Participants:
| Scene Title | Digging for Turnips |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Sibyl sets out to return something that was stolen. |
| Date | June 6, 2018 |
An Attic
The ladder creaks from disuse as Sibyl picks her way up. She leaves behind windowless darkness and climbs up through the hatch, and into murky afternoon light filtered through a grimy circular window.
Empty, as expected. Of people, anyway. There's indications left behind of a bed now removed. Instead, a broad hammock has been fashioned and set to hang off exposed beams, overflowing with a mismatched sundry of blankets to stave off the cold. An old wardrobe set into the corner likely predated the current occupant, if not the war, and next to it, a stack of briefcases gathering dust and the greenish tinge of mold in its seams.
A writing desk has been repurposed into something else, with a tin basin, a still damp cloth lying swampy at the bottom of it.
The whole place smells familiar, like when she woke up from her spell in Etienne's hammock on the Salve Regina for the first time. Cigarettes and sweat and leather, an undercurrent like cleaning alcohol, the earthy tones of an intimate living space.
She knows what she’s looking for.
She knows that it’s here.
A drizzle mists across Staten Island, filling its dips and valleys with low-lying pudles of fog. Trees have begun to take on shades of muted green where slivers of new growth appear as budding leaves on the ends of branches and in shoots that will eventually open into new, soft limbs. Spring brings wildflowers and the return of small, colorful songbirds, to the dark, tangled woods that the uninhabited corners of the island are known for. Still, it’s a lonely life for those who have chosen to eke out an existence in these solitary places.
Stay away from the old Lighthouse or the dogs will get you, has deterred most youths from seeking out the building that was once a haven for them, but there are exceptions to every rule, and Sibyl knows better; there are no feral dogs out here, only a person whose posture and wounded gleam in his eyes reminds her of one.
Dew clings to her boots and dampens the socks she wears rolled up around her ankles. The marginally warmer weather has allowed her to transition lighter clothes back into her wardrobe, which she’s pieced together from the various individuals she orbits. A wool coat with a rabbit’s fur collar once hung on a rack inside the Vault, while the black dress she wears beneath it is a gift from Alister Black and fashioned from a stiff and pragmatic fabric that feels like it might be a variety of cotton.
She follows the winding path that leads up to what remains of the Lighthouse, a parcel wrapped in brown paper tucked under one arm. It’s morning, so her hair is still damp from the bath she started her day with back at the Trade Commission, and twisted into a long braid that curls around her head like a dark, ashy-colored snake.
Do you still have to knock if the other person on the other side of the door can already see you coming?
There’s a shamble of salvaged tin siding and wood arranged in the rough shape of a shanty against the ruin of the Lighthouse’s western face, still save for a tatter of plastic flagging off one corner in the wind. Its flanks are streaked with rust, corrugated armor layered against the cold and the drizzle and the morning light.
There aren’t any windows.
Inside, a work bench mounted with a reloading press is stationed opposite a bare bones cot piled with blankets — currently host to the lump of a ginger cat, warm and dry and content with his paws tucked in and his one eye slitted shut.
There’s an old tool chest pushed in under the bench, a stool, scrapwood, a hatchet on a hook. Clothing and clean water and supplies packed under the bed. A woodburning stove at the back holds glowing embers — not enough fire to pipe smoke up through the makeshift chimney. The floor is hard-packed earth, swept clean behind the figure who cracks the door open.
Flint is tall and lean and long in the face — a dusty grey ghost with eyes that ring too bright when he turns back in from the light.
Clonk. He sets the pot he has in hand down onto the bench, still steaming, the air inside thick with the stink of cheap coffee. There’s an oil lamp for him to drag from a shelf to plant next to the pot — smoke-stained, shade chipped.
Good enough.
The gloom inside flickers into shades of orange.
He’s still in his pajamas at the bench stirring grit off the top of his pot, a water-stained shearling coat pulled on over plaid pants and an undershirt that was white, once. He has his boots on too, insulated against the chill leaching in from the floor.
There are guns everywhere.
“Hello, Mike,” says Sibyl. “I brought breakfast.”
She doesn’t cross the threshold or make any move to step inside without an invitation. What she does do is unwrap the parcel and present Deckard with its contents: two slices of dense black bread, half a lemon, and smoked trout with head from the Rookery’s market, still warm, its skin blistered and blackened from being cooked on one side for too long.
Her eyes tick past him, to the guns. Maybe she counts them. Maybe she looks to see if there are any she recognizes among his collection. Maybe she’s just being cautious even though she apparently trusts him enough to want to share a meal with him.
“Then you can come in,” says Flint, a pair of squat mugs squared next to the pot for him to pour into.
Scruffy head stooped down away from the door, he fills both mugs in turn, spoon tipped to keep the worst of the grinds from clumping in with the coffee. He’s more careful with the second than the first, the steady current of light behind his eyes dimmed for him to chase a bit of grit off the edge.
That’s the mug he sets aside for her.
His eyes are still dark when he glances over his shoulder to see what she’s brought. They stay dark for him to turn slowly around the rest of the way, long in the slack of his jaw.
His right brow is split up the side, hemmed together with scraps of white butterfly bandaging; bruises blotched purple and black up around the bones of his face have had time to pool under his eye. He’s squinty on that side, blue too clear against the crimson stain of his sclera. And he’s looking at her hard.
“Holy shit.”
Bread, lemon and fish?
“Bibbidi bobbidi boo, huh?”
He picks up the less horrible mug without glancing away, and offers it out to her.
Sibyl dips into a customary curtsey that feels as prim and out of place as the clothes she’s wearing, so there’s some irony in it whether she intends there to be or not. She places the parcel’s contents on the nearest flat surface and uses the heels of her hands to smooth the wrinkles from the paper.
“I still feel like a pumpkin,” she admits with the tiniest of glances snuck back over her shoulder. Her eyes catch on discoloration around his socket and the burst blood vessels, injuries she’s seen paraded around Staten Island often enough for her to know they aren’t permanent, but still cause a sinking sensation in the place where she imagines her stomach is.
She delicately hefts the coffee cup, turning to lean her weight against the workbench. There is a question on the tip of her tongue that she washes down with a bitter swig. Instead, she says: “The leaves are starting to come in on your beeches. It looks nice.”
A grumble of disapproval clags in Deckard’s throat — haggard and gravel-shot. Impossible to say if it’s for the outfit or for the sentiment. There are a pair of bone pale dishes stacked on a shelf over the bench — chipped and discolored, but clean. He didn’t have them the first time she drifted in, but they’ve been here ever since, always in the same place.
“People don’t rob pumpkins.”
He reaches to bring the plates down to the bench, a handful of silverware deposited down on top in a bird’s nest of prongs and tarnish. Clink and clank, there for her to help herself first.
His beeches look nice.
“Thanks.”
He steps away to give her space, following routine to sink himself down onto the side of his cot while he waits. The tatty wad of his cat sinks with him, and hardly stirs otherwise, tail tucked in snug against his side.
“You gonna tell me where this is all coming from?”
“Alister Black.” Sibyl’s answer is quick and without any teenage defensiveness, almost so matter-of-fact that it’s prim. She smoothes one hand down the front of her coat. “He wants me to be his protege.”
The second half of her explanation sounds dubious, like she’s questioning Alister’s judgement. Her coffee cup bumps against her front teeth on the next sip. When she swallows, it’s with a similar sort of hesitation that wears on her self-esteem. “I don’t think it’s a very good idea,” she adds. Then, for clarification’s sake, “For him, not me.”
She sets the coffee cup down, freeing up her hands to divide the bread and fish between two plates. Deckard gets the larger pieces. “What happened to your face?”
Another indistinct grumble is Deckard’s answer for that, coffee swallowed down with an involuntary rankle for the assault it mounts on his senses. But it’s hot. And for a moment it seems to clear the ringing in his ears, mug passed from right hand to left so that he can reach down and scruff behind his cat’s ears. He’s quiet, while the cat turns his cheek up to have that scratched instead.
“Lost a fight.”
That’s what happened to his face.
“Caught a pirate digging in my turnips.”
The cat yawns and tucks his face down away into his paws; Flint pushes him over and smooshes a half-hearted clawing away from his pant leg with a handful of flipped bedding.
“Anyone ever had the talk with you about things it’s not ok for Alister Blacks to do with their proteges?”
There’s something about Deckard’s answer that has Sibyl hesitating. She feels pressure in the pit of her chest, the urge to dig a little deeper — like a pirate shoveling turnips — but the same something also allows this urge to naturally pass.
So she tries a joke instead: “Is it the mustache?”
She pinches the lemon wedge between her fingers. It’s a little past its shelf date, too dry to produce more than a few drops on the first try. Whatever squeezes out on the second she leaves for Deckard.
“I don’t think he’s like that,” she adds, peeling off a brittle strip of trout skin, which she offers in the feline’s general direction. “I see his sister more than I see him, and when we do talk it’s only about the business. His Trade Commission, shipping, future sales. He’s lonely like one seagull all by itself is lonely. He needs other birds, that’s all.”
The cat alerts to the offer once he’s twisted free of the sheets, and s t re e eches his way down and over to sniff at Sibyl’s fingers. Like his owner, he’s slow to take trout in his needle teeth. Seconds later, he’s still dropping that scrap of trout skin out onto the floor, licking it up again, and crunching away at the back of his jaw. Really making it last.
Flint creaks off the cot to take his plate where she’s portioned it out, crushing the last bit of lifeblood out of the lemon with the bite of his thumb. He towers over her, lingering distrust for her seagull companion angled down in aside, his eyes ghastly pale in the lamplight. Inhuman.
“The mustache doesn’t help.”
But there’s no skip to the beat of her heart, no furtive fidgeting in her bones. Not on the subject of Alister Black.
He slides his plate off the bench and returns to the cot to sit, mug set aside on a box, fork scraped up from porcelain to twist off a chunk of fish. Seagulls are noisy. They eat garbage and shit everywhere — all sentiments he chews rather than lend voice to. Too tied up in the taste of real food to complain about the shitbird who paid for it.
“Then it’s nice of you to look out for him,” is what he says instead, eyes on his plate. “Didn’t know he had a sister.”
Sibyl seeks out Deckard’s eyes in an attempt to find his gaze and hold it. She finds her attention drawn back to the discoloration of his skin instead, the blood gathering bright, hot pink where the vessels have burst and pooled. There is an instinct to reach out to touch, to cradle the worse side of his face in her palm and smooth fingers over the split in his skin.
It comes from a deep, forgotten place inside of her. So do the words: “I know it wasn’t turnips.”
She curbs the desire to make physical contact with Deckard easily, as though it belonged to someone else. The promise she makes him next will be harder for her to let go of, if she ever lets go of it at all. “I’ll take it back.”
She finds the ring in the drawer of the desk. It is what Sibyl imagined it would be: gold and plain. The smooth, burnished metal winks in the sunlight as she holds it up to the dilute beams streaking in through the attic’s window and checks its interior for an inscription, or any kind of identifying blemish.
There isn’t one. The grave Etienne stole it from had been unmarked, too.
Staten Island’s littlest jewelry thief threads an equally modest gold chain through the ring, loops it around her neck, and fastens the clasp with the tips of her deft, freshly scrubbed fingers.
She tucks it under the collar of her shirt and lets the bare skin of her throat and upper chest warm both ring and chain. Beneath her clothes is the safest place for the piece — just as she knows that the mainland will be the safest place for her, before the day is through.
Only one thing left for her to do.
She fishes out the phone from her coat pocket and slowly, deliberately hammers out a message:
meet me at outside sea view hospital
im leaving the island tonight.i have $10,000 if your brother can promise my safety.