Sun and Moon (part 13)

Shady figures stared on from the abyss of the chesterfield, unrelenting, unblinking except in the shuddering light blocked by the fan. They were loud and made a tingling noise, like when someone traces their fingers over your side right where all the nerves are.

Those smiles. They were familiar somehow, but the faces were gone, so she couldn’t particularly tell. And there was someone missing from that pivotal picture, as if they were cut out with jaggedy scissor strokes and replaced with cutouts from other pictures so that the others would look natural instead of like a hole was cut into them. Was that what she was? A cutout? And where was that original ‘her’, the one that had been cut out? Did she feel out of place at all, or was she surrounded by cutouts of her own, so that she herself would feel natural instead of jaggedy and misplaced? She wondered if there was anyone like her, any other cutout girl or boy, and she wondered whether their cutouts were jaggedy or carefully cut, and if maybe all the cutouts came together and glued themselves to each other. Would they even notice a change? Would she? And when that glue started to fade away with time, would she drift back to those shady figures on the chesterfield, the ones who still smiled fakely for her beneath the shivering of the fan? She had so many questions, but things were too slippery to hold onto right now, when her cutout world was occupied by bronze boxes and forgotten songs and Earths and Moons. Earths… that’s right, she was on Earth right now, wasn’t she? And there was something that needed doing…

“Julia, are you quite alright? You seem somewhat off-kilter.”

She looked up and smiled at Francesca. “I was just daydreaming, Francesca.”

“Hmm.”

She looked down and found that she’d been doodling a portrait of a family, with a large chunk cut out of it. She stared at it in confusion, not really remembering having drawn it.

“Well, darling, perhaps you should get some real dreaming done. You may do well from it.”

“I like daydreaming better,” Julia said, smiling as she lay down her pencil. “It’s easier to control.” Looking down one last time at her picture, she turned it over so that the blank side was facing up. With some degree of hesitation, she finally added, “I think.”

Delicately, Francesca pulled the hair out of Julia’s free eye, careful not to disturb the other side. “Dearest Julia, you really must rest sometimes. Your Umbry can take care of you, can she not?”

“Umbry’s the one who needs taking care of. If I’m the Sun, then that’s what I’m supposed to do, right?”

“Why do you use that analogy?” Francesca looked at the face-down drawing that sat alone at Julia’s desk, trying to look through the one side to the other.

Julia rested her head on her hand. “It just comes naturally, I guess,” she finally said.

“Is that really the truth?”

She paused, and finally sighed in defeat. “The truth is, I can’t really recall right now why we had that name. It was probably some stupid whim, I guess, but it stuck, so here we are.”

“And yet you seem to take it so seriously.”

“Well, it’s fitting, isn’t it?” Julia leaned back to look at Francesca and simultaneously rest against the older woman’s waist. “Maybe it was someone else who gave it to us, but it’s always just been us, y’know? I was the sun, and she was the moon, and we had those music boxes and… augh…” Suddenly, she was holding her head and biting her lip and squeezing her eyes shut.

“What is it, dear?” Francesca leaned over her, putting a hand to her forehead. Her fingers were refreshingly cool, but not at all cold.

Finally, Julia opened her eyes, seemingly a little relieved. “…It’s nothing. I guess I’ve just been pushing myself.” She stood up, and had to lean on Francesca a bit, but finally got back up on her feet. Walking in a slightly wobbly line, she headed for the stairs. “Bedroom … upstairs … I think I’ll take a nap, Francesca.” She paused, leaning on the door frame. “…And thank you. I feel better for some reason.” The door closed behind her and Francesca kept listening until she heard Julia climb to the top of the stairs and into her bed. Then, she returned to her desk and flipped over the picture.

It was exactly as she had suspected – memories that Julia was supressing, or possibly was being forced to supress by some external force.

And there was something else.

Julia had mentioned another box.

Now all she needed to put this puzzle together were the boxes, which meant that whoever was currently in possession of them would need to be found. Preferably quickly, before this mystery deepened any further.

***

Bony fingers played with the two boxes as though they were a Rubik’s cube. He turned them over softly in his lap and trying to find an opening. He attempted to fit them together in every way possible, and he was sure he could – it would just take time. If Francesca could do it, and if Frederick could do it, then surely he could as well. But he’d been doing this for hours, and his fingers were beginning to hurt. He stretched them and then balled them into fists, and they cracked with a satisfying sound as they recoiled into their position beneath his sleeves. Feeling much better, he turned one box around a little bit, and something finally caught. There was a click, and the two boxes opened – and they were empty. All except for a push-button at the bottom of one of them.

It figured that those two wouldn’t let go of the message they’d been given, especially at the gunpoint of such an idiot. But this secret was something they couldn’t possibly have seen in the short time before the boxes were taken from them, and he took solace in that.

He still possessed a part of their secret. And so he pushed the button, preparing to destroy the box as soon as he’d finished. The noise came softly at first, but then every other soft noise was drowned out, as his ears tuned into the thing he remembered more vividly than anything else.

The thing that they would remember – something that would click with all four of them.

He felt something strange against his cheeks – tears, he presumed, or perhaps blood, from a popped blood vessel? He didn’t know, but the sounds were too beautiful now for him to stop listening. So he closed his eyes.

It was time to meet with the others, he realized, and show them this. Until then, he lamented, he would wait to hear the end of the song. He pressed the button again, and the room was filled by the vacuum of silence.

Vacuums. Nothingness. Was that what he was now? Nothingness? Or a cutout?

Cutouts… where did he get that from? It seemed memorable, but he couldn’t quite place it. He would have to figure it out another time. Softly he placed the two boxes on the table and clicked them closed, and left them for better, more productive thoughts than cutouts and nothingness.

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