Concentration
Concentration
People are dying
Children are crying
Concentration…
Children’s voices echo eerily from the concrete - a circle of five. Little girls; two with brown hair and three with blonde and the old man stands on the other side of the fence, his thick fingers fitted through the diamond-shaped chain, watching them.
He thinks “I am old.’’ Watching them, he feels old. Listening to their voices, the high terrible innocence of their song, he grips the fence hard and he aches as he remembers.
Concentration…
But so much as been forgotten as well. His eyes are watery and pale and the way they see the world, past and present alike, through them, is changed.
Concentration…
He remembers bodies powered to ash, drifting on hot winds and sweeping away from furnace flames.
Concentration…
He sees them piled high, stinking and stick-thin; broken, nameless and forgotten; shoveled into a mass graves – living and dead alike.
Concentration…
He remembers streets paved with shattered stones, where to walk is to walk on the names of the dead, erasing them as though they had never been.
Concentration…
He remembers streets glittering with broken glass - a night of blood and flame.
Concentration…
He remembers all this, but he has forgotten much as well. He has forgotten himself. His own name has been erased as well and more than his footsteps, he fears, have taken those other names away.
When he thinks of the past he can no longer remember whether he stood arm to arm with his brothers; faces grim and guns at the ready. When he thinks of the past he cannot remember whether he stood ankle to ankle; chained to his brothers and digging his own grave.
He does not remember and he is afraid to look at his body to see whether he bears a number or a name. He does not remember if he has wasted and withered flesh or whether he is hale and whole. He wears baggy clothes that do not fit and they hide his shape and he does not remember what it is that his clothing hides.
Stab a knife in your back
Feel the blood trickle down
Stab a knife in your back
Feel the blood trickle down…
He remembers a girl with warm brown hair; cut short and softly curled. He remembers that she had blue eyes and a beautiful smile; rosy cheeks and skin the color of cream. He remembers her name; Deborah - Debbie. He remembers this, but he cannot remember his own name. He remembers the past, but it is an abstract and terrible thing – he cannot see himself in it and he is afraid to look too hard.
He remembers the girl, but he does not remember whether he loved her or whether he killed her, whether he held her or whether he betrayed her or whether it was both. He wonders whether there is a difference in the end.
He remembers a man with dark hair falling into his warm brown eyes. He remembers the man dying in his arms, coughing with blood on his lips, but he does not remember why. He thinks of a camp, a desperate place full of people doing desperate things. He thinks he hears a voice pleading for mercy, but he cannot remember whether it is the mercy begged of an enemy or craved of a friend.
He thinks he hears this voice, but he doesn’t remember because there’s also a voice, ravening and desperate, like a demon whispering in his ear, that tells him if he kills this man he himself will remain alive.
His eyes water and he watches the children circle and sing. He grips the fence until his fingers ache, until they are chapped and cold and numb. When he pulls them away, the skin tears and sticks to the frozen metal and his fingers bleed.
When he sleeps he hears the echoes of their song in his dreams. When he looks out on the empty playground, long after the children have gone home, he sees the ghosts of other children with flesh the color of moonlight and eyes the color of bruises and coal and mouths, empty holes that can no longer scream or sing. He sees them swirl in endless dance among the wind-tossed leaves and there are tears deep in the folds and lines of his cheeks because he remembers and he doesn’t know why.
Concentration
Concentration
People are dying
Children are crying
Concentration…
He is at the schoolyard again the next day and the day after that. Despite the hollow ache in his heart, despite the pain it brings, he cannot stay away. The children have noticed him there, even the little girls singing their terrible song. He sees them laughing behind their hands and pointing in his direction. Some of the little boys, growing braver over time, began to dare each other, so they dart close to the fence then skirt away, shrieking with laughter.
He wants to tell them to stay away. He wants to ask why they are blind.
At times they come with sticks in their hands and drag them along the links of the fence, thrumming it into strange vibrations to see who among them will come the closest to his hands before running away.
Sometimes they don’t pull back and the sticks scrape his knuckles before the boys go screaming away and he draws back scratched and bloody hands. But moments later they are at the fence again clinging just as hard; the blood still seeping out from beneath the skin. He cannot let go.
When their sticks do not drive him away the boys grow bolder still, launching rocks that leave deep sickly-colored bruises upon his skin. They bring rotten eggs and their fragile shells shatter on the links of the fence, stinking of sulfur and leaving ichorus streaks on his clothes and skin.
A chill wind comes from the west, bringing the memory of another wind heavy with ash and it dries the yoke on his skin leaving it stiff and sticky and brittle. He does not wipe it away, but leaves it to run down his cheeks like puss-colored tears. The children grow bored and return to their song.
Crack an egg on your head
Feel the yoke trickle down
Crack an egg on your head
Feel the yoke trickle down…
He watches the children and they are so young - they know nothing of death and pain. They don’t understand that they should be afraid. They do not understand sorrow and it hurts him that they do not know. In their innocence he loves them. In their innocence he hates them. Always their song is in his head and he tries to obey their dizzying words; concentrate, concentrate and remember, but it is hard and it makes his head and his heart ache.
He remembers long railway tracks - ash scattered - stretching into the distance, but going nowhere. He knows terrible secrets - that there is tallow around his bones and lye beneath his skin. He knows these things, but he does not know why.
His gaze is carried through the diamond-slit fence to the other side of the playground where trees stir gently in the breeze. The sky overhead is sullen and the leaves are made pale by the wind, showing their silvered sides as they ripple to the current - pale as rotten flesh. In the heavy clouds he sees winter coming.
One by one the leaves are stripped from the trees, drifting down to crowd the playground for a month or a day - a drift of fallen bodies to be forgotten under the snow. He sees the branches, already cruel and black, stretching like words across the sky and he is afraid of what they might say. He wants to remember, but driving memory away, is the terrible-sweet echo of the children’s song.
Concentration
Concentration
People are dying
Children are crying
Concentration…
He wants to leave; he wants to run away from the thing in the back of his mind that tells him that something terrible will happen if he stays. His skin feels dry, like powered ash drifting away on the coming winter winds. Underneath his skin his bones feel brittle, ready to shatter and crack and turn to dust beneath the echoed vibrations of a song.
He is dizzy, his vision is black and he can no longer see the children in their circling dance. He thinks he has fallen down; that he lies twitching on the ground like an insect in the last throes of life, but he cannot cry out and no one comes to help him. He feels a thin silvery trail of spittle on his grizzled chin, he feel a slow trickle of blood from somewhere on his scalp. His skin is splitting apart and he is terrified of what is hiding inside.
He stands at the fence bordering the schoolyard. The wind is sweeping cold across the asphalt and fallen leaves are stirring and scraping roughly across the ground. The branches are black and angry across the sky on the other side of the yard the children are strangely silent and still. They are dressed in black, wearing woolen coats that reach below their knees and the only color is from their hats, which are like fallen petals or angry drops of blood against the whiteness of snow.
He looks for the little girls, now silenced in their song. They are standing in a knot with their backs to him; a closed circle, their faces hidden. They do not have names.
He counts them carefully and counts them again; there are not five now, but only four.
He feels his breath shorten in his chest and he is dizzy. He thinks he can smell the rich scent of earth, packed hard between the trees, waiting for the frost to come. He can hear the remaining leaves still clinging to the branches, making a skeletal rattle and bringing the terrible scent, not only of the earth, but also of things rotting and dying and falling away.
In his mind there is the image of a little girl with blond hair and blue eyes running between the trees. He cannot remember if she is laughing as she runs or if she is crying. He cannot remember whether he loved her or whether he killed her, whether he held her or whether he betrayed her or whether it was both. Maybe, he thinks, there isn’t a difference anymore.
He has an image in his mind of a little girl wearing white tights, which stick out beneath her woolen coat - and black patent leather shoes, which are shiny and no longer touch the ground. He hears the creaking of branches on the trees - a pendulous gallows sound.
The children are silent and they shiver in their circle. Their faces, though he cannot see them, are pale and grave. They understand death now. They feel its shadow and it chills them more than the winter air. They know how to be afraid. He hates them because they are no longer innocent and he loves them just the same.
He continues to watch them with his fingers woven through the links of the fence, freezing on the metal and numb with the winter’s cold. He cannot see their faces so he does not know whether their mouths are moving or not, but even so, he can still hear the echo of their ghostly song.
Concentration
Concentration
People are dying
Children are crying
Concentration…
Tie a rope around your neck
and pull
pull
pull…
A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and currently lives outside of Philadelphia. Wise's work has been published, or is forthcoming, in numerous publications including Realms of Fantasy, Lone Star
Stories,
Fantasy Magazine, Insidious Reflections, Cabinet des Fees and the
anthologies, Time for Bedlam, Shadow Regions and Into the Dreamlands, among others.