One Week After the Coffin Closed

They laugh, the children, dancing in the meadow. There is something in the sound that unsettles his heart. Ferro can only remember ever hearing that sound from far off, joy has ever been a distant thing for him. There is a game to their movements, the rules he has never been able to puzzle out. He isn't a very smart man, dull to the point that even children's games evade his understanding. No, that isn't true anymore, is it?

His gray eyes blink, and the meadow around the children returns to a dirty street; two crashed carriages up the road offering just enough break in the traffic for the kids to have room to play. The older boys waiting for him to wander over with sticks and rocks in hand fade away into his memory. The roar of the city rises again as he looks on; just five children running about in the road, playing some strange game.

Picklebarrel. The word springs up in his mind, a memory that wasn't his just a few days ago, but that is now. She had known it, Holly Menta. Her name, that he will never forget, she kept screaming it at him over and over as he drug her away to somewhere secluded, "My name is Holly Manta, you don't have to do this. My name is Holly Menta, please stop, you don't have to do this."

Remembering the name was more than the other ghosts banging around in his head got. Her ghost was louder, almost like the specter of a person. Just that morning, he caught himself looking for thread in the warehouse, the compulsion to stitch up a tear in his shirt utterly overwhelming. Only, he didn't know how to stitch, didn't know the first thing about it. The impulse, the fact that something inside of him moved his body without being told to by someone else, intrigued Ferro.

It came again near noon, an impulse, a desire, but this time he couldn't put his finger on what it was. Following the impulse out into the street, he found the city. How strange it was not to have ever thought about the city before today. There were more people here, just walking past him on the side of the street, than he had ever seen before leaving his small village. Shouldn't that have some effect?

The thought itself sits strangely in his mind. Why should it? Not much ever affected him before.

Ferro shook his head, turning left and continuing along Baker's Street. The day burned with heat. A constant press of people moved around him, drifting like water, eddying in pools in front of storefronts or stalls selling fresh fruit. The discomfort was a familiar thing, a state of being beaten into him through years of reinforcement, but today Ferro felt it differently. It was not just annoying for the way that it made his hands itch, or in how it made his shirt stick to his neck, but it was annoying because it slowed him down. His legs continue carrying him on, leading him somewhere he didn't know.

A bell chimes as Ferro pushes open the flimsy door. He figures it is brass from the sound. Inside, he finds four tables set out near the open windows, one man seated in the back looking up as he wanders inside, the rest of the other patrons content to carry on their quiet conversations. The sweet smell in the air seeps into him, exciting memories not originally his, leading his eyes toward the countertop running along the left side of the small space and the big man wearing an apron behind it.

Frowning, the man fixes Ferro with a stare. "Thought I made it clear already that I'll not have beggars in here disrupting good folk at their leisure."

Ferro pauses in the entrance, looking down at himself. Ah, there was a bit of dirt clinging to him, and his clothes had seen much better days. "I got coin," he says, reaching into a pocket and pulling free a pouch that rattles with copper pennies.

The man behind the counter tilts his head at Ferro, eyes drawn inexorably to the jingling bag. His demeanor changes, growing welcoming, but as Ferro walks forward, it isn't some cafe owner he approaches, but Big Russel, the owner of the general store back home.

"What can I get you, lad?" Big Russel asks. A banging against the wooden wall makes Ferro flinch. No, not Ferro, now he is just a boy again. He is always flinching, always alert for the next hand. Big Russel's grin vanishes as he turns, shouting at his sons running around in the back of the store to quiet down, before facing the boy again, looking down at him. "Your ma'am sent you to pick up her order of seed?"

The boy nods, clenching the hem of his shirt tight in his fingers. It takes everything in him not to start shaking, to keep looking at Big Russel's neck and not stare down at the floor.

"Got it under the counter here," Big Russel says. Before the man can stoop, Little Russel, a young man twice the boy's size, stomps in through the door.

Little Russel lopes to the counter, leaning against it and staring down at the boy while his father grabs the grain. He doesn't say anything, not with his da right there, but words were never the language Little Russel spoke most fluently. When Big Russel comes up again with the huge sack, slapping it down on the counter in front of the boy, a worried expression comes over his features. "You going to eat that at the counter?" Big Russel asks.

"What?"

Ferro blinks, and the store is gone, the small and finely decorated cafe once again in its place. The sack of grain on the counter is replaced by a small white bowl with sweet-smelling pink and vanilla lumps inside.

"He said," a sneering voice says into Ferro's ear. The teenager, a boy who can't be older than seventeen, leans in, his fine features making a grimace. "He asked if you are going to eat here or if you are going to drag your ass outside to eat with the rest of your friends in the gutter." The boy's grimace twists as he mocks, sniffing the air next to Ferro. "I can only assume that is where you crawled out from."

"I'll not have anyone stirring up trouble here," the man behind the counter says. "Be civil, young man."

"Why would I treat a dog like it was a person?" the teenager asks. Behind him, three other boys similar to his age snicker at the comment. There is a fineness to their dress, well-put-together clothes of vibrant colors. Not so nice that they could be from any of the nicer districts, but well off enough to lend an air of arrogance, not that any teenage boy ever had difficulty acquiring that. "These beggars flood into our city and fuck everything up. Now I have to wait for one to fumble through ordering and sit in their stink. You probably stole that money, didn't you?"

As a point of fact, Ferro had stolen the money. They'd piled bodies up in the sewers, many of them adventurers, the kinds of people who kept all of their belongings on themselves. But what Ferro couldn't figure out for the life of him was why this boy was speaking to him like this.

The teenager's hand snaps out, reaching for the bowl on the counter. To Ferro's eyes, he might as well have announced his intentions to the entire cafe and wound up a punch in front of his face. Ferro catches the hand, his fingers closing around the boy's hand awkwardly, crushing his thumb and pinky finger together.

Then, the teenager starts yelling, and everyone is looking over. The boy's friends start shouting as the teenager falls to his knees in front of Ferro. Such a commotion. He didn't even break anything. Something deep down in the primal parts of Ferro tells him to rip the boy's arm off, to stuff the stump down his throat to right the disrespect he was shown.

When Ferro was new to the change, he might have done just that, but after listening to that voice two or three times and feeling no relief in the aftermath, he learned to ignore it. Sigrid's words come to him, commanding him not to draw attention to himself. That was shot as well, the entire cafe was staring at him as he held the teenager's hand in his own, squeezing so tight that the bones were beginning to bend inside his grasp. If he was being honest, he didn't much care about Sigrid's words either. She wasn't here, and the terror she tried her damndest to instill in him was a quiet scream in the back of his mind. Any other day, that would have been enough, the barest whisper of a threat enough to move the dull apathy of his mind into starting inertia. Today, though, he wanted something else.

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A moment later, Ferro walks from the cafe with a porcelain bowl in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, leaving the bawling child and stunned onlookers behind. The walnut-sized balls of sweetness in the bowl begin to melt as soon as he makes it to the road. They taste of strawberries and smooth cream when he takes his first bite, a shiver of cold running through him despite the heat of the day.

Another memory surfaces at the taste, sitting on the stone dock overlooking a pond as the sun lights the water orange. She laughs along with the girl next to her, the two balancing sticks on their fingers to see who will get the last piece. She wins, of course, but gives up the last bit of sweet cream anyway. Days like this are rare things, and they always made her want to give up the last bite of cold cream.

Ferro blinks, the ghost of a smile still fading on his face as he finds himself somewhere else in the city, the cafe long behind. The bowl in his hand is empty, and tired of carrying it around, he drops it into an alley as he continues his walk. His attention moves away, the sound of music drawing him on, the smell of salty snacks riding close behind.

The line of the street turns sharply, the path across the cobblestones leading to a lawn of short grass, a few trees decorating the hectare of a park. Those with nothing but a sack of clothes to their names and loose scraps of food loiter about the expanse of the park, sitting on blankets thrown out on the stone, the nearest a full foot away from the grass. Ferro watches as two men belonging to some noble family, their brightly-colored uniforms giving them away, walk past. Each moves with one hand lazily gripped around the handle of a truncheon shoved through their belt while their eyes scan the beggars cringing from their patrol. The display of city hierarchy only captures his attention for a moment, his eyes drawn past toward the streamers hanging from the trees and a huge wheel slowly spinning through the air with people riding inside metal carriages.

Before he knows it, he is in the park, the sound of playing music drawing him on as his mouth waters for the scents in the air. Past a break in the trees, pin-stripped tents sit out in the park, people moving hurriedly between, buying treats, playing games, listening to a quartet of musicians playing fanciful instruments, watching a juggler balancing on a board while a little dog runs about trying to tip him off, or riding on one of the three contraptions set out in the park. Mostly, people wait in line, but that does little to dampen a genuine excitement growing in his chest.

The lights. Red, blue, and yellow lights stand strapped to poles that litter the place, their softly strumming magical glow somehow piercing right through the sun beating down overhead. The magnificent wheel in the center of the park spins with the lights, and Ferro finds himself caught up just watching it slowly turn. The word carnival bubbles up from somewhere in his mind, but he knows the feeling that comes along with it, a buzz in the ends of his fingers, is purely his own.

A huge man tries to bar his way as he approaches, shouting something about bums. Ferro flicks him aside, his eyes never leaving the spinning wheel. He is halfway to the attraction before a woman barking in his direction pulls his attention away. When he looks, it is Sister Sinta standing there, beckoning him over to a booth she stands behind, her sister's habit pulled up and worn sinfully loose. He drifts over.

"Knock down three cans to win a prize," Sister Sinta whispers at him, her voice breathier than he has ever heard it before. The nail of her finger digs into the top of a small skull as she rolls it around on the benchtop in front of her. "Just two pennies to play."

Ferro's gaze drifts past toward the back of the stand. Painted on a board at the back of the booth is a wicked and dead tree rendered in bright color. Sixteen bodies hang from the tree, some impaled on branches, others bound with ropes around their legs or hands. Three pedestals stand in front of the painted scene, a stack of three tin cans on each.

Gray eyes drift back to Sister Sinta, and the woman flinches when they fall on her. "Quite a smile you got there," she says, taking a small step back.

"What's the prize?" Ferro asks, depositing two pennies on the benchtop. When he picks up the little skull, it feels remarkably leathery in his hand, weighted almost like a ball. His fingers run over seams his eyes can't see.

"We have color canes or some colorful little animals," she says, gesturing to a shelf attached to the booth.

The cans spray back against the wooden backdrop, the left-most bottom ripping up a bit of board from the stand where it was glued down. Sister Sinta's eyes open wide as they clatter to the grass. Without missing a beat, more to grab the can exposing the con and return it to its pedestal, she moves back, putting three different depictions of elven martyrs, rendered in gypsum, in the most intense throes of their deaths.

"You have a good arm," Sister Sinta tells him.

"Seems that way." Ferro takes the depiction of Kaer'Adomina, the Saint of Long Voyages and New Horizons. He finds it the strangest thing when he looks down at the elven woman in his hand, her head cradled in her own hands after being murdered at the hands of human invaders. Whoever decided to paint the small gypsum figurine in stark indigo and violet was a real madman. The strangest thing happens as he walks away from the booth, staring down at the figure in his hands. It changes into some strange creature, looking almost like a horse with a long neck, indigo dots covering it.

A smile, genuine and true, spreads across Ferro's face as he takes a moment to stare down at the little figure. He tries out the rest of the carnival games. Certainly, he could power his way through the games of sport or figure out the hidden tricks, but he feels he doesn't need to. Again, memories trickle up from the back of his mind, things he has never done before, but just as much a part of him as anything else. The desire held inside those memories loves the games, loves winning them, and exploiting little strategies figured out over a lifetime at it. Ferro's desire, his excitement at the thrill of the games beneath the glowing light joins, mixes in, and devours those loose strands. The last desires of the ghost riding passenger behind his eyes fade as he makes them a part of himself, uses them to lever open a door in his soul long locked shut and crusted over with time's passage. As he walks away from the carnival ground, the baggy pockets of his thin coat weighed down with little figurines, he is the one who loves carnivals, always has been.

Neither he nor much of anyone else notices the blades of grass standing erect wherever his boots touch the ground until one unfortunate soul steps in the wrong spot and has their foot run through by grass turned to real blades.

The sun is already casting long shadows off the buildings, setting the sky a burning violet, by the time he makes it to the street. A girl, no more than eight, catches his attention as he crosses the street. She stands alone, the rush of the evening crowd moving around her like schools of fish avoiding a predator. He is drawn over by the sight, something about her.

"Are you lost?" he asks.

She looks up at him, eyes made as big as saucers, squirrely blonde hair all a tangle about her head. She shakes her head, mouth opening and closing for words that never come, before she looks down at the road, clenching the strap of her overalls in her left hand.

"You live around here," Ferro says.

To that, he gets a nod.

When he offers his hand, she doesn't hesitate to slip her own inside his. They walk together, taking the street down and away from the carnival, away from the small shopping district along Baker's Street, out toward the more populated neighborhoods. It doesn't take her more than a block before she starts talking, going on at length about her friends and what she did that day. To the questions she peppers him with, all he can say is that he is going to meet his friend later.

Her home wasn't far off, as it turns out, the third floor of a building built of gray brick. He stops a ways off from the building when he spots a frantic woman standing on the stoop. The woman's eyes are red, her hair a mess with stress and worry.

"How did you know where I lived?" the girl asks him as he lets go of her hand. Tena. Ah, yes, that is her name, he recalls.

"I'm smart in that way," he says.

"Tena!" the woman cries when she spots her daughter, running toward the street. "Where have you been!?"

The child has already moved on from him, running across the street toward her mother's open arms. "I thought Holly would be at the carnival," Tena explains. "She is always at the carnival."

Ferro is already walking away before the two can catch each other in an embrace. The echoes of the ghost in his mind rail against him, screaming for him to turn back. A dark blade rising from the depths of his soul split the phantom in two, rubbing it out of existence. Its desires, pains, and loves sink to the bottom, lining the floor of his soul like so much collected dross.

The indulgence had been interesting, rewarding too, but ultimately, he was the ruler of his own soul. That felt more clear now than it ever has before. The door at the center of his being still stands open, just a crack, the idea of wanting something, anything, slowly spilling out like smoke from a dying fire.

Today was good, maybe tonight will be as well. He had to help Morello with something, he didn't know what, but that didn't mean that he couldn't get something out of it. His fingers run over the animal figure in his pocket. Now, the considerable effort to change his face, to smile, still exists, but for some reason, he finds it worth it for a time.

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