Authors: David Podlipny
Turn
The odd shapes of the broken pieces seldom failed to amaze him. Or rather, it was the strange characteristics they possessed, at least ostensibly, which captivated him. It didn’t matter whether it was hours or weeks apart, but whenever he returned after an absence, each and every piece around him seemed to have changed, altered somehow, moved around and reshaped. The immensity of the concrete landscape, spreading out in all directions as far as his eyes could wander, was likely what muddled things for him. It was a rather disorienting view to take in.
However, its crushingly boring backbone never really escaped him. When the novelty of it wore off, usually when he no longer could spot the red handlebars of his bike leaning against the concrete, the gloom intrinsic to every torpid grain and specks of lifeless dust, and there must’ve been billions of them, and even the pervasive stale smell, began weighing on him, disrupting the fluency of his vision. At that point, he wasn’t sure what to think.
But oddly enough, at times when his mood was foul and his mouth tasted like someone else’s, the gray boulders, blocks, lumps, slabs, and chunks were at the same time able to neutralize such states and sensations, perhaps because of their unfathomable weight; therefore, the deathly serenity of the immense concrete landscape was oftentimes simply serene, in the most pure sense.
It was, in part, due to its shape-shifting abilities, a very strange, even contradictory place.
Perhaps because of his good spirits on this particular day, Sono revisited the nearly untouched notion of it once having been an enormous concrete roller coaster, snaking and coiling its way around the vast space, parts of it unnervingly high. In his mind, whenever coming across a suitable piece or presented with a cluster of them, he assembled it once more, capriciously and with delightful ease.
The fact was that it could’ve been many things besides a roller coaster; it could’ve been nearly anything imaginable. But now, only venomous cockroaches scurried around among the rubble, one sharp turn after the next, and enormous dust bunnies taunted gravity with swirling loops in the currents of air his leaps generated.
Despite the dark brown hue, its unbendable character, and the fact that the gray concrete it was sticking out of, sometimes grotesquely, looked nothing like flesh of any kind, for a very brief moment, Sono saw crystallized veins in the hundreds, then thousands. It had, perhaps, a very long time ago, been a pulsating, living roller coaster. And yet, snapped clean off, brutally shredded or twisted into a snug coil until breaking, the rusted rebars sticking out from the gray concrete pieces, no matter what harmless association was spawned, were all potentially deadly on contact.
Four concrete pieces and equally many leaps later, all of his previous thoughts discarded of like ballast along the way, his mind was as light as though he’d never once pondered upon the concrete.
Sono leapt from one massive concrete piece to the other, not once touching or even spying ground between them. He enjoyed leaping across the pieces, vigilant of his footing, rebars and unexpected gaps, and not much else. But what he couldn’t wrap his head around was the fact that the concrete still withstood a great deal of pressure. Even though he was skinny, jumping onto the end of any given piece, even with full force, not once did anything even budge or creak. And yet, a quick glance around, and it all looked like it had collapsed from a single mischievous slap. The only sounds were those from his shoes, disrupting the arrangement of age-old grime, which at times caused him to slide menacingly across the surfaces.
Once he got close to his grandpa’s home, he was astonished by the distance he’d covered, seemingly instantly, looking back across the vast, jagged landscape, like he’d ran across the waves of a calcified sea.
His grandpa’s home; closer to a manmade cave than a house, was a perfect concrete sphere cut in half and dropped to the ground. Together with the empty swimming pool behind it, they were the only structures around that still enjoyed the luxury of one day being able to crumble to pieces. Unsure of the purpose his home had once served, his grandpa found it much less disorienting than Sono did, nor as grim, whether inside or outside.
So that he wouldn’t need to make a hole in the ceiling, if such an undertaking was even possible, his grandpa had made an unsightly contraption out of various mismatched pipes, a sheet of metal which he shaped into a funnel, a black substance he claimed to be tar to prevent it from seeping out ahead of time, and some long rebars to support the entire structure; a structure that directed the smoke from the fireplace in the center of his home out through the arched entryway and into the open.
The dark brown cloth covering the arched entryway of his grandpa’s home served both as a door and a sign, since a big circle was drawn onto the rigid and raspy fabric with charcoal, right above his name, Edgar. He refused to divulge the reasons behind either of them. What he did tell him though, and gladly so, was the purpose of the cloth. Having rescued it from the harsh ways of the concrete rubble, he claimed its spirit would help guard his home. Surviving despite the world collapsing over it, the resilience would forever be retained in its fabric.
Stopping dead, Sono cocked his head to the surging bloom of an unearthly sound. He stood motionless, statue-like, lips parted and eyes adamantly fixed on he did not know what.
It sounded eerily similar to when he himself had leapt from one concrete piece to another, though somewhat softer, the steps of someone less heavy-footed. Parting with the front of his grandpa’s home, he turned around swiftly.
Leaping across the concrete waves, her outstretched arms helping to stabilize her, was a human being, painted with all kinds of colors, brightly contrasted against the gray surroundings. He didn’t know what else he should’ve expected. A phantom? It looked truly bizarre, like a giant had gotten hold of a rainbow on the run from the confines of a billboard, crumbled it in its enormous hands, and then set it free again.
Looking at her with his lips still parted, the vivid colors shimmering on her limbs as though powered by a phenomenon related to but surpassing electricity, she etched herself with ease into his most permanent parts; she, a bundle of colors, instantly becoming his eternal representation of a human being.
Stopping on a piece of concrete of substantial size, no more than an arm’s length away from him, she peered into his eyes with condensed interest. The bright green color around her dark brown eyes almost made her scleras vocal. Acutely aware of his heart rate accelerating, he felt compelled to say something.
“Hi.”
Sono, breathing through his mouth, watched the center of her lips part, though very faintly, merely outlining a void in the shape of a black pearl.
“Hello.”
Diffusing a complementary wave which suddenly forced itself upon him, he turned his palm around instead, rather desperately, as if suddenly turning a giant knob.
“I’ve, uh…never seen you here before.” He implemented his corkscrewing hand into his speech. “Who are you?”
“Trnyklgiuty.”
Upon hearing what, to his best knowledge, was a bunch of random letters strung together, however melodious the conflicting result was, Sono frowned in bewilderment.
“Uh…Turn what?”
“My initials. Trnyklgiuty,” she clarified straightforwardly.
“Ah…all right. That makes it…” His chest rose as he inhaled. “What should I call you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s a hard name to remember. Initials, not…” He fashioned an indefinable expression.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Do what? Call you by your name? Sorry, initials…”
She nodded briskly. The bright red, blue, and yellow patches on her neck were mesmerizing.
“Well…you’re not gonna be easy to forget.”
She smiled, baring the ends of her front teeth. The thin strips of enamel bore promises neither of his senses knew where to house. His entire skin bubbled.
He suppressed his initial question, and kneaded together a wholly different one. “Do you, uh, know Edgar?”
She tilted her head slightly, and contorted her white eyebrows, as if befuddled by his question. With a single hop she had turned her back to him, and though it seemed like only a handful of leaps, she was suddenly so far away the colors amalgamated into mud. Unusually calm, Sono couldn’t bring himself to move, or to speak; he didn’t want to. It was all so strange, and yet so beautiful.
Unlike his grandpa, the decorations on her skin had mesmerizingly vivid colors. His grandpa had something between his own scar tattoo sentence and Turn’s enthralling patterns. Another shaman, during some kind of ceremony, had once made rather large incisions in his skin, on his forearms and on his cheeks, which he had then himself rubbed with charcoal. On each cheek he had a faded circle, and on his left forearm he had four faded vertical stripes, and on his right forearm four faded horizontal stripes.
Edgar had about shoulder-length hair, of a speckled gray, the color partly due to his age, but more so because he slept on the dusty ground in his home, and also used vast amounts of that dust to wash it with, leaving him with any number of unidentifiable pieces strewn in his alert, feral hairdo. Behind his home he had heaps of it gathered. Naturally, his entire body had a grayish tinge, making his shirtless upper body appear almost clothed. The colors on Turn’s skin were as far apart from dust and faded charcoal as youth and old age. The crisp colors covered large parts of her visible skin, sliding under her light gray t-shirt or under the legs of her white knee-length shorts, smattered with brown and purple trees, palm trees to the best of his knowledge. They also covered parts of her face, her entire neck, her arms down to the knuckles and her legs, stopping only where her vertical leg shifted to horizontal, making her feet and the parts of her head where her short hair covered it the only places free of applied colors. Though the patterns stayed the same, intertwining circles, tapering stripes and intricate lattices, the colors on the left half of her body differed from those on her right half. Only the green strip on her face, right across her eyes, stretching from one temple to the other, was unchanged. The red parts on her left side were green on the right side, the black parts were yellow, and the white parts were blue. Her left kneecap was of a crisp white, and her right kneecap of a dense blue. There were few cracks in the designs, if any at all, and the edges were surprisingly smooth. It was unlike the sort of paint he’d come across before, mainly powders his grandpa had mixed with water, sometimes peeling even without the surface stretching and bending. Were it simply a better paint or were they, in fact, tattoos?
The most striking feature was the smallest one, invisible unless one stood face to face with her; she had a bright blue mole on her cheek, or at least it looked like a mole to him. It wasn’t flat; he could see the raised edges. Every Outsider’s skin was dirty and dusty, tainting and covering every feature except large scars and sentences, but hers had an illuminating plumpness to it. It was the first time he had ever seen anything like it. The color was almost the same as the wet sand in the last tray of his grandpa’s filtering device, but without the noise, her spotless skin teeming with inherent warmth. Did the vivid colors achieve that, or did they rob her of it?
He wondered how long he would remember the exact colors and designs, all the little intricacies about her, because he did not possess a photographic memory to be proud of. Doubt had gradually begun to pester him. Had he already tinkered with them?
Her feet were the only two places where she was dusty, veiling them in a dry, fine gray dimness. She was barefoot, something Sono found highly suspicious, given the unforgiving landscape.
Though his first thought had leaned toward war paint, upon further reflection, her colorful designs probably tipped more toward festive, at least not bloody warfare. It was too inviting, and it contained none of the dark tones and death-alluding patterns he’d seen in pictures from the past, where people painted themselves in preparation for battle with skulls and fangs. Maybe his grandpa could shed some light on the entire thing.
While Sono stared across the seemingly never-ending rubble, feebly trailing the image of a leaping Turn long vanished, the steps of his grandpa flowered behind him. Edgar’s discordant shuffle, due to his left leg being significantly shorter than the right, together with his once green flip-flops that had a tendency to avoid his heels, collapsing his insteps further and slapping his sole on every step, was unmistakable. So was his lightweight necklace out of pull tabs, in every color imaginable, which jangled at the slightest disturbance.
“Who’s the girl?”
His grandpa cleared his throat succinctly, and then let silence fall. Sono turned around, more to rouse him than to greet him.
“What girl?”
“War paint.”
He cleared his throat once more, and then swallowed audibly. “War paint?”
Sono found his repetition vexing, but ignored it and continued scanning the immensity of the rubble for any sign of her. Why had he told his grandpa something he had ruled out just moments before?
“She’s got colorful patterns all over her body; green, blue…it’s not war paint. She’s got short hair. Barefoot. Do you know who she is?”
Edgar rubbed his left cheek in circles with three of his fingers.