The Other Side | Short Story

1

The other children dare me to steal into the monster's tower, and because I have no parents telling me no, I say okay, alright. Just watch me do it.

I open the door. I enter the tower.

The grownups tell us that the tower sits exactly on top of the Divide, of the invisible border between our side and the Other, and that we are not allowed in the tower, never, ever. 

It makes us wonder all the more what things on the Other Side are like.

But most children have parents, or a someone that will cry if they are gone, so they cannot go. I do not mind. I am curious, too. I've lived under the tower's shadow all my life. Its length is a wonder. Its many dangling rooms, like earrings against a long neck, is a marvel.

Inside, I find only dust. I find rotted boards and crooked picture frames. When I toe my way past the Divide, nothing happens. Air smells the same. Colours look the way they always do.

There is nothing for me to take, to show the others. So I climb.

There are many ladders. The floors I find are the same: abandoned, dusty, patched and in ruin.

And then I climb onto a floor with a strange furnace of rugged black stone. There, I find a boy.

The boy is on the Other Side of the room, past the Divide. He drops his basket full of things because I, a strange girl, has just climbed into his room. I look at him, and he looks at me. He is beautiful, with long blue hair, wide blue eyes.

I look a little more before I climb back down to leave. He does not stop me. I do not apologize for scaring him, or for breaking into his home.

*

I am bound in cloth and left in a cage of rope and twine, because the other children told on me to the village elders. They told on me because they are cowards, because they are stupid on fear.

The elders tell me I am tainted by the Other Side, and I tell them that there is no such thing as monsters. There are only easily-scared boys. They do not listen.

I am to stay caged in the forest for five days and four nights, and if I am alive, I will have been cleansed by the moon and the stars, and may return. If I am dead, then I am dead.

They hang a short bamboo stalk from my neck, glazed on the inside with nectar, with enough water to last me one night. They weave berries and nuts into a wreath on my head, so that I will not starve too badly the first day.

*

On the third day — with the wreathe and the stalk empty, empty, and with me curled into myself to balm the sting of my hunger — I hear a snap and am cloaked by shadow, and when I look up, a monster is there, dripping and writhing and clicking.

I did not know monsters could look so wrong. I did not know wrongness is enough of a thing to hurl at, to vomit at. Because there is nothing in my stomach, the smooth viscous yellow of my stomach acid is the only thing that rolls out of my mouth.

The monster touches the cage, touches through the cage, and when it touches my cheek, I forget — out of fear — to be human.

I scream and claw and rail against his wrongness. The world smudges behind my tears. I lose my shoe with my kicking. The nails of my left hand snap and bleed against its hide.

The monster heaves and heaves against the cage until it is uprooted from the earth. Then it drags the cage and me, me thrashing like an animal, away and away and toward the tower.

I am dragged past the tower's door.

I am hauled, step by step, up the many, many ladders.

The monster clicks and writhes and drips as it goes. I kick at it several times, and it drops me several times. I wince at the fall and roll into bruises, but even though it has dropped me, there is nowhere to run. I am tied, and caged, and my teeth still cannot tear through the layers of cloth. The monster slicks down the ladder, picks up my cage, and hauls me back up again.

We stop on the floor with the dark stone furnace. The monster is going to cook me and eat me.

It pulls out a long iron chain. It ties my cage down in a corner on my side of the tower and leaves me there, then ambles back to its side of the room.

I do not understand.

I stare.

Slowly, slowly, on that Other Side, the monster's lines waver like heat on the horizon. Its wrongness and slickness tucks into rightness and form. I see the beginnings of arms and legs, of a torso, a neck, a head. I see his hands. I see his long blue hair and wide blue eyes.

The boy from before watches me.

He only watches.

His lips are pressed thin, and I see bruises have bloomed sickly-yellow over his skin from where I've thrashed against him. I see the crescent indents of my nails and my teeth. I see the gouged red lines of my scratches.

I do not remember losing consciousness, but abruptly, I am waking, and I am alone. I have soiled myself, and am stained sticky. The sky is dimmer.

My rope cage is gone. My hands are unbound. Clamped around my left ankle is an iron with a chain, and the chain — with links thick as my fingers — sinks through a hole in the floor. The monster did this while I was unconscious.

Then I see before me a tray of food; it is all that matters.

I yank the food toward me. I feast. I cough and choke several times because I do not stop to chew.

It is good. The food is good. I do not understand. The Other Side is full of monsters, and we are told to stay away. But boys are not monsters, and monsters do not feed girls.

I look about the room, properly, for the first time.

My side of the room has a single desk, a chair, a chest. On the desk are blank parchments, dry quills, inkwells. The chest is open and empty. Next to me has been lain a thick mattress. It is topped full of cushions and a quilt — a quilt of stitched together colours. In each patch of colour a scene is embroidered: a girl with a dog, a flower under the sun, a ship on the seas.

I look over at where the ladder should be. It is gone. The empty space where it was is covered up, boarded up, nailed in with wood.