Page 12 of In This Iron Ground
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Here is a dream.
You are in the forest. It is dark and it is cold and you do not belong here.
It appears to you like this.
First, there is the smell. A putrid thing inside your nose, that curl of your stomach and clenching of your throat that tells you,something isn’t right. Something inside you is rotting and you can’t stop it. Something is dead inside you and there’s nothing you can do. It bloats before it decays and the soil inside you turns acidic with its waste, with the scent you can’t escape.
Then, there is the taste. A thick paste that rises, choking your throat, coating the back of your tongue. You crouch on the loam and your starving mouth, where spit and bile collect, cannot help but eat from the rotting flesh, the juices staining a pomegranate shape across your neck. It is bitter, bitter. You are always starving. You are always discontent.
You hear it, then. It is a noise that has been around for millennia, that all creatures know: the call of pain, of sorrow, of loss. It rips from the inside out, like the edge of a knife carving raw tendons, like a shard of glass shredding your gums. It’s the slow, thin slicing of your tongue, like a torch held, unflinching, against the tender skin of your underbelly.
And, God, the feel, thefeelof it, you wish it were actually pain. You wish it weresomething, something you could hold onto, that would tell you—I’m real, please, I’m here—but there’s nothing. Every day there is a little less, every day you are more of nothing.
And when you see it, there in the forest air, that shredded emptiness, the darkness that has no exit, that only goes down, down, down, you—
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The following months were strange. Most of the time, Damien felt like he was being dragged by a current too strong to fight, across the chiaroscuro landscape of the Salgados and the McKenzies, each with a will much stronger than his own.
In school, everything was more or less as it had always been. The Salgados wouldn’t talk to him there. Nadie and Hakan were both too old to have orbits close to Damien, and Koko was occupied with her own unwelcoming group of friends. Koko talked to him a few times, but Damien saw how her friends looked at her when she did.
There was no way Damien was infecting her with the toxicity of his reputation.
At the Salgado house, however, it was like a window to a different dimension.
Damien would be invited over once a week. It would always be during the school week and never for a sleepover. The McKenzies allowed it for unknown reasons, although if Damien had to guess he would say it probably had something to do with Nicola, the social worker.
His visits to the Salgados’ would pretty much always go the same way.
Damien would start the afternoon doing homework in the kitchen with Koko, periodically getting distracted by one of the twins or by Koko herself. Mia never got angry, all her admonishments sounding soft and teasing compared to the McKenzies’.
Koko was a little temperamental, easily swinging from annoyed to enthused, but Damien didn’t take it personally. She was like that with everybody in the family. Despite this, Damien managed to unwrap Koko, layer by layer.
For example, one thing he found out about her was that she absolutely loved gore. Gore films, gore graphic novels, creepy podcasts and internet stories, documentaries about serial killers, and YouTube videos about historical disasters. Damien was subjected to more of that content than he thought was possible. He was amazed that Mia didn’t catch her. Or maybe she knew and allowed it. It was hard to control a force like Koko.
After they finished their homework, Koko and Damien would go up to her room and pour over all the blood and guts and people driven to the edge, spending a lot of time drawing their own ideas out. Koko had a distinct style, favouring characters with bulbous warts and slobbering mouths and guts spilling out onto the ground. Damien, on the other hand, favoured a more character-centred style, influenced by the aesthetics of the golden age of comics in the 1940s, mixed with the darker, grungier colouring that was more prevalent in the graphic novels of the early 2000s. Damien could tell Koko didn’t usually talk that much about these interests and therefore was far more expressive and enthusiastic than the cool-faced girl she appeared to be in school.
Damien liked spending time with her not only because of this but because, despite how blunt she could be, she didn’t pry into Damien’s personal life. She made rude comments about the way he smelled—or, at least, theysoundedrude, although the content of the comment wasn’t usually so—but she didn’task.
The one exception to this was one time during dinner, about a month and a half after their first meal together. Cameron had made a comment about what time he was going to drop Damien at the McKenzies’ when Koko had piped up.
“Why do you call them that? ‘The McKenzies’. Sounds weird.”
“Um, cause it’s their name?” Damien answered sarcastically.
“Uh, no it isn’t,” Koko replied, kicking him under the table. “It’s theirsurname. It sounds like they’re your, like, teachers or something.”
“I dunno, it’s what they wanna be called,” Damien said moodily, looking down at his plate. It didn’t deter Koko at all.
“Yeah, but, isn’t that weird? Aren’t they supposed to be your foster parents—”
“They arenotmyparents!” Damien shouted before he could stop himself, his glass of water almost toppling over as he slammed his fist against the table. He froze, shame festering in the pit of his stomach as everybody fell quiet after his outburst. He tried swallowing, but his mouth was suddenly dry.
“What’s wrong?” Dee piped up, looking around the suddenly still table. Mia and Cameron shared a look.
“Are they…maybe, are they not very nice, sometimes, Damien?” Cameron asked softly. Damien hunched into himself.
