Day Two

Morning came with all the anticipated menace of a stalking predator.

Fawn awoke sitting on the stool at the head of the table, her dress collapsed further up her legs owing to the curled position in which she slept.

Eventually her mother came down, having assembled the kind of meaningless courage one needs to face a situation after it has passed. She was now almost willing to acknowledge the reality her tortured children would endure, but all the same, reached with a shaking hand toward her suffering daughter: not to comfort her, but only to pull the dress further down the child’s leg, covering her more effectively.

As if this pointless and vague half-effort would now change something.

The brothers were still walking slowly up the hill. They had closed the door behind them and left without a word, while their sister remained asleep.

Their feckless mother was still trying to tend to the girl’s dress, a misguided conservative action after the fact, unwilling to acknowledge that her sons had left the house.

With a darkness of spirit and weighted steps, the boys dragged themselves up the hill: muscles and bones heavy, burnt and stricken with misery regarding the true nature of having to submit to such savagery voluntarily.

As they walked, the road seemed more and more dusty, as though the environment was reaching out to prevent them from their march. With no flowers to enjoy, no clouds to admire, and nothing but grit and pain in their eyes, it felt to them both as though they may not have the strength to complete their penance.

But the alternative ... The alternative was utterly unthinkable, no matter how hard those steps would prove to be.

The burns covered all of the skin on the front of their bodies, and due to the way they were tied down, their palms were terribly affected. Their eyes were red and swollen, and they struggled to move freely as their muscles had begun to seize.

No one made them walk to their punishment. They were not being whipped or threatened; they were not tied or dragged. They must walk of their own volition. Villagers wandering around them would leer at them, some throwing things, some simply shaking their heads in unspoken judgment.

Those within earshot would make uneducated adjudications, while echoing a universal sigh of relief that they, of course, were not the ones walking toward such suffering.

The morose shuffling continued until they reached the tower for the second time, where the doors were held open for them by Cast Soldiers: a strangely sanctimonious gesture, given the reason for being there in the first place.

They were forced to wonder whether there was any limit to the cruel hierarchical nature of these unregulated rule makers.

The boys passed through the opening, and slowly ascended the cramped stairway to where they must spend yet another day. A shard of sunlight passed over the younger brother, his hand trembled and he moved it from the light.

They clambered again into the wooden boxes provided, while the Cast Soldier came across the room to lock them in, then slid them out yet again into the searing dark red, flickering sunlight. Both the boys twitched and flinched from the renewed exposure but still made no sound.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

It was as though their silence would somehow make a point or change something. It, of course, changed nothing. Their hands curled suddenly to try and do anything about the feeling of excruciating damage to the skin of their palms. With pulses racing and bones aching, nothing helped them as they were exposed again. They would only find ease with the going down of the fearsome sun.

The strength of the star was unending, soulless, unyielding and intense. Their eyes suffered greatly, and closing their eyelids seemed to stop nothing and was somehow no help.

Their skin was dry, becoming rigid and scraped looking. Having been under the light for mere moments on only their second day, they were already in abject misery.

Evening on the second day arrived with more heft and foreboding than even that morning. This time knowing more of what was going on, but still unsure of where it would lead, Fawn sat in her room watching out the window as she had done the night before.

This time she found herself leaning on the window’s edge and moving her dress off her shoulders as she had done so many times before. It seemed such a small thing to have caused such trouble. Again and again, she obsessed on how she might have prevented all of this, had she only been ... less like she had always been. Nervously she rubbed the skin on the back of her right hand and watched the evening light fade from the window.

She looked out and saw her brothers walking back down the hill even slower than the day before. They seemed to go relatively unnoticed among the few people that passed by this time, their motions stiff and labored.

They struggled with every movement. Fawn watched for some time as they took much longer to get home than before. Her brow furrowed in a now familiar way. She reached for her bare shoulder to squeeze it, as though she might find some solace in the mimicry of an action she knew for cycles as reassurance.

She made her way down the stairs, arriving at the front door to see her eldest brother had already opened it. As he removed his hand from the door handle, it left skin and flesh behind, deep enough so that blood and muscle fiber fell away.

Fawn turned sharply from the door handle with a shudder and walked with her brother to the dining table where he sank onto his stool, his teeth clenched in strain as he tried not to fall or slip. There was a simple food paste prepared for him and his brother on the table, not cold, but not hot either. It had clearly been prepared by someone who had no intention of interacting with the boys when they came home: their mother, still nowhere to be seen.

The eldest brother, uncomfortably seated at the head of the table, struggled with his food while the younger brother seated to his right did what he could to consume something through the cracked and torn form of his mouth. With nothing worth saying to each other, the boys sat in silence as their sister came to kneel between them like she had done every night before.

This time, the eldest brother could no longer pick up the wooden spoon he usually used. The attempt made him shake, the pain evident through his distress. Fawn helped him eat as best she could, then turned to the younger brother who was persisting with his attempts, to little effect.

The burns on their skin were significant and numerous, as was the damage to their eyes. Their mouths were dry, their lips cracked and split deeply. The dust in their hair looked as though it had been there for weeks.

Fawn still knew nothing of how to help, save the meager assistance she could provide with their food, but so desperately she wanted to do something, anything at all to help ... or, take back what it was she had done.

The panic within her was mounting as she took in the true scale of what was happening to the boys before her. More than ever before, they looked like the children who had always loved her, rather than the men they were growing to be, and would have become, if not for who she was.

The burden of reality bore down on her and began to show through the kind smile she kept for them. Eventually, the gravity of the moment gained such mass that she could no longer stand beneath it. She returned to her kneeling spot on the floor as the two brothers gradually abandoned their meals.

Now back in her usual place, she waited for a word from one of the boys, something to give some notion of what they were feeling, or what she could do. The younger brother reached over to her right shoulder and squeezed it as he stood up, saying nothing, regarding her through scalded eyes now rimmed with blood and broken vessels. She looked back at him with gentle kindness on her face.

He somehow managed a smile, although it cracked his mouth to do so. He then took his slow, painful steps away, ascending the stairs for something resembling rest.

The eldest reached down to stroke her face gently with the back of his right index finger.

“We love you, Fawn.”

Blood was forced to the corners of his mouth from the effort. He laid his wounded hand on her left shoulder, stood, and slowly went to join his brother.

The stricken child doubled over with heavy grief, shaking and sobbing like an adult, not a youth, helpless and bereft.

Regardless of how distraught she became, there was still no attention garnered from her mother who remained upstairs, unwilling to comfort any of her tortured children, too afraid to respond to the suffering of her sons, or the bitter, endless tears of her little girl.

Both the boys had gone upstairs to bed now, so Fawn curled up on her eldest brother’s stool, holding his flawed wooden spoon, and tried to get to sleep, her exhaustion total.

–Garrick M Lynch–