Crystal Eaters Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Part One

  40

  39

  38

  37

  36

  35

  34

  33

  32

  31

  30

  29

  28

  27

  26

  25

  24

  23

  22

  21

  20

  Part Two

  19

  18

  17

  16

  15

  14

  13

  12

  11

  10

  9

  8

  7

  6

  5

  4

  3

  2

  1

  0

  Also published by Two Dollar Radio

  TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry.

  We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

  Copyright © 2014 by Shane Jones

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-937512-19-4

  Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

  Cover: Dannemora mine with the open pit “Storrymningen,”

  Elias Martin, 1780-1800.

  Author photograph: Erin Pihlaja

  Typeset in Garamond, the best font ever.

  No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  TWO DOLLAR RADIO

  Books Too Loud to Ignore.

  TwoDollarRadio.com

  [email protected]

  Part One

  40

  It feels good to believe in one hundred.

  They walk through the village wondering how many they have left. Their land is homes and shacks lining seven dirt roads. Everything is hit with sun. Tin roofs glare. Wooden structures glow. The city appeared at the horizon like a mountain range decades ago but it’s close now – dangerously close and growing closer by the day – and believing in one hundred is a distraction. A long road connects the village to the crystal mine. A man named Z. mumbles his number and walks by the home of Remy.

  Inside Remy’s home Harvak the dog is on the table. With each breath his stomach balloons pink skin. His left eye drips crystal (Chapter 5, Death Movement, Book 8) and his count lowers. Remy thinks about lying face down and entering a place where she wouldn’t hurt. She pets Harvak’s head ten times but nothing happens. She touches a Harvak hair on his leg longer than the rest. When she pulls the hair like a rope attached to an anchor, fingers over fingers instead of hand over hand, the end result is a hole with zero inside. She spins the hair into a wreath. With one finger she taps the hole ten times but again nothing happens.

  Two gasps from Harvak are split by Dad yelling from downstairs that dinner is ready. Her hand bleeds from Harvak’s teeth. His body stiffens with cooled blood and fleas jump from the remaining fur so she covers him with the blue sheet and places the hair wreath on top.

  Harvak lost his count in various ways.

  One afternoon in the crystal mine he slipped, kind of toppled forward over his own front legs and fell down a sharp incline, jaw spooning black dirt outward, spine struggling to right itself with twists.

  Remy accidently hit him with her bike and the snap, like a tree branch, made Remy look to the woods, not back at her dog with the broken leg twitching in the road.

  The most damaging was the village-wide panic when the city came into focus, shadow-bodies grazing on the horizon. Everyone went into a panic, filling burlap sacks with canned goods and clothing, quickly clearing shelves. They sprinted from their homes after double-locking their doors with two-by-fours, and they slept in tents in the mine. Elders said to protect the crystals. Some held knives. The strongest took turns patrolling the perimeter, resting against the stilts of wooden structures while others read books and played a game where they tossed crystals into cardboard boxes from fifty feet away. What they forgot was Harvak. It was deemed too dangerous to return. Late at night Remy tried to sneak out and was restrained, full nelson, by a boy with a black facial scar in the shape of a key who told her the city is coming, get into the mine and hide. Harvak stayed pressed against a window where he waited for an approaching body, no food or water near, the sun warming the glass. Remy imagined his ribs rising through his fur.

  Other punishments included being slapped for eating Dad’s boots. Put in a room for barking he couldn’t control because he was scared of the city. Screamed at for running in the house and wobbling a lamp that tilted the light from Mom who had fallen asleep on the couch holding a red box. Punishments created by humans and placed on dogs. Remy’s dog. Her dog. Harvak.

  Looking at the blue sheet’s shape on the table she pulls herself through every negative moment resulting in a lower number. Harvak is far past the life expectancy of a dog (40 crystals) and his old age has quickly taken the remainder in the last week.

  Remy asked her parents before if crystals could be added, life extended. Dad said no with the word tucked inside a breath over his forked potato. With the simplest questions Remy felt like she was bothering him. Mom said yellow were used for electricity, blue were common, red and green rare, and don’t mention black, because despite the rumors no one’s seen one. You can’t increase your count because your number only knows how to get smaller.

  “Dinner,” Dad repeats from the kitchen, his voice hard, angry.

  Remy once believed each pet on Harvak produced one crystal inside. Every day, falling asleep in bed, she made sure to touch him a minimum of ten times. She’s done this to herself before, while standing at the bathroom mirror, tapping her body in sets of ten, starting at her forehead, then to her shoulders, then to her heart, and finally ending at her stomach where the crystals shine.

  If I walked away, got in bed, got into a position where I couldn’t see what was happening right now maybe my number wouldn’t fall.

  In the kitchen Remy says Harvak is gone. Under the amber ceiling light they stand. Dad leans against the sink, water running over wooden dishes. He exhales and stares at his boots. Something more than Harvak’s death is wrong. There’s silence and dread stacked on top of previous silence and dread. Mom says she’s sorry into Remy’s head. From Mom’s mouth pressed into her hair Remy smells the sourness of dead dogs and she begins, with one finger, counting on Mom’s back.

  39

  With lips coated in glittering filth, dressed in red shorts with white trim, Remy mourns Harvak’s death by running like a dog in the crystal mine. Two separate roads – one for trucks to enter and one for them to exit – spiral down to a field with pyramids of excavated dirt. Remy as dog-child moves on all fours. On the dirt mine walls rest wooden buckets dangling from a pulley system built on the ground above. Idle work trucks with their gun metal paneling appear two-dimensional in the evening light glimmer while Remy’s left hand shines wet with blood from the rocks that pinprick her palm.

  She imagines her count as a loose pile of yellow in her belly, not a stack of a hundred red. No combination of touching her body helps, it just feels good.

  As a toddler, lying in bed on top of t
he covers, naked, with blond hair hooked around her shoulders, she asked Mom to place a hand on her stomach and to guess how many. When her hand touched her skin Remy puffed her chest and made a scared inhale. Mom said One hundred. She asked Dad, who was in the garage fixing the truck, his head buried under the hood, if she’d reach a day when her count would be zero. He pulled himself from the engine holding a wrench the size of her forearm. He crouched with the wrench on his thigh. At first he seemed irritated because she had interrupted his work, but then he said As long as your Mother is around you’ll always have at least one.

  She knows now that everyone is losing.

  Kids in the village have witnessed their parents vomiting blue and yellow slush into kitchen sinks, toilets, couch cushions, their laps. Remy has studied Mom’s lead-heavy movements, her shortened steps, her cough that turns heads at the market. Remy can help herself and Mom by learning how to add crystals to what is already inside, she just needs to figure out how. There must be a way to add. There must be a way to reverse the fall. Like the thought that Brother rallied behind so obsessively and look where he is now, city prison. The universe is a system where children watch their parents die. Mom loses weight with sunsets. Her skin dims with sleep. Remy tells herself that she’ll be the one to figure out what nobody else can. She’ll save Mom from experiencing the number zero.

  Dad’s answer when asked what’s wrong: A disease has entered her and we can’t get it out.

  Remy as dog-child rolls in the dirt. She runs on all fours toward a mine tunnel. The only color on Remy under the moonlight is her eyes and several streaks of blond hair the dirt hasn’t covered. A man in the city stands at The Bend using binoculars. There are two other men, one on each side of the man, and they take turns passing the binoculars and laughing and drinking from tall moon-reflecting cans. Remy barks into the mine tunnel until her echo comes back.

  38

  It’s difficult to move under the heat wave twisting the sky into something new. For weeks the temperature has only risen. There’s no relief in the forecast.

  The heat melted a green crystal. Z. smeared the green across his forehead and laughed from the shelling sensation on his skin as they walked the fence. So many men with long limbs and goofy faces. Their name is Brothers Feast, and according to Z., they will be remembered forever.

  On both sides of the fence are enormous dirt fields. In the distance – the city and prison. Ricky heaves a bottle over the fence and they run in the dark, laughing, back to their humble homes so unlike the city’s structures. They have technology. The village has crystals. Tendrils of turquoise from city pollution screen the moon above.

  “We’re going to be someone,” says Z. “C-c-c-come on, back to the fence. B-b-b-back to looking at the prison.”

  The city is a weed. It grows closer with buildings being built and will soon cover the village. The elderly watch closely like they do the sun and they preach it’s end times. Others believe the city moves because they want to destroy what is archaic. The village has nowhere to run. Their way of life doesn’t match up with the city way of life. They are bigger. Here it all comes, they say. Open up, they say. We’re fucked, they say.

  The prison is located on an island of land built slightly away from the main city buildings, connected by a single-lane road.

  “We’ll be r-r-r-remembered,” says Z. “Just you guys wait.”

  The lights illuminate curling barbed wire and concrete walls so tall and smooth the Brothers often ask each other during meetings How did they build them so high without it collapsing? Is it magic? Must be magic. The city is navy blue suits, cafeterias, ham sandwiches, granite counters, several types of stop signs, mouth-mint dentists, blacked-out car windows, bottled water, eight-to-six office jobs, drywall. But the prison is different, something special, like magic.

  “Is anyone listening to me when I say g-g-g-great things will happen?” says Z. “Anyone, anyone at all?”

  The Brothers answers yes, they know, great things are coming. They dream of prisoners running wild with guards trailing, the air above the guards’ heads whisked with batons, lights exploding through their bodies, the air sticky and sweet with perimeter flowers blooming like smoke on the single-lane road as they run.

  “Men have always been scared of the city, r-r-r-remember our lives in hiding. Depressing. We can’t hide anymore, the city won’t let us. Here it c-c-c-comes.”

  For inmates, the worst part isn’t being locked up and having a shoebox-sized window to squeeze their face against, observing the city and imagining their loved ones eating cherry pie. The worst part is they can’t see the beautiful place holding them. They can’t see the lights spiking the night sky like Brothers Feast can, standing, at the fence.

  “If you’re remembered f-f-f-forever, you live f-f-f-forever.”

  The Brothers aren’t listening. They can’t concentrate on anything else beside the prison. They know Z. is talking, but they don’t process what he’s saying.

  “Agree,” someone says.

  “Doing it,” says another.

  “The t-t-t-trick,” says Z., “is to become part of p-p-p-people’s memories, their reality.”

  37

  Dog = 40

  Ant = 3

  Bird = 10

  Mold = 678

  Baby = 100

  Mother’s tear = half

  Plant = 230

  Remy = unknown

  Cat = 39

  Spit = partial

  Cloud = 88

  Horse = unknown

  Moon = 4,000

  Frog = 12

  City = infinite

  Village = always falling

  Tree = 480

  Fly = 4

  Sun = 10,000

  Rabbit = 8

  Mirror = reflective of object

  Dirt = infinite

  Pinecone = 7

  Lamb = 22

  Air = infinite

  Flower = 1

  Crystal count is depleted gradually over time but can be drastically decreased by events. Getting hit by a truck would most likely erase a baby’s one hundred. If the baby survived, wrapped in a tiny full-body cast, her count would be similar to a rabbit’s. Her count would no longer be a shining triangle of one hundred perfectly stacked crystals inside her body because it would resemble scattered shale.

  The village survives on myth.

  There is the story of Royal Bob, a myth so old it is easily dismissed today, but a story that is still told. Royal Bob is the first person to find a black crystal. He boiled it down into dark syrup that he sipped for decades. Seen running at night in blue shorts, mouth open, grinning, head tilted back with his gray hair stretching twenty feet behind him, dogs weaving in and out. Royal Bob rarely spoke, never entered daylight, but the myth says he preached several times at night, in a mine tunnel lit with hanging lanterns, about the black crystal to the elderly. His body was never found. All the glass tubes were empty inside his home – the elderly slowly walking the halls, picking up the glass tubes by thumb and finger and dropping them into burlap sacks. Some say Royal Bob lives inside the mine where he runs endlessly through the tunnels. You can see his hair. Some say Royal Bob will never be zero because he’s forever filled with black crystal. Some say his soul is tethered to the gravity of all village dirt. Others say he escaped into the city so he could destroy it. But no one knows because a myth is a myth.

  The oldest books advise worshiping the crystals excavated from the mine. Today these practices are limited, deemed antiquated and pointless by many. Most crystals, especially red and green, are for selling now. The yellow are melted and poured through machines. Red crystals become knick-knacks displayed on tables and mantels. Few believe in their healing powers. But the mining still continues at a high rate, day and night, because it’s what they’ve always done and they need the yellow (YCL) for their lamps, refrigerators, and generators.

  Discussing your count in the village is like discussing the weather in the city.

  Count i
s not a city belief. They want to take over the village. Those in the city have little understanding of the village and are comfortable with destroying it and capturing the crystal mine because it’s all so different from their way of life. The city believes in the new ways of progress, not the old ways of tradition and simplicity. Many use The Bend not only as a curved road to jog, but to look in at the village and wonder why they live the way they do. They bring binoculars and get drunk and stare. Legislation has been passed to install high-powered stand-alone “binocular stations” costing taxpayers fifteen thousand dollars, including the salary of a part-time “binocular attendant” and not one complaint to date has been filed. The city lives like it will never die.

  Remy spends hours touching her stomach, trying to predict her count. She wants a hundred crystals shining like a campfire. When she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror she only sees the dark and wonders if she’d be prettier if she lived in the city, had lipstick, dresses, shampoo infused with rose oil, sunglasses to cover her face.

  Once, she saw green crystals in the corner of her eye. Four of them hung like beads of water from her eyelid and when she ran downstairs to show Mom they broke into a pea-green pool clouding her vision.

  “I swear they were there.”

  “I know,” said Mom, inspecting Remy’s eye. It wouldn’t stop blinking. “I’ve seen them before.”

  “Really?”

  “As a baby they blinded you.”

  “Scary.”

  “The body is small then and the crystals are everywhere. Sometimes, they come out.”

  “And now they’re gone?” said Remy. She touched her eye.