Illusion Ain't Revolution

[Cicadan]

Lena carefully appraised the lonely looking packet she'd broken open, checked the food, and made sure no scraps were left to waste.

The other girl's words, she appraised bluntly. The tone, the face attached, those two things she felt more comfortable folding into neat little origami notes to stuff away into the cramped shelves of her brain. Lena's eyes fixed onto the other girl's eyes and lips with some innocent insistence, shy the moment she'd be noticed, but otherwise content in visualizing the meaning in a way easier to hear than with her actual ears.

"They would be very petty, not worldly." Lena tried to agree, in her own way.

The other girl's brow so briefly became heavy, shadows deepening into... a scowl, yes. That was what other people looked like when they scowled, Lena had sketched such things before. She was left with a moment to compose some form of response, and options didn't occur readily.

"Sorry."

Lena had never stopped listening, for a moment. This conversation was perhaps louder than she liked, but everything else was too familiarly quiet.

Americans moved very silent when they knew the 'who', when they could guess the 'where'.

"My name is Mag-... Len-h... Maggie." It had been so long since she'd said that name aloud.

"I don't, um. Usually pay much attention in class." Perhaps honesty was the best policy. "I will admit I am extremely nervous, around others. Often asleep, in class."

She hoped, most of all, that Calista would not start yelling again. Bad things happened when people yelled. Maggie had learned that the last time the guns had been chit-chatting so loud.

[Brackie]

Well that explained one thing she hadn't asked, yet opened up a whole different box of things from the thing she did ask.

"Wait, Maggie? I thought your name was Lena?"

Calista was confused, and she didn't like being confused, especially here when she didn't know how long she had left to live. It meant she didn't have all the answers even though literally ten seconds ago she thought she knew some basic stuff about this girl, one of them being that her name was Lena. Yeah, the fact that she didn't know Calista's name was an easy enough explanation, but...Calista had seen this other girl around, she'd heard her talked about, she'd talked about her once or twice with her friends who weren't even here, and the common consensus was that the brown girl's name was Lena, it was as accepted a fact as the sky being blue, or America being evil, or Kat being a cutter. But here she was suddenly revealing her name was Maggie this entire time, like she'd been lying to the school and to everyone she ever knew and it spread so far and wide that suddenly, Calista was feeling something other than general apprehension towards this girl she'd suddenly promised to bunker up with.

It was mistrust, it was fear, it was both in a swirl. Calista couldn't trust the girl any longer. One of them was going to have to leave now.

But she was still standing next to Lena, or Maggie, or whatever her name was, and the girl she had no trust for had a knife in her hands wheras Calista had nothing but her fists and the plastic remains of army food sitting on the table in front of them. It quickly became apparent to Calista that she was suddenly in a very unsafe position in the room. The other girl had all the power over her.

So the only thing she could really do now was mask her sudden bout of paranoia with generic confusion, pretend that whatever answer, whatever lie the other girl was about to tell, was good enough, and head back and get her fucking gun.

[Cicadan]

"Yh-.. yes. I was called by Maggie before I came to the UK with my family. My nicknames just, um... Shorten my full name."

As she explained the truncated version Lena watched the windows. They were small, dingy enough with little particulates of dusty motes of earth stitched together into opaque curtains. The light could still come through and cast all else in the room in a dim off-shade of the likely painfully bright sun outside. Bright and brilliant lens flare sunlight diluted 'til a somber tone of brownish orange that washed over their skin. Lena shyly turned her gaze back to Calista and tried to smile, in that way that was perhaps painfully tense at the edges but earnestly so.

There was a stiffness to Calista's shoulders, but Lena couldn't be sure what that meant sans the context of the artist's intent.

"I..." Honesty, still. "I'm a refugee. This isn't the first time, that is, that the Americans have done harm onto me."

She breathed, oh so carefully. Measured cupfuls of her filled lungs with bakers precision. It would at least give her something else to focus on besides the sudden tension- or maybe it was the always there tension.

[Brackie]

Calista could see right through Lena's lies. It was just so obvious, really - was she supposed to believe at any point that there was a name that shortened to both Maggie and Lena? Such bullshit, needless bullshit.

"Oh. I'm...sorry to hear that."

Keep her occupied, get to the bed. Pretend you care about what the liar has to say.

"Listen, how about we get all our stuff together if we're gonna stay a group? I'll get my stuff and you get yours."

No, they were not staying a group, because Lena, or Maggie, or whatever her name was, wasn't staying here any longer.

As the other girl became occupied, Calista walked over to her bag and began piling everything inside, except for the two pertinent items. When everything was inside, she quickly slid the spear inside the gun, picked it up.

Calista had a gun in her hands, and she didn't know what she was going to do with it. But she knew what she needed to pretend she was able to do with it.

"Hey Lena?"

She spun around, gun held in her hands, finger on what looked like the trigger, and aimed at the other girl.

"Get out."

[Cicadan]

Lena wasn't sure, where she'd gone wrong. Had she been to slow to answer? Too untrustworthy? She'd never been good at answering questions without easy answers.

She forced herself to stay calm, or it might have been that the sudden pindrop-quiet, deadness of static seemingly stuffed in that void of space between her ears and behind her eyes was false clarity. False bravado. There was a gun aimed her way, but it might as well have been fake as everything else seemed to be.

Reality blurred, rather. Maggie was staring down the barrel of an American's still-burning gun. Lena was staring likewise.

"Y-you won't accomplish anything-.. Calista!"

A name for the unfamiliar face.

"Please-" A step closer, hands held up and away from her vitals. Forward, reaching out. Lena was possibly too terrified to even realize what she was doing.

She'd never been more scared, when she'd been forced to run, to leave the others behind.

"I'm n-..not your enemy."

[Brackie]

"No, don't fucking try this."

The other girl probably couldn't tell but one of Calista's hands was shaking. Fuck, she was aiming what was essentially a gun at one of her classmates. This was stupid, this shouldn't have been happening at all, but the fact of the matter was that she couldn't trust this other girl as far as she could throw her, and despite her childhood and recent brawling, Calista couldn't throw another girl very far.

"You're not staying in this room another moment because I can't tell when you're telling the truth and when you're lying, and for all I know you've been lying to everyone since the start of school."

Calista didn't want to shoot the other girl, just scare her off. But she didn't know what would happen if she was pushed. Calista didn't want to even entertain the thought of having to kill her, but she just needed to leave this fucking building and never come back for as long as she lived, never darken the church's doorway with her shiftiness. She was always afraid of foreigners, but she never stooped to the level of those shitheads her mother occasionally brought home before the man who could soon become her new father, who hung out at the pub with other shitheads and talked brave about bashing ragheads and darkies like they were boogeymen hurting the children. The other girl was nearly as foreign as you could get, but in spite of all that Calista put her best foot forward in this awful situation and it got thrown back in her face.

If she hadn't noticed the slip-up, who knew what she could have been capable of.

"If you move forward any more I'll shoot you, so step back. Now, or I'll shoot."

The shaking in Calista's steady hand became visible.

[Cicadan]

Calista's hand trembled in real time. Faster than adrenaline's drag. Faster, still, than fear enlightened her in terms so simple as the tension that forced each step forward to be the heaviest.

If Daddy had abandoned her, or had abandoned her friends, Maggie might have never known the grace of God. Nobody left behind. Nobody left to die in that forsaken happy place she called home. Non ci piove.

"I have n-nuh-not-... not lived through what I have lived. Through," she gasped, still even in how her lips hung open in a weak pant and the words dripped out.

"For you to get yourself killed." She forced herself to insist. It was Lena's own fault. She'd asked for the name. She'd dared to, for even a moment, care. Now all the beauty of her life, the grace that had delivered it from evil, would be so casually crumpled like paper between her fingers.

Lena would not allow this, she determined. She just didn't know where the resolve would come from, but she'd already proven it once before.

Maggie had promised herself that she'd live. That they all would.

"You're trembling," she begged. "You don't want-.. nhgh, you... to do-..." And she stepped forward, still holding her hands splayed, opening her vitals to the other in the form of delicate skin.

"You don't want to-"

[Brackie]

"DON'T FUCKING TELL ME WHAT I DON'T WANT TO DO!"

Calista was redlining in real time. Who the fuck did this girl think she was to talk about her life like she knew her, like she had any idea what she'd gone through and had to go through every day to keep her entire life from crumpling around her like a red paper cup, and like she knew what would be gone from her family if she didn't get home?

She was nobody, she was nothing. She didn't deserve the flakes of her spit, let alone the luxury of being around Calista for a moment longer, and she needed to leave right now. Calista needed to make the girl leave so she could be alone, so she could hide it out and figure out what she was going to do and how she was going to make sure she got home to her family.

"DON'T YOU FUCKING-"

In the shakes of her anger, her fingers compressed on the trigger.

[Cicadan]

Abby was shivering like she was cold, but it was very hot outside because Mr. Sun was not happy that day and it reminded Maggie of the slow days on Daddy's farm, but Daddy's farm was now far behind them, she could no longer see it back when Mommy had said they needed to leave the van and have an adventure on foot. Maggie did not like this adventure much because it was very hot outside and it was very tiring, and Maggie was scared that without the van to hide inside they would not be protected from the men who carried the loud guns and who would be angry and run after them if they saw them.

"Please, Abigail-" and Abby had also started to cry but Maggie was scared because it was loud and people would find them, but she didn't know how to tell Abby to stop but it was okay, Mommy knew how.

"Please please," she whispered, "you must be quiet

But the gun had exploded and it was too loud, and the something behind Lena shattered violently. Much too much was happening and she wanted to scream because it was too much and she thought she'd vomit from the terror, from the too many things filling her up like a vase as the American's boots continued to circle outside like crunch crunch crunch as the bedsprings violently rocked. Lena wasn't sure when she'd gotten here but she was sprawled out over the bed and Calista too, only Calista had tumbled onto the bed backwards. They faced each other. Lena's ears screamed static silence, like an old television had been left to screech an empty channel into her brain.

"Stop. Stop- stop, stop!"

Lena threw her knees onto Calista's stomach and pinned. She didn't know why but she knew she had to stop Calista. Before it was too late, before the Americans found them. They wrestled- Lena's hands clawed at bare skin, at each of Calista's wrists. Lena continued to throw her weight forward.

Lena had never held another this close before. Now Calista's blood ran grimy and slick through Lena's fingernails.

[Brackie]

Calista's anger blended with unearned confidence, but evaporated the moment the trigger compressed and the spear shot across the room and shattered the window, before she realized what she'd done and her stomach threw itself from a five-story building and the girl charged at her and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Her head rushed as her body was thrown to the bed, the other girl screaming words she could no longer recognize, and Calista knew she was in a fight once again. Not for clout, or for social standing, but for her life. She was being attacked for wanting to keep herself safe, for thinking of herself over others, which is how it always was, so now she had to fight for herself.

"GET OFF ME!"

She felt sharp fingernails digging hard into her wrists, she felt what felt like sweat pour down her arms from the hands, but could have been anything else.

Before she knew it, Calista's right wrist had become free and she'd thrown a nailed hand at the other girl's face.

[Cicadan]

Lena's cheek split and bled. The only thing that was happening on this Earth was the nothingness of a hollow mind.

Something loud shattered the window and the only sound Maggie could hear was the falling of glass, like the little tinkle of bits of ice or like the sweet crunch of candy beneath her teeth. Maggie had felt something brush the lobe of her ear and suddenly it hurt and was all wet and Abby was screaming and Mom was screaming but it was too quiet because Maggie could only hear glass

Lena's bottom most knuckle hit something warm, something hard

And they were running but Abby was too heavy for Daddy and two other girls tripped and tripped again at his feet, the tree branches were too tall Sofi complained, and they were too tall and they scratched at Maggie's feet as she kept running, kept on trying to run but she could hear the sound of the boots crunching up mulch behind her and if they got too close the guns would sound and she would die

Again, she hit again, not knowing what she was hitting but she slammed her fist into it until she heard something crack. Once, twice, three times with the crude plop of flesh upon flesh. Lena had stopped speaking and only breathed. She remained alive, so did the other, but Lena only acknowledged that the silence in her head was deafening, her eyes blank as

Stay alive

My children

You must

Something else hard under her fist, something else to break. She would not die she would not die she would not

[Brackie]

The air between them, above the cone formed by the knees in Calista's chest, was filled with a flurry of hands attempting to attack. Calista's hand had gashed the cheek of her attacker but the attacker kept on attacking, punching and punching and attempting to hurt the girl beneath.

She could feel every movement with every punch and hit, and at one point she thought she felt a finger slip in further than it was supposed to, and when Calista could bear to look she saw that one of her fingers was dangling off the hand like it wasn't supposed to. The girl was insane, just like they all were, even with such a hideous injury she was single-minded in her goal.

It was all suddenly much more than Calista could handle right now - she was no longer in fear for her safety, she was in fear for her life. If she didn't get this girl away, if she didn't stop her from attacking, she could die.

This girl was trying to kill Calista.

And that was when it erupted from Calista's throat. Her own hands began fighting back, flailing at exposed flesh and punching at existing bruises she had only caused seconds ago and the chorus that joined them was a long, piercing, everlasting scream that threatened to shatter the last remaining window.

[Cicadan]

Lena remained silent. Deathly so, not a peep.

Maggie felt sick. She was sick, because that was her friend. Abby had never stopped crying and never stopped screaming when Mommy had tried to give her food, and the food was running out because all the cans in all the houses were empty except for the rotting things that smelled bad. So Mommy had tied up Abby by putting a shirt twisted into a rope around her wrist, and Mommy had done what she'd had to do because what Mommy had told Lena she had to do was to gag Abby. And Abby looked so sad and it was scary because little drips of runny bile peeled down the corner of her lips and over her chin and her shirt was stained and her eyes were stained with tears.

But Mommy said it.

"Stay alive."

The noise erupting from Calista's throat only registered as an abstract threat. The rest, bruises and scrapes and dislocations and all, were merely there. Lena looked, but felt no urge except for the most crucial of all. Survival.

She needed to stop. They would all die if not. Lena was Maggie was the words of her parents bringing them all to safety through a land of death. Lena would take action, as she was taught. She didn't know how the sharp taunt of the knife had ended up on the bed or how it had tricked it's way into her hands and she didn't know how it dug into Calista's windpipe until the handle and Lena's fist kissed broken and flayed skin.

The paper pumpkin fluttered as spurts of blood painted it.

Lena hadn't expected the tension against the knife to be so taut, she hadn't expected much of anything at all. She expected Calista to grow silent, in time, to grow cold.

[Brackie]

Calista's heart beat in her ears. Nothing was working. The girl was still holding her down, fighting her, hitting her, and not letting her go. Her eyes danced around the room, waiting for someone to appear, called by her screaming, her siren for help. She began attempting to thrash, to try and throw the girl off of her. She didn't want this room anymore, she wanted to be anywhere but this room, anywhere but near this terrible violent foreign liar.

The scream turned into loud sentences.

"GET OFF ME GET-"

Her voice disappeared, as a large block appeared in her windpipe and halted both noise and air. The sudden cease arched Calista's back as her body tried to breath in but was incapable, and suddenly sweat poured down the front of her chest from the pain in her neck. She looked down and saw nothing but the hilt of the knife from the murderer's hands, the blade invisible to her eyes but located exactly where her throat would be.

The murderer's hands were attached to the handle, so Calista tried pulling them out, but it would not budge. The grip was iron, holding the knife in place as Calista struggled to breathe or talk. She pulled, but nothing moved. Dots danced in front of her eyes, as Calista was suddenly unable to remain focused on anything within the sight of them. Her grip weakened, and all she could see was the ceiling as her head rolled back on the top of its spine, trying whatever it could do to keep the air flowing.

Her hands strayed from the murderer's and soon began searching for the blade itself, finding nothing above ground. She tried pulling, but it soon occurred to Calista just how weak they were, how they could barely form curves by the fingers. Near exhaustion, they fell to the bed, as Calista's body began its involuntary thrash and convulse. At some point, the body continued to spasm even though Calista had seconds ago lost consciousness, her thoughts disappearing altogether as her eyes remained unfocused and open.

Moments before the oxygen evaporated from Calista's body completely, two thoughts burst through as the last things she would ever image.

My family.

The last twitches relieved themselves.

Please let-

And suddenly, everything Calista knew disappeared.

F11 - Calista Carpenter: DECEASED

[Cicadan]

Lena could only hear silence as everything else abated. The chasm of echo against her skull cleared. A few moments passed slow, passed painful as the insistent creep of shock radiating up her arm, outwards from the death grip around her knife. She checked, double checked. Nothing broke the silence. Not the march of boots.

Maggie had learned something in those stifling silent summer days. All children eventually learned that some things when broken couldn’t be put back together. She learned it a bit earlier.

Finally, the sound of Calista's pitiful death rattle. Just loud enough.

The quarters were largely unmolested. The sun had crested a bit higher into the sky, piercing the veil of murky beer bottle windows a bit harsher, to wash all within in the coal embers of a bar lit at final call. The bookshelves remained unmolested and undisturbed, dusted with the staleness of history. The upholstery remained unmolested, rugs and linens thick to bloating with disuse. The room was elegantly spartan: save the bed with it’s forcibly unmade sheets, wrinkles collapsing onto wrinkles that piled onto the still bodies now lying atop.

Lena, finally, saw the murky red that was quick drying to crust under her fingernails. Finally comprehended, and finally let the knife cool while it remained stuck in the corpse- Calista, her name was and always wood be Calista- it remained stuck in the corpse like a poker driven through meat fresh from the oven.

Lena’s hands hit her mouth at once, and she could have screamed, or could have puked, but some ancient part of her with some ancient name didn’t dare make a sound.

Free of the oppression of mindless fear she now understood her transgressions so fundamentally that her life itself seemed almost significantly fractional. No, that couldn’t be. Her life was still worth something. The blood and tears and sweat her parents had spilled had led her to this moment, heinous as this moment was, irrevocably broken a warmth-stained and leaking thing as Lena had crafted with her own two hands. Her hands, she didn’t know what they’d done, they’d betrayed her, betrayed this girl lying below her that had once been nameless.

Breathe- no-

Breathe, she had to breathe. She had to get up and soundlessly tear at her skirt with mindless abandon, the runny streaks of blood painted across the seams and jagged over the pleats yanked at. Violence as mindless as the violence that had taken Calista’s life, now scrubbed the evidence from Lena’s uniform and turned it to tatters. Exposing the skin of her legs was a small price to pay.

Hell to pay. Someday. Eventually. This she knew.

God’s grace had perhaps abandoned her. There, in the pit of her stomach. She could sink that low, low as the feeling of gravity trying to claim her and drag her stained hands where she belonged. Her soundless panic continued, she desperately scrubbed her wine-washed hands over and additionally until she almost peeled skin from the palms, and she violently danced, wild with the emotive sacrilege that had no place else to go. This scene.

Her fault. It was all her fault.

She would walk with the weight of this sin. Be slowed by it, in a land where one inch given was one life lost.

But still, she breathed. Even as she shed ugly tears that she refused to cry. Nobody watching, nobody witness. She could have broken down, broken like Calista was broken, and she well should have. She did not, and she remained. A thing of this Earth to judge. Crawling on all fours as she struggled even still to feel the full weight of what she’d wrought. She could have called it a farce if she didn’t know that she only knew how to experience emotions when this alone. When struck down to this state, reduced. On her knees. Not praying, not panicking. No intent, no point. Lena stared at the bed with eyes desperately searching. A corpse. Red motes staining what could have been peaceful slumber. Nothing more.

She breathed. Breathed to calm. That almost made it worse, when she could continue to coldly and rationally understand, this thing that she had no hope of understanding.

Calista looked beautiful, almost. The queerest of observations. Time passed, silent. Lena continued to grieve, not knowing what she was grieving when it could have been Calista’s life forfeit. Or, perhaps, her own. But-

No. No, no, no. Not that. She would not die.

Because, she knew one thing, at least. She’d been taught that much, and remembered it vividly to this day. She could abandon this place. Abandon the memory of what she’d done. The feelings could be run from if she ran fast enough. That she knew how to do. She’d gotten very good at it, once upon a time.

Never stop moving, when trouble bears down.

It will catch up only if allowed.

((Lena Bianchi continued in Mr. Wharf? Fire))