Things Fall Apart

The Trash Lords sat still.
The sun rose and set.
The weather was heavy.
The sun was violently beating the sand. Nobody could put a bare feet on it.
There was no wind, no clouds. The sky was bright blue. The air was so tight they could barely breathe.
Jet Star, Fun Ghoul and Cherri Cola were slouching in the sofa, Party Poison and Kobra Kid sitting on the mat, sipping old sodas, their eyes barely open, almost naked, shiny with sweat, flies circling around them they weren't courageous enough to chase.
"It's funny how what's left of our childhood stands in rusty soda cans which content went flat a while ago..."
Doctor Death Defying's voice pensively echoed from outside the House "But, hey kids! Believe me or not, the heat's actually better outside."
"Thanks, D" Cola replied in a husky voice "But I don't think any of us is courageous enough to move..."
"Man, if Dracos can survive under this heat, I'm pretty sure even the dumbest of them could get us all right now..." Jet Star sighed.
"I HATE this heat! It's overwhelming!" Cola exclaimed.
Tommy Chow Mein, wearing his usual impeccable suit entered the Radio House.
"Dude! How can you were this same suit night and day under every weather and still have it impeccable! I don't understand it's like magic!" Doctor D huskily laughed, entering after him. "Aren't you just dying of warmth right now?"
"Nah I'm alright." Tommy soberly replied. "Anyways I brought stuff back from the outskirts of Bat City especially for you guys!"
"Oh boy! What is it?" Cola jumped up, clapping.
Tommy smirked. "Some good stuff, my friend!"
"Won't you just tell us already?" Poison impatiently sighed.
Tommy ruffled in his suit's inside pocket for a while before theatrically brandishing a small plastic pouch filled with light blue pills.
Cola gasped.
"What is it?" Jet Star genuinely asked.
"Drugs. Duh!" Tommy explained.
Poison darkly smiled. Fun Ghoul excitingly jumped on the sofa, laughing.
"It'll make the heat better, at least." DJ Hot Shrimp sighed dramatically, entering the living room from the bedroom. She wasn't here a lot recently, as it seemed that she had found another home in the Zones, the sectored areas of the desert surrounding BL/ind cities, so that Doctor Death Defying was looking for somebody else to broadcast.
"Come on! Be a nice pal and pass it on!" Doctor D begged Tommy.
They all sat in a circle around him, detailing each and every one of his movement with curiosity.
Tommy simply emptied the pouch and distributed a tiny blue pill to everyone.
"Those ones are simple. Just swallow them and I swear you'll be sent galaxies away!"
Everyone complied and then laid back a little, their minds slowly fogging up.
Fun Ghoul closed his eyes, strangely calm.
His mind was like a pink map, pinpoints at the tip of his fingers, scratching names on a mailbox.
The sun wasn't here, it had stayed back home. The world was too cold, too violent. Still, he had embraced it all, and now wandered through life, looking up, waiting for more, at the moon, the stars teared in the Night's black paper like full stops in the world's story written on the back of the sky's infinity.
His story was being written, and he desperately stared at it, looking for a 'but', for a 'then', blindly wishing to dead stars for anything to change, vainly trying to breathe, crying upon dry bones, thinking: "I want to come home"
But when he took a good look at himself, or, at least, pretended he did, all he could see was a pathetic Nothing, desperately crawling in the Dust, full of vain hopes and dreams, broken promises and memories,
Dying of Homesickness
for Where, When, What?
Poison's hair was blood red. Pitchfork red. "Let's repaint these walls" red. Murder red. Poison red. He twisted one of his bright red locks around his index finger.
Poison needed to be Poison as the sea needed water. Poison needed to be Poison, because he needed to be someone. He needed to be in control. He needed people to know his name, he needed them to think "Poison" when they saw red. He needed to be remembered, otherwise he felt unimportant, drowned in the human mass, identity-less.
His dreams were never big enough, his sorrows never sad enough, his joys never happy enough, and his life never important enough. To matter.
Most people did not know that they did not know wether they were or they weren't.
He did.
Jet Star was seeing blue. Blue everywhere. He was cold, so cold. Everything was.
He had long hair and rhymeless rhymes, half blue moons under his warm brown eye.
He remembered of a time when his rhymes rhymed and he had deep dimples when he smiled.
The blue was floating over everything, taking over.
At least blue is still something, he thought.
Everything was better than black and white.
He remembered, how, when he was just a kid, his heart used to be as loud as a kick drum at a rock show, but now it just was a time bomb ticking out.
And maybe, he thought, maybe they were sacrificing themselves now, to build a better world where none would ever have to take someone else's life away, ever. Maybe living a pale, washed up life was worth something after all?
Kobra Kid sat silently, eyes wide opened. But he didn't really see.
He was lost in the fabric of a world that was going threadbare. And sometimes beyond.
Too often, people imagined Time as a straight road with a beginning and an end. They imagined themselves walking along that road, the past behind them and the future in front.
But if the future was in front, then they had to be blind not to see it.
Kobra thought Time was a spiral on which he walked the wrong way around, facing the past, the future above his shoulder.
He suddenly closed his eyes, and remembered.
He remembered that
Over his shoulder,
Somewhere
there was a woman holding a black umbrella so she wouldn't taste the salt of the rain when the sky began to weep;
there was an 8 years old child, tied up in his white bed with summer air tight on his paper skin, remembering how now was the time of the year cherry-trees blossomed in his garden, who wouldn't make it past tomorrow;
there was a young girl folding up love letters into paper planes to throw on the balcony of the girl with eyes like marbles living in the apartment beside hers;
there were people reading books, getting married, dancing to old records, opening letters from all over the world, cooking rice with exotic spices and red sauces, buying colouring pencils, driving faster than they should, painting murals of the sky on the sides of highways, writing poetry in blue copybooks, taking pictures of funny-shaped clouds, getting their hair cut, thinking about faraway friends, drinking fizzy sodas in the sun on a cafe's patio, ignoring the telephone,
Reading this story.
Somewhere,
People didn't have to sit in their empty black and white houses smelling like disinfectant with all their lights off,
Somewhere,
People didn't have to hide and be outlawed for buying colours for worn out clothes that were all the wrong sizes,
Somewhere,
A kid with no voice, no name and closed eyes was thinking "I'm alone"
Somewhere
That kid finally understood
he never really was.
He remembered.
And he had to fight with his body to take his next breath. And it seemed to him that it was the most painful one he ever took.
He could remember that, a long, long time ago, breathing was so easy he sometimes forgot about it.
But that time was over now.
His eyes seemed to be stuck shut.
"I think he fell asleep..." He heard a voice hush.
"Are you sure he didn't pass out?" He recognised his brother's voice.
"No, he's probably tired from the heat, and maybe from the drugs too, but he'll be okay, it wasn't strong." Somebody else said.
"Man, that heat is so overwhelming, it's almost scary, as if Something Big was coming."
Something Big coming.
He could have talked. He could have opened his eyes and tell them what he remembered. He knew he could.
But he didn't want to.
And even though he was so hot he could literally feel his skin melting away, his whole body suddenly froze from horror.
None of them actually Were.
But there were things that Kobra hadn't seen.
He hadn't seen a boy with a mask, burning his bare feet away on the burning sand, who was afraid to grow old.
He hadn't seen a dangerous boy sitting next to a rusted postbox with secrets to reveal and a mind as wide as a pink map.
These two had an appointment they couldn't miss.
"Hey." Poison whispered.
"Hey..." Ghoul smiled, eyes shut. "I was waiting for you."
"Good." Poison said "So?"
"I said we shouldn't say anything at first. Talking always makes things worse. I know about it." Ghoul said. He opened his eyes. Poison nodded.
And they sat here, in silence, staring at each other.
Even though the heat was more than what anyone could take, they felt just fine, as if this place was exactly where they were meant to be all along.
Poison suddenly realised that Fun Ghoul didn't seem so crazy after all, now.
Maybe that was what the point of the silence was.
Every morning at sunrise, before the heat became too overwhelming to do anything, Poison would wake up and take long runs through the Zones by foot. This had many perks for him: it permitted him to :
a) stay fit,
b) check everything was normal in the Zones,
c) perhaps answering some early morning distress calls,
d) take a look around the Trash Lords and possibly find useful materials that had been thrown away.
This very morning, everything was calm. Poison got woken up by the faint bipping of his watch. He swiftly got up and folded up his sleeping corpse-bag, took a look at his comrades, all sound asleep, and then got out.
"Hey Poison!" Cola, who was on his guard shift smiled. Poison grunted what seemed like a "hello" back, and then got away, running. Cola looked at his lonely silhouette getting smaller and smaller and smiled to himself.
Poison liked the feeling of the mass of the earth under his bare feet, he liked the sand flying around him when he ran. He liked the loneliness. It was the only time he could think.
In his breath, grains of sand danced. He placed his bandana above his mouth in order not to swallow any. The still weather could only mean sandstorms were coming. They all could feel it in the weight of the air: Something Big Coming.
Poison was almost at the Trash Lords now. He could smell them from a couple of dunes away, even before he saw the top of them.
And when he climbed down the last dune, and finally beheld the Trash Lords and, further on, Battery City waking up in the early morning mist of pollution, he stopped, out of breath, and lowered his bandana he had used as a mask.
With the heat, the Trash Lords stank even more than usual, and fat green flies, sometimes as big as a fist, buzzed around everywhere, forming a green crawling wave halfway hiding the sun. Poison carefully climbed down the hill, looking for any hints of a human presence, friendly or not, difficult to locate in the smelly waste mess. A dozen of filled corpse bags had appeared since the last time he had been here, along with various unidentified objects. Poison walked in between the waste mountains, ignoring the strong smell of various rotting food and drinks, and corpses. He thought that maybe, one day, the Trash Lords wouldn't be wild anymore. One day, humans would tame the menacing piles of trash into well structured buildings, a Trash City, right next to a clean, black and white and disinfected Battery City.
But, suddenly, after passing a notoriously big mountain of waste, Poison spotted something unusual.
Something big, clean and white amongst the dirty.
An entire white car, which looked like it had been abandoned here, probably by some refugees.
Poison turned on his Walkie Talkie while approaching it carefully, in case it had been a trap.
"Poison to Radio House, Poison to Radio House, over."
"Doctor Death Defying to Poison, you okay mate? Over."
"Yeah I'm alright. I'm at the Trash Lords, and I think I found a car in perfect shape..."
"Trans AM" Jet Star said, while wiping his hands covered in red paint on his trousers. "Because that's a reference to the Radio, also because it had been transformed from a BL/ind vehicle to a Killjoy's one, you know, the 'trans' thing?"
"I like Trans AM." Poison said. "And it's much more colourful that way." Poison nodded at the modifications Jet Star had brought to it. He was the artistic one, this one was. Poison remembered with nostalgia of how he used to go to an art school himself, before Everything went Berserk, but he chased the thought immediately. The time was now. What was done was done.
The car was still overly white, the sole novelties being a giant radioactive spider painted on the front, some blue, red and purple bands, in the shape of lightings, "Vaya", the Spanish for "Go" on the side, and "Love and Revenge" written on the back.
"That is a fucking battle car!" Fun Ghoul exclaimed, overly happy.
"Can any of us even drive?" Cola asked, more down-to-earthly.
"I used to." Doctor D said with regrets. "But I can't anymore, now. Not since the Helium Wars."
Fun Ghoul winced.
"I could try." Poison said. "I mean, there's no way I could hit anything in the Wasteland with it. Am I right?"
The long-awaited sandstorm that had made itself ominous since the beginning of the heat wave had finally broke out. And it was one of the biggest sandstorms in man's history: the amount of sand flying around was so dense it completely cut out the light from the sun, so that the Zones would live in constant darkness for three days, with no indication of what the time was. The wind howling outside was making the Radio House's walls violently shake, and the grains of sand projected against the roof and the windows produced a constant tapping noise. Had somebody been yelling outside, nobody would have known.
As a matter of fact, the overall sound of the sandstorm sounded like a continuous and immeasurable suffering cry from the dark wounded sky.
Everybody had taken refuge in the Radio House or in Tommy Chow Mein's Bazaar, the only two concrete buildings that had a chance to stand up against the storm in the Zones.
Party Poison had put his Mousecat mask that had an air filter on, and had left the building at the time refugees had started to come in. It had been three days, and he hadn't came back since.
The Radio House was too crowded for anyone but Kobra Kid to notice.
What Kobra Kid didn't notice though, was that Fun Ghoul was missing too.
The both of them were standing under the dark wounded sky, facing the elements, sand projected on their whole bodies, slowly wearing out their clothes and opening minor wounds in the places their skins were discovered. They had crawled behind the Mailbox shrine, only left standing by some unnatural will, and had curled up against each other in order to leave the less surface possible for the sand to wound.
They both knew concrete buildings weren't the best way to stand up against storms.
They had an appointment they could not miss.
They patiently waited for the storm to end, still for three days, not talking.
On the evening of the third day, the cry made itself less and less powerful, and the sand bit less. After a while, they could stand up without being hurt and could eventually behold the moon that had been hidden for three days.
They both took off their masks.
The sky didn't look so wounded now.
All the candles that were left standing near the shrine had been lighted out.
"Ghoul?" Poison whispered as if someone else might hear him if he talked louder, or as a mark of respected for the mailbox shrine, "I've meant to ask this to you for a while now, but, you know, why did you stab Kobra, that day we fought against the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W?"
"First of all, but I think you know this..." Ghoul answered straight away as though he had been expecting the question "Know that I could have killed him if I wanted to. But I just hurt him, as a warning."
"A warning?"
"A warning to you, against him."
"Why would you warn me against my own brother? He would never hurt anyone!" Poison exclaimed.
"He's not the one you used to know, you see..." Ghoul said
"Explain!" Poison enquired.
Ghoul closed his eyes for a little while, as though he was gathering his thoughts.
"He has changed. He's not who you think he is..." Ghoul eventually said "I don't know if you remember, the first day you left Battery City for the Wasteland." He said. Poison shook his head negatively. "Anyways, the first thing that stroke me here was the perfect silence as opposed to the city's constant movement and noise. It was beautiful, resting. You know?"
"I never noticed..." Poison said "But maybe, you're right."
"Well, it's the same kind of Silence Kobra has fallen into. With his name, he lost something of himself that even a new mask couldn't give him.
And you know how your Emptiness only echoes his Silence, right?
Well his Silence means Nothing, and by Nothing I mean, that's what he is, Nothing, he's just an empty shell. I know you know who he used to be before, and I know your principles tell you to forget about it forever, but, please, remind him. Maybe his voice'll come back, who knows? Maybe his reason too."
"Kobra is the same person he's always been! With or without Silence! I forbid you to talk about him this way!" Poison exploded.
Ghoul suddenly stood up.
"Silence has fallen upon him like the mist: bit by bit, unnoticeable.
But you must understand that he would rather move his pencil than his lips, because the ink spills while his voice dries up.
You must understand that he had came to a point when he had nothing left to say,
only Silence remained.
He shuts his mouth and listens : he hears things better this way, and he enjoys it.
But he's slowly fading out: he becomes a little bit blurred, a little bit transparent, even to those who knew him best.
His skin becomes paler and his eyes switched off. People have forgotten who he was before.
It never mattered much to him anyways, so he forgot it too,
and became Silence.
And only Silence remains."
"Ghoul... How do you know all of this?" Poison whispered, suddenly calmer.
"I told you not to talk." Ghoul snapped.
And he left, just like this, leaving Poison alone on the sand, wondering.
Only silence remained.

Notes

sorry I hardly have time to write now (i feel like i'm apologizing every single chapter)
but i intend to finish this