Tatemae

Day 5 - Night - Making a Monster

I've drawn a mob of emotionless ghosts.

I've finished the chalk family, complete with an entire city of stick figures behind them. There's barely any gray rock left. Instead, I am slowly running out of room, forced to draw pictures one on top of the other.

The city people I have drawn look like people that could be in my city, but they're not. I've realized now that not a single person I've drawn could really be anyone I know. Their hair isn't pitch black like a Lumière, and it isn't sunlight white like a Fos either for that matter. Instead, they sport an uncomforting gray with smiles, frowns, and crude affection I don't really think I've seen anyone with before. No one here on this world is happy. Not Fos and not Lumière. It's not any gray I've ever seen before. It's a gray that is both simultaneously darker than black and yet brighter than white that is impossible to imagine whenever I take my eyes away. You have to stare directly into the madness to truly understand it.

They can't possibly be human.

I guess that's me then. I can't possibly be human, can I? Not anymore.

I can still hear his voice! Ash! There at the table! Glaring down at me and vigorously shaking a heart in his hands as he yelled. "And yet you still eat!"

"Yeah! I fucking do!"

I wonder if anyone can hear me.

"Hello!" I yell. "Matri! Ash! Anyone!"

But nobody answers.

There aren't any other Meonjeo-Jug festivals planned. I suppose that's a good thing. Nobody else will be captured for such a terrible event. They'll die quickly all at once in the middle of the night with barely enough time to scream, versus having to sleep here day and night knowing that soon you'll be cornered in an arena with the eyes of a thousand people cheering for how pitiful you are.

It's much better to die quickly when you're young.

I hear something. Something walking in the arena!

"VIDE! DARCELLE! CALLUM! DON'T LEAVE ME!"

I hear them! Right there! In the center!

"COME BACK! I'M RIGHT HERE!"

I rush to the bars and shake them, cringing at the sound of the metal and the smell of urine on the iron. There's no one there. How is there no one there? Did they run away that quickly? Why would they have come back only not to take me with them? Are they just here to mock me?

"STOP! YOU HAVE TO COME GET ME! PLEASE!"

No one's there. Nobody at all.

"THIS IS HELL! PLEASE, COME GET ME! HAVE MERCY!"

The stick figures with the gray hair are cheering for my demise in every direction. It's impossible to hear what they're saying, but I know they're mocking me. My hands and face are twitching with every unintelligible whisper. I look back at them, and they're not moving. Of course they're not alive! I'm going insane. For a second there, the way the dying light grazed upon the wall, I thought I saw them as living people huddled in the back of my cell and mocking me. They had faces like my family, or faces like the monsters that hide in the back of my head. They had faces like Gods, and demons, and things even worse than that which lurks in Hell. Things that are worse because they're not mere mad imaginings, but worse than Hell because they're real in the here and now. Alive. Today. They had twenty eyes and a thousand mouths, a hundred fingers and bodies twisted into impossible shapes and angles, yet all of them looked more human than I feel. For a brief second, I saw myself among them, and I was neither Lumière nor Fos. I was one with the Void. I was a mess of chaos and order that came together to make a beastly nothingness. I was neither alive nor dead, yet somehow, far worse than Death. I was truth, and that truth meant something.

"I DIDN'T MEAN TO!" I yell. "DID YOU THINK I WANTED TO?! I'M SO DAMNED HUNGRY! YOU HAVE TO COME BACK FOR ME! YOU HAVE TO RETURN! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME HERE IN HELL!"

There's scurrying. There's definitely someone there.

"I WAS HUNGRY! TOO HUNGRY! I HAD TO! I HAD TO EAT THEM! I'M SORRY! I'M STILL SO HUNGRY!"

...But it's coming from behind me.

The stick figures! Those animals! I knew! I knew they were really people!

My new family's mocking eventually lulls me to sleep.