Yesterwary

Demi carried the empty food container, mindlessly wandering the damp and lonely path back to Bastian’s house. She wanted to give Michael hope that he wouldn’t spend the rest of his days in a place that was so void of feeling and loveliness, but all she had to offer him was food and words. She was so consumed by her own cold, dark thoughts that she didn’t notice the footsteps behind her until a hand grabbed her shoulder and stopped her in her tracks.

“Good evening, miss.” An officer in a pristine, navy blue suit tipped his too-tall hat at her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“That’s quite all right,” Demi said, hand over her quiet chest at the fright. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes, of course.” But something shadowy hid in his eyes as he glanced down at the container in her hand. “I just have to ask, what is that intoxicating smell?”

“Oh…” Demi scrambled for words, looking down at the box, then back to the officer’s face. “I… I was wondering the same thing, actually. I found it on the side of the road while I was walking.”

She handed him the container and tried to conceal her nerves while he examined it. He dipped a pinky into the ketchup and rubbed it against his teeth as if he were testing for some sort of tomato-based narcotic. His eyes widened.

“Where, exactly, did you find this?”

“I’m not sure. I’m a newcomer, I don’t know my way around very well. Somewhere on the other side of the clock tower?” She hoped she was convincing.

“That direction?” he asked, eyes narrowing in suspicion as he pointed in the opposite direction of the clock.

“No, the other way.” Demi said with certainty.

“You’re quite sure?”

“Yes.” She nodded.

“I’m going to hang onto this,” he said, voice thick with doubt. “You have a good night, miss.”

“Yes, sir. You too,” she said, holding her breath as she turned in the wrong direction from Bastian’s house.

The officer made little effort to hide the fact that he was continuing to follow her. Heavy footsteps echoed after her all the way to the tenements, and the sight of Paul behind his desk in the lobby offered her little comfort.

“Everything all right, girl?” Paul eyed her with worry as she made her way for the stairs. “Ain’t seen you since you showed up.”

“I’ve been staying with Bastian,” she explained casually.

“Oh, is that so?” His tone was the type that tends to be reserved for hormone-ridden, teenaged girls, and perverted old men.

Demi nodded and shrugged as politely as possible, before hurrying up the stairs to her apartment, to which she hadn’t ever intended returning. Fishing the key from her pocket, she swung open the door and made her way through the dim, dismal room to the window. Warily peeking through the curtain, the officer waited on the street below, staring up at the building. It was too dark for him to be able to pick out her face, but a chill caressed her neck as his eyes travelled upward.

She fell onto the bed, which was still unmade from her first night in Yesterwary, and she stared up at the water-stained ceiling above. Kraus had made it clear that it would only be a matter of time before the gendarmerie caught word of the sudden appearance of real food, but she hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly, and she certainly hadn’t expected it to be her own fault. But she had to carry the boxes back with her from the orphanage. Michael had no way to dispose of them without someone finding out. Of course, she didn’t have to take food to him every night… but she felt as though she did.

She rolled over in her bed, staring off into the dim streetlight through her curtains, wondering how long she would have to surround herself with the terribleness of the place in which she would have been living if not for Bastian. And what would he say about the encounter? Shame on her for trying to make life just a little better for one of Yesterwary’s poor, young souls?

Demi pushed herself up into a vague, sitting-positing at the side of her bed, cradling her face in her hands as dull light tried its damndest to penetrate the curtains. At some point in the night she had fallen asleep, kept company by dreams of foods wielding an array of weapons and chasing her through a field of blank pages.

The streets were filled with dreary people on their paths to work, but no sign of the officer with whom she’d had a run-in. She shuffled her way through the moving stream of bodies and carriages, until she reached the ominous, splintered door of Bastian’s house.

“Where have you been?!”

In the sitting room, Bastian was propped up in one of the overstuffed chairs, with Mr. Goggles under one arm, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts at his side. “I’ve been worried sick.”

“Okay, dad,” she mocked, yawning all the way to the kitchen.

“I’m serious, Demi. What happened? I know you weren’t at the orphanage all night.” He carefully placed Mr. Goggles on the counter, took hold of her shoulders, and studied her face for signs of distress. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she assured, wiggling out of his grasp. “A cop stopped me on my way back. He smelled the damn food.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, really. He just wanted to know what it was. I lied and told him I’d found it on the street,” she said, heating up the stove and searching the fridge for a carton of eggs.

“And that took all night?” he asked, crossing his arms and tapping the toe of a torn, fuzzy bunny-slipper.

“He kind of followed me. And I thought I probably shouldn’t lead him back here, so I went to the apartment. I guess I fell asleep.” She shrugged, inhaling deeply as the gooey remains of what might have been a chicken one day leaked through its shell into a hot pan.

“Great,” Bastian whispered, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“It’s fine, really. He has no idea who I am, or where I work. He doesn’t know where you live. It’s fine,” she assured, hoping she was right.

“I don’t think you should go to work, today,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Just to be safe. I’ll stop in and tell Kraus what’s going on. You should stay here, lay low for a while.”

“What are they going to do to me? Take away my spatula?” she joked.

“That’s not the issue, Demi. You don’t understand. You’re a non-conformist,” he said, glaring down at her. “You’re not technically doing anything illegal, but Kraus would get arrested for employing you.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why do we only get one chance? Jobs don’t work out, and people find new ones,” she ranted, angrily prodding at the runny eggs. “It happens all the time.”

“I know it’s messed up, but that’s just how it is here.”

“Who decided that? The town certainly didn’t. It’s a town. It can’t make decisions.”

Bastian sighed, wearily accepting a plate of breakfast before Demi cracked open a few more eggs. “There wasn’t any law enforcement in Yesterwary for a long time,” he explained, taking a seat at the table. “Then, one day, a gendarme ran out and showed up. He didn’t like the way things were run; People did whatever they wanted. So, he gathered up a few men, and they started the gendarmerie. They made the rules, and they’ve enforced them ever since.”

“Well…” Demi said, joining Bastian at the table with her own plate, “…fuck those guys.”

“I have to go,” he said at the sound of the clock tower’s ninth chime, having barely touched his food. “Stay here. Please?”

“Fine,” she sighed, frowning into her eggs.

Demi sprawled out on her bed, stretching her arms as far as possible, until it felt as though they might detach from her body. She’d never spent an entire day alone in Yesterwary before, and she wasn’t too fond of the notion, but she took the opportunity to do some very-necessary cleaning up. After having swept and dusted the entire house, which she had expected to take much longer, what with all the morbid knick-knacks that had seemingly gone their entire existence without a cleaning, she filled a bucket with hot water from the sink and dumped the entirety of her wardrobe into it, which consisted of only about six articles of clothing. Doing her best to heed Bastian’s warning about hurting herself, she swirled the clothes around in the steaming, murky water with a stick, until it was a spinning vortex of dingy fabrics, gray liquid, and about a week’s worth of dirt.

Loosely translating the order to stay inside the house as “stay within the general vicinity of the house,” Demi retreated to the back yard. It seemed relatively safe, completely surrounded by a tall, rotting fence, which stood at least a foot over her own head. There was no real way to tell that the yard was completely surrounded, of course, as the fence disappeared into the fog that lined the city.

Demi stared back at the mist as she hung the sopping clothes on a piece of rope, which she’d assumed was for laundry. Glancing around to make sure she was alone, she took a few paces toward the back of the yard, and stopped for a deep breath. A few more paces and the fog was only inches from her face, hanging in the air, unmoving and beckoning. She reached out a shaking, bandaged hand, until her entire palm was immersed in the haze. With a gasp, she tugged her hand back to her chest and examined it. There didn’t seem to be any apparent damage. Quite the opposite, in fact. In removing her makeshift gauze, she found that her burns from the previous night had completely healed. She looked down to her cracked chest and wondered, for just a moment, then immediately shook the idea from her head and went back to distracting herself with chores.

As she worked on scrubbing the tower of dishes that Bastian had been neglecting long before she’d showed up, Demi’s mind wandered in the way that the minds of writers often do. It wandered fantastically and illogically, until the threads of a story began to weave themselves together. In the throw of her imagination, she was walking into the fog, blinded by the thick ground-cloud, and traipsing aimlessly. All sense of direction was stolen by the dense whiteness, and only the sound of her rushed breath accompanied her.

The sound of the door creaking drew Demi out of her mind, and she was met by a very startled and confused Bastian.

“Everything is so clean,” he said, hushed, as if speaking too loudly would bring the dust back.

“I got bored,” she said, drying off the last clean plate and hiding it away in a cupboard. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“This is… weird.” Bastian looked around the kitchen, inspecting the shining surfaces. “I don’t think I like it.”

“Do you want me to go get a bucket of dirt and fix it?”

“No, I’m kidding. The place looks—” he cut himself off at the sight of her palm. “What the hell?” he breathed, taking her hand into his and rolling it over.

“Oh… I… I stuck it in the fog, and—”

“You what?!” he shouted. “Demi, why would you do that? You had no idea what would happen!”

She had expected him to be excited by this new finding, but she only found herself in the midst of an angry, worried embrace. Bastian clutched her as though the fog might still reach out and take her away from him, almost as if it had done so before.

“Promise me you’ll stay away from it,” he said, pushing back with a hand on either side of her face.

“Okay,” she whispered, searching his eyes for the meaning of his reaction.

“Promise me!” he cried.

Demi flinched at the voluminous boom of his voice, and felt small in his hands. “Okay… I promise.”