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Scorn by Praxis "We just want to know what happened." He's a big man, this Detective Floyd. Big in the way that you might think of a draft horse, or an English Mastiff, as big. Broad, and lumbering in his pace. Thick-browed and balding save for a few tiny, erect, hairs — like peach fuzz — that stand at attention near his temples and around the crown of his thick, bowling-ball sized head. He folds hands like catcher's mitts, calmly, as he makes this request. He's married, or so says the ring on his finger. His nails are, surprisingly, well-manicured. There's a deep, scabbed-over, gash just above the knuckle of his thumb on his right hand. Something old. It'd probably hurt when it was new. "What?" She says from where her attention had glued itself to the wound on his hand. Before that — before he'd joined her and introduced himself, when it was just silence and the powerful aroma of government issued, pink, granulated soap that'd stuck to her since they'd let her wash off — it'd been the blank, particle board corner of the room she was being held in. It was easier, and safer probably, to not let her mind begin retracing her steps. Between every blink and hidden around the corners of her mind were memories of what had happened hours prior: that powerful, bitingly cold wind. The hateful miasma of voices that'd all been chattering and buzzing like a swarm of insects. The initial red mist that begat an arterial spray that'd drenched her, the floor and every single thing in that tiny room on the fourteenth floor of 1390 Olympic Park Cr. in blood. It had seemed impossible. An impossible amount of blood spurting and being ripped from the twitching, rigid shape of a thing her mind no longer recognized as human. Shrieking, gurgling, thrashing in epileptic fits, the torso, head and what remained of limbs of her former colleague had — if not literally, then in every conceivable sense but — been ripped apart before her very eyes. Somewhere, in her memory, existed the sound tendon, and bone, had made as they were shredded under the force of... What? The wind? The voices? Her mind latched onto something she'd, somehow, begun to forget. "We just want to know what happened." Detective Floyd says again, like he'll keep saying it until one of them breaks. She's suddenly very aware of the rattling buzz of a fluorescent light that hangs above them. "You wouldn't believe me," she says, absently. "We just—" he says "But you're going—" she says, at the same time before they both stop short. She looks him in the eye. She's not familiar with this specific expression on the face of law enforcement types. The usually stern, priggish facade is washed over now with something that looks a little more ordinary, and a lot more concerning. "We just want to know what happened." He says. "But you're going to make me tell you anyway," she says, at the same time. She shrugs in a way that suggests there's a hidden "See?" in there, but says nothing. "She was a witch." She says, plainly. "A witch?" He replies, without missing much of a beat. "Yes." "Mmk," he says, pawing lazily with the pad of his finger near his left nostril. "Who was a witch?" "The woman." It dawns on her that until then, somehow, she'd almost forgotten. "I never told you about the woman. The woman who," her train of thought skids on its rails a moment before running off-track entirely. The fact that her mind had latched on to, and just as suddenly seemed to lose grip of, was fickle; like that part of the her memory was smudged. She'd seen a woman there, in Office St. 110, but how had she gotten in? What had she wanted? What had she been shouting at Mr. Dolarhyde about? Her lips are moving, like she's speaking, as she feels her mind fixating and wavering away from the crooked, accusatory tip of that old woman's finger as she'd lambasted the man. "Lizzy?" Detective Floyd says, patiently. He'd asked if he could call her that. "Huh?" "Who was a witch?" "The woman. She ...I dunno, she must've broken into the building. She was crazy. This crazy old woman ...that'd been shouting at him on the street too," she said, as the memory momentarily crystallized. "She was upset about some property deal that had fallen through. I guess she waited for Mr. Dolarhyde to show up to work to lay into him." She cleared her throat. "It was her." "It was her? Her what?" "She was the one that did it. She's a witch. She said that to him, on the street. She told him that was his last chance to change his mind. That if he didn't, then his ...soul — she used that word, I remember — was in..." She shrugs in defeat. "I can't remember, I'm sorry. She was calling him all these names: Swine merchant. Rabid dog. She was ...really, really unhinged." It's strange, the way her mind is squirming away from her. The further she probes at the specifics of what had occurred only hours ago, the murkier these memories seem to become. One moment, she has what feels like a firm grip on something — insane as though it seems — the next it's all vapour and mud; shadows and dust that amount to nothing but a feverish ache in her skull. She can remember the old woman, retching up her words at Mr. Dolarhyde and the flurry of wind and shrieking cold that scattered maybe fifty thousand individual sheets of legal paperwork to the ceiling and down in a blustering vortex. She remembered, and hoped one day to forget, the look of shock and disbelief and terror on the man's face as his knees, shins and pelvis had begun to shatter under the oppression of some unseen weight. She'd watched his skin peel and his skull collapse all while that woman and her chorus of ruin vomited up their hatred and disgust until he was reduced to less than nothing. But she could not remember the woman's face. With every passing moment, the very shape of her was beginning to wither to not but a figment of trauma and ordinary, biological shock; a hallucination that offered just as little about itself as it did explain the state they'd found her in. Her head aches. Her bones feel brittle. She feels — though she knows this to be untrue — like she hasn't slept in days. She feels, quite earnestly, that she's becoming ill. The Detective is saying something then but her attention is back on the glint of his wedding ring and the deep red and black gash on his thumb. Safer this way. Better to point her mind away from the searing pain that starts up her spine when forcing herself to recall. "I'm sorry, I can't remember..." She hears herself say. It goes on that way for some time. One detective after another. Two at once, sometimes. Some seem angry. Others, overly sympathetic. She loses track of time but the sky is dark when they finally wheel her outside. She hears them, speaking in regards to her, around her, but makes no effort to interject or to do much beyond breathe as they lift her into the back of an ambulance. She hardly feels the prick of something being fed into her arm just as she can only faintly make out what the paramedics are saying. The sky was dark. There were stars. More than she would've guessed. She tries, and fails, to remember the name of the street they're on, the name of the city, her home. Her own name. It's all beginning to fade. She lets it, slowly at first as she begins to sink, but soon it all goes as easily as wind through the trees. |
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