The Other Side | Short Story

3

I decide to name him Blue.

He is around my age, I think, but he moves quick and sure like he's lived for longer. He's fluttery like a bird, dipping from place to place with always something in his hand, or something smudged along his arm, or with feathers caught in his hair.

When he cranks in new rooms for me to see and to explore, he watches me and forgets to blink, and bobs on the balls of his feet like a child, eager for praise.

But he turns distant like the chimes on the windows when he studies the dark stone furnace.

It has two doors: one on my side, the other on his. I've never known a furnace to need two doors, but I cannot ask why or how it works, since Blue cannot understand. It is never lit, anyways.

The dark stone is lumpy with marks, marks like pictures. Blue maps the grooves there, the maybe-languages there, and taps his quill against his mouth. Ink stains his bottom lip. He winces, tongue stuck out, whenever he licks his lip by accident.

He is better at drawing than I am.

He is better at cooking than I am.

He looks up a lot, out of his window. He never looks down. It is always up and up and away.

He learns, somehow, that cheese is my favourite, and he mixes them into the soup for me. He leaves cubes of them for me, with grapes, before he turns in for the night.

But I still do not know anything. I do not know why I am here. I do not know why I am being cooked for, and drawn for, and swung in rooms for. Maybe the monster really is lonely.

Maybe the monster is just a boy after all.

*

Blue brings me a room without a roof. Jutting over one of its low walls is a long metal tube. I do not know what it is.

I enter the room and settle on a cushion. Blue gestures for me to hold onto something, and when I nod, he turns the crank. The room groans. It peels free from the tower, and then I am flying.

I am hurled along with the room through the wide, wide air, through the deep open night, and the world below me is a blur of colour, a blur of colour. I scream on laughter. I whirl high and higher and to the highest point, and on that highest point of the tower, the room clicks into place.

The wood groans. I am still laughing.

A little while later, another room joins mine. It pieces beside my room from the Other Side. Blue is in that room. His hair is blown sideways by the wind, over his eyes, and he smiles toothy at me.

He points at the metal tube. He mimes for me to look through it, and I do.

I see, I see stars upon stars, looking like sugar, like sunlight off stretching sands, and it makes me want to sink my fingers into that field of lights. Through the glass lens, it makes me think I could.

"It's a wonder," I say. 

I have never seen stars close enough to touch. I look over and see that Blue's drawn a constellation for me. He gestures for me to find it, up in the stitching of the night sky, and it takes me until I am chilled by the night, but I find it.

"There it is," I say, smiling. 

When I look back at Blue again, he's pulled up a scroll of sketches and watercolours of a boy in white and a boy in black, and a glittering treasure upon a pedestal. Looking through the scroll, I understand it is a story.

A story about the constellation.

It begins with the boy in white reaching for the treasure. The boy in black — his brother, his friend, I do not know — tugs on White's arm and shakes his head no, no. Please do not do it. White shrugs the hand off. He plucks up the treasure and smiles triumphant.

And then the treasure is shining, blazing, caught on fire like the sun. That sun gobbles up the boys and spits them into cages made out of glass.

As punishment for attempting claim on the treasure, White's lines pop and bulge and sprout fur until he is a hunchbacked beast. Black is doomed to watch, helpless.

That is how the story ends.

I frown. "This is a terrible story."

Blue sees my frown. He smiles, and it is how he says sorry.

"You should've chosen a better one, a happier one." Blue says something. The sounds slosh over themselves. I say, "Tell me another story, one with a happy ending."

I know Blue did not understand me, but it does not matter. He is already drawing me another constellation, even without understanding. I look for this new one in the dark above and find it quicker than before. And like before, Blue rolls out for me a scroll-story to look at, to gape at, to get lost at.

I want to touch him.

Even now, after weeks and weeks, I am kept chained on my side of the room. Blue brings me different rooms to play in — tearooms, greenhouses, libraries, a small theatre — but the Other Side is forbidden to me. I want to touch him.

I straighten. I abandon the metal tube and toe the edge of the Divide, and the chain at my feet pulls taut. I say, "Let me come over."

Blue is looking at me. I know he cannot understand, but I think, maybe, he understands my eyes. He understands the set of my shoulders, and the colour of my voice. He sets his scrolls down, and presses thin his mouth, and shakes his head.

I scowl. I kick out against the chain and jerk my arms over the Divide, and I do it fast enough that Blue is caught off guard. I catch his arm before he can pull away.

He's tense. He stills. He holds his eyes on mine and looks nowhere else, and I think it is a threat, or a dare, but I do not let go. I tighten my grip.

He says something, something low, something slow. I know he is telling me to let him go. I shake my head. I yank against the chain again and say, "I want to cross over." I say, "I want to see your side of the world."

I don't know why, but Blue's started to shake. I can see him swallowing. His eyes — flickering, twitching — hold desperate on my face, only my face. His hands are fists. Again, he speaks low, slow, and when I shake my head again, he bares his teeth.

He looks down at the ground and yells, and tears his arm from my grip. He turns. From over his shoulder, I see his face is all shadow, grim and hard like stone. I want to say sorry. But I cannot be sorry about wanting to touch him.

He moves away to the far side of his room. He turns the crank there. Rumbling, his room parts from mine, swings low and lower, and then swings out of view.