((The corpse had been left behind, eyes wide shut.))
Inevitably, the only thing Marcy had done for Roxy’s presentability was rob her of her useful sundries. Bit of an insult, really. If she’d been that in need of a fix’er-up Kelly would have obliged without hesitation. Payment for her one dragging foot, a means of thanks for the rush and thrill of living, of thriving, that accompanied the ice cold shudder up her spine each time she felt her shot-open knee almost fold from under her.
Not like Kelly was using the food herself, anyways. She didn’t have much left, but she was saving it for a special occasion. Sometime never, she’d consider the scraps of morsels left in her bag worth a nibble. For now, she didn’t need the energy. The only things she needed were things she could trust only herself to provide.
Roxy, after all, had demanded the answers from someone else. They had called each other friends, once, and all Roxy had to show for her trust was the particular patterning of her innards. There was an almost hypnotic swirl to the cream of her guts- it was small things like that, little details, that helped Kelly feel grounded.
Kelly trudged up to her, her presence barely heard and felt. Even the moon seemed to spill off her skin, it’s pale lingering chill refusing to stay put, leaving most of her head obscured under an umbra of her own dark hair, dissolved slowly into a briarthorn of twist and fray.
Kelly knelt at Roxy’s side. Slowly, methodically, cleared the gnarl of her bangs off her eyes. She wanted to see her clearly.
I don’t think there was ever anything to find.
Kelly hadn’t lived this long for that to be Roxy’s last words to her. She’d remember Roxy at her best, not at her most defeated.
Her hand was cold as marble as it gently tended to Roxy’s body in stiff sweeps. Roxanne’s glassy eyes were sealed, Kelly mindful of the weight of the lid, slightly fluffing up the sagging jelly of the eyeballs so that Roxy’s closed eyes looked full. The uniquely squirmy, oily texture of gore did not bother Kelly, it was actually quite easy to get used to it when it was attached to her own body in so many places, let alone just bits and pieces of another dying thing. Kelly rescued Roxanne’s guts, repacked them into the empty cavity from which they’d been liberated.
She undid what was left of Roxy’s top, cutting down the front of the bodice with the first aid kit’s pair of surgical scissors. The whole shirt she replaced it with would hide the gash in her abdomen adeptly- with some creative snips along the seams of the back, to widen it as needed. Roxy had been a larger girl, after all. In physical form, anyways.
She’d picked her chartreuse shirt. So long after that color had been meant to represent a spur of the moment impulse towards craven social homogeneity, it seemed like a fitting thing to bury with the dead.
Silence passed, after Roxy’s corpse was neatly bow-tied, set aside to decay in peace. Kelly had nothing to say, any words she’d known for a moment like this had died with a previous iteration of herself. Prayer and ritual were turgid artifacts of a more naive time, inert blocks of rigor mortis and fanciful dream.
The only way she knew to honor Roxy’s memory, now, was that Kelly pick up where she had left off.
that you have the body
the witching hours of early Day 13
Her trial had occurred in that nearby house she hadn’t seen in the downpouring rain. They’d tried to judge her- had only liberated her, with their arrogance. It seemed fitting she stayed a while longer.
Kelly continued on, ever vigilant, observing the shadows in the corners of her eyes leerily whenever they budged a fraction of an inch. All just ghosts, and the occasional muttered caw of some winged-thing readjusting its perch atop an ivy vine. Kelly imagined, a bit belatedly, that the animal population of the island must have been thinned by the starving hordes of George Hunters’ student body. She, herself, had never even been tempted. Whatever twisted, dying grief screams were hidden under the increasingly gaunt, skeletal contour of her stomach were easily ignored. Tamed, shamed, forbidden. As all things on this island. It took discipline, mindfulness, to conquer weakness.
Her only other company besides the birds were corpses, a multitude of them, that seemed to find a spot besides the path around every kink and bend.
One of the odder meme trends, perhaps, a collective unconscious effort to die in this place specifically. It made Kelly kind of wistful. She had no particular plans to die, but if she’d keeled over here she might at least have been a sheep among the masses one last time. She did have to admit to herself that she had at least some fondness for that series of dissociated images and sounds slowly rotting in a deep burial pit in her skull that she’d formally called her life.
It’d been a simpler time, cliche as it was to say. The asking price of Kelly’s current trajectory in life was high, even if she met the challenge with a certain relish. Nowadays Kelly felt a stronger kinship with the inert corpses than the still walking and breathing ones.
They’d taken the easy way out, really. She pitied the dead only as much as she stoically envied them.
She’d tired only a little, still slowly sipping on a finely aged adrenaline, seemingly bottomless, when she decided to settle down. A corpse she didn’t recognize. He’d worn glasses- maybe. Some sort of twisted and shattered wire woven deftly into the pulpy remains of his face implied that much. He’d died with a smile on his face, turned ghastly shaped when the structure of the skull surrounding it had popped like a balloon.
Kelly was a lonely breathing silhouette in the dark, some nominally feminine shape tucking itself into a lotus sit with an unconscious dusting off of her denim. A sort of lotus shape- her bleeding leg was uncomfortable to bend fully. It was stiff where the bandages inhibited her knee.
Kelly stole the small orb- for diabetics, if her memory remained any iota relevant- off the headless bodies’ chest and tinkered with it. It was inert, maybe a bit warmer than the corpse it had come from. No buttons served a purpose anymore. If there had been any meaning left in the device, any purpose, it was forfeit. Kelly leered at it with her eyes still poking out from behind the blank canvas of her mask, then set it aside.
Her hand touched the unknown corpses’ chest, the sensation of the thinnest strip of padding before there was naught but bone and slowly congealing viscera. She made a passing effort at stroking, and feeling, and receiving nothing back for her efforts. Just another limp sack of flesh, hewn apart at the seams as she was.
She’d never really figured out, she supposed, if she was really attracted to men or not.
The occasional haunting image of Lucas’ dick size aside. Her opinion on being broken in half more so than she already was notwithstanding. She’d done her due diligence in exploring the possibilities, had she not. She’d flirted and tried to kiss and tell. Even on this island. She’d even considered Roxy, for a time. An objectively beautiful girl, allegedly, by some arbitrary standard of Western media.
It was something of a breather, the thought. A pointless and meaningless musings, a reminder of a smaller version of Kelly Nguyen. The one that had hemmed and hawed and squirmed.
She spared a glare at them, still her company, never leaving her alone. The camera that had caught the deaths of both these men had been innocuously wreathed in vines and weeds, as omnipresent as God was for the weak-minded, the superstitious. Kelly considered their attention, let the corpse alone. Slept as she usually did, that was to say, not at all. Both eyes open, glaring at the shadow trailing the moon, a shadow slightly consuming Luna’s face.
---
---
---
She paced relentlessly for a time. It felt almost intrusive, not the walking amongst the dead, but the thinking like them. Following the limited mechanisms that had led to their various demises. It was like disturbing the cobwebs in a mausoleum before cracking open the slab to violate and disturb the treasures within. Thinking back to the past, contemplating herself. It was not forward-looking, no, but it was necessary. In a way, calming. Her breath had never been quieter, never been as deadwater as her heartbeat.
She didn’t want to call such a thing- history- her life’s story. That would have implied a definite ending in the future, a punctuation mark on something immutable.
The gravel of the path crunched underfoot, barely. Once more she felt secure in the ambient darkness. The camera would only barely be able to make her out, perhaps, something scuttling around in the dark.
Kelly continued on, ever vigilant, observing the shadows in the corners of her eyes leerily whenever they budged a fraction of an inch. All just ghosts, and the occasional muttered caw of some winged-thing readjusting its perch atop an ivy vine. Kelly imagined, a bit belatedly, that the animal population of the island must have been thinned by the starving hordes of George Hunters’ student body. She, herself, had never even been tempted. Whatever twisted, dying grief screams were hidden under the increasingly gaunt, skeletal contour of her stomach were easily ignored. Tamed, shamed, forbidden. As all things on this island. It took discipline, mindfulness, to conquer weakness.
Her only other company besides the birds were corpses, a multitude of them, that seemed to find a spot besides the path around every kink and bend.
One of the odder meme trends, perhaps, a collective unconscious effort to die in this place specifically. It made Kelly kind of wistful. She had no particular plans to die, but if she’d keeled over here she might at least have been a sheep among the masses one last time. She did have to admit to herself that she had at least some fondness for that series of dissociated images and sounds slowly rotting in a deep burial pit in her skull that she’d formally called her life.
It’d been a simpler time, cliche as it was to say. The asking price of Kelly’s current trajectory in life was high, even if she met the challenge with a certain relish. Nowadays Kelly felt a stronger kinship with the inert corpses than the still walking and breathing ones.
They’d taken the easy way out, really. She pitied the dead only as much as she stoically envied them.
She’d tired only a little, still slowly sipping on a finely aged adrenaline, seemingly bottomless, when she decided to settle down. A corpse she didn’t recognize. He’d worn glasses- maybe. Some sort of twisted and shattered wire woven deftly into the pulpy remains of his face implied that much. He’d died with a smile on his face, turned ghastly shaped when the structure of the skull surrounding it had popped like a balloon.
Kelly was a lonely breathing silhouette in the dark, some nominally feminine shape tucking itself into a lotus sit with an unconscious dusting off of her denim. A sort of lotus shape- her bleeding leg was uncomfortable to bend fully. It was stiff where the bandages inhibited her knee.
Kelly stole the small orb- for diabetics, if her memory remained any iota relevant- off the headless bodies’ chest and tinkered with it. It was inert, maybe a bit warmer than the corpse it had come from. No buttons served a purpose anymore. If there had been any meaning left in the device, any purpose, it was forfeit. Kelly leered at it with her eyes still poking out from behind the blank canvas of her mask, then set it aside.
Her hand touched the unknown corpses’ chest, the sensation of the thinnest strip of padding before there was naught but bone and slowly congealing viscera. She made a passing effort at stroking, and feeling, and receiving nothing back for her efforts. Just another limp sack of flesh, hewn apart at the seams as she was.
She’d never really figured out, she supposed, if she was really attracted to men or not.
The occasional haunting image of Lucas’ dick size aside. Her opinion on being broken in half more so than she already was notwithstanding. She’d done her due diligence in exploring the possibilities, had she not. She’d flirted and tried to kiss and tell. Even on this island. She’d even considered Roxy, for a time. An objectively beautiful girl, allegedly, by some arbitrary standard of Western media.
It was something of a breather, the thought. A pointless and meaningless musings, a reminder of a smaller version of Kelly Nguyen. The one that had hemmed and hawed and squirmed.
She spared a glare at them, still her company, never leaving her alone. The camera that had caught the deaths of both these men had been innocuously wreathed in vines and weeds, as omnipresent as God was for the weak-minded, the superstitious. Kelly considered their attention, let the corpse alone. Slept as she usually did, that was to say, not at all. Both eyes open, glaring at the shadow trailing the moon, a shadow slightly consuming Luna’s face.
---
---
---
She paced relentlessly for a time. It felt almost intrusive, not the walking amongst the dead, but the thinking like them. Following the limited mechanisms that had led to their various demises. It was like disturbing the cobwebs in a mausoleum before cracking open the slab to violate and disturb the treasures within. Thinking back to the past, contemplating herself. It was not forward-looking, no, but it was necessary. In a way, calming. Her breath had never been quieter, never been as deadwater as her heartbeat.
She didn’t want to call such a thing- history- her life’s story. That would have implied a definite ending in the future, a punctuation mark on something immutable.
The gravel of the path crunched underfoot, barely. Once more she felt secure in the ambient darkness. The camera would only barely be able to make her out, perhaps, something scuttling around in the dark.
V8 Vibes:
V7 Vibes:
Memory was fragile, it cracked as it aged, it lost tone and definition. Like anything else. But once she’d been a girl who’d worn things like pink scrunchies and polka dot dresses, who’d gone on outings and shared gossip with people named… Who knew their names? Had their names ever mattered? They had only ever been cogs in the machine that kept them in control, because at some point they’d all bought into the system that had demanded scrunchies and dresses and outings and gossip from them, and Kelly had been no exception. Her memories were something alien in how familiar they were, like an optical illusion she expected them to stop making sense the moment she solved the riddle of how she’d come to be.
All this time had passed, all these trials she’d conquered. The pieces of herself and others she’d abandoned along the way. She was so close that she could feel her tongue curling behind her mincemeat lips, as if to spit the words out like the pus that dripped from each of her wounds.
The words, at first, were foreign. The echoes of others, of their own wrestling with the truth. Usually the words were just echoes of privilege, of presumptuousness, of asinine white hicks like the whose-its and whats-its that had dared attack her for merely representing a future they couldn’t comprehend, that was righteous as it was indignant in its rejection of the human spirit…
In favor of what? Exactly? What was it that Kelly was trying to become? She had suffered indignity, beatings, trials, mutilations. To what end? The anger and the desperation were gone now, such was the winnings of her victory over their expectations.
Everything they’d wanted from her. To give in, to break for good. They were broken too. But they’d all eventually crumbled to dust, taken their final steps and breathed no more. She’d lingered. That meant her’s was the righteous cause.
But the cause itself…
Power, without the will to use it.
… The two of them had, after all, never been so different. Politics was politics, no matter how grotesquely petty or personal.
Kelly earnestly wondered why Juliette had not made it further- perhaps her imagination had finally failed her, perhaps she’d cracked under her own expectations. Perhaps the same mind that had once surpassed Kelly’s had simply had less potential- had hit the limit of its growth, too soon, too fatally late.
A shame. Kelly would have liked to meet her again perhaps. Likely to kill her, necessarily, but also to genuinely thank her.
Kelly glanced around, almost buoyant, as if refreshed from her stupor. Her eyes blank in the cameras as they passively observed her creak like chitin. The stars above, infinitely far away for how tiny their light fell onto her skin like holes in the roof of the world… they were close. She could see them, and nod, as if in respect of their immortality. Impossibly beyond reach.
To continue to struggle in that direction, above, that was the noblest goal of all. The luck of the dragon was that it could ascend, infinitely into the sky. Beyond reach, beyond reproach.
Finally, as she stalked away, she noticed her in the distance. A large pot, something misshapen slumped in front of it. An inadvisable shade of pink, that a hunter’s eyes could barely detect the hue of through the infinity monochrome of inky midnight, even when that hunter’s prey had long been deceased.
Just further proof of Kelly’s speaking truth to power, then. The power to see even the most loathsome things in the dark. Where they belonged, dying while she lived. No need to think of that particular thing any further.
All this time had passed, all these trials she’d conquered. The pieces of herself and others she’d abandoned along the way. She was so close that she could feel her tongue curling behind her mincemeat lips, as if to spit the words out like the pus that dripped from each of her wounds.
The words, at first, were foreign. The echoes of others, of their own wrestling with the truth. Usually the words were just echoes of privilege, of presumptuousness, of asinine white hicks like the whose-its and whats-its that had dared attack her for merely representing a future they couldn’t comprehend, that was righteous as it was indignant in its rejection of the human spirit…
In favor of what? Exactly? What was it that Kelly was trying to become? She had suffered indignity, beatings, trials, mutilations. To what end? The anger and the desperation were gone now, such was the winnings of her victory over their expectations.
Everything they’d wanted from her. To give in, to break for good. They were broken too. But they’d all eventually crumbled to dust, taken their final steps and breathed no more. She’d lingered. That meant her’s was the righteous cause.
But the cause itself…
Power, without the will to use it.
… The two of them had, after all, never been so different. Politics was politics, no matter how grotesquely petty or personal.
Kelly earnestly wondered why Juliette had not made it further- perhaps her imagination had finally failed her, perhaps she’d cracked under her own expectations. Perhaps the same mind that had once surpassed Kelly’s had simply had less potential- had hit the limit of its growth, too soon, too fatally late.
A shame. Kelly would have liked to meet her again perhaps. Likely to kill her, necessarily, but also to genuinely thank her.
Kelly glanced around, almost buoyant, as if refreshed from her stupor. Her eyes blank in the cameras as they passively observed her creak like chitin. The stars above, infinitely far away for how tiny their light fell onto her skin like holes in the roof of the world… they were close. She could see them, and nod, as if in respect of their immortality. Impossibly beyond reach.
To continue to struggle in that direction, above, that was the noblest goal of all. The luck of the dragon was that it could ascend, infinitely into the sky. Beyond reach, beyond reproach.
Finally, as she stalked away, she noticed her in the distance. A large pot, something misshapen slumped in front of it. An inadvisable shade of pink, that a hunter’s eyes could barely detect the hue of through the infinity monochrome of inky midnight, even when that hunter’s prey had long been deceased.
Just further proof of Kelly’s speaking truth to power, then. The power to see even the most loathsome things in the dark. Where they belonged, dying while she lived. No need to think of that particular thing any further.
V8 Vibes:
V7 Vibes:
“I finally realized, I think. The dragon in Roxy’s story is this island.”
If Kelly Nguyen was breathing, it was quite hard to pick out such a noise from the white noise. The tape hiss of the recording, or perhaps ambiance of the night.
“Well, not this island specifically. Hah.” A monotone syllable laugh. Cheerless. “I’m not trying to bring literary analysis back into vogue or anything… but, it’s what the island represents. What all of them did.”
Kelly Nguyen creaked as she shifted the weight on her heels. As of that point in that particular garden camera’s recording, she’d been standing still for almost an hour, impassive.
“The princess is giving into the dragon’s demands. The only thing she ever wanted was to be free… Yes. See.” Slow, measured gestures with one hand. Always summoning the viewer’s attention. “When you… accept it, that the dragon is invincible, that fate is ever onrushing…”
A long pause.
“You realize, rather, that it was there all along. Roxy said, ‘you are at the cusp of finding yourself’, but that was never true. The dragon was always inevitable.”
Kelly Nguyen stalked a bit closer to the camera, her feet barely seeming to move.
“You understand, don’t you?” An earnest question. A gentle tone, almost like an entreaty between friends. Kelly Nguyen’s voice briefly flirted with that pathos, before hollowing out once more. “You see it? The trick? That’s what they have been trying to obscure from you.”
Kelly Nguyen’s fist curled, meeting her other palm without a sound.
“We have power. But they,” and Kelly Nguyen’s overemphasis of the word they each time would briefly color her blank stare with venom, a talisman she refused to relinquish.
“They, have poisoned our minds. It’s simple science- inertia, making us incapable of changing, of seeing the truth behind their mechanisms. All of it- decency, politeness, respect for authority? The racism, the sexism, the classism? All the bullshit?”
Kelly Nguyen’s calm tone was almost mechanical. Like a programmed affect.
“It’s called society. But what it really is, it’s a trap.”
A finger jabbed at the lens above, that framed her in the perfect way that she haunted the colorless image like a ghost.
“You can’t grow yourself when you play by their rules. You don’t evolve, you don’t get stronger, you don’t see through the ruse. They have you, they win.” A finger slid over her throat, a hideous and brief choking sound. The finger had lingered, pressing deep into Kelly Nguyen’s windpipe as if corporeal punishment.
“Where I think I realized it was when they kept abusing me, really.”
She raised one finger, one of the only ones she had left.
“I was abandoned.”
Then another finger.
“Beaten. “Another finger, “mutilated,” another, Kelly Nguyen’s voice briefly speeding, constricting in her throat as words got caught behind one another and she choked on them in impotent indignation. “Tried. Accused. Interrogated. Harassed.”
Kelly Nguyen needed a long moment to breathe, and was still, silent, as she took that moment. Her gaze never lifted from the camera.
“Where does power come from? Think about it.”
A longer moment was allowed to pass.
“We always think it’s the things they told us matter- supposedly. Right?” A bare whisper. “It’s the government. It’s the media. Power comes from within. Power to the people. How to win friends and influence enemies.”
Kelly Nguyen shrugged her tiny shoulders.
“What they don’t tell you is that power is never given. You have none. Do you understand?” Kelly Nguyen’s head tilted, briefly, before snapping back into place like it was spring loaded. “You do not have power until you earn it.”
“Until you take it.”
“The invincible dragon,” Kelly Nguyen drawled, as if putting on a smile, as if putting on the accent of a dead classmate she’d never out loud called a friend, “is actually reality itself.” An understated conclusion, as if merely musing to one of the dead corpses she’d spent the night with. “Invincible. Unstoppable. Inevitably, we fall before it.”
“That is why we never stop fighting. That is why- the very reason- that stagnation is never an option. It is death. What happened on this island was,” Kelly Nguyen swept her arms, an eerily thin scarecrow encircling her domain. “My many hapless peers, in all their lack of vision, tried to play a game. One where they assume they get to go home, as if nothing has changed.”
“They reject the truth, because it is… something of an inconvenience? I’d say?” Hollow, artificial laugh. “As if we get to go back. As if we are unbroken, when we claim our reward.”
“No… no, no, the dragon is not restrained by the boundaries of this island.”
A thumb met Kelly Nguyen’s chest, almost snapping straight through the flimsy bone.
“I, at least, have realized it. It’s time to drop the farce, isn’t it? What happens on this island… that’s the true nature of us, buried in the manure of pomp and circumstance. That we are always broken, and only decay more, with each moment that we must cower. You see all this?” Kelly Nguyen’s fingers jabbed, never pointing at anything, save all those shadowy slumped over things that lurked beyond the frame of the camera, wanting for even an open grave.
“This is how it should be. Do you understand? It is inescapable. They just try to disguise it from you- your right to be free. You are only shackled by the prettiness of society. It’s like putting makeup on shit. You shouldn’t be fooled. You’re better than that. After all…”
“Have I not proved it? Have I not gotten up each time, in spite of all the damage they have done to me? I am better than them,” she hissed, “I am stronger,” she cursed,
“I am evolved,” she spat, as Kelly Nguyen’s composure briefly dissolved into the more chitin-like features of her face. Smooth, black as the midnight shrouding her. She cleared her throat. The distortion disappeared without a trace.
“The rest of my peers,” Kelly Nguyen continued boredly, refusing to stare the camera quite in the eye as she considered her nails. “Will try their best. I don’t particularly fault them for it… But I don’t see it happening. They are limited by their lack of understanding. They are… unfit, let’s put it that way. The problem is… They think we are approaching the end.”
“No.” Voice throaty, deep, even as the pallor of Kelly Nguyen’s complexion continued to drain live, real-time play-by-play.
“This is just the beginning. What happens on this island is going to echo and reverberate onto the mainland. Society will revert to the mean- to what it always has been, when we strip its pretensions off. We have figured out the truth. We’ve finally ripped down the curtains. They can’t stop us now.”
“See.” A soft, friendly sounding smile, hidden by a mask. “I know who you are. You’re out there, feeling as trapped and helpless as me… I can’t promise I can save you, though. All I am is a messenger.”
“Call me your best friend.”
Kelly Nguyen raised a single fist at the camera. A soft tension in the fingers, as if she’d extend them the next moment- for a handshake, for a hug.
“Because I’m telling you. I’m showing you. You can evolve. You can change. You can escape. You can break yourself, and shatter everything else that dares hold you down. They dare to judge you. They hold you down. They will see the error of their ways.”
And they will let us out of our prison.” Her fist came down. For the first and only time before she finally stalked away, Kelly Nguyen’s gun entered the frame. One hand, no support. She didn’t tremble. It was pointed right at the camera, an unspoken threat, at her all-too-definedly nebulous enemy.
“Piece by bloody piece.”
For a moment, the tension of Kelly Nguyen’s finger atop the trigger was visible, in how the little creases on her knuckle deepened, as if tensing by an infinitely small degree.
“Next time we meet, my friends. It will be as conquerors. I believe in you.”
The most earnest giggle Kelly Nguyen had ever laughed in her life. Warm and bubbly, and bringing the briefest moment of life to her blood streaked face.
“So let’s make a change.”
“It’s not just on this island, see, where we are compelled to thin the herd.”
((Kelly Nguyen continued in perverse verdict))
If Kelly Nguyen was breathing, it was quite hard to pick out such a noise from the white noise. The tape hiss of the recording, or perhaps ambiance of the night.
“Well, not this island specifically. Hah.” A monotone syllable laugh. Cheerless. “I’m not trying to bring literary analysis back into vogue or anything… but, it’s what the island represents. What all of them did.”
Kelly Nguyen creaked as she shifted the weight on her heels. As of that point in that particular garden camera’s recording, she’d been standing still for almost an hour, impassive.
“The princess is giving into the dragon’s demands. The only thing she ever wanted was to be free… Yes. See.” Slow, measured gestures with one hand. Always summoning the viewer’s attention. “When you… accept it, that the dragon is invincible, that fate is ever onrushing…”
A long pause.
“You realize, rather, that it was there all along. Roxy said, ‘you are at the cusp of finding yourself’, but that was never true. The dragon was always inevitable.”
Kelly Nguyen stalked a bit closer to the camera, her feet barely seeming to move.
“You understand, don’t you?” An earnest question. A gentle tone, almost like an entreaty between friends. Kelly Nguyen’s voice briefly flirted with that pathos, before hollowing out once more. “You see it? The trick? That’s what they have been trying to obscure from you.”
Kelly Nguyen’s fist curled, meeting her other palm without a sound.
“We have power. But they,” and Kelly Nguyen’s overemphasis of the word they each time would briefly color her blank stare with venom, a talisman she refused to relinquish.
“They, have poisoned our minds. It’s simple science- inertia, making us incapable of changing, of seeing the truth behind their mechanisms. All of it- decency, politeness, respect for authority? The racism, the sexism, the classism? All the bullshit?”
Kelly Nguyen’s calm tone was almost mechanical. Like a programmed affect.
“It’s called society. But what it really is, it’s a trap.”
A finger jabbed at the lens above, that framed her in the perfect way that she haunted the colorless image like a ghost.
“You can’t grow yourself when you play by their rules. You don’t evolve, you don’t get stronger, you don’t see through the ruse. They have you, they win.” A finger slid over her throat, a hideous and brief choking sound. The finger had lingered, pressing deep into Kelly Nguyen’s windpipe as if corporeal punishment.
“Where I think I realized it was when they kept abusing me, really.”
She raised one finger, one of the only ones she had left.
“I was abandoned.”
Then another finger.
“Beaten. “Another finger, “mutilated,” another, Kelly Nguyen’s voice briefly speeding, constricting in her throat as words got caught behind one another and she choked on them in impotent indignation. “Tried. Accused. Interrogated. Harassed.”
Kelly Nguyen needed a long moment to breathe, and was still, silent, as she took that moment. Her gaze never lifted from the camera.
“Where does power come from? Think about it.”
A longer moment was allowed to pass.
“We always think it’s the things they told us matter- supposedly. Right?” A bare whisper. “It’s the government. It’s the media. Power comes from within. Power to the people. How to win friends and influence enemies.”
Kelly Nguyen shrugged her tiny shoulders.
“What they don’t tell you is that power is never given. You have none. Do you understand?” Kelly Nguyen’s head tilted, briefly, before snapping back into place like it was spring loaded. “You do not have power until you earn it.”
“Until you take it.”
“The invincible dragon,” Kelly Nguyen drawled, as if putting on a smile, as if putting on the accent of a dead classmate she’d never out loud called a friend, “is actually reality itself.” An understated conclusion, as if merely musing to one of the dead corpses she’d spent the night with. “Invincible. Unstoppable. Inevitably, we fall before it.”
“That is why we never stop fighting. That is why- the very reason- that stagnation is never an option. It is death. What happened on this island was,” Kelly Nguyen swept her arms, an eerily thin scarecrow encircling her domain. “My many hapless peers, in all their lack of vision, tried to play a game. One where they assume they get to go home, as if nothing has changed.”
“They reject the truth, because it is… something of an inconvenience? I’d say?” Hollow, artificial laugh. “As if we get to go back. As if we are unbroken, when we claim our reward.”
“No… no, no, the dragon is not restrained by the boundaries of this island.”
A thumb met Kelly Nguyen’s chest, almost snapping straight through the flimsy bone.
“I, at least, have realized it. It’s time to drop the farce, isn’t it? What happens on this island… that’s the true nature of us, buried in the manure of pomp and circumstance. That we are always broken, and only decay more, with each moment that we must cower. You see all this?” Kelly Nguyen’s fingers jabbed, never pointing at anything, save all those shadowy slumped over things that lurked beyond the frame of the camera, wanting for even an open grave.
“This is how it should be. Do you understand? It is inescapable. They just try to disguise it from you- your right to be free. You are only shackled by the prettiness of society. It’s like putting makeup on shit. You shouldn’t be fooled. You’re better than that. After all…”
“Have I not proved it? Have I not gotten up each time, in spite of all the damage they have done to me? I am better than them,” she hissed, “I am stronger,” she cursed,
“I am evolved,” she spat, as Kelly Nguyen’s composure briefly dissolved into the more chitin-like features of her face. Smooth, black as the midnight shrouding her. She cleared her throat. The distortion disappeared without a trace.
“The rest of my peers,” Kelly Nguyen continued boredly, refusing to stare the camera quite in the eye as she considered her nails. “Will try their best. I don’t particularly fault them for it… But I don’t see it happening. They are limited by their lack of understanding. They are… unfit, let’s put it that way. The problem is… They think we are approaching the end.”
“No.” Voice throaty, deep, even as the pallor of Kelly Nguyen’s complexion continued to drain live, real-time play-by-play.
“This is just the beginning. What happens on this island is going to echo and reverberate onto the mainland. Society will revert to the mean- to what it always has been, when we strip its pretensions off. We have figured out the truth. We’ve finally ripped down the curtains. They can’t stop us now.”
“See.” A soft, friendly sounding smile, hidden by a mask. “I know who you are. You’re out there, feeling as trapped and helpless as me… I can’t promise I can save you, though. All I am is a messenger.”
“Call me your best friend.”
Kelly Nguyen raised a single fist at the camera. A soft tension in the fingers, as if she’d extend them the next moment- for a handshake, for a hug.
“Because I’m telling you. I’m showing you. You can evolve. You can change. You can escape. You can break yourself, and shatter everything else that dares hold you down. They dare to judge you. They hold you down. They will see the error of their ways.”
And they will let us out of our prison.” Her fist came down. For the first and only time before she finally stalked away, Kelly Nguyen’s gun entered the frame. One hand, no support. She didn’t tremble. It was pointed right at the camera, an unspoken threat, at her all-too-definedly nebulous enemy.
“Piece by bloody piece.”
For a moment, the tension of Kelly Nguyen’s finger atop the trigger was visible, in how the little creases on her knuckle deepened, as if tensing by an infinitely small degree.
“Next time we meet, my friends. It will be as conquerors. I believe in you.”
The most earnest giggle Kelly Nguyen had ever laughed in her life. Warm and bubbly, and bringing the briefest moment of life to her blood streaked face.
“So let’s make a change.”
“It’s not just on this island, see, where we are compelled to thin the herd.”
((Kelly Nguyen continued in perverse verdict))
V8 Vibes:
V7 Vibes: