Iris had no sense of humour. The quest for one had passively begun a week ago when an off-handed comment had piqued her interest. Supposedly, it was something strange or out of the ordinary that made one laugh. Twist words or a situation in a way one might not expect, and there you had it.
She had agonised over it, day in, day out. Sitting in her guardian’s office, she spent hours plotting what her sense of humour should be. A fair few times, she had doubted if it was even something she should be thinking too hard about, yet she simply did not know any other way. She didn’t know what she found ‘funny’ when it seemed that everyone else did.
The comedy routines she would perform in front of Evalyn Hardridge were all just as successful as that of a first-time stand-up artist. They’d either fall on deaf ears or earn a mild smirk, a smirk with the word ‘pity’ written on both lips.
So then, she looked for inspiration. Strange, out of the ordinary, unexpected. Sure, she could find those three things easily, yet she had a hunch that the nightly visit to the hallway in her dreams wasn’t exactly what most considered funny.
Her thoughts grew fragmented as she switched her focus to her sight. She knew she shouldn’t, but sometimes she’d catch herself, and it’d look so pretty.
Walls. They were there…barely. Their off mix of beige and grey looked solid, complete with stains and scratches, emulating the abuse one might find along the walls of any other all too affordable rental. But it looked ‘solid’, in the sense that theatre sets only looked solid without the context of the entire stage. The bristly, wine-red carpet had eaten away at her clothes like a cat’s tongue carving meat from bone. The sickly, white lights illuminated every ugly surface of the space like a hospital ward. It was all a farce. A…where did she learn that word from?
Why get close when you can curl up in the corner?
Because she was scared. Because she was scared of what?
Herself? She couldn’t be scared of something she didn’t know.
Her eyes were wide open, yet she still couldn’t tell. She still couldn’t see. She still couldn’t look beyond the doors…………………….
That’s right. A farce. Something fake. She had learnt that word from when Evalyn was on the phone with someone. What was she describing?
That’s right, the doors! The doors that ran down each side of the hallway. She had called them a farce. She had heard her say it. That Iris’s mind was a farce. The doors were there to prove it. Why would she try and hide who she was if she already knew?
Why was she there in the corner? Curled up in the shadow instead of getting close. Was that her guardian? Her beloved Evalyn Hardridge? Private Detective and the world’s greatest warrior?
She couldn’t see that far, even if she squinted. It was the end of the hallway after all. No one saw that far into the dark, not anyone. She had asked around and her answers had been conclusive. One hundred per cent of the one person who voted said so. She did not want to get closer, the figure in the dark was scary. Especially when she got excited. She didn’t mean to be scary, Iris was sure of that.
No. She wouldn’t get closer. The foetal position was fine with her, it made her feel like she was in her mother’s beating womb. Wrapped in a thin veil of flesh and veins. Why would anyone ever want to leave?
Warm. Can you feel a warmth that you can’t remember? Remember one that you never experienced?
That was a funny thought. The figure in the corner was laughing through the white sheet over its face. Its voice was croaking, screeching. That counted as laughing right? Maybe that’s how Evalyn laughed when Iris wasn’t looking. When Iris wasn’t around to see. When she was really enjoying herself.
Bones creaking.
Doors widening.
The cold from the door beside her chilled the skin under her nails, begging feverishly for another body. Another one to keep the other Iris company, body half buried in snow. Her eyes weren’t as bright anymore. They were still beautiful, in their own way.
She was having fun, wasn’t she? Was this what she found fun? She didn’t exactly know, but the racing of her heart and the twitching of her muscles counted as excitement. Evalyn mimicked her, jolting and spasming. The white sheet sewn to her face drew new blood the more she moved, the more the stitches tugged at her skin.
Open a door, Iris. Open your favourite one.
She refused to open a door, opting for both her eyelids instead. Elliot’s and Evalyn’s bedroom was dark, but not pitch black. The silver moonlight provided just enough ambient illumination for Iris to see the faint glow of the markings in front of her. Almost as if the whale on Evalyn’s face greeted Iris before she did.
“Nightmares again?” Evalyn cooed, her voice low. Iris felt it through vibrations in the pillows first and heard it through the air second.
“Yeah,” Iris muttered. “It’s okay. I’m getting used to them now. They’re not as scary as when I panic.”
Evalyn frowned at the girl who had crawled her way into their sheets. An attempt at subtlety had been made, but the force of habit had caused Evalyn to notice the shifting in an instant, and most likely did her husband, although he feigned ignorance.
If Evalyn would insist on taking care of it, then he would take the opportunity to sleep. ‘Resourcefulness’ was what he called selfishness.
“Were they especially bad today?”
“Yeah,” Iris muttered as she sank deeper into the mattress. It was noticeably softer than the guest bed she had commandeered recently, and they hadn’t gone out to buy a new one yet. Being busy wasn’t exactly the problem, it was simply one of those things that would slip their minds until it was time to fall asleep.
“I wonder why that is,” Evalyn said.
“I don’t know, but you cooked tonight, so that might have been it.”
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
They both heard a loud snort from the other side of the bed. Quest for humour, complete.
The Caney Apartment Complex was home to two families on the first and second floor, held as an investment on the third floor, hosted a minuscule bar on the fourth, and office space on the fifth. For as long as Iris had been there, she had been given free rein up and down each floor.
The bar’s door was often left unlocked, save for the chain keeping it from swinging open fully. Iris had tried to squeeze through once before but had been warned by Evalyn that if anyone saw a child in a bar by their lonesome, she’d be the one getting in trouble. One day, however, she’d be able to see the kaleidoscope of stained glass bottles up close and listen to the jazzy music in person, instead of through the floorboards.
The floor below was nothing of note. The door had been locked, and even trying through the peephole, the lights were always off, and the curtains closed. It felt wrong to keep such a nice space unoccupied, yet when Evalyn had tried to talk economics, Iris had quickly decided that the capital gains weren’t nearly worth the time and effort invested in listening.
Evalyn had told Iris to lay off peeping on the families for her own good, so she hadn’t. She herself wasn’t particularly keen on interacting with the feral game that passed as children. Iris wasn’t exactly full of herself, far from it. She just had standards, standards based on the fact that she almost exclusively lived around adults.
She had asked Evalyn if they could get a colourful sign similar to the ones both families kept hanging from the front door, almost as if they were competing. Evalyn had failed to understand what was wrong with her current one, so Iris had given up.
Two weeks. Two weeks spend holed up in the apartment complex. If she wasn’t exploring, she was reading. Anything in the office that covered broader topics, atlases, or encyclopedias, she would be made to read. If she was not reading, she was doing other work.
Evalyn had explained that even she wasn’t sure of Iris’s exact age, and it would be problematic if she reached the age to start secondary school not knowing that an addition symbol was indeed not the crosshair on a sniper scope. And so, they had been following the curriculum together, cutting the fat and memorising what would be assumed prior knowledge.
Yet Iris could not help but prefer the last activity she had been trying to keep consistent with. Between classes and her work, Evalyn had been teaching her to draw. With the sketches of Evalyn’s armour as her muse, Iris had been trying her absolute best to string together abstract rectangles, triangles, and circles into something resembling a human. Apparently, as long as the sketches made sense to her, that was all that mattered, but cutting corners wasn’t exactly going to do her any favours either.
“The one thing that bothers me, Iris,” Evalyn started after a prolonged silence. For ten minutes or so, the scratching of pencils and filing of cabinets had been the only sound coming from inside the small archive. “Is the fact that your hair goes poof when you’re about to attack.”
“Why’s that a bad thing?”
“It’s not a bad thing in itself, except imagine you were fighting me, and I saw your hair begin to disappear. I’d immediately know something’s about to happen.”
“It won’t be so bad once I make my armour,” Iris said, focusing on her drawing.
“Yes, but we still need something in the meantime…what’s the most amount of hair you’ve ever used at once?”
Iris grabbed a length from her side, measuring her way up the silver strands with two fingers, as if they were the blades of a pair of scissors.
“About ten centimetres?” she guessed. “It’s the amount I remember using for that one time you chased me through Sidos.”
“Memories…”
“I thought you were trying to kill me.”
…
“I uh…was just wondering if you think you could use a significant portion of it all at once?”
“For what?”
“Just make the easiest shape you can think of with it. Maybe the size of your fist.”
“How much?”
“Let me show you,” Evalyn said as she put down the files she was sifting through haphazardly on the nearby shelf. She came up behind Iris’s chair and gathered her hair in a ponytail, running her hands down the length of it until she came to her shoulders.
“About here, everything underneath here.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
Iris closed her eyes and concentrated. Small shapes that only used an equally small amount of hair had started to become muscle memory after entertaining herself with it for hours on end. Anything larger required clear concentration on the object itself. Her growing comfortability had meant panicked visits to the hallway were less frequent, but by no means non-existent.
She felt the ends go first, and slowly worked her way up towards the guideline Evalyn had put in place. The image in her mind was consistent, if not barely. Naturally, with more matter came more volume, but her instructions to keep the object small had been clear. Cramming that much in so little felt dangerous. One wrong move, and she’d let the entire thing burst free, and with that much matter, she wasn’t sure to what size it’d grow.
Closer and closer, she inched towards Evalyn’s hands, the one consistent stimulation to her senses. With every passing moment, the image in her head fluctuated, turning into something of an imperfect oval, rather than anything perfectly spherical.
“Open your eyes,” Evalyn said.
“I can’t. The image is going to crumble.”
“If you take a look at it, it won’t just be an image anymore,” Evalyn suggested as Iris felt the office chair spin halfway. Iris did one last do-over of the shape in her mind, before greeting its real form.
Imperfect, just like everything else she made. That wasn’t exactly a surprise. But it hovered in front of her, roughly the size of her fist.
“If you keep a significant amount of matter in this state, you can form it into whatever shape you want, without giving the enemy a heads up every time you do it. It’s still imperfect, sure, but it’ll suffice once you’re able to forge something more complex.”
Iris kept her attention beamed on the object. The uncertainty that had come with its creation had not lessened a single bit.
“That thing is really dense. I don’t know what’ll happen if I drop it.”
“Fair point,” Evalyn said as markings along her arm gleamed underneath her thin sleeves, “I’m not exactly in the mood to explain all this to everyone who lives below us.”
“Not to mention Elvera.”
Evalyn bobbed her head in nervous agreement, moulding with her hands a catch for the object.
“Drop it. I’m fairly certain I can keep it up,” she said as she knelt, putting both hands underneath the platform.
“What if it doesn’t hold it?”
“Then let’s both hope you can will it out of existence before it reaches the floor. We’ve got to find out how heavy it is.”
Iris gave in, as she had gotten used to doing. The more and more they prodded, the less and less they went wrong, especially with Evalyn around to minimise any potential damage.
“Alright, three, two, one, now.”
The object dropped in an instant, creating an ungodly sound as it slammed into the catch. Evalyn, almost caught off guard, summoned her strength and kept the meteor just centimetres from the flimsy wooden floorboards.
They both stayed still for a moment as Evalyn regained her bearings and slowly rose.
“I can hold it up if I will it to, but by my own strength, I’d probably have my arms torn off. Forget about using it as a source, just hit whoever you’re fighting with that.”
“You always say to make sure people can have an open casket funeral when they die.”
“…fair point.”
The catch and the object floated in between them, an ominous mix of different coloured shapes. Iris decided that she’d have to drop it on solid ground and see how much damage it actually did before using it. Perhaps a different shape was more suited, one less condensed.
“Before, you get rid of that, let me go get a mirror.”
Evalyn skipped out of the room, a strange movement for her, and after only a few moments, she returned with a small mirror one would only ever use for makeup. Something that Iris could not for the life of her picture Evalyn using. She held the mirror up to Iris’s face, and Iris’s reflection stared back at her.
The length of her hair had shortened to her shoulders, altering her look significantly. She swished her hair around, the lessened weight making it much easier to move her head. Better for a fight. Evalyn’s mind was far from the combat advantages of the look, however.
“You need to work on the cut, but short hair suits you as well. Makes me so jealous, though. The fact that you can choose whatever hairstyle you want that day makes you a thousand times cuter.”
Iris blushed, her mind itching to find a catalogue of different styles that she could experiment with. Perhaps this was another way to figure out something else about herself. And that was exciting.