Apparitions by Adam Pottle

Author:Adam Pottle [Pottle, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Matter Magazine
Published: 2023-09-07T19:11:22+00:00

RESISTANCE

Felix had tried teaching me about time. He’d formed clocks with his hands, counted out the seconds, scratched out calendars on the air. Like a kidney made of iron, my body wouldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t accept that all the things that happened to me could be broken into seconds and minutes and weeks and years, that the blob of time I spent in that room in my father’s house could be hardened into numbers and slotted into shelves that had been waiting for them all along. When I was first arrested, they argued for days over whether I should be tried as an adult, and now, every once in a while, my lawyer tells me I have a few more years before I can apply for parole. I don’t know what that means. Telling time is trying to use a glass to control a river. Time is a way of controlling. Time means nothing if nothing changes.

In that basement room, I’d grown until my head started bumping the ceiling, while my father grew heavier. His hair shortened. The bigger man grew even thinner. He wore the same clothes, and his body disappeared within them. His belly shrank, his skin grayed. The long-haired man never came back.

But my hair had grown. On my head and under my arms. Nobody cut my hair anymore. The men enjoyed it when a dog yanked me around the cage by my hair. I hurt my neck many times. My nails grew long and the only way to keep them short was clawing at the dogs and at the ground and at the walls. I lost one nail when a dog ripped it out.

Sometimes the men had tossed things into the cage. Rocks. Pieces of wood or metal. Shards of glass. I fought in rain, snow, mud. I never knew when I’d be finished. Sometimes the hard earth would be littered with soupy blood and desperate claw marks, and I’d still have to fight. My father kept opening the cage. He was testing me, seeing how much I could take. Maybe he was proud. My arms hardened as scars piled on top of scars. My fists sharpened. My mind flattened. The angry smiles of the men and the sorrow and outrage in my heart never faded. Time meant nothing.

When the fights were finally over and the bigger man hauled me back down to the basement, I continued to see the dogs’ teeth chomping at me. If I closed my eyes, I saw their stilled claws and slackened tongues. They fought me in my dreams. Tore at my clothes. Snapped at my face. I punched at them in my sleep. Broke two knuckles like that. I tried to stay awake all the time, staring at the light that never went out.

If I didn’t dream about the dogs, I dreamed about the monsters. They’d step out of the walls and out of the pages of the book and surround me and hold me in their clawed hands. They stared at me with their enormous green eyes.

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