Wordsworth – Chapter 8 (Patreon)

Wordsworth – Chapter 8

“Please, Tay, don’t do this,” Lisa’s voice warms something deep in my chest, even as I ache to soothe her worry, even as I yearn to layer words upon her wounds until they are protected from a world that always intrudes upon them, tearing open what should’ve been healed—focus.

I take a deep breath, feeling the sensation of my ribs straining when I can’t take in any more air and I’m forced to slowly deflate. It isn’t the calming pattern Lisa taught me, because that has the opposite effect of what I need. Because the drowsy calm lulls me to whispered words while my head laid upon a cushion and my body was protected by warm blankets, and tales unfolded—

Another breath. Intense, uncomfortable, verging on pain.

That brings me back. To the present. To the moment.

To her.

“I have to,” I finally answer in a whisper as I look through the wireless cameras I installed yesterday under cover of beauty and night.

“No. No, you don’t. Never use those words, much less with me. Do it because you want to, because you feel it’s right, but never because you have to. You don’t. You no longer have a moral obligation to even lift a finger if the world burns around you.”

“Liz, I kinda dislike being on fire.”

“Yet you would still gleefully jump into an ongoing arson.”

I bite back a chuckle.

“You’re impossible to argue with,” I tell her, stating the obvious.

“Does that mean you won’t do the ludicrously reckless, stupid thing you’re planning on doing?”

I look at the screen of the tablet she set up for me. At the feed of each hidden camera.

At the people lying on bare, stained mattresses.

At the dirty floor, the cracked walls of the abandoned building on this part of the docks.

At the used, empty syringes, and the girl kneeling on the ground to pick one up.

“No. No, it doesn’t mean that,” I finally answer.

“… And I am the one who’s impossible to argue with.”

I chuckle once more. At the grumpy tone, the implied offense, the…

Well, the concern.

“Seriously, you just convinced Kid Win to get off your case, and now you’re going to throw it all away for a bunch of—”

“Liz, don’t try to seem crueler than you are,” I cut her off before she says something she’ll regret. Because she makes an effort not to manipulate me, to just support me and allow me my autonomy as I fumble while trying to regain the pieces of Taylor Hebert scattered all across this city, but she’s still the clever fox, and foxes always play tricks.

They can’t help it. It’s in their nature.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, contrite. Sincere. “I… It’s just so frustrating, you know? Just a little more, and they would have no choice but to recognize you as a hero.”

I close my eyes and swallow the hard lump lodged in my throat.

“Heroes… Heroes are what they do, not what people say about them,” I finally tell her.

There’s a sharp sound from her end of the conversation, from wherever Lisa’s sitting at, talking to me, seeing through my camera, waiting for me to act and move despite her advice.

It sounds like strangled sobbing.

I distract myself from it, focus on my mission.

On the people using this Merchant’s crack house.

Meeting Mush, talking to him, made me think. Because I’ve spent years hearing about the Merchants, about how vile they are, about abducting people off the streets and forcefully addicting them to get more clients.

It made sense, in the way a horror story told around a campfire makes sense. There was a great evil that could strike at any time and claim a victim from among any of us, and we could only live in fear of the monster in the dark.

The story is true, yet, false. Its simplicity makes it a lie.

Yes, falling prey to the Merchants’ tactics, getting too much of a taste of their products, is a great evil. Something to be feared, avoided.

But it’s not them that bother trapping people.

Why should they? Why commit a crime that’s so much worse than just peddling their merchandise just to get more buyers... when they don’t lack for any?

Because the monster that kidnaps young kids and forces them to inject false joy into their veins isn’t so simple. It doesn’t wear a single mask.

It could disguise itself as a friend offering a good time that you no longer want to end, a dream that stretches past morning even as your body withers.

It could be desperation and loneliness, and a last refuge, a way not to think, not to feel. A death in all but name, but one anxiously sought for.

It could be reckless hedonism, or control falling apart, or the need to belong to someone who’s already falling and drags you with them in an inescapable embrace.

It could be any of a thousand things, because the monster is tricky, astute.

Not as much as a fox, of course, but that isn’t the point.

The point is… That the monster claims victims, one after another, and that they each live through it in a different way. Some get scared after seeing him and run and never look back. Those are the lucky ones.

Some just get a taste, maybe take one of the things that don’t scare them that much, and live a normal life aside from it. And the monster lets them, because it doesn’t care how many live content as long as he can drag others down.

And those he sinks his claws into, the ones that fall…

They don’t end up in places like these.

No, those who are here are still falling.

And maybe they once were proud workers, or carers for their families, but all that’s gone as the monster keeps claiming pieces of it.

So, Mush, the kind, ugly man with a nice smile, will never pick a kid off the street and drag him in here so the monster can devour him.

But he will stand aside as the kid walks into the monster’s lair.

And what kind of hero would allow that?

“If… if I can’t convince you to stop… At the very least… Can you come home tonight? So I see that you’re okay?” the clever fox asks, enticing me with what I need and want most.

Almost like the monster would. Except the monster lies, and the fox, at this point, doesn’t.

“Of course,” I answer, my voice as soft and warm as I can make it.

“Right. Give ‘em Hell, Tay.”

I look once more at the cameras and touch an icon on the tablet to connect the hidden speakers.

There are no villains in there. No one with a mask and a colorful costume.

Just victims.

Of others, and of themselves.

But a hero should save all of them.

So… I won’t give them Hell.

I’ll give them…

“Two roads diverged on a yellow wood…”

Trees emerge from the shadows in the den, the words flowing out of me crawling across the street to form swaying trunks and ever-falling leaves as the ground beneath dirty mattresses shifts to loam, and grass, and roots snaking below discarded leaves that aren’t yellow, but smell like it.

I’m not there. I am as far away as I think I can manage and still manifest my power with this many people listening, but I sense the smell of wet, fertile earth, of the sweet decay at the start of autumn, of bark wet with dawn’s dew.

The forest is as important as the roads, because without it, there wouldn’t be any meaning to them. They would go across nothing.

And there’s a man in the middle of the path, at the part where it forks, where destinies split. Except the man is a woman, and a child, and a diffuse shadow, and, if one looks at it carefully enough, they would see the man is actually every single person present, all of them at the point where they met two roads on a yellow forest.

One of the roads had a monster lurking on it.

But the one who waited to make a choice didn’t know, couldn’t know, because the grass was as trodden upon in one as in the other, both paths with as little wear as could be seen.

And so the traveler hesitated until, not having any choice but to continue, set upon a path that seemed just as good, just as fair.

And with every step they would convince themselves that it wasn’t as fair, but more, that there weren’t any leaves turned to black upon their chosen path. And they pondered about the other one, the one they hadn’t taken, and thought they may be coming back to it one day and see if it really had been just as fair.

But with each step they took along their road, the fork, the path not chosen grew further and further away.

Until they knew that no, they wouldn’t come back.

That once they stood in front of two paths.

And they chose one, that they now felt less traveled.

And the autumn light dappled by falling and swaying leaves grows dimmer as I near the end of the poem.

It has an accepted meaning, one most people think about, and another, made in jest about a dithering friend often wondering about long-past choices.

But I am not here to give them a lesson about literary analysis. No, I’m here to let them see, to let them watch as the traveler goes down a path.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

So I sigh, and mourn, and sympathize as the traveler just ponders about the long-lost fork. And walks.

But then, when I reach the last word, I make an effort.

I twist meaning, and tone, and intent.

And so the autumn light returns, the leaves made of inky words gleam across it in their gentle dance, the smell of the woods flares again, less acrid but all the more potent.

And the traveler pondering about the road less traveled takes another step, and the woods open as he comes across another fork.

As he comes across another two roads.

I let the words hang in the air like dew on rough, black bark.

I let each of them, awake and alert for maybe the first time in months, see the traveler take their guise as he goes from woman, to man, to child.

And then I let my power fade, taking away the grass, the leaves, the trees, the loam, and the traveler.

And, finally, last of all, I take away the road less taken.

My words flow back to me, and I slump on my chair, thankful for the drawn curtains not letting any outside light disturb me as I close my eyes and my temples throb in pain.

Lisa’s silent on my headset.

But she’s Lisa, so it doesn’t take long for that to change.

“Tay…” she whispers, mindful of a headache she knows all too well. “Tay, look.”

I force myself to open my eyes and look at the tablet, my only link to the house now that my forest is no more.

I see people on their mattresses, lying on their backs with eyes wide open.

I see some sitting on the ground, weeping.

And…

And I see some stand up and walk away.

And I choke back a sob, because that’s what a hero is supposed to do.

To save people from monsters.