Until it becomes real

Until it becomes real

« That was my idea! I decided to come!” she screams, the last word propelling a long and slimy spit bubble towards the old rusty tool rack hanging loosely from the termite infested wall. The tool rack doesn’t budge. It’s still holding on to a small hammer, a trowel and a pair of pliers.

She hates the pliers more than the others. Its cracked grip is a rubbery blue and the crusty metal beneath bleeds through a dozen wormy slits. More important, it doesn’t belong here.

“You’re of no use here. No one ever needed you!” She takes a step forward and her nose comes awfully close to touching the sad looking tool. “You shouldn’t be here”, she whispers, drawing out the last syllable in a long sinuous sigh that lasts until her lungs buckle and cramp from the lack of air.

She’s right. What good can a pair of pliers do in an old barn? There had never been any wiring in there. No electrics. Perhaps some crooked nails to straighten out. Someone needs to do it. She remembers the words. The soft-spoken voice. Breathy, almost gentle. Someone needs to make them right. The pliers speak to her directly, without moving, without a voice. She can see the melodious hymn swell from the tip of both its curved and mangled handles, puffy swirls dancing around each other merrily, flowing up and up towards her face, the promise of their unspoken words clapping around her ears like clam shells being ushered to shore by a steady, languid current, never quite staying out the water, never quite lingering in.

“You can’t touch me now”, she mutters, and her eyes cross each other as the whispering puffs join into one single stream, and she knows it’s about to try and penetrate her nostrils. It wants to make its way up to her brain and stab it until it becomes flat and leaky. They promised her that, but they did it with the alluring strength of a warm crimson sunset, and she couldn’t take her eyes away from it fast enough. Stupid, stupid girl you are. Dumb and clumsy and frail.

“NO!” she tears herself away from the tool rack and whips her body backward with enough force to lose control over her shaky legs. They tangle together and she collapses on the straw-littered floor, disarticulated like a sack of bony rags, her butt painfully landing right across the handle of a grub hoe that was just lying there half-buried underneath a hole-ridden plastic tarp.

She screams from both pain and surprise, but anger takes over. She jolts back up and before she even realizes it, she’s smashing the tool rack to bits with the grub hoe she just picked up from the floor, wielding it like a questing knight from older times about to eradicate the last bits of evil from the world, crazed with righteous might.

The hammer and the trowel and the pliers all fall together with an unremarkable thump on the very first hit, but she keeps pounding on the barn’s wall, the dull metal end of the hoe unable to dig through the thick wood. She growls like an animal, and probably looks like one. Her bald head sends a continuous stream of sweat over her eyelids and into her eyes. It flows steadily all the way down to her throat and in between her breasts towards her belly button.

She stops banging on the wall when she finally realizes that she’s stopped breathing and collapses on the floor once more. On her own accord, this time.

She crosses her legs and takes her head between her hands. “I decided to come here”, she says again, looking at a small heap of fodder dispersed on the ground between her knees, the long thick straws piled together like the wooden sticks of a Mikado game. “You didn’t decide, I did”.

The pliers don’t speak anymore. She pushes them away from her with a kick of her right foot. She wants to destroy them. She needs to destroy them. Didn’t they destroy her after all? Aren’t they the very reasons she came back here? The pliers and the nails, the rake’s pointy ends, the broom and the hose. Bending her dirty fingernails, twisting her toes, leaving red shiny trails over her back, blue and black pools over her shoulders and her legs.

She unfolds her body and raises her arms up, then slowly lowers her back to the floor. The broken-up roof’s dangling, moss-covered shingles slowly sway with the light breeze, and she can see the naked branches of the black pine tree she used to try and climb on when she was little.

She lifts her left index finger and points it at the tip of a burgeoning branch shaped like a crow’s foot. She closes her right eye, and with her left, travels from the tip of her finger to the crow-branch and back again, her vision blurring along the way. “This is not your fault”, she tells the branch. “You did nothing wrong”.

The branch doesn’t answer, electing to keep swaying gently instead. The burgeons hanging from its tips are like lumpy dark eyes staring down at her, but she doesn’t feel any evil coming from them. They merely want to observe. They might even be looking out for her.

“Do you know how I used to think there was nothing outside this place?” she asks the branch and the tree, even though she figures they must already know that. They’ve seen her here many times. For years and years that wouldn’t end. A drop of water in the ocean for them. “I used to think that the outside wasn’t real, but I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

She hears a light creaking coming from a barred opening below the broken shingles on the roof. It’s soft but it lingers and travels around the crumbling structure like a skittering lizard. When it finally tapers out, she hears several short bangs closely following each other. An old shutter slamming against its frame from a sudden gust of wind, perhaps. Or an exclamation mark acting as final punctuation to the message that came from the walls.

“I think I understand”, she murmurs, rubbing her right palm against a patch of exposed earth peeking out from a hole in between two slabs of wood. “But I didn’t come here for nothing, at least”.

She knows she can’t break the pliers anymore than she can destroy the old barn and the memories etched inside its rotten walls and into her own withered heart. She can’t bury the tools that made her who she is now, not really.

But she can talk to them. Play with them. Look at them for the first time in her life without fearing them. She can see how they feel against her skin, harmless and innocent. Cold and devoid of malice. “You never asked for this, did you?” she asks the pliers and the rake and the wheelbarrow she used to try and hide in, but is now shamefully resting in a dark corner behind an unfinished brick wall, its wheel long gone.

She decides to stay in the barn until sunrise. And if it’s not enough time, she will stay until the next one. She will keep asking the barn’s inhabitants the questions she couldn’t speak or even imagine before she left their realm a lifetime ago.

She knows they will have the answers, and they will speak them using their own words. Their own tools. And she will see them for what they are.

When she’s finished, the outside will be waiting for her. “When it becomes real”. She smiles as the branches above her rustle with glee and the old wood around her sizzle quietly.