Chasing Phantoms

[MethodicalSlacker]

[from the past into an interlude]

Too late, Jodi walks through the same space that just hours before would have been her salvation.¹⁰⁶

She does not recognize the spot as such. To her it is a scrap of wood afloat in the same salty sea breeze that has relentlessly pummeled her senses since her senseless awakening nearly 36 hours ago. But it could have also been longer by now. That was caution talking. Betty's mind was a knife on which Jodi was stuck. Betty was a framework, and Betty was also nothing. Betty moved with a purpose. Jodi scurried like a rat. Yet they took the same steps.

Jodi was looking for the Buccaneers. Not these Buccaneers, whose trail she followed unwittingly into the evening, but the ones she left behind in the metal belly of the ship. Betty's assumption that they'd run into each other somewhere down the line just by force of nature and will itself was, unsurprisingly to Jodi, wrong. Jodi didn't take anything Betty thought seriously. A better way to put that would be that Jodi didn't take any of her own Betty-thoughts seriously, but that would be cheating. Betty was just impulse, just doing. Jodi thought and felt and did too, but Betty was a force of nature. Betty could do things that Jodi could not. But Betty was Jodi, and nothing else. And nothing was Jodi, and Betty else.

Pearls of foam bubbled on the crests of the waves underneath Jodi's feet. The flimsy wood path drifted buoyant above the water; Jodi imagined it snapping loose and drifting to shore. As far as ways out of the arena went, waiting for a storm and finding something solid to hold on to and drag you back to shore might not be too bad. Then again, the sharks were swarming. Surely. Offscreen. Never to be seen on television. Was watching a floating bloated corpse get eaten good TV? Jodi would find out when she watched the reruns. Betty wouldn't.

And that was because Jodi would survive this. Betty couldn't. Jodi wouldn't allow it.

Her supplies were dwindling. The temptation to lean over the side of the board and take a scoop of salt water was great, but Jodi resisted. It would only dehydrate her further. She hoped that she'd get the supply exchange she hoped for out of Pippi and Luanne sometime later down the line. That or else Betty was going to do something she'd regret, and pay for.

Why the name Betty? Jodi never knew a Betty. Her mother's side of the family had no Betty's. Neither did her dad's. It was an older name, out of fashion, sucked up into pop culture and synonymized with individuals deemed unseemly to style one's offspring in the image of. Betty Boop was one. She couldn't think of anything else. Ugly Betty? Sure. Point was that in the Downward Twenties, Betty was long out of fashion. Had been for decades.

Truth be told, it just called out to her. On the spot. From nowhere. A crack in the wall. A hissing pocket of steam stuck somewhere in the metal siding. Calling into the night. Whispering 'Betty.' And Jodi heard, and Jodi repeated. Whitman was purely spite, and subject to change. That was just Leah's fake last name turned back on itself. Leah was a real name, and only that. So was Jodi. Betty was a force itself. It was heavy. Heavy Betty. A name you needed to hold with two hands. Something that could hurt.

Betty was a weapon. Not just any weapon, but a weapon whispered from God.

With her arms outstretched Jodi walks the wooden tightrope, balancing the bottomless blue and thin sky on the thin line of the horizon.

Into the orangered light she walks, on and on. Many thoughts. Head full.

[and then elsewhere.]

[+] Open Footnotes

[106] Circumstances permitting, she would have liked to have been there. Alas.