Dreamscape

Apologies for the length. This is actually the first bit of my (failed) NANOWRIMO novel, that I've been editing now instead of working on papers for school. So it's not newly-written, but newly edited, anyway. And perhaps next week will be the Week of Actually Writing New Things.

Gwyn was backed up against the wall, her little fists curled, her fiery little eyes dancing with mirth and as filled with righteous anger as only a five-year-old’s eyes can be, when Karl first saw her.

He was eight, small and shy, with a mop of black hair that bothered his mother because, no matter how often she took her sewing shears to it, it always managed to flop into his eyes, and his first thought upon seeing the Gossamer twins leering into Gwyn’s freckled face was “RUN!” His legs wouldn’t obey his brain, and so he stood in the middle of the playground and just stared in shock and horror and wished to be at home again.

Michael and Madeline, Mike and Maddy, the seven-year-old twins who ran wild in the neighbourhood, who cherished an especial hatred for the entire human race for reasons that had nothing to do with their scatterbrained parents and everything to do with their love of destruction, were exactly the same height: a head taller than Karl, a head and a half taller than Gwyn. They had the same porcelain doll features and the same purpling bruises perpetually shadowing their eyes and the same gap-toothed grins that put adults at ease and children on their guard. They had the same tribal braids with the same blue-tinted highlights and the same artistically slender fingers. They had the same eye for targets and the same love of fighting and the same inexplicable taste for cheese and jelly sandwiches. At the moment in question, they were receiving the same glare from the round, freckled, snaggle-toothed redhead and chuckling in the same way at her hostility.

Gwyn was dancing back and forth on the balls of her bare feet and swearing at them like a sailor. “You’d fuckin’ better stop yer laughin’, ya mangy crap-ridden, flea-infested pockets o’ pus, or I’ll fuckin’ be splittin’ yer filthy, hell-spawned faces - we’ll see how yer laughin’ then, ya fuckin’ twinning creeps,” she railed, green eyes narrowing and face so red that Karl would’ve sworn he saw steam escape from her ears if he’d been able to think at all.

So far none of them had noticed him, and he intended to keep it that way. He pulled his sweater sleeves down over his hands and squirmed in his shoes, knobby knees rubbing against each other as if trying to wear through the fabric of his trousers, which they’d already done several times, to the point where his mother, tired of constantly patching, covered the insides of his knees with oilskin and dared him to wear through THAT. Gwyn was posturing, Mike and Maddy were beginning to get annoyed for real, and the three were so absorbed in themselves and each other that they hadn’t bothered to look away from the shadow of the wall to the miserable figure watching them.

Watching. Karl was always watching, it seemed, and as Gwyn took a swing at Mike’s nose and Maddy took a kick at Gwyn’s shin and there was a Gwyn-Mike-Maddy pileup all of a sudden pouring out into the sunlight and rolling like a tumbleweed of childish curses and childish fists, as it became hard to distinguish leather from suede and blue paint from green, Karl watched again.
There was red in there, now, and a flash of white as someone dug their teeth into someone else’s limb and a flash of black as a boot came flying out of the mess to fall directly at Karl’s feet. And still, all he could do was watch, held back by some invisible force from acting or even thinking.
There was laboured breathing and an unearthly silence as Gwyn-Mike-Maddy beat itself into oblivion. And still, all he could do was watch, fingers unconsciously clenching and unclenching, knees violently rubbing together and teeth biting on tongue to keep him from crying out.
There was laughter as Mike and Maddy, confident in their size and strength and twin-ness, disengaged themselves from the lump and Maddy strolled over to Karl to pick up her boot. She looked at him, blood trickling from her nose and cuts on her face and a split in her lip, bruises purpling on what of her body he could see beneath the black leather and green paint, and she slapped his face lightly and laughed before sitting down and lacing up the boot. Mike stood over Gwyn, arms folded and legs spread apart, green paint mixing with red blood to make a nice brown mess on his face, watching Maddy struggle to knot her laces.

Karl stood like a statue until she got up and walked away, thrusting a thumb back at him as she started to speak to Mike in their twin language. Mike’s shoulders shrugged, he jerked his head in the direction of the playground gate, and they walked out in perfect synchronisation, not looking back, not making an intelligible sound.

He waited until he could no longer hear Maddy’s caustic voice or Mike’s high-pitched laughter, then stumbled towards the shaking body on the pavement. He stood watching her for a few minutes, counting the fat, clear tears that rolled down her blue-streaked, red-streaked cheeks, taking in the livid finger marks on her bare arms and the torn skin of her knuckles, before he knelt down beside her and gently touched a round shoulder.

“Get yerself away from me,” she mumbled into her chest, lips moving thickly through the caked blood.

He pretended not to understand her and instead lay down next to her, taking off his sweater and covering her with it, curling his body around hers as the rain and night began to fall at the same time.