IRVING //a short story//

2.

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it talks.

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WREN IRVING

Come Monday the fog seemed much thicker than usual. The creature was silent as it gobbled up the remains of what once was a classic and made its way onto a calm cover depicting a train and a boy with glasses and a peculiar scar. Wren was somewhat relieved as she left the darkened room, but her shoulders were tense as she fixed the bricks onto her back and ignored the gaze of the many things as they pleaded.

School was its usual odd. With colours that didn't seem to match the shades coating her mind, and guilt travelled down and up her spine as she walked briskly away from her friends, the bricks laughing. Boredom played games with her, she fancied herself in a castle, a jester ironically brooding in the corner. The fantasies, to her, where the only normal thing about the place. In fact, if the grey peculiarity of everything could get any stranger.... There was a boy. He was new to the halls of noise and pubescent stench. He was tall, with smiling off-coloured eyes that couldn't decide if they were brown or green, but that wasn't what made him odd. What made him odd was the fact that he was trying to talk to her. Wren didn't reply to anything, just stared in some mild horror. He smiled and ignored the line of people who actually wanted to talk to him, to be his friend. She wished he would go away.

On the way home, she couldn't help but notice that the sky was blue, it was painfully pretty.

When she got to her room the creature was bigger, a mass of grey and mouldy blue hair, bulging frog-like eyes and sharp teeth sticking out in every direction. He stared as she place down her things, as the room erupted into whispers, as she collapsed amongst the covers. She turned her phone on, and it vibrated with messages upon messages from her friends, asking her where she was, why she was avoiding them, what her problem was. Wren thought it best to leave it off.

"You don't need them."

The creature's voice was terrible, like the feeling of a knife gently touching the side of your neck, the cold terror and dark surprise that chills everything in your body.

"So now you talk."

It stared.

"yes."

"Do you have a name?"

"No."

She decided internally that he should be named Irving. Just because.

"Why don't I need them?"

"You don't need them."

Wren dangled her legs off the side, imagining small people bustling along the streets, going about their lives far below her. She turned to her phone, cold and blank, sitting alone on the bench, and her forehead creased in some hurtful thought.

"It's all pointless anyway, they don't understand you like I do, they'll just end up hurting you."

"What makes you think that you know me so well suddenly? All you ever did was scream."

"I know more than you think, I can see right into your very soul" Irving crawled closer, his clawed, disfigured hand pointing to her sternum. "You're like a book, I know about every little fear, every doubt. How you're terrified that you'll never amount to anything, that you'll be alone, that you're a disappointment. I know that you're so paralysed at the thought of failing or getting hurt by people that you do nothing."

His eyes looked straight into hers or rather straight through them.

"I'm not here to hurt you, in fact I'm here to protect you, from everything, from them. You don't need your friends, they'll just end in broken hope and pain, trust me."

The tasks in the room with their once impenetrable glares now screamed out and pleaded. Don't do it, they whispered, don't do it, they screamed. The room was alive with noise, the clothes in heaps, the fish in the tank, the bricks in the bag and the books in their pile pleaded and begged. Wren didn't listen, today her room was a bunker. Against herself.

That night Wren's phone was buried in a deep, black drawer.... Its charger was disconnected. The fog became thicker.

Weeks went by and Irving talked more, their conversations were more one sided than anything, Irving did the majority of the talking, but that's not to say that Wren didn't talk... some days she just didn't have it in her to speak.

Today, however, she did.

"Why did you scream?"

Irving was too big for the dresser now, and had instead chosen to lurk in the washing basket, eyeing off the fish. The room watched with baited breath.

"Why do babies cry?"

"Because they're hungry?"

"No, They cry because they cannot speak. Have you ever seen a baby verbally ask its mother to feed it?"

"No, I haven't"

"I screamed because I could not speak, it wasn't after I'd devoured at least three of those whispers full of words that I mastered it."

"Were you a baby?"

"No."

The goldfish asked to be fed in hushed whispers and Irving watched closely as she sprinkled in flakes. The bricks spilling out from her bag tripped her on the way back, begging to be put to rest.

"Ignore them Wren, go back to bed"

So she did. Irving's grey eyes stayed trained on the tank.

That night two fish disappeared.

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