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Damn spiders, webbing up the rafters again.
Heaving a sigh, Scar hangs his head from the back of his chair, nearly cracking it like an egg to fry on the crafting table at his back, and props his boot’s sand-chewed heels to air. Yet another precious thing worn-through. Yet another endless night. Yet another web. Stubborn ain’t a big enough word for these spindly-legged creeps. How they keep getting up there, Scar hasn’t got a clue, but cleaning up after them is getting to be a bigger pain in his behind than just leaving them there to fester, so he squints and tries to convince himself they’re beautiful.
Undying moonlight creeps through a petal of stained glass raised high above his bent neck. On the glass, the silver light— spilling down across his face, his lap, his worn-leather boots, and of course, the spiderwebs— pours. Splits. It’s a real treat waiting to see which color will take, which little shard will glitter and dance across Scar’s shadows. Today, tonight, it’s green that weaves a web above him.
Maybe they are. Beautiful, that is— in a macabre way only nature is capable of and only Scar can abide. You know, in that far-away way that assures the phantom goosebumps pimpling his bare arms are just that— phantoms.
The front door creaks open. The night’s draft invites itself inside. Like a hand, pale moonlight stretches across dusty floorboards.
Speaking of the Devils.
“Excuse me?”
Scar’s body is a lament of cracking joints and tendons like overly-tuned fiddle strings as he leaps from his chair in a flurry of limbs and breathes a bit of life into a dimming oil lamp on the counter. Sweeping up his red-patched hat, Scar plasters his widest, most painful smile and dips the hat in welcome.
His latest customer is no more than a silhouette, but as the dark mass approaches the counter and into the low light—
How strange. The man has no shadow.
Darkness falls from him in sheets, as if he’s impervious to it. What little of his face visible beneath a bundle of crimson scarves and a ruddy hood nearly glows and the slightest red flush over his exposed cheeks could be from sun or wind alike. His hair the color of a fresh straw-bale and eyes as rich as those rare, round chocolate candies with a gushing caramel center that Scar bartered an aphasic white-haired outlaw for. Oh, how he remembers the way they melted on his tongue; how sweet they’d tasted. A truly priceless thing, he thinks.
He wonders if this stranger knows sweetness like that, or if those eyes are but a trap.
“Hello, hello,” Scar says. “The Sanctuary welcomes you! Please, feel free to peruse its lovely wares and finest delectables, traveler. All available at unbeatable rates, I can assure you.”
The stranger lifts an amused eyebrow. His mouth tilts to the side as those candy-brown eyes sweep the upper shelf displays left to right, then back again. This month’s inventory is really something special: fresh bread, a whole bundle of watermelon seeds (stolen), a spy glass (borrowed), a criminally good deal on acacia wood, and a fresh batch of bonafide invisibility potions (not something that can never be used for anything remotely good, but Scar’s in the business of diamonds, not virtue).
All of which Scar would gladly deliver in his well-practiced speech. But for all of a full, nauseatingly long minute, he finds he can only stare at layered fabrics, brown eyes, red nose and think of a single, rare word: alive.
Hand to his chin, the stranger takes his time studying the wall.
Scar studies him.
He’s small but in no way insignificant. Not in the way he’s trying to be with such excess fabric dangling off his shoulders and the rest of him drowned in equally dull shades of red and brown head-to-toe. At best it’s strange attire for the summer weather, but it’s downright atrocious, almost unnatural, for nether travel. There’s only one reason a man would hide under so many layers.
It feels like lifetimes pass him by before the stranger speaks. And who knows? Maybe they have. Scar has no way of knowing. “These the real deal?” the stranger asks, pointing to a flight of bulbous vials of silverish-grey liquid that swells like breathing. “Not some kind of gimmick?”
There’s something cynical in the man’s tone that makes Scar’s skin prickle. A tough customer’s an easy thing to predict, tangible as the ache in his knees when a storm’s coming. Customers ‘round here don’t have much of a choice, mind you. One of the few things Scar and them have in common. Whether they’re in need of a cold drink, something to ease their stomachs, or a pretty trinket or two to keep a busy brain, the Sanctuary is it. The singular blip of humanity on the underside of the map. A humble shop with four walls (acacia, a rich and rare wood that many wandering eyes love to ogle) and a slanted roof with a single stained-glass window slightly off-center, but it is a Sanctuary nonetheless. All the more reason to keep things spiffy.
Scar’s eyes anxiously dart up to the breath-thin webs, waving coyly at him in the draft.
“Gimmick?!” Scar balks, chest clutched in offense. “These are handcrafted by the most fearsome witch on this side of the world. Careful now, she might hear you doubtin’.”
“And which side would that be?” A mischievous crinkle ignites the traveler’s eyes. Scar didn’t think there ever was a shadow of brown that could be so vivid.
The smile that stretches his face is less practiced and more raw. “Oh, boy, am I glad you asked.”
A map in the Sanctuary is about as useful as a steaming cup of coffee in a desert, but Scar’s all too gleeful to whip out the old roll of parchment from beneath the counter and roll it flat. But before the traveler can lean in too close, Scar flips it over and splays it out wrong-side up. Nothing but blank, vaguely yellowed paper stares back up at them.
Scar feels the stranger’s eyes on him. He imagines it’s what burning in the sun might feel like.
“It’s hard for folks, wrapping their heads around a place like this,” Scar says, lazily sliding across the room to fetch a quill. It’s an old, battered thing made from an old parrot feather, traded from some other traveler-turned-phantom Scar’s long forgotten the name and face of. When he whirls back to face the stranger he can’t help but notice how nicely it’d fit the man’s rusty ensemble.
He squints one eye shut and holds it up by the stranger’s head, though from this distance, the quill’s nearly as tall as he is. The traveler taps an inpatient foot, arms folded across his chest.
“Aha. The Sanctuary.” Scar wags the quill in a circle around him and returns to the map, marking a crooked X in the center of the blank parchment. “Let me guess. Wonky compass?”
Watching Scar through knotted brows, the stranger reaches into his pocket and produces what looks like an empty tin of tobacco. A little red arrow spins round and round helplessly in the center, searching for home.
“Another gimmick?” the stranger croaks, all embers of amusement stamped out.
“This place isn’t sought,” Scar says, and this time the smile takes a few tries. When he finally manages it, the stretch is a familiar pain. “Only found and only the once. Lady luck’s got your favor today.”
It’s enough, Scar tells himself. This has to be enough.
This is all he has.
“I’m not sure that’s the saying,” the stranger says. Then, “What about you?”
Scar beats his eyelashes at him, stunned. No one has ever asked that before. “I stay here.”
“Always?”
“If that’s how long I’m needed,” Scar says, hoping against hope that somehow it’s the truth.
It’s hardly an answer but it’s enough to satisfy the traveler. The man’s chocolate gaze drops to that inked X, home-made compass clutched in one hand and his scarf’s fraying edges in the other. A battle’s fought vividly across his face— lips twisting, pink nose scrunching, irises jumping left and right across a nothing-map in search of answers he won’t find.
Trust Scar’s already searched that empty parchment for hours.
“Seems dull,” the stranger says, face hollow, and like that— the battle’s lost. And Scar’s only now remembering the caramel-chocolate candies’ stinging, bitter aftertaste.
Scar touches his cheek to ensure his smile’s still there.
“The company’s a treat,” he says.
They lock eyes, and such things, Scar’s learned to savor. A stranger’s warmth across the counter, the feel of their palm when they hand over their payment. Bitter-sweet chocolates and the warmth of the sun borrowed from another man’s skin. It’s not nearly enough. It’s all he can ask for. And every inch of him aches knowing this stranger will turn his heel and leave like each one before him. Those chocolate eyes will fade from real to memory, then memory to nothing.
Yet another phantom.
How else will he make room for all the new faces to come?
The silence draws too far, too thin, like it’s a breath-width from snapping back in his face like a whip. “Anything for the road?” Scar asks. Best to stick to the script.
“I’ll take the whole lot. How much?”
“For you,” Scar says sweetly. “Ten diamonds.”
The stranger pulls a face like he’s eaten something sour.“Five.”
“Eight.”
“Six.” The stranger reaches for a burlap bundle knotted at his waist and produces a small bag of hard candies. Striped green and red and yellow drops wrapped up in chrome, crinkly paper. “And I’ll toss these in. I’m feeling charitable.”
“You drive a hard bargain, friend,” Scar sighs, as if the whole ordeal is more trouble than it’s worth, but he offers the traveler a solid, agreeable hand to shake all the same. “A deal’s a deal.”
It’s another feat entirely to ignore the warmth brimming from the stranger’s palm when it slots against Scars, to purge the topography of calluses, the countless truths untold safely tucked away beneath them, and to stifle the curiosities that flare with each one.
A handshake, six diamonds, and a bag of candies later, the stranger’s belt is heavy with three invisibility potions and the spiderwebs are still glowing green. The stranger offers little else in the way of a goodbye then the tilt of his head and what Scar assumes to be a grateful smile. Perhaps there’s a twinge of regret there, too, in the way the stranger covers his face with the edge of his scarf as he leaves the Sanctuary behind for good. No name to remember. No face to forget. Just a pair of chocolate eyes and the faintest graze of heat on Scar’s cheek. A trick of the night.
Scar rests an elbow on the counter, grinning himself silly. He rolls the chrome bag of candies between his fingers. Red, yellow, green. He raises the third to the stowaway moonlight.
Green stained glass, green candy, green webs.
He pops the candy in his mouth and holds it in his cheek until it melts to nothing.
***
It may be days. It may be months or years or lifetimes. A tenacious moon only means time can be counted in the perishable. The finite. Emptying shelves. Mite bites gouged from aged floorboards by the door with a limp hinge. Spiderwebs, new silk spun over stained glass. Sticky chrome wrappers. By now the moon’s a wordless taunt, hands over Scar’s mouth and ears as bodies filter in and out, as his skin dries and cracks from dry air and the constant grit of sand grates his eyes raw with each blink. It’s home. It’s miserable.
This misery has always been here because he has always been here, but as the moon never seems to fully dim before pouring through the stained glass anew, he swears the cold’s creeping in further and further. Like something’s rotted, except there’s no sour watermelon to feed to the crows or mold to carve from the wooden steps. Something’s rotting, and Scar can’t reach it. There’s a break inside himself, the tiniest sliver of a crack that swallows the cold air in. The walls are thinning. The shingles on the roof are peeling off one by one. Like spiders. Sneaking in any gaps and cracks they can squeeze their squirming little bodies through.
Once inside, they unravel.
Like himself. He sprawls in that chair. Lifts his boots to air, hangs his head to crease against the crafting bench’s edge. He searches, painstakingly, for any kind of familiar shape in the intricate spirals of silk spun in his ceiling. And today, tonight (it’s all the same), moonlight traces each delicate string a vibrant, bloody red.
He’s nearly sure of the shape of a sun, blazing rays like vengeful fists beating down on his cheeks, when the door whines on its hinge.
Practice, like time, wears a man to the bone. So he doesn’t notice the way his body moves of its own accord— a sweeping hat, puffed chest, phony grin, a growing greed hot in his belly— like a marionette on strings. A wooden puppet carved hollow for the sole, cruel purpose of making something incapable of starving to death feel the pain of hunger. After a while that ache dulls, and had it been anyone else walking through that door, Scar may not have remembered that gnawing ache in his gut at all.
Someone approaches the counter. Someone Scar recognizes, and at once there’s an old friend leaping from the lip of his tongue: alive.
The word itself is so foreign, it rolls around his mouth like a cold, hard marble. No matter how long he holds it in his cheek it doesn’t fade away; there’s no sugary burst on his tongue or the faded color that stains it after. But Scar thinks he can remember the feeling, the taste of something kind, like chocolate, like chrome-wrapped hard-candies. Green. Yellow. Red.
A familiar face. Something Scar’s never known before. A face with its soft, sun-kissed edges as shaky and incongruent as a smudged painting scrawled from memory. Pieces there but shreds torn, missing, patched crookedly into the best-fitting place. An intensity in a stare from which it previously lacked, its subtle warmth replaced by something sharp, scalding, desperate. Layers of dark, grungy reds and browns. They’re gone now, exchanged for a simple poncho lying over his bare chest and shoulders. It used to be red, but something’s drained the color in splotches, leaving a lifeless pink. A speckling of freckles turns scorched shoulders into constellations. Bare hands curl into colorless fists, fabric balled, edges frayed.
His fingers are tinged red, too. Blood not fully washed away.
Red candy. Red spiderwebs.
Red sand. It burns to the touch.
There’s no denying the insistence tugging in Scar’s stomach, the hair-trigger instinct to reach across that counter and touch the man’s sunburnt cheeks. Just to feel the heat, to touch the second-hand sun. Just to know it’s real, somewhere, someplace, sometime. To know that these brown eyes and straw-colored hair are things he knows. Things— someone— real.
“I—” Scar can barely speak for fear of dropping the phantom candies from his mouth. As if the memory will fall and shatter to pieces at his feet. He tells the stranger, only when he finds the courage to swallow, “I know you.”
But this man is no stranger. No stranger has ever looked at Scar this way.
The returner stares at Scar with an open, chapped mouth.
Scar can’t feel his face. Is he smiling? He’s not sure if he wants to be.
“I’m sorry,” he says, unsure why.
The returner’s voice is hoarse. “I was just—”
“Passing through?”
There are no tears in the traveler's eyes, but perhaps they’re a near thing. If this man were someone else. If the sun hadn’t burned so hot, if his skin wasn’t flushed pink and the skin of his nose peeling from healing burns. If the Sanctuary wasn’t so dark and cold. If the boy wasn’t consumed by sunlight in a place where there is not even a shred.
“What is this?”
Hesitantly, Scar reaches for the parchment map, kept beneath his same counter in the same little cubby he keeps his—
“No.” The returner’s fingers scorch Scar’s wrist, like the sun’s kept wrapped tight in a few layers of fragile human skin. As if one person can hold so much pain and light and heat. “I mean— What is this? Why are you here?”
It hurts. But Scar can never dream of making him let go. The jolt of adrenaline under his skin burrows deeper than a knife-point. It cuts sharper, kills quicker, dissects the exact aching stitches sewn under Scar’s skin that trap him here. He leans into the pain, the burn, the returner, and it’s all he can do to keep from shutting his eyes and imagining that heat flush all over him.
What does it mean about me, Scar must wonder, to want to be burned?
“I don’t get it,” Scar says, and though he is the most talented salesman on the underside of the map, the lie tastes cheap even to him. “How did you find me again?”
“Do you remember?” the returner’s fingers clench until all color but the smudgy red drains. “The desert. Do you remember?”
With those blood-stained fingers clamped over his pulsepoint like a shackle, there’s nothing Scar can remember except things that surely don’t belong to him. Sand between his teeth. A world where the sun reappears in one window before fully setting in the other. A bare weight against his back. Body heat. Promises, maybe, if he could believe such a thing. Cool, moonless nights where the wind soothes, a reprieve.
A sanctuary.
The returner’s eyes, darker now and ringed with bruises Scar recognizes from encounters with his warped glass mirror, skirt across Scar’s face. His stock’s rich again this time— a beetroot harvest, a freshly-tailored saddle and a few feet of lead (combo deal for those willing to spend a pretty penny), and for the most adventurous customers: a shining golden apple rumored to heal any ailment— but what good are any of these wares when the traveler’s begging for the few things Scar cannot sell.
Whatever can be found scrawled on Scar’s face, the returner’s expression fractures— a hairline split, a crack in the glass across every sunburnt inch, tracing the paths the pads of Scar’s thumbs took: down the sides of his cheeks, the sharp, near-starved angle of his jaw, the hollow of his throat— but it does not shatter. No, as all fine things never should.
“Please. No,” the returner mourns into upturned, blood-stained hands. An inside-out prayer, muscle and sinew bared. Fingers uselessly flexing around the hollow where his heart should be.
“I thought it’d be done,” he whispers. “That I’d be done.”
Scar wishes he could comfort him. But he’s been alone too long.
He wishes he could touch him; that a brush alone would be enough to coerce muscle’s memory into play, to trick his body into believing what his mind so desperately wanted to. Putting the fractured pieces back together, find a home for this misplaced, masochistic deja-vu.
As if it hears, as if its craning its neck to hear and savor the quickening beat in Scar’s chest, the moon’s light pushes in. It reaches further across the floor, across Scar’s nape (there’s a great heat there, greater than the moon’s borrowed crimson, and the feel of flesh tearing and the stench of gunpowder stings his nostrils) and the backs of his trembling hands (Has he always had these scars? Have they always felt so tender, so fresh?).
The moonlight reaches its bloodied hand to the returner’s face, chocolate eyes tinged red, the curve of his left cheek draped in the glorious color and suddenly all Scar can remember is its taste. Better than stuffed chocolates or marbled candies or trick elixirs.
It tastes like a victory.
Just not his own.
“I’m sorry,” Scar croaks, strangled by the weight of how much he doesn’t mean it. How much he’d do it again, if the moon ever decided to let him go. If he could leave the Sanctuary, if the desert and the pain and the joy and the stranger were ever real. If it can be something so easily bought as knock-off potions and useless redstone antiques.
If it means he’d end up right here again. Behind this counter. Counting the nights in stained-glass fragments— green, yellow, red— waiting for a man made of sand, inside and out, to slip in through the door with the night’s draft.
To feel the heat second-hand and pretend, eyes closed, head tilted so far back he nearly cracks it like an egg to fry on the crafting bench. To open them again and find the man, hands slick with blood, staring at him like, for once, Scar is the phantom.
No, an apology can never be enough. Not for Scar. Not for the returner.
They both know it. The returner’s head bows, split lip sucked between his teeth, eyes cloaked by wiry fringe. He cradles his hands to his chest, caressing each bloodied knuckle and counting as if memorizing every scrape and bruise. As if they are precious things. And the returner turns to leave, faded red swaying in his wake.
Scar, unable to watch him go, sinks into his chair. Props his sand-chewed boots. Lets his head hang and crack and bleed itself dry, memories dripping steadily free. Replaces them with red-tinged moonlight and the way it catches on the glass, on the wooden beams, on the silky threads.
Same old night. Same old spiderwebs.