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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
~Robert Frost, Fire and Ice
The world starts and ends with fire but, in between, there is ice.
It’s not that she’s cold. She’s never cold these days because her blood runs hot and her heart is a rabbit that’s never getting caught but, sometimes, at night, the world as she knows it exhales on her and it’s the sort of chilly that layers just won’t keep away.
“Here,” the world says and returns it all to her: pours memories in her lap, never mind that she doesn’t want them there. “Fix this if you dare.”
There’s nothing she wouldn’t dare do but this? This she dares not touch.
3
“What do you want, then?” Ekko says, crawling to her through piles of wreckage they’ve been using as a playground longer than they’ve known how to play. It’s a burial site of once-useful and never-useful things, all maybes and somedays and nevers, and it’s the only place she can stand, never mind that someone threw up in that corner over there or that else someone pissed in this corner here.
“Nothing,” she mumbles into her bony knees. Her everything is bony because she’s a kid, and poor, and perpetually hungry, and useless, and fucking useless, too. Sometimes, they treat themselves and Vi buys them shashliks dripping grease, leaking suspicious juices and oozing heart attack – things that take three painful days to stop abusing their digestive systems, but they sure gobble them up anyway and lick their fingers afterward too because the memory of the flavor? The memory sticks around even longer than the stomach cramps.
Mostly, though, she’s been growing up gorging herself on hopes and with how hopeless (useless, everything-less) she’s being, no wonder she’s all skin and bones.
Ekko is skin and bones too, underfed enough to slip through the hoops and traps of the graveyard of scraps of metal and its cousins all the way to her dirty nook of misery.
“There must be something,” he insists as he crouches in front of her like some small animal that doesn’t know any better. (That’s what they both are: small animals that don’t know any better). “Do you want a screw? Or maybe a screwdriver? A calamari? A juice? A hairclip? There’s this—”
I want to die, she thinks.
No, too scary.
I want to never have been born in the first—
“—place where they sell stuff like that. I don’t know. I wouldn’t. But I could learn. I could check. How about that screw?”
“A screw for a screw-up,” she sniffles, wondering how long she’s allowed to feel sorry for herself for. Everything went wrong again: she slipped, twisted her ankle, made noise, got in the way, ruined it all, messed up, messed up, messed up. “What would I do with a screw?”
“Dunno,” Ekko shrugs, watching her with eyes far too big for his face. She wonders if he’ll ever outgrow himself. “You do all sorts of things with all sorts of stuff.”
“Poetic,” she sniffles.
“Is that what you want?” he perks up. “A poem?”
A poem?
There’s no poetry down here, no one has the money, the energy, the time. Poetry is not for people who go to sleep early because they’re too hungry to stay up and it’s not for people who stay up because they’re too hungry to go to sleep. No poems for the likes of them, no stanzas for those who run their tongue along their teeth to count how many they have left, no verses for those whose knuckles are the only part of their bodies tougher than the soles of their feet, and no rhymes for girls who can’t get away with never getting anything right.
“Where would you even find one?” she mumbles into her knees. The skin there is scabbed and Vi-tended-to but it is not Vi-kissed.
“Dunno,” Ekko shrugs again. “I’d check here and there. Ask around. Tinker a bit. For you, I would even steal one.”
The ‘for you’, she decides, is for her right knee, where there’s hardly any skin left. The ‘even’ is for her left knee, still aching but only scratched.
“Maybe if we shot a bird out of the sky, it would spit one out,” Ekko says and his eyebrows almost touch in the middle as he deliberates, like a drawbridge slowly folding down.
“A poem?”
“Mhm,” Ekko nods. “But I don’t think I want to shoot birds.”
“Me neither,” she nods. “I don’t want a poem if something has to die first.”
“A song then?” he brightens. “A joke? A marble? A shoelace?”
She shakes her head.
“A crayon!” he cries triumphantly.
“I’m cold,” she confesses.
“Cold? But it’s hot down here.”
“Not that kind of cold,” she sighs. Of course he doesn’t get it. She doesn’t even get it herself.
When you’re cold, people do things for you: they wrap you up, they give you a hug, they rub your shoulders, they pull you close, they make you a hot drink, they blow on your hands.
“A screwdriver,” she says as she slowly gets to her feet, “will do.”
*
“Cold, cold, cold,” she mumbles when she wakes only when did she even go to sleep? “Freezing.”
She has nothing to wrap herself up in, but she hugs herself, rubs her shoulders, pulls herself close, makes herself a hot drink, blows on her hands.
No luck.
The memories keep coming like subjects lining up for an audience and she’s yet to behead a single one. They keep returning like a yoyo, down but then up, sideways but then back into her hand, off and away but then too close, and what a joke that there should be laws of physics she hasn’t broken yet.
She finds some sort of a rag and burritoes herself, but it doesn’t do shit either. If she saw a bird now, she’d shoot it on the spot, but birds know better than to come here.
(A bat would do but, by now, even bats know better than to come close.)
2
It goes like this:
(oh, if only it’d keep going but things never do: a spinning top always falls on its side, a yoyo string always snaps, and a ballerina always eventually breaks her leg)
They’re both underfed and underloved and under-what-have-you and for every invention that explodes like it’s supposed to there are three that don’t, but whenever a cloud of color expands between them on their playground or off it (are they ever off it no matter where they are? are they ever off it when it’s them?) it’s childhood itself erupting like a rainbow that they haven’t had to pre-pay for with rain.
She thinks it only once, but she does think it and it will never (ever ever ever) be unthought. They’re falling over and their giggles echo (‘echo’ must be one of her favorite words). He’s laughing so hard and his mouth is open so wide that she can tell he still has all his teeth.
I don’t need a screwdriver.
And then:
My favorite crayon would have to be you.
They roll in what used to be grass but mutated into something more resilient, and they crash into what used to be dirt but became filth, and they fall into what used to be puddles of water but is now sludge, and later their clothes are coated in all things vile, yes, but that’s not all they’re coated in.
Today, I was happy for thirteen and a half minutes, she tells herself as Vi holds up her dirt-tracked shirt and raises an eyebrow at her over the neckline. Here’s the proof.
*
She’s known about the place for a while.
The tree. Really.
It’s fine, it’s alright, it’s… whatever. Cute. Oh-so-precious. Applause-worthy and she’d clap her hands but she mustn’t make a sound.
Things don’t grow down here, she thinks at him furiously as she uses a screwdriver – for old times’ sake – to force her way into what she knows is his… place? Is that the word?
Things don’t grow down here; what is wrong with you?
She crawls in through the window and she can tell he’s not there right away. It’s not disappointing. In fact, it’s a relief. It is, it is, it is, everybody fucking— everybody shut up, okay?
Okay.
She picks things up, lets go. Picks them up, lets go. Picks them up, lets go. His presence is all over the place even if he’s not here in person: he’s absent but it’s like the door is still clicking closed, like he’s just left.
She doesn’t explore much because she’s here for a reason and it wouldn’t do to get distracted, but she does open a few drawers and poke her nose into a few corners where it certainly doesn’t belong.
“Ha,” she snorts when she finds a metal cup full of screws. “You should have offered me a hex nut, instead, idiot.”
Something you can put on your finger. Something you can thread a string through to make yourself a necklace. Something a little easier to keep.
“Finally,” she breathes as she crouches next to his mattress and reaches for the worn, smelly blanket.
Well, she says smelly but all she means is that it smells like him.
She doesn’t know what’s more fucked-up: that he should still smell the same after all this time and all those mistakes, or that she should still remember what he smells like in the first place.
“Never mind, never mind,” she sing-songs to herself before wrapping herself in the blanket, bringing a corner to her nose, and breathing it in. The goosebumps fuck off almost instantly and she grins before giving the world the finger, in the general direction of the window. “There.”
She’s not going to sleep. She’s staying awake so she can memorize every second of every minute of every hour – if she’s lucky – of what it’s like to be properly warm.
1
Her only warm memory, her only lit match:
Silco’s hands come up, cradle her head, rub up and down her spine like he’s counting her bones.
(He isn’t but she has so many of those: when her heart broke it felt like a grenade exploded inside her and broke and broke and rebroke every bone she had, but it’s alright now. It’s okay now because, broken or not, bones are tough, and everything soft has to go.)
“We’ll show them,” he says and it’s a promise. “We will show them all.”
The rest is years of the same broken record hesitating on the same broken memories.
She’s a problem and she will show them.
You were twice the person at half her age and she will show them all.
Because you’re a jinx, do you hear me and this, here, is the only poem she’s ever heard even if it doesn’t rhyme.
(So many birds had to die for her to earn this one.)
*
How funny, she thinks later as she sneaks out sometime before dawn and where is he spending the night, anyway? All she knows is where he isn’t and not where he is.
But how funny that people should change so much – surely this is true of herself as well? – and still smell the same.
(There isn’t a thing she hasn’t broken by trying to make it work.)
She leaves clutching a hex nut he won’t miss, just big enough for her pinky finger.
0
Does she leave herself behind or does she take herself with her?
Next time she throws something it’ll explode just the way she’ll want it to, oh yes, it will.
*
Fighting him is like a dance, a song, a
(the past explodes between them and blooms into a present but will it rot into a future?)
poem and it’s no longer Jinx’s only, but it’s still and always her favorite.