Boketto - UNFINISHED

The Women of the Waste

By the time they stab the boy's eyes out, one man is already dead on the pavement.

"You fucking monster!" The man with the knife yells. "I'll make you feel what it's like to turn to stone!" He caws, with his sweaty, quaking hands clenched around the knife that's twisted into the trembling boy beast's eye. He holds tightly onto the dagger as his desperate face searches the crowd for what I can only assume would be State's Workers. When he doesn't see us, he continues hacking away. Not a soul dares to end the assault in our absence. Instead, everyone from the shopkeepers to the beggars of the city bizarre, have gathered around the scene to a choking degree-- each whispering under their breaths how thankful they are that it wasn't them caught between the creature's gaze. Despite it being high noon, they've all quit work to gaze at this pinned embodiment of Death-- the vessel of his ungodly majesty, the degenerate Void Witch himself! Well, I suppose what was once the figure of the necromancer, at least. Now, it is only a shell without a soul; a debauched, defiled personification without purpose, disfigured at the hands of an idiot playing God.

"I won't go any farther without Malinda." Sable huffs from behind the shrill mechanic whine of the wheel barrow. Her face is a mess of hair and dirt, but even as the loose strands from her bun obscure her features, I can still see the blue of her badge twinkling across her small eyes. "I know people often get worked up when the death of someone they loved is involved, but that man really looks positively insane; without Malinda here, I won't put myself on the business end of his knife. I'm staying here."

The crowd is too thick for her to push through with the wheelbarrow anyway. "Fine, but let me go try to reason with the Devil myself."

Sable doesn't bother to fight me. "Just don't get killed, Adrienne."

There's nothing quite like a street painted red to summon Hell! From where I am on the outskirts of the massive, bulging crowd, the man with the knife in the center almost looks like a monster himself; my word choice couldn't have been more correct. A real demon, that one. The true Devil! His face is the brightest red I see in a scene that is already sweltering with blood and pieces of smashed meat. He sighs, and wipes bits of eyeball on his pants from off his fingers. While he sits on top of the twisting, bloodied body of the boy beast, tears of the real creature's blood are dripping systematically onto the pavement.

I feel each of his screams down my spine with a cringe.

The boy he sit atop cries an unholy shrieking in a tongue that sounds vaguely like our own. I get the strangest feeling that if only I could focus, maybe I'd understand. It's an eerie little whine that pulsates off the stone like water rolling off a roof, or a piece of paper getting caught by the wind. It is a scream that is almost just as deadly, I suppose, as his eyes were, because for a second I find myself unable to move. Maybe I'm the one turned to stone, instead of the stone corpse than now rests in boulders in the middle of the scene. As it wails, the man who stabbed his eyes out pushes the knife in farther, with a heavy grunt and a sick laugh that sounds unnervingly like the lighting from a terrible storm. Ignoring the red and white bloody globs he now has for eyes, the beast looks normal enough-- black hair and a sweet heart face. Perhaps he isn't a monster now at all, I think. Perhaps that's all it takes to make a monster a real boy again. I can almost convince myself he's just another person when I don't look head on; that maybe that isn't the mark of the beast soaked into the skin of the blinded creature, or the abysmal holes of two missing eyes.

"It needs to be sent to its own domain!  It needs to be sent to the Void!" I yell, trying to break through the crowd. "Killing it will only make everything worse!" Everyone tries to ignore me.

In the crowd, younger children are busy tracing in the air the head of the petrified man with their fingers. While they draw some fantastical, invisible outline, their parents gawk at the severed limbs and exposed organs with a hyper sense of disbelief and shock. The corpse is only pebbles now, and his decapitated head has its marbled, igneous mouth wide open, gaping at the sky. It's an unfortunate thing, I think, to look one of those wicked beasts in the eyes.