Eli stands by the fridge as his eyes skim the pinned notes. He looks over their own handwriting, the same instruction on each in different words from their various past versions on countless scraps of paper.
So. The hiss. That obviously never happened. I clearly still don’t remember writing any of this. We’re nowhere near an explanation for why being around each other feels like living inside a live wire. Right–
“We’re nearly done.” Maz, behind him, watches his hand wrap around the mint tin tighter.
“Yeah.” The magnets snag his attention. His eyes snap to the closest one. The shadow around it bends into curves where angles should be. He looks up at the weak glow of the bulb on the ceiling before returning his gaze to the fridge.
“I’m guessing the light–”
His own shadow leans on the fridge door, and the more he stares, the sharper his shady silhouette draws itself.
I’ll have to hope that Ari was right. At least about Viper being good for ‘maintenance’. Shadows are acting up after all, and this is all we’ve got.
He turns towards the counter and flicks open the mint tin. The last two scales skitter in the wake of motion inside, looking blacker and stiffer.
Maz steps closer to him as he picks one out and places the tin on the counter.
“Let’s get today’s spinach portioning over with, then.”
The scale snaps as he readies it in his hand, and the rushed split leaves the halves splintered.
“Half for you…” His eyes stay on the halved scales when she reaches for hers.
She shuts her eyes as they take their halves. When she opens them, she finds him facing the sink with an empty glass in his left hand, the other turning the tap on.
As he sticks the glass under the running water, he feels it turn colder, watching it overfill and spill onto the old burn marks on his fingers. They seem more red, more tender, more distant, and more warped underwater.
The noise of the streaming water ups its pitch and grows louder without needing him to twist the handle further.
The hiss is Ari’s urban legend, Viper wants to be spinach, physics has left the building, and now the tap would rather sound like a blender.
He stares unfocused at the water spinning around the drain.
***
The blender came on with a whirr that went up two whole octaves at once. Obviously, the green sludge in it wasn’t agreeing with the poor appliance.
I nearly said that out loud, so instead I looked up, counting the strip lights overhead, because why not. Yeah, three, that’s what I thought. Even if that was Maz’s thing, it was a better something to do than watching Jackal at the counter.
He wore a jackal’s face and an apron tied in a knot, its stiff loop standing upright, cinch in the middle letting two tails fall straight down. I’d seen– No, there was no apron. The shape of it, though… right. He had a key, with an ankh for its ring, and placed it beside the blender.
Was he called Jackal, or was it what we called him because he wore a jackal mask? Didn’t matter.
His mask sat a tad raised off his face. He must’ve stopped noticing it was even there. His sleeves rolled, forearms underneath holding a balanced peace in the muscles, he killed the motor and held the jug.
The noise didn’t go anywhere. It kept pinging off the walls until it eventually fizzled out. Apart from a rare few things, nothing really ever passed the marble unnoticed. The stone’s entirety ran colder here than in the hall. I never figured out if it was the vents that dropped the temperature. It might have been the room’s way of helping the tired people inside it. Why were we so tired?
Six hearings before the break, the rota said. It was six yesterday too, and we’d done way more than eight. Sat with my back to the door, I looked at the papers in my lap, hah, considering the table had no spare space, and the chairs I trusted weren’t anywhere in sight. The numbers were clearly off.
“What’s in it, Jackal?” Maz sounded like she was smiling. She was sitting across from me, but it was hard to notice if she actually had a smile on, as she had her head nestled between her hands.
Her fingers dragged down her face and found the table. What was she looking for?
She stretched her arm past the folders towards the middle in an awkward lean. The name card clipped to a lanyard around her neck read ‘Mazmire’, written in a much larger font than the ‘Archive and Logistics’ beneath it.
I knew I had a quiet laugh at that, some point in time. It was as if even the badge preferred not to mention where to find us, at least me, too proudly. She picked up a pen. There was already another one behind her ear. She settled in her chair and scribbled something in the margin of the paper in front of her.
“It is not too green for you, is it? You will be thankful by the time your queue rush is over, or you won’t, and that will be its own answer.” Jackal tipped the jug to pour into three glasses.
“Mostly spinach. The rest is what keeps you upright past the fourth hearing.” His mask tilted at the room as he set the drinks down on the table.
“The colour does the work, yet the taste proves to be the cost.”
The napkin under Maz’s elbow had large and flourished handwriting that read ‘Be divine, not late.’ Deon’s signature at the bottom started with the style of a ‘D’ that they’d been trying to make fashionable for centuries.
Jackal pushed two glasses across. I took mine, Maz took hers. The glass was cold and the green inside it was the colour of a river Maz had once told me about, but this definitely wasn’t the best time to wander down memory lane. Jackal clearly was on to something, and I couldn’t put my finger on what.
“Our break is almost over,” Maz said.
“Deon’s already nagging me about the party.”
“Has Deon ever stopped talking about those? The party will inevitably happen.” Jackal was looking at me through the mask, no, past me, towards where the queues were behind the walls.
“So will the paperwork. The uncertainty should be on what is happening underneath.”
I drank. Its flavour, definitely some sort of vegetable, gave way to metal that the drink kicked loose before swallowing. Earthy, I thought, it didn’t feel right to be so sure about that. I told myself not to think about it too much as I took the next mouthful.
“Mind you…” Jackal put the jug back on the base before he reached up to adjust the mask on his face.
“The work itself cannot be what is making you weary. It is the same as it was last cycle.” He turned, and the mask tilted at me.
“When you wish to see, it is not challenging at all to notice the strings behind being orchestrated. The culprit seems to be pulling those of the wrong people, don’t you think?”
My hand was resting on my paperwork. I held my fingers at a definitely not too weird angle to hide them, feeling the scarred skin on two. I’d taught myself not to look at that part of me. I was never going to make this obvious.
I knew I could work it off, whatever it should cost, sooner or later, I’d have worked it off for her sake. I slid my hand under the file, just in case. Yet it struck me as if Jackal’s mask was able to keep tabs on even that, regardless.
Maz laughed as her hands dug into her hair.
“You always say that, ‘last cycle, the cycle before’… any future cycle warnings? It’s only admin, and a bare minimum at that. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any conspiracies running underneath.”
“Whether you like it or not, there is.” Jackal’s mask pointed at me, still, and never at Maz.
He waited. The waiting was the thing. Everybody waited. The queue was just there beyond the door, only growing longer.
“Drink it before you get back to work.” He turned to the counter and took out a jar from under it.
I drank the rest of the glass, and the taste of metal built up, and I let it be, and I kept my hand beneath the papers.
“And Elysinth…” Jackal poured the remaining green in the jug into the jar.
“You know the queue will not resolve itself.”
***
“–won’t it?” Maz turns off the water.
Eli looks at her, standing half a step closer to him than she was, her eyes locked on his hand that presses hard against the glass under the tap.
Elysinth? That’s not even the first time that name cropped up.
“Huh? Yeah, I checked out there, didn’t I?”
He forces out a small laugh.
“It was obviously my turn to be ambushed with a memory.”
Or, I could just stop talking.
He puts the glass down and turns away from her to grab a tea towel that hangs off a drawer handle.
“Oh… What was it?” She slides her phone out and ticks another box on the calendar.
He dries his hand.
If that was Jackal, he knew. He knew something I knew and Maz didn’t. I’m obviously annoyed by this, so… Elysinth. No, file that for later. Jackal didn’t say anything, though. Okay, so maybe he didn’t know. Maz definitely didn’t. Maz. Yeah, of course she’d ask. Why did I even mention anything? I can’t say all of it. Should I? Not to her, at least not entirely. In the memory, we were clearly having a busy day, and it could mean nothing, and she doesn’t need the…
“Let’s call that one Jackal’s smoothie.” His hands wring the tea towel into a mitt that strangles his fingers back in kind.
“Weird, right? I must’ve reached my limit with the scales, and they’re finally getting to my head.”
She looks up, staring at the back of his neck.
“Jackal?”
It’s silly, but… you know it. Oh, for the love of– How could you not think of it that way before? The jackal mask. The scales… the actual weighing scale.
“Yep, that’s–”
“Yeah.” With the tea towel slapping on the countertop when he throws it, he spins back, eyes locked on her phone calendar.
“That’s one more to go.” He jams both hands into his pockets well past his wrists as he hurries out of the kitchen.
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