Cave Game

VI - Faux Wings

It was a strange feeling: attaching a body to the voice he had been listening to. Alex wore a fern green v-neck tunic, and pair of cuffed brown pants; Both items of apparel were similar in make to his own, but worn and torn considerably more. His eyes started from the cave floor. Steve followed a slurry of mud, plastered to her pair of sturdy boots and the roll of her pant legs. The hem of her tunic was burnt in a couple places, and ripped in a few more. Oxidized, brown blood stained her shirt from where it had seeped out of a long gash in her side– Alex's right hand cradled that wound. Her fingernails held a thick, black line of dirt under each, like letterboxing on a feature length film. Up her hand and past her wrist bone, limber and pale arms continued, marred with various lacerations, bruises, and what he surmised to be a few bite marks. Amongst the dirt and blood, a smattering of freckles decorated the visible portion of her upper arm. The freckles wandered up onto her face, where wreathed in a halo of burning red hair, her dimpled, rosy cheeks were covered in the same speckles. Her curious green eyes sat atop them, beaming and full of life like a serene swath of algae-covered bayou, glowing with the light of the sun. Her nose crinkled. Blood dripped from it, in a meandering, sticky line down her lips and off her chin. Her bloody nose framed a genuine and beaming smile. 

Steve saw Alex's smile– a smile so big despite all she had undoubtedly been through, on a person that had no right in their current condition to be so happy- and felt a flutter. Somewhere in his mind, the strange feeling had been handed a pair of faux feather wings and told to try its darnedest to get off the ground, much to the amusement of the rest of the attendees. The strange feeling didn't care. For but a brief moment, he felt that in a scary, new world filled with so many worrisome and dangerous uncertainties, A world that God seemed to have unceremoniously tossed over His shoulder, that he had finally found a constant: that beautiful smile.

The three-pieced logic blew that fluttering strange feeling out of the sky like a clay pigeon. Her injuries weren't as bad as he had vividly imagined, but they were certainly as bad as he thought, or as bad as he was expecting. While in the dark, he had astutely surmised that anyone with fluids in their lungs that should be in their veins couldn't be considered the most healthy. Oddly enough, Alex seemed for the most part unbothered by the vast amounts of blood she hemorrhaged, engrossed in the scenery more than anything. This lack of apparent concern was balanced by Steve picking up the slack of worry with more than enough for the both of them, and rightfully, too– the woman he just met looked like she was about on her way out. This world didn't make sense. She must be in excruciating pain, logic said, although his eyes deceived him. The world seemed to spin with her as she rotated, taking in the majesty of the flowers and leaves surrounding. 

Moss, clay, vines. Whirling, tumbling, churning. Steve felt a little sick.

• • •

Alex turned to Steve as he stepped into the light and her vision for the first time. 

It was a strange feeling: she didn't really know what she thought Steve was going to look like. Now, he was defined. His simple black shoes stood planted on the ground as if he had been grown there. He wore a teal tunic and a pair of worn purple pants; Both items of apparel were similar in make to her own, only much looser and much less clean. Her eyes started from the rooted dirt below him. Alex traced the outline of a man with her eyes, a man dusted in black soot nearly head to toe. Looking closer, she realized the entire front face of his clothes were charred to a fine crisp, as if he had slipped through the grates of a giant's grill, been forgotten, and left laying in a massive bed of charcoal. His body was Swiss cheese, pockmarked with red cuts and fragment punctures, like craters on the moon's surface. He was missing a fingernail on his left ring finger, and blood dripped from the cavity left in its absence. Past his wrist, hefty, tan arms connected to muscular shoulders. He nervously picked at his dark skin, flaking from the large burn wounds on his forearms and like old paint peeling from a dilapidated house. His face had the same treatment: a healthily slow-tanned complexion with an unhealthy amount of flash burns. A long, thin line from where something sharp almost missed him drew its way up his cheek and to his large protruding ears. His hair generously cushioned them with thick black clumps, tumbling chaotically down his head like the patterns traced by a yellow rubber duck in a turbulent, foaming river. 

His cheeks were lean, and smeared in a solution of sweat and ash. His eyes were squinted, like he was trying to figure something out. His eyes were calm. His eyes felt like he had borrowed them from a gunslinger; eyes accustomed to the haze of desert heat and the stinging smoke of hand rolled cigarillos. Nestled in the bags of his wrinkly eyelids like a pearl in a clam, two irises sat. Each gleamed like a wizard's orb, and each was a purple, deep like the parts of the ocean untouched by man, where all kinds of unfamiliar things dwell. Underneath his battered nose, his mouth laid expressionless, slightly agape.

This confused Alex; each and every part of his face and body oozed emotion, save for his mouth– why not his mouth? His mouth looked cold and unchanging, like the disc slot on a computer. She could tell was hiding something, she could feel it. Her racing mind concocted plans on how to coax different expressions out of those blank lips. Her thoughts were diligently working on a course of action for how to get surprise out of him when she caught up with her runway brain and realized she was distracted.

She cocked her head slightly to the side, smiling. "You look like shit."

"You do too," he replied.

Her stomach grumbled. Both of their eyes darted to the fruits hanging from the vines. They looked like bright yellow gooseberries, only each was the size of a peach. Dew beaded tantalizingly on its surface like condensation on a soda can in a commercial.

"What if they're poisonous?" Steve cautioned, already knowing what they were both thinking.

"I'm going to die either way," Alex said, and she took a bite. She chewed. The flesh of the fruit emitted a diffused glow through her throat as she swallowed. They both waited in exasperating silence for her to have some sort of comically violent reaction and die an anguishing death. For a while, only the cave made noise, with its deep hum and water lapping. 

They both stared at each other. 

Alex smacked her lips and took another bite.

"Y'know," she reckoned through a mouthful of fruit. "Itsh not the worsh thing I've 'ad."

That handful of slurred and mostly indecipherable words said around the food in Alex's mouth was all the confidence Steve needed. He lunged for the nearest vine and plucked the drupe off its tendrils. He reasoned that even if it was actually poisonous, and it was merely slow acting, he knew that he could die with a full stomach. His teeth tore into the rubbery skin with an unexpected ferocity, and he guzzled down the rest of the fruit shortly after.