Unter Aller Sau
A story detailing an ice deliverer and her horse in the age of consumption, or something of the sort. Filled with play of word and violence, it's perhaps quite good. Either way, please god read it.
Image by Martin Parr
The box was filled with ice which we delivered- the we being me and my horse Tobias, a mare with a mane of grey so very grey that the sight of it could, and would at my command, turn the speckled tartan of an anxious sky into the blue of a happy-go-lucky one- and the box was attached to the back end of Tobias by an uncomplicated series of ropes and knots, tiny loose bits of ice inside making the rattling noise of a cupful of bones being shook, shook senora as we trotted or cantered or galloped along our daily route.
The sky was already, with no display of grey necessary, the blue of an anything-goes day when we came around the bend of a once cobbled but then tarmacked street with clip clopping sounds that would have driven a clip-clopaholic either out of or into sobriety, my right hand gently rubbing the side of Tobias’s snorting head which could hear the engines of more than a few cars a few streets over and so was roiling and rising up and down in a fearful horsy wave, his fear of cars, there but manageable since the day I’d gotten him, having gotten progressively worse since one had revved behind him on purpose and then sped past to try and make him rear. My hand was calmness personified, my hand was the lord and master, alleviating fear with a commanding presence that would have made a chicken shed its feathers in double quick time if that’s what thine presence has commanded, but my hand failed Tobais that day when a louder than normal car horn sounded, combining with the rumble in the jungle noise of engines to create a sound far louder than what we usually heard. One that caused Tobias to what he'd never done before no matter his fear, to do a never done before rear that wasn’t sheer enough to slide me off but that was sheer enough to make the box of ice so carefully tied to his buttock slide like itself was a skate on a rink of what it contained, falling to the floor with the usual sounds an ice box of insulated plastic makes when colliding with the outside world of far harder things, kerplunkskittysplash being a good if not accurate description, the kerplunk part being the sound of the box striking the floor and spilling open, skitty being the ice previously held inside being sent dancing like deformed swans across the ground, and splash being the bit of water from any ice small enough to immediately melt sloshing across the ground amongst frozen compatriots.
Instantly, and without even thinking about it because how could one think when rage has lassoed your brain to roller skates and then sent that brain and those skates rolling down a very steep hill with only more and more hill in sight, I got off Tobias and began punching where his whinny came from with a hand as hard as leather from years of having the rough leather of reins wrapped around it, his great body falling to the floor as if shocked. I punched in rage for ten minutes more, not feeling my hand or any of my usual love for Tobias until he stopped whinnying and his tongue lay extended on the street next to what had been his whinny maker, feeling my hand and my love abruptly after because Jesus, God in a bucket like a crab, what had I done and what was going to happen and how could I forgive myself and how the hell was I going to finish what I could finish of my route without a horse to deliver on? Cradling one of his ears gently, I let myself fall, lying next to his body, staring up at the sky which, as if sensing what I’d done, had turned into a non-colour, perfectly normal, no-optimism-or-pessimism type of sky, never again to be turned blue at my command because I’d stained the only grey in the world that could make it that way a horrid bloody red. I stared up and started weeping like my presence in the present was an atrocity and only by weeping could I bring the past presence of me- the presence pre my beating of my horse- to the present and remove what was me. I wept like that for several minutes, just long enough for me to start having anxiety about the fact that I was already severely behind on schedule and that I’d be in trouble with a lot of clients if I didn’t pull myself together and do something with the remaining ice in the box, which I looked and saw was just two large cubes, one misshapen and the other perfect.
Getting up in a hurry, I instantly slipped on a mixture of blood and water- an odd concoction similar in texture to the mixture of baking soda and glue and green colouring that make easy slime, gelatinous and thick and sticky, sticking to my shoes as it slipped me- falling and breaking the hand that’d broke the horses back and face in a way I’d never fallen and broken before because it was a part of the ice delivers deal that doing what we did was good and us golden for it. It was common knowledge that golden people had a guardian angel watching over them to make sure that no matter what happened in their lives or on their routes, they would be protected, but protected I felt not as I cradled hand to face, the warmth of Tobias’s blood like the flickering flame of a candle, burning my cheek from being too close as my eyes flickered up and around in the invisible spaces and slots I would have normally expected my angel to be clicking into, feeling nothing as I flickered, no clicking or slotting, no sense of protection, and more no horse to carry me onward, I was abandoned but only mostly forlorn, I had to persevere!
“I’m an ice deliverer,” I said out loud and whimpered. “I must deliver ice. I’m sorry Tobias.”
Getting to my feet steadfast, I approached the fallen ice box lying at the back of what had been, and still was, Tobais’s behind and nudged it with my foot with care and an almost sexual tenderness, it twitching as one whose life was at that moment transmogrifying into death would as one of the two cubes still intact, the imperfect one, like a giant mishappen blood cell, oozed from the gap that the closed lid usually made not a gap.
Sigh was the emotion put to words my brain formed, and, ‘sigh’, was what issued itself from my lungs as I put the cube back in place with an expert kick of the foot, picking the entire box up off the floor with the two bespoke leather straps that had two little backpack bros incorporated stamps stamped into the fabric of them and that had been attached to the side for the unspoken possibility of any such unlikely emergency. Picking the box up like that would have been easy in another life, in another world, on another day on any other delivery job when I hadn’t done did a horrid thing and punched my beloved horse to death and lost the promise of a guardian angel who would never ever leave if I just didn’t do something unthinkable and gold removing like what I had done, on another day when I hadn’t slipped on a mixture of horse blood and water and broken my hand. On that another day I would have enjoyed the heavy but satisfying lifting of the ice box and continued on my route, delivering where I could, apologising where I couldn’t, receiving whatever punishment awaited me from those that the couldn’t applied to, but in the day I was living then and there, in the events of that day that had transpired and couldn’t be made not spired, I was punished early as I lifted by not angry customers but just life. The strap I grasped first with my only available hand bursting in two and the ice box, which I’d been swinging up to my shoulder, swung right back down and round, bashing into my left leg so hard that I buckled slightly and had to use all my ice delivery skills to stay up and also swing my undamaged hand in a circle to stop the insulated lid from popping right back open and ridding me of the options I had remaining for the lucky two clients, banging my head off a nearby wall as I did in a clear indication my skills had been impaired, seeing after three or four stars spinning like a major motion picture logo around my noggin.
I didn’t let my dizziness get a hold of me and pin me in a bear hug, I wrestled it out of its hibernation cave, out of the woods, and into deep lake territory where I drowned it without pause, using my broken limb as quickly as possible and only screaming slightly, I swung my bag around again and wrapped the single strap across my chest so I held the gigantic ice box across my back like a satchel, standing straight and blinking to rid my sight of the tears beading and falling from my physical and emotional pain. The part of the route immediately ahead was shaped a little like a needle, with the part where I was being incredibly thin- the walls slightly touchable by the tips of my fingers and also the tips of my toes- and the part that lay ahead- that Tobias had had to practically tiptoe through to fit through at any possible time- being thinner even still, a sliver. I ventured ahead, the walls closing in around me, the bricks seeming alive, throbbing in a heat that I’d never noticed when on the back of Tobias, moving in their crumbling mortar like mating mallards gone mad. I could feel the air and the walls brushing my skin and saying hello, hello, hello, as they oppressed me, almost cutting me off, seeming to get thinner than ever before and thinner than ever before they got indeed, as proved when I popped out the end of the squeeze with an audible one of those, a crunching sound like crisps being rustled for the spirit of the night’s favour following as the alley completely closed up and the bones and mass of what had been my horse, was dissolved.
I span as an ice deliverer never should whilst on route- an offence to the company motto, ‘We move forward so your ice doesn’t have to’- and put a hand against the odd shaped bricks blocking where the alley had once been before the walls had merged, the bloody pain of my broken hand that was at my side and barely moving at all because of the bloody pain it was in, had a tingle to it, a tingle of loss, the tingle a puzzle gets when the final and most important piece of it goes missing. Then I carried on going, spinning and walking on, more people around once I wasn’t in the once-upon-an-alley walking with heads down, pointedly or not ignoring me and my ice box where usually I and my ice box would be noticed and saluted as Tobias trotted us past, the motion of them living their lives being very to and fro with there being two large slow moving queues of them going in opposite directions, the sheer tidalness of them not parting like I was Moses and they red like the sheer tidalness of them had every other time before, instead not parting at all and smashing me from both sides, making me spin in one way and then the other like a holiday goer unable to choose a sight to see. The crowd let out collective groans of annoyance at my flesh not yielding, “Gosh, darn prick”, “The cow says moooooooooooo-ve”, Who you think you are?”, “Get out of the ze way, damnnnnnn bro”, the calmness the sheer height of Tobias usually brought to them being non-existent when he was non-existent too.
Battered and bruised I was by the pushing, punching, and pulling on that busy street, the peeping electric thrum of a tram making its way down a line which was a line that I and the rest of the crowd were walking on, with the we-ain’t-moving attitude of a parade with far purer purposes than the one we all possessed which was just to get to where we were going, adding more desperation and hurry to the proceedings. The only thing that got me the through the chorale with most of me intact- though I lost a thumb from my hand that was broken, it being lightly brushed by an elbow with I-don’t-want-to-get-hit-by-a-tram-so-I’m-in-a-hurry intentions and so being knocked from the rest of me with no apparent reasoning, falling without the grace of an autumn leaf into one of the indents of the tram line- was the ice box, which had a mass so wide and cumbersome that it did with ease what five people all set to help me clear a path would have struggled with, blasting opposing people off their feet with the slightest turn from me and finally blasting a hole in the whole wide mass big enough for me to fall out of.
As soon as I managed to emerge, falling without grace, I emerged no longer on the busy street but on the side of a wide canal which was the site of my first delivery, the first client on the route being a young woman that slept on a bench a few metres down from a dark and narrow barge tunnel and who sweltered and sweated like no one I’d ever seen to make apparent how strong her need for ice was, her being one of the ones whose designated ice had spilled like the blood of a freezer and so being the first I had to deliver disappointment to, the first time I’d ever delivered such a thing.
Blood dripped from my broken hand with its missing thumb in perfectly placed droplets as if leaving a trail for the appendage to follow home if it so desired as I stepped down the canal towards the young woman who, legs crossed beneath her, had the bottoms of her long hair held in both hands, sweat pooling and spilling from those hands which couldn’t, but still strived to, catch and keep the droplets that ran from her scalp and down the strands of hair like rain on a train window being dragged to the side, her eyes closed and peaceful until they sensed my approach, at which they sprung open like the mouths of babes in a milk drought.
“Ice, yes, yes, give give, you giver, deliver me rapture St Deliverer, now!... by the way, don’t you usually have a horse?”
“It… it passed away, the horse, my horse, not long ago, which brings me to your delivery,” here I gulped,” Unfortunately, I cannot deliver you anything as,” here I choked a sob and flinched, “My ice box took a tumble when my horse died and your portion of ice melted on the floor, it pooled away and there was nothing I could do to save it, I’m sorry, I can only say that I am sorry.”
The eyes trembled and stared at me like I was an insect and they beings with just one wish but one wish they would happily waste on gaining feet to step not just once on me but over and over on me until I wasn’t even a smear, until I was nothing at all. The eye lashes above them caught the extra sweat that began to fall from her scalp, cradling the drops like hammocks before letting them fall gently down to catch fragments of light in rainbow flickers that promised so much more beauty than in what was coming, which was a whipping, the whip part of the whipping emerging from beneath the crossed legs of the young woman in a way that would have been oh so easy to stop if my guardian angel hadn’t abandoned me, the tip of it, the whip that is, striking my cheeks, one after the other, leaving small bloody crosses. Standing up, the young woman pointed a finger at me, tutted in a way that made me long for Tobais’s long neck to hug, and jumped in the canal as she usually did with the bundle of ice I usually delivered her, for the always cool water to become even cooler, that time instead the water just reacting to the heat of her and beginning to bubble with little toil but a lot of trouble, becoming hotter and hotter and making her scream.
Hugging my body tightly, I carried on forward to and through the barge tunnel that could and would lead to a client I could actually still deliver to, the sound and sight of the young woman screaming vanishing as I vanished into its darkness that was usually so traversable because of Tobais’s natural aptitude for traversing in the dark but that was not so traversable with my own natural aptitude for being baaaaad at traversing any particularly dark place. Crashing, banging, and walloping, I hit the bricked walls of the tunnel over and over again as I tried to move on, the heavy weight of my insulated ice box throwing my centre to the side so I became disoriented and it was all I could do just to keep going forward and hope that what was forward to me was actually forward in direction and not back the way I’d come from, the screams of the young woman being torturous enough in memory.
Like a squeeze in the breeze, eventually, I made the sound of a fart as the darkness birthed me from itself on, luckily, the other, the right, side of the tunnel, disorientation from the sudden light assailing me, colours flashing in the peripheries of my eyes while my mind swivelled in the drivel of its encasing, but there was no time for rest or rumination as immediately I had deal with the next customer on the route, a man who I could actually deliver to and who always held an ice cream cone that’s ice cream was always melting without ever actually melting but that stopped melting for a brief second, or minute, or maybe hour, when he held some delivered ice next to it.
“Ice?” He asked as someone impersonating a dog wanting a walk would while holding out his cone, white cream dripping off the top of it in rivulets down his hand. “My cream is melting, you can help?”
“I can help, I have ice for you,” I said, my voice cracking from the relief that no more immediate punishment was to be dealt, swinging the opening of the ice box towards the man for one of the single cubes remaining, the misshapen one, to come out with both a falling and a slight shrinking as it approached the outstretched hand of the man who caught it and immediately pressed it against his cone, the cream that had melted forming back on the cone to prepare to start melting again.
“Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, you’re wonderful, just wonderful, always delivering, and where’s your horse? Here horsey. He always likes a lick of my cone,” Clicking his tongue, the man’s head swung pendulously from left to right as if the great height of Tobias could have been simply looked over. “Where is that horsey?”
I nodded my head as if the question hadn’t come and pressed a finger from my undamaged hand into the space of the broken hand where once there had been a thumb, pressing hard there so that agony ran down the still present fingers like the melted cream had, and would again, run down the man’s, walking off without answering him, the name Tobias ringing out with every silent and not clippity or cloppity footstep I took, the crosses on my cheeks stinging in a manner that made me think that if the sky had some kind of deity somewhere in it, than it knew what I’d done and hated me for it.
There was a moment, as there were always moments on the route that came as surprises no matter how many times or not they repeated themselves, on the further part of the canal path where the sky blurred into vermillion hues that weaved and intersected in sections like smoke rising from something charred to become much more than the sum of its parts of origin, the vermilion hues surrounding me in a moment of true rarity because it was a moment that truly had never happened to me on the route before as Tobias had usually carried me above it all, surrounding the floor and the canal too before entering my nose and mouth like the webbed intrusive fingers of an angry frog, poking moistly around inside me and blocking my vision from seeing much at all. The taste of vermillion was like that of a blood clot all heated up in the heat of the day, iron and salt in the form of smell as well combining like the sea in me, having a party in me that made me gag and choke, eyes watering to the point of seepage and dripping until they’d dripped enough and thwart vermilion smoke did what vermilion smoke tends to do and vanished for no other eye to see it in just that way again, revealing at its pullback that the canal and its pathway was no more and that I was where I usually was at that point on the route which was in a garden of a botanical nature.
The garden was the point of demise, the garden was the dread creeping through the alleys of my heart, the garden was a poet promising melancholy entering my body through that most undignified of entrances, oh Anus Mirabilis!; the garden held within the numerous sections of it that made it botanical the largest concentration of disappointee’s on the route, and without the angel on my once golden shoulder, I was genuinely terrified for my life and embarrassed at the lack of quality product I had for delivering.
Like a game promising increasing difficulty, I started in the garden with the clients whose disappointment I thought I could take with not ease but certainly not the difficulty of what would come post-them; the monk in the butterfly farm section who had a severe lack of eyelids, to aid him in gaining enlightenment and prevent sleep, and needed ice to rest against his dry eyes and ease agony, his punishment for me being in the form of a pack of throwing cards being expertly thrown at me, the quick flurry of them running after my running away form and sticking in my back in various places; the milk man in every way except employment sitting in the greenhouse of carnivorous plants who liked to kill the plants by placing fragments of ice in their jaws until those jaws snapped shut because it helped him feel better about being a milk man in every way except employment, his punishment for me ridding him of his way to feel better being a throwing of a bottle of milk at me, the bottle smashing across my nose along with several of my teeth, fragments of glass and liquid oozing into the bloody crosses on my cheeks and transforming, forming sculptural figures of an almost sacrificial nature to rest of them; the pond keeper whose pond was overheated and so wasn’t a pond really but a small indent filled with steam and who liked to throw ice inside the steam and hope against hope that one day it would be cool enough for the ice to not immediately join the steam in the air but instead melt slowly into water and form again the pond, his punishment being him chasing me in a circle around his wannabe pond until he caught me, holding one of my feet in the steam of his wannabe pond which engulfed it and gave me the red right foot of a Milton-wannabe figure; The Japanese peace gardener guarding the peace of the place who always ordered one huge block of ice to break into little pieces himself and did so, arranging it once broken in a circle around the whole place as if the momentary chill aided the guarding and whose punishment was the worst of the garden because it wasn’t special or with meaning and because it focused on all the parts of me already severely injured, him taking me outside the boarder of the garden so as to not sully what little peace remained and simply thrashing me with feet and fist until, with a nod, he went back to kneel by a sand laden path.
Perhaps it was to do with my lack of horse, perhaps it was because I wasn’t golden and had no angel on my shoulder or anywhere on my person, perhaps all my perhapses were beside the point and it was simply due to my near fatal injuries, but the botanical garden sank like a popup picture book picture being folded and closed up into the ground and suddenly I was very near the end of the route and not walking or moving but laying loafily, comfortably, in the arms of the Floozy statue in the centre of town, ice box no longer satcheled across my back but resting on her thigh below, her sad smile on me and holding all the Mona Lisa blues in the world in it, making me want to not deliver any further but stay right there with her. But no amount of wanting could let obligation and duty take the backseat and I rolled with groans galore up- but down emotionally- out of her arms, her smile seeming to speak as I did, to say, ‘Are you sure? You could stay. Is this necessary?’, a question I’d never asked myself and didn’t want to then either because who was I if I didn’t deliver?
Shouldering my ice box yet again, shaking and quaking on my joints, I headed onwards with a little hope in heart because it wasn’t toward punishment I headed, but to the final end, to the possible restoration of goldeness, to the last client I could deliver to and the very last client on the route, a Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter with no hair at all on their body- something I knew because they sat naked on their top floor in the centre of a painted circle (the paint a thick yellow, the colour of the lines on the sides of roads when fresh), their body not having any discernible sexual characteristics and so being almost dolphinesque in its smoothness- except for a single black curl, a remarkably thick single strand of hair really, that fell limply from their forehead. The final client was rumoured amongst the ice delivery crowd, all of who had to factor the top floor of the skyscraper where the skyscraper sitter sat into their routes, such was their need for ice, to be the child of a professional ski jumper and a leopard seal because they certainly weren’t very ordinary to the sight, but that was all hearsay because the ice delivery crowd liked to hear and then say, often with no real opinion on what they’d heard and said. The Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter liked to stack the ice delivered to them around their circle, piling it up into an almost igloo shape that never ever came to fully be more than almost as the ice did what ice did and always melted before construction was completed, the water running off into a small drain that lay within the circumference of the painted circle.
The Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter rarely spoke, but when they did they did in a voice that was squeaky and strangely clean- the embodiment, I thought, of a freshly mopped floor if said freshly mopped floor were ever to cast aside the shackles of being a freshly mopped floor without tongue or mouth and let human speech encroach outwards- and once when they spoke to me, surprising me as I was already walking away and they usually only spoke if I asked them a question, they asked me a question.
“Horse, woman on horse, to sit in a skyscraper, to sit in the part of a skyscraper most likely to scrape the sky, to sit in the part of a skyscraper most likely to scrape the sky while also in an icy construction that makes one feel at home, should you not have dreams?”, turning away before I could reply to begin construction.
The skyscraper the top floor skyscraper sat in was one of the oldest buildings in the city to people not very old, one of the youngest to the rest, and was tall enough that if the claim had been made that God was male and made of human constructions and that God had a penis and that God’s penis was damn large and that the skyscraper itself was his penis on earth, well not a single person knew another single person who could oppose that claim. It sat only two streets away from the arms of the floozy I’d left behind, protruding up among the two purposefully squat buildings that clung around its base like cubic testicles, and I got to it as swiftly as someone as injured as I was then could, the red right foot of me dragging slightly behind the healthy, ish, left one, as bereft as a butterfly whose symmetry had flew off. At the entrance, the doors of the skyscraper slid open automatically with a soft menacing hiss that had never been there when Tobais had been there to carry me through previously, the security of the place watching me suspiciously too as I approached the water trough installed for delivery horses and their riders to take my designated final delivery of the day one minute break, watching me even more suspiciously when, collapsing on the rim, I lowered my features to the hay and scum speckled water to drink.
“Hey, hold up,” one of security guards stepped forward, placing between my mouth and the water an ungloved hand. “Step back. Are you a horse?”
“Yes,” I lied weakly. “Neigh”
“Mmmm,” the security guard looked me up and down and I felt a gap in the air that once would have been filled with a fairy waving a wand to solve everything opposing me. “Man, you’re not a horse.”
“I’m an ice deliverer, I used to have a horse that I rode, I’ve rode it in here before, but it died not long ago, I swear, look at my boots, these are horse riding boots. Please, I swear I’m a rider, I’m just thirsty.”
“I’m not a horse, I don’t have a horse either, so guess what, I don’t drink from here, I buy a bottle from a shop, I drink from a bottle from a shop, I turn on a tap, I fill up a glass, I drink the water in the glass that came from a tap, normal things to do for someone without or not a horse,” the security guard stared hard, blocking me with all the blockage he could muster until I pulled away, talking hard after my retreating body until it entered one of the extra-large service lifts at the end of the hall. “These troughs are for delivery horses and their riders, we, me and you, aren’t those things, they are the rules and I enforce them, I’ve enforced them well today.”
My mouth was dry and wet all at the same time and my throat ached from its deviation from the routine of me and Tobias both drinking for the solid minute of my designated break and then, still gasping, the both of us, riding up in the lift without composing ourselves until just before the ding went to signal we’d entered the clouds of the top floor, at which point our gasps were swallowed and our composure posed. This time my gasping wasn’t swallowed nor was I composed at all as the ding went to signal such a thing, it continued and I continued with it, almost falling out onto the floor when the doors slid open, limping toward with the shwoo-shwoo breathing sounds of a whistle nearing its final whistle, the final client, who sat in a puddle of water from where their previous delivery had already melted, tiny eyes- sitting like two indents in a mound of mashed potato in the centre of his head- blankly staring at me approach. I swung the heavy ice box around my body and just barely managed to flick the lid of it open with my one unbroken hand, the final, largest, and most perfect, cube of ice that’d managed to survive, oozing out with the romanticism of a quaffed lock of hair sliding down in front of a single sultry eye.
Landing, as it always did, on the ground with a thumparumppump that suggested its nature was far more musical than its, as ice, probably was, the ice- which was the rarest and most expensive of all the product I delivered- completely see-through, varying from most of the ice I delivered which usually was cloudy and basic, your bog standard ice – once dropped, had visible lines of breakage and fault swimming through it like aftermath tarmac in a volatile relationship with an earthquake. Once landed, the ice, as if called to its recipient like it was a dog called Silence, crawled along the floor from where I'd dropped it with the movements of also a dog, but a legless dog impersonating a snake wanting only in life to slither to its hearts content, over the edges of the sitter’s circle, arriving at the waiting sitter who exuded not peace or serenity but instead a curious numbness, as if they were a vacuum where no one emotion could live.
Stopping in front of him, the giant ice block released some ahh-I’m-already-melting droplets which ran with the fluidity of flamenco playing Flemish man across the horizontalness of the side that in that moment was the top and then dripped vertically down both the sides that in that moment were the sides before, out of the blue and red and green and pink if you weren’t me and hadn’t seen it happen before on other deliveries, with a hand held like it was a hammer rather than the fleshy hairless hand of them, the Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter struck the cube of ice with force enough to send so many lines of fracture and force through the thing that it burst, smashed into pieces that were just smaller versions of the cube it'd been before, perfect little reproductions falling all around the sky scraper sitter.
Done, finished then, the smash being the acceptance of a delivery done, the route completed, with my day of work over and no feeling of goldenness flooding back over me and no motivation left in any of the nooks and crannies of me, I could no longer hold myself up, falling to my knees in that high up place with the imprint eyes of the Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter flickering around like they were hand jive’s jovially joyriding a rodeo bull.
“Dressed the part,” they spoke to my kneeling from, strangely in terms of their usual tenor, not being as high pitched or clean as usual, rather deep and dirty, a grave hole representation of a voice, their eyes continuing to flick around. “Action done but no horse around for action to be done on, strange, no ice ever is delivered with no horse, no way no how, it shouldn't be done, isn’t done, is horse ill?”
“I guess you could say he’s ill,” I spoke softly, my tongue feeling as if it were a spade and my words blocks of granite I had to haul up from the dirt. “He’s suffering from deadness, earlier today he fell and I lost many blocks of ice, I didn’t have to but I did, I finished the route alone, I did what isn’t done, I delivered and disappointed many alone.”
“Deadness?” The skin where an eyebrow would have resided on a normal creature crinkled up in an imperfect arc, as it would if an eyebrow was actually there and being raised and crinkled. “Horse died? Died how? Horses don’t die, not in these parts.”
“He died, he just died, I don’t know how, what am I? A knower?” My voice came out both faster and sweatier than intended, salty liquid forming on and dripping from my tongue in place of saliva. “He heard some very loud noises, got scared, and reared, he dropped the ice and then he dropped and then he died.”
The top floor sky scraper sitter did something I’d never have expected someone who barely looked normal to do, they stood up at their full height- of barely four foot three it looked like- and their indents peeped up at me further, flickering coming to a stop to inspect exclusively my chin while stretching an arm up and over their head, covering some features with splayed fingers and then wiggling those fingers suggestively.
“That, ‘I don’t know how’, doesn’t sound right, it sound downright lieful, but your chin doesn’t lie, your chin couldn’t lie, your chin is downtrodden from the lies told above it but still it tells the truth, it screams the truth to me. You punched your horse once it reared, you punched your horse to death once it reared, you punched your horse to death once it reared your chin says, you punched your horse to death once it reared for no reason other than the ugliest reason, anger, your chin says.”
Gasping, I grasped my chin between my unbroken hand’s fingers, stroking and pinching the curves of it to try and get it to take back the truth it’d told, but to no avail, because the truth was out and once it was out then it couldn’t be brought back in, it had been done and what had been done had been done and would always have been done, my chin whispering cryptically to me in response to my pleas only, ‘Tobias was no more than a single sunset seen by a single eye’.
“He was your horse, he was a good horse, he carried you and all that ice all over,” The Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter said while the ice I’d brought for them, along with all the promise of it being constructed into something before the melt, began to melt away on the floor, spreading out, expanding like a lung preparing to commence lūʻau, puddling around the bare feet of the Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter whose toes were in prime position to splash, but splash they did not. “All over he carried you and still you punched him to death, still you did something, a terrible something.”
Falling further to the floor, my knees that’d held me up seeming to disappear, I began to writhe as if taken by the holy spirit, the pain in my body increasing as my movements did, extending battered and bruised fingers to the sky that lay so close beyond the above granite roof and then pressing them into the floor as if reaching for the core that lay somewhere so far below in the earth. I did this and then I did more, I went wild and crazy and mad and sad because I was being made to confront, right then and there, the terrible something I had done and I felt grief and what was worse than the grief was my being made to confront my general and fundamental lack of care for the terrible something I’d done beyond how it made me feel, ME. Not a thing, not a blasted thing, was really felt towards the horse Tobias had been, not a thing about how the horse of him would never ever be seen on this earth again, how the horse of him would never trot again, because all my feelings were focused on me and my grief and disappointment in myself for what I’d done and also what I'd suffered and been suffering because of what I’d done.
Raising my head with difficulty while my body wormed around with the floor, I cast my eyes anywhere but at the Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter who stared measuredly at my chin, fishing for another sight that would capture my attention whole also trying to will my chin that stubbornly refused to be silenced into at least invisibility. But my chin acted against me and remained very visible and seemingly spoke even more than before to The Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter, who nodded at what it told them while curling their single strand of hair, which seemed to be growing longer with each twirl, round and around their finger.
“Your chin tells me more, your chin tells me so much more, your chin tells me how you really feel and that isn't a good way to feel, worse, it's a bad way to feel, it's a way to feel that shouldn't be felt by a person who is actually good and decent and proper, certainly not by an ice deliverer. Your chin tells that you aren’t golden, that your angel has left you, your chin tells me that you're rust.”
All the pain my punishments had inflicted on my body increased tenfold and my vision took on a hue of red and then, worse than that, in response to the damnation uttered by the Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter, my skin, though the joints and muscles and bones beneath it were still moving wildly, began to feel like it was resisting the wild movement going on below it, like it were getting too tough for the wild movement to continue to be wild and had.
“I'm not rust, I’m not, my chin knows nothing, please, I’m golden,” I managed to say, my pleading voice echoing as if emanating through a pipe.
“Then where is your angel? I'm looking around and I have to say that I don’t see evidence of an angel, I have to say the injuries you’ve suffered and the pain you seem to be in doesn't suggest an angel here, there, or anywhere protecting you.”
“Fine, my angel is gone, fine I know it, but I’m still golden, I must be, I’ve done enough to be, I’ve been punished by the ones whose ice was lost, oh I've been punished, I've been punished bad, that’s more than enough. Tobais even would forgive me if he could see how I finished the job, my job, how I suffered when I could have walked away from the job and gone home and found a completely different job and not suffered at all, how I persevered to prove my worth of goldeness.”
The Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter’s eyes felt like fingers touching me all over as they looked me all over, lingering on the red foot of me that lay away from the rest of my body as if not a part of it, that lay more turgid than the rest of me though more turgid the rest of me continued to grow, they looked and looked and touched and touched and anticipation crackled in the air as it grew and grew like a bolt of lightning maturing, then, when they’d looked enough, they shook their head and then shook it some more.
“You suffered in hope of worth and besides there's no enough, never enough, not enough in all the world for what you did to horse, you can't calculate what you’ve suffered and subtract and divide it from what you did to horse and declare the situation null and void, you can’t do that because you have no angel, because you aren’t golden, because you are rust.”
My body then completely rigid, my bones dancing in their prison cells so loud they became a musical accompaniment and rattled inside me like pebbles in a tin can, loud but not loud enough to block the noise of the fingers of the Top Floor Skyscraper Sitter clicking, making rhythm of their own, nor loud enough to block the sudden squeal coming from above that then wasn’t above but on top of me, a giant coiled tail and snout figure covering nearly all of my body up like a boulder blocking a cave, just my red right foot being left uncovered.