The Other Side | Short Story

2

The chest is not empty. There are clean clothes inside, and I change into white underthings and a white dress, and then toss my soiled clothes out a window.

The length of my chain is a strange thing. I am able to walk fully, easily, to the desk and chair on the far end of my side of the room. But when I step near the Divide, the chain pulls taut and short, and will not budge.

I cannot cross over.

*

I wake to the tower screaming, teetering, about to fall. The walls are torn apart. The floors are splitting. It is an earthquake, I think. The monster has decided to tear its house down, I think.

Except the monster is the beautiful boy again. He is on his side, with a hand on a crank. The crank he is turning is pulling the walls and the floors apart, but the tower does not fall. The walls and floors shift and switch places, and they click back together like puzzle pieces. My side of the wall next to my mattress is pulled away and — swinging close and closer — replaced by a room. 

The room thuds into place. The tower rocks, and groans, and remains upright.

This room must be one of the dangling ones I saw from before, from the base of the tower — the rooms like earrings.

Inside it is a mirror, a sink, a toilet, a tub. The open cupboards are stacked with towels, bandages, bottles. There are metal tubes jutting here and there, rusted over, bent out of shape.

I am gaping. Rooms are not supposed to swing and move. Toilets and tubs and sinks are not supposed to exist. No one quite remembers how water was pumped through metal tubes, anymore.

The monster is trying to give me a bath.

I turn to look at it, at the boy. He — smiles, at me. His arm is in a sling. It was not in a sling before.

He steps near the Divide and I shrink back into the mattress. I think about running to the desk, for the quills, to stab him with, but it will not be enough. It does not matter. He stops before the invisible line, and does not cross it. He opens his mouth and speaks.

I do not understand him.

His voice is warped like movement under water. Only a low burble rolls out. I do not know why, but the Divide is muffling his words.

I frown. I stare. I ask, "Are you a boy, or are you a monster?"

He watches my mouth move. He stares the way I did, so I know he also does not understand.

He sighs and turns and leaves, and when he comes back, he comes back with a tray heavy with food.

He slides the tray over the Divide. His fingers inch careful behind the line as he pushes and pushes. Then he stands, and watches me. I do not move. My stomach growls. Still I do not move.

The boy tilts his head, then turns. He leaves down the ladder. I wait. For many breaths and many beats, I wait. When I am sure it is safe, that he is not going to take me by surprise, I relent for the food. I eat.

I do not look away from the ladder.

*

The boy speaks often to me from the Other Side. When he does, I say, "I still can't understand you."

When he passes me a tray of food — three times every day now — I say, "Do you have cheese? I love cheese," and he tilts his head at me, because he can't understand me, either.

He stays in the room more and more as the days pass. He no longer wears the sling for his arm, and I find fewer and fewer bandages on him every time I see him.

He sits at the table on his side of the room and writes. He holds up the parchments for me to see, but like the blurring of our voices, the lines smudge when I look at them. They spread like ink in water. I can only frown and shake my head, because I cannot learn what he is trying to teach me.

He scratches his head and scratches his head, and crumples up the parchments, angry, frustrated. He bunches his hair up behind his ears with one hand, and the side of that hand is smudged black with ink. Blue knots over his fingers, but he does not notice.

"I can't read anyways," I say. He turns and looks at me, and I know he does not understand. I speak on all the same. I say, "I was never taught how. Girls without mothers and fathers don't get taught things much."

He sets down his quill. The line of his mouth tilts this way and that, because he is trying to catch the sounds of my words. I snort. He looks ridiculous.

I turn and move to the table on my side of the room. I open an inkwell. I dip a quill into the ink and trace out shapes on a parchment, the way I do with sticks in the dirt. When I am done, I hold it up for the boy to see.

I have drawn the shape of me in a dress, and the shape of him in a shirt, in a trouser. With the parchment still held up, I draw stars and flowers around my shape, to say that I am wonderful. I draw wiggled lines and snakes and eyeballs around his shape, to say that he is not wonderful, but I am only trying to make him laugh.

He laughs.

His nose wrinkles, crinkles short, with his snorting. His hand is no longer in his hair, but his hair is still frizzy in the back like some bur. He returns to his table. He sorts out a blank parchment, and sketches in broad, quick strokes. He is smiling to himself.

I sit crisscrossed on the floor with my drawing in my lap, and wait. As I wait, I say, "Even monsters get lonely, huh?"

I say, "If I had known all you wanted was a pet, I wouldn't have punched and kicked you so hard."

He does not understand me. He finishes his sketch, and holds up his paper for me to see. I see it is an outline of me, with long wild hair, with hands fisted in my dress. My eyes are comically round. They are bulbous on tears. My mouth is a wobbly mess of a circle, or something like a circle, and I know he is making fun of me. I scowl.

He tilts his head back and again, laughs.