Page 9 of Of Monsters Of Kings

I’d broken through the wall into the shaft when the landlady went to do her shopping one day. Piece by piece over two weeks when the landlady went out, I’d built a platform in the elevator shaft, and then—under the frail cover of night, I’d carted Mother here from across the city.

I’d stayed on at our old building another week and invited our friends and neighbors for a farewell tea party so they firmly believed Mother gone. They’d assumed I’d moved across the city for cheaper accommodations. They’d pitied me because I turned from schooling before specializing in a skill that would earn me better prospects in life. They’d believed me incapacitated by overwhelming grief and unaware of the ramifications of my choice. I would always struggle to make ends meet because I’d missed my one and only chance.

They’d been wrong about one thing, though. I didn’t turn from that easier future because of grief.

But because of love.

“Patch, my love,” Mother wheezed in greeting.

“You’re awake. Are you in pain? I’m late today.”

“I’m fine enough.”

My mother could be in excruciating pain and still answer the same.

“I have your midday dose,” I said.

I stepped on the most solid boards and crossed to where Mother reclined on a mattress in the corner. I’d stitched together burlap sacks the night before bringing her here, then stuffed the huge bag with worn bedding I couldn’t sell. Mother said the mattress did the job well enough. I knew “well enough” from treating her bed sores that wasn’t the case. The thing was, I had no more to give her, and that made my heart ache from dawn to dusk and back again.

She sighed. “Is it only midday? I thought it afternoon.”

I crouched beside her on the mattress and kissed her pale, warm cheek. “Here it is.”

“Hold off on the medicine, for now, my love. Tell me of your morning.”

The times before I administered more medicine were her most lucid, and we both enjoyed them. She’d lived in this shaft for nearly nine months—hidden from sun and people and everything that filled a soul with joy. Pitched into darkness, what life was this? Death would be kinder.

Like me, though, a harder future didn’t deter Mother, and she’d informed me many times that her life couldn’t end yet. She said that I’d get hurt if she left early.

I believed my mother.

“I lost my job,” I told her. “A skeleton crew shut down the hotel. I went to speak to their boss, but he wouldn’t hire me.”

She gasped. “Patch! A skull as your employer? What were you thinking? Did they harm you?”

“I’m fine enough.” I sounded just like her, so I added, “They didn’t hurt me. They just behaved oddly.”

Shivering again, I tried to brush away the cobwebs of strangeness. The unsettling feeling caused by Ox’s nothing eyes remained, however, and I’d only experienced something like it once in the blurred days after Mother’s stroke.

Though I could remember each action undertaken back then, the memories had a blur to them. I’d spent our entire savings on a pig carcass to throw over walls, waiting until the carrion birds and sand had time to do their work before reporting Mother’s disappearance and possible suicide to the law agents. As far as they were aware, the females in our line had a consistent history of such things. The rapid beating of my heart was what I recalled most from those days, just like the beating of my heart now.

“You need more medicine.” I reached for her arm.

She jerked away. “Not yet.”

Without medicine, she suffered from spasms that wrenched her weakening body rigid. Mother said the spasms would lock her heart up and throw away the key one day, but medicine would give her enough time. I would have chosen a locked-up heart over losing my mind to a medicine-induced haze each day only to slowly die in a dark elevator shaft, but then, by not entering the breeding pens, I was making a choice that forty-nine daughters before me hadn’t.

The day of my stroke, I’d choose death over the wall as my fate.

“Let me change your toilet cloths at least,” I said.

She relaxed against the pillows while I rolled her and changed the toilet cloths for fresh ones. I shoved the dirty linens out through the hole, dragging the trunk back after.

“Tell me of the skull and his skeleton, daughter,” she said. “How were they odd?”

I cut her a sharp look. She’d said “skeleton” instead of “skeleton crew,” and that drifted close to the all-knowing terror of the skull’s comments.

I didn’t wish to speak of my time with them. I wanted to go along with my mind’s suggestion to deny the entire experience.

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