got no problem with being sick,” she muttered. “In fact, we’re not sick; we’re just different from everybody else.” She pushed herself up again and went back to arranging the sardine cans on the rack. She focused on her task, pointedly not talking to Arashi or Allen at this point. “We don’t need to be cleaned.”
She set up the cans, lining them up perfectly, making a pyramid on this rack, making a linear arrangement in another. She set them down fast, and hard, and harder and faster and on and on that when she dented a can from just gripping it a little too hard she forced herself to take a deep breath and calm down. Then she heard the tinkle of the bell hanging above the door, and she knew Arashi had left.
Allen had gone on to clean up the bar; he was done with counting the till. He had a closed look on his face, a look that Cielo knew she had on her own when she heard the question their friend had asked. “He felt bad, you know.”
“We’re not sick.”
“I know that. He knows that too.”
Cielo took a deep breath, held it and let it go. It was one thing to deal with being sick, and it was another to feel bad about what other people thought about it. They didn’t have a disease. They were perfectly fine.
But that’s why you have that scar on your head, remember? A voice told her, you got shot because you were different.
Their “disease” wasn’t simply defined by science, anymore. It was a genetic malfunction, to make use of a scientist’s words, which made those afflicted die at an early age. It ate away at the sanity of those inflicted, and if they didn’t die from complications like blood incompatibility or from the unexplained rupturing of the heart, then they would die from losing their minds. Allen had told a story about a Meta who died at the local hospital - he couldn’t have a blood transfusion because his blood was “infected”, and the hospital had let him die. He needed blood from one of his own kind, and apparently the hospital didn’t have any in their blood banks. Or so the hospital claimed.
There was another reason why they were discriminated against, too. The graveyard disease made people different. It was called like that because a long time ago, when the world had lost touch of mother Nature and the keywords of mankind were “prevent mutation and death”, people started to come out from their graves, previously called dead but clearly not after digging out of their coffins and burial grounds. And soon there were people able to read minds, though not “read” in the same way as television shows made them out to be, but emotions and dreams and feelings and ideas were picked up and understood and seen by those who carried the disease. At first there were only a few, but their number grew and grew and soon there were protests and rallies from those who wanted them segregated and those who lobbied for their rights. It has only been around for two generations, and yet it had cost so many children from being born.
Cielo, as well as Allen, they were part of the second generation, and already their numbers were diminishing.
“I’ll go look for him,” She said, setting the last of the cans down on the floor. “Finish this up for me?” She sighed, one hand going to her nape to try and massage away to ache that was beginning to grow there. She shrugged, looked at Allen, who gave her a quiet smile of agreement, and she went on and out through the back door.
She walked around the block, feeling out Arashi’s path, that being the feel of Arashi as Arashi himself and it was like a thread that shared its color with none of the other threads in a tapestry. She had grown familiar with the “feel” of his path, and like walking on a varied-colored marble floor, not one shade was the same as the other, similar though they may be.
The path took her two blocks down, around a corner, up to the bus stop, down two alleyways, and up a dilapidated building. Building 14, room 23. This was…. Not Arashi’s apartment.
Cielo hesitated, making to knock on the door, and then drawing back, then again and so on. This was a little awkward.
“Ah, fuck it.” She knocked on the door, paused and waited for a reply, then knocked again. There was shuffling sound from inside, then two voices that sounded like they were arguing, then the sound of a deadbolt’s lock cylinder being turned. Then the door swung open and-
And it wasn’t Arashi.
A small boy, about fourteen in age, stood in front of her, his long dark brown hair in a braid and his pleasant face in a dismayed expression. There was also a certain lack of upper clothing on the boy’s part - Wait.
Cielo just stood there, staring down on the boy - she was of the good height of five feet and nine inches, after all, and the boy was barely four and ten - and they remained that way until Arashi pushed the door fully open, his expression mussed and a little flushed. Cielo took all of two seconds to take in the boy’s lack of shirt, and then Arashi’s disheveled state, and her eyes widened.
“Oh, hell no,” she exclaimed. “Don’t make me go crying statutory rape, you moron, what the hell are you doing?”
Arashi heaved a sigh, his hands going to his face, then into his hair, then being set down on his hips. “It’s not what you think.”
The young boy huffed, then nodded at Cielo. “C’me in, lady, there’s no need t’ hang by the door.” The boy’s ‘o’ sounds were a little forced. He led her in, pushing random objects on the floor out of his way with his foot, then sat down in front of the couch - not on the couch, mind you - and watched Cielo move around the mess to find some place to sit on.
The room wasn’t clean, nor was it a complete mess. It seemed like it had been lived in a little too much by too many people, and the wallpaper was peeling in so many places. There was no rug or carpet, and the wooden floor was covered in scratches and water stains, and the three windows in the room needed cleaning. The air smelled wet, as well, and she wondered if it was the unwashed clothes or the plumbing that caused it.
Arashi sat down next to the boy, one arm immediately going around the younger male’s shoulders, and Cielo bristled. It looked wrong, of course, and she opened her mouth to say so, but Arashi caught her eyes and gave her a warning with a look.
“This kid’s my… sort of brother,” Arashi answered to the unasked question in Cielo’s mind. “He’s like you, just so you know.” With that he prodded the boy’s head affectionately with his knuckles, a somber smile on his face. There was look of disappointment on his face - disappointment over what exactly, she couldn’t place, but it was a poignant look nonetheless.
“He used to live in the outskirts of the city, near the dumpsite,” Arashi worded out, carefully as though saying the words thoughtlessly would make the meaning sound like an insult. “Used to, since he got chased out of the place by morons who thinks that-“
“That we’re the scum of the earth?” Cielo finished for him. Arashi gave him a serious look, while the little boy made shy noises from where he sat, leaning in to Arashi’s chest like an infant seeking for his mother’s arms. She waved a hand. “So how did he end up in the city itself?”
Arashi looked at his lap, his free hand laid down with the palm upturned. “He got beaten up. This granny, she was our old landlady and she knew where I was working, knew the phone number to my apartment; she called and said this little kid got in trouble. I took a day off and picked him up, moved him here. That was last week.”
“Why not stay at your place, then?”
“I live here now. Since there’s two of us that I have to feed, expenses go up.”
Cielo sighed. It was just like Arashi to not tell them these things - he was very poor, yes, and also very proud, and with rent getting more and more expensive as the days go by, the blue haired teen would have to take on another job, work himself to death and not let those around him notice. “You could have told us.”
The male youth gave her an awkward smile. “Last time I told you guys anything, you guys paid four months’ worth of rent and refused to let me pay you back.”
Cielo gave him a lopsided grin. And then her face fell. “So you’re nursing him back to health.”
There was another pregnant pause, and nobody could find the words to fill the growing silence. Cielo stood and held her hand out to Arashi. The other teen looked at the hand, his eyes wide with confusion, and then those eyes widened a little more and he shook his head. She told him through a look that she shouldn’t refuse.
The little boy stared, a little bemused.
“Sick kids can’t stay in a place like this.”
And with that, Arashi acquiesced.
***
It was a good two hours after closing time when Cielo left, and that was nine in the evening, this day being Sunday and the shop always closes early on this day. Allen had spent those two hours contemplating on the next day’s motions, for tomorrow was Monday as everyone knows, and Monday often meant school, or work, or a little one and a lot of the other. The cans were done with their arrangement, or rather Allen was done with them, and the noodle packs were easy to stack, but the candy jars needed refilling, and that took the most of an hour, sorting candy packs by flavor or by kind, or sometimes by shapes. Allen had never appreciated the joys of color-coding as much as he did when he was done; he looked at a rainbow-colored array of candy set along the counter like they were trophies of great value.
They probably are to some kids, I guess, the thought to himself, grinning. Children often thought of candy as more precious than money, after all, and he thought the same about the multihued sugary treats as a young boy.
The backdoor swung open, the distinct sound its hinges made reaching his ears. That must be her, he thought, picking up the empty boxes of merchandise and putting them at the back of the shop, then made his way to kitchen. He flipped the kitchen’s lights on, squinting at the general direction of the door as the flickered to life, and as soon as the light was stable he came face to face with-
Well, he didn’t get to recognize what it was that he saw, because a fist connected with his temple, and he was flung back, the back of his head hitting a stool as he came down. He twitched on the floor, the pain in his head a little too much at the moment, as just as his head was clearing he was kicked in the stomach, and then on the head again, and he brought an arm up to protect his skull as the stool was picked up and smashed on his person.
It didn’t take long for Allen to lose consciousness.