Pinocchio (One Last Kiln Firing)- Part One

The boy's name didn't matter; as he had grown, he had lost it, like he had already lost so much. He got his second name when he had begun puberty, and the first ceased to exist, and that had been that.

Gole was a boy who was rapidly becoming a man, despite the fact that his mind was trapped in the misfortune of what his life had become. Misery had been a part of Gole's life since he was conceived. He was family-less, leading him to believe that whoever his family might have been, they were poverty-stricken. It was the most optimist view that he could take of the beginning of his life, for otherwise it would mean that he was never wanted and had been simply dumped.

To best describe Gole would not be unlike describing a barely decomposed skeleton. While the other children who had been taken in as workers in the doll shop grew into beautiful creatures, Gole's body grew in bizarre contortions, every growth spurt that carried him into adulthood gave his body more of a pinched, emaciated form, seemingly foregoing putting muscle or fat on his body in lieu of his height, which grew rapidly so that he seemed to have shot out of any chance clothing that he came across.

The one thing that Gole was prideful of was the asset that the two doll makers who worked in the boutique had wanted him for. His hair was the one thing that seemed to be worthy of awe, because his hair was used by the doll makers to create the beautiful little wigs for the shop's specialty bisque dolls.

Gole did not particularly hate or like the dolls that were made out of his hair, although he did loathe the cruel process that would take his filthy, unruly hair and have it fully cleaned and pliable to be woven into doll's hair.

The years passed as Gole grew, marked, to him, by however long his hair had grown. He was aware, vaguely, that he was rapidly becoming older than any of the other children, most of which had simply made their way out of their servitude to the doll shop by becoming married, finding another route by which to make money, or by simply running away. Gole was certain that for the most part, everybody who worked in the doll shop wished that he would do the same as the other children, as he had grown from a normal child and into a pale, bony, near-translucent being that worked in abnormal silence.

One day, while cleaning the doorway to the shop, a woman came into the shop, and was apparently surprised by the sight of Gole as she almost walked into him as he sat on his knees, scrubbing. After nearly tripping over him, she grabbed onto her chest, as though she were recovering from a terrible shock, and her face contorted into a mask of fear and horror as she saw Gole's sunken features as he looked up to her, panicked.

She screamed and tried to run out of the shop, with the only slightly younger owner of the shop following , nearly tripping over Gole as he tried to pursue her down the street.

The incident did not leave Gole, as one of the other children in the shop had overheard the exchange and had made a a point to tell the other children, one of which had found a knife and had carved, over his bedding area, "Gole". Later, Gole learned that what the child had tried to write was "Ghoul". The name stuck, and Gole found that couldn't have cared less about the loss of his old name.

The days passed, and Gole's hair grew to a length appropriate for cutting. One day, an order came in for perfectly black hair, and Gole was told that the old man who crafted the dolls was overworked, and that he needed Gole to do most of the work of making the doll, which included a firing process that took three firings through the entire process of the doll's creation.

He knew most of the process already by simply being around when either the old woman or the old man wnt through the process of creating the doll, but he was nevertheless taught the entire process of how to make the bisque dolls, from the first moldings to the final bit of painting.

The old man created the first making of the doll's body before leaving the doll to Gole's hands, meaning that Gole would have to stay up, alone, in the kiln room that night. Suffering from exhaustion, depression, and hunger, Gole nevertheless hauled the wood to the firing vessel.

As Gole was almost finished with carrying the wood, he began to feel the edges of sleep closing in on him, and he was startled awake when he dropped the wood on the ground, the sound of the hard wood clattering to the ground and dropping on his feet shocking him awake. He shook off the pain and picked the wood back up, looking forward to getting the kiln fired so that he could take a short nap while the doll fired for a little over an hour.

As Gole threw the last of the firewood into the small space where there fire would burn under the stout structure, he breathed a sigh of relief. He turned around and tried to remember where, in his sleepy stupor, he had placed the flint. As he looked around, he realized that he had not yet put the doll into the kiln. Gole shook his head, trying to clear off the veil of sleep that was wrapping itself around him. He was so certain that he already put the doll into the kiln.

He picked up the thing that would later become a doll and walked to the kiln, shoving the slab that covered the kiln over. As he turned to look over at the doll, he choked back a scream as he saw the vague stumps of what would later become its limbs begin to move on their own, like a blind thing trying to get a grasp of its senses.

Horrified, Gole dropped the doll into the kiln and pulled the lid of the kiln back to cover the hole. Gasping, Gole dragged a hand through his filthy hair and tried to think rationally. At that moment, he realized that the thing he wanted most to do would also be the best thing to do for himself. Fire up the kiln, turn whatever the thing was back into what it was supposed to be.

Gole tried to remember where he thought that he could have last lain down the flint, and as he took a panicked step backwards, he heard the small, scared voice that reverberated from the kiln, making Gole think, ludicrously, of a child speaking from the bottom of a water-filled well.

Where am I?... Gole, where are you?

Gole turned slowly to face the kiln, not believing what he was hearing. Was it possible that he had fallen asleep and was dreaming all of this? He could remember putting the fragile doll into the kiln, he was certain of that, as he tried to understand the implications of hearing the voice from inside of the kiln.

Goooooollle.... The voice seemed playful as it elongated his name, then immediately lost any pretense of playfulness as it turned into the voice of a frightened, crying girl. Please don't burn me, Gole, please join me in here or let me out. I promise I won't frighten you any more.

Notice

Am putting the final bits together for the next story that'll be added to the blog shortly. Sorry for the delay on this one, I've been playing Mass Effect 2 and the online play of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, on top of all of the books that are on my summer reading stack (there are around twelve books that I am rotating reading at the moment). I would also blame Shirley Jackson, as I have been reading through her collection of short stories, and realizing how much I just... fucking admire the hell out of her. It's also eerie that I had only read one story of her's before I started writing this collection, and how her themes with naming her stories mirrors my desire to do the same. I can't help but be inspired by such a perfect example of the Gothic style, and I've been flying through around six or so of her short stories, just today.

This story I am going to be putting up will actually be an addition to the finished collection, one that has no hard origin copy that I have been typing up like the others. I'll add it when I'm certain that it's near as perfect as I can write and edit it to the best of my abilities as a writer, and that may be tonight or by Sunday. I'm still struggling with the ending, but I think I've been reeling it in, slowly but surely.

The Baba Yaga (Signs of Life) - Part Five - The Finale

Jeremy came home that night, hardly paying any attention to the commute back home or the people on the bus. He went inside of his apartment, threw off random pieces of clothing as he walked down to his bathroom, turned the shower head on, and he drenched himself under some boiling hot water. He did not know how long he was under the shower head, but when he emerged later, he was so weakened by the heat of the water that he collapsed on the ledge of the tub as he attempted to leave the bath.

He started to weep, his arms supporting him as he laid, pitifully, against the edge of the bath tub. Weakened by both the shock of heat on his body and now by his lack of strength following his crying, Jeremy had no choice but to lay against the tub, robbed of both the strength – and the desire – to get out of the bath tub.

The next day came for Jeremy roughly, as he awoke to the twin annoyances of his alarm clock screaming loudly from his bedroom, and the light of morning blaring through the uncovered glass shining from the bathroom window.

It was a struggle to eat, to get dressed, and to walk down to the bus stop and not look like a man who had just walked away from some awful devastation. The bus was a bumpier ride than it seemed as though it usually was, and it didn't help that the closer that Jeremy felt to the facility that he felt sicker and sicker to his stomach, souring hard, almost forming a mass right at the pit of it.

Amidst the raucous cackling of a loud group of black teenage girls, Jeremy rested his head on the heavily smudged glass of the bus window, wanting it all to just end, just as his day outside of the apartment had just started. The bus rounded a corner, and Jeremy felt the mass at the pit of his stomach fall down the pit as he saw the diner that he has visited so shortly ago. Looking at the diner, he found it difficult to think of anything else but the vague face of the waitress that he could somewhat remember having served him the first time he had come to the diner. He was unable to stop himself from thinking about the woman's face, frozen in pain, creating a puddle as her body sunk to the floor, spilling.

The image in an unpleasant one, and Jeremy tried, mostly in vain, to shove the thought of the woman's face and pain-filled, writhing body from his mind. He began to resort to shutting his eyes tightly, wishing that he could stop thinking about such awful things.

He got off at his stop, and walked, wholly unenthusiastically, to the front doors of the facility. Pushing past the doors, Jeremy made his way past the security cameras, the metal detectors, and the bored guard that leaning against the guard's desk, Jeremy walked to the locker room like a man about to walk into his prison.

Undressing and dressing, Jeremy tried to find a mindset that could allow him to cope with what he was about to go through. First he reminded himself of what John had told him that day before, the way of thinking that the most he could do with the position he was in was to give some decency to the bodies he worked on so methodically. He could do something about the way that, at least the bodies he came into contact with, were treated with the bare minimum of respect that had failed to come to them in life and continued through death.

Thinking about the bodies only worked at depressing him further, so he tried on thinking about the other workers who would be in the work room with him. Thinking about his unemotional, mostly silent co-workers didn't work in accomplishing anything, so he soon discarded the idea of thinking about the fact that he wasn't alone – that he was simply just a part of this silent majority of the people who were touching the pale corpses in their far-too large medical dressing.

Jeremy pushed into the Extraction room, and was no more happier than he had been all morning, with the added deficit of having to look at the tableau of the work room as he walked in. He had the image of what he initially saw as he came into the room burnt into his memory before he could blink it away.

The way the room was set up was that it was essentially a room that lead off into a series of rooms that most of the workers on the floor had little to do with, save for retrieving tools or, when they finished with the exhaustive retrieval of fluids and tissue that were related to the manufacture of the anti-age serum, dumping and retrieving a new specimen from the appropriate rooms.

Just looking at the room made Jeremy shudder.

Walking over to his station, Jeremy made a cursory inspection of it. He had abandoned it for the last two days, and he had to make sure that everything was in good and working order. from his instruments, to making certain that the work surface was well sanitized, sterile and as sad as a morgue's work station. Afterwards - after Jeremy had sanitized all of his instruments, inspected them to be in great working order, and then had made certain that everything attached to his station's glorified gurney was in good working order and that nothing was not as it should be, he made the unhappy walk to the Ice Room.

The list on his checkboard for the day gave him a list of the numbers of the corpses that he was to make extractions from. The numbers would correspond with the tags that wrapped around the black trash bags that were stuffed into the large freezer that made up the Ice Room, which themselves were neatly organized on large, sterile, gray shelves that went up four shelve spaces. The numbers that were the bags' identities were readily visible to the eye upon entering the large room, and Jeremy made his work of gathering up the specimen, as quickly as he could, not enjoying the awful cold of the room that reminded him far too much of death, decay, and loneliness.

The corpse was slightly heavier than he was used to, and his heart sank as he understood the meaning of those few extra pounds that weighed the bag down. When he slit the bag open at his gurney, he had to swallow a lump in his throat as he saw the pale, grotesquely angelic features of the toddler that was in the bag.

Its body appeared to be shrunken, almost a little shriveled, in its limbs, but its head was what warranted the most attention. The poor thing, its head must have doomed it from its gestation, which gave it an awful, jarring deformity that seemed to make itself immediatally memorable to Jeremy in a single instant.

Gasping, Jeremy imagined what an awful weight its head must have been on its swan-like, oh so thin neck. Was death, at least in this child's case, a welcome blessing, and life an awful curse to a person born into such a body? It was much easier to glance away from the child's (a boy, he would later realize, upon cursory glance of his frozen, tiny genitals) face, and his softly shut eyes, his longer than usual eye lashes giving him the look of a sleeping child.

Jeremy gently turned the small corpse over, and was grateful for the small blessing that was the fact that he could do his work without having to look at the boy's face. He made the incisions, drained much of the fluid from the child's nape, and cut away the tissue samples, working as well and by the book as he could, under the circumstances. His hands were shaking, and he almost dropped his instruments and his specimens more than once.

He thanked God, more than once, that everything that he was doing was completely standard, and with no deviation between one corpse and the next. It was no scientist's work, despite what it initially looked like, it was no better than factory work. Cut here, drain this, cut this, bag it all up, re-wrap the corpse, and take the next specimen from the Ice Room, until a break came or the end of the day came, one or the either.

Except something different happened this time, something that deviated from the everyday work that happened in the large room full of quiet, alien-looking workers, who cut and moved so methodically.

Jeremy had decided to turn the corpse over after he was finished, and had to keep a hold of the head as he did so, worried that the head would snap loose from the thin remnants of his neck, after it had been so crudely operated on. Remembering the initial instructions that he had been given when he first started working at the facility, he recalled how the technician that had given him his first day of training had told Jeremy that after the extraction process had finished, that you did not have to worry too much about any injury done to the corpses. Jeremy couldn't stomach committing further injury to the child's already defiled body, so he tried, as gently as he could, to turn the pale corpse over.

In doing so, his hand grazed against the boy's chest, and what he felt made him freeze, stilling him in his motions. The chest fluttered, weakly and in a way that was not completely equal with that of a heart beat, reminding Jeremy, somehow, of a cloud of butterflies caught in a drum, their wings beating occasionally on the tight skin. It almost seemed to beat harder, more assuredly as his hand closed gently on the chest.

The words formed on his lips, and he whispered them in deep wonder, even as his mind tried to debunk what he saw, what he felt before him, under his hand. His eyes flew to the child's face, and he could not see any visible signs of livelihood on the boy's face, on his still-blued cheeks and on his shut eyes.

And yet, the more that Jeremy saw signs that should have countered what he believed that he was feeling, the more that he became surer that what he felt was real. He knew that the bodies that they did crude operations on were considered legally dead before they were brought into the facility, he knew that he had to of cut some sort of a function critical to the functions of living when he cut into the nape of the corpse's neck. Blood had not coursed from out of the boy's puncture wounds, and he appeared to be, in every sense of the word, as dead.

And yet, he lived. His chest was not warm under his hand, but it felt less and less cool with each moment that passed. Signs of life filled the poor, broken body, and as he came to the realization that life seemed to remain, or it had returned, to the corpse that he had drained of fluid and tissue that should have been necessary for the capacity to sustain life, Jeremy felt weaker and more despaired than he could have ever believed that he could sanely feel.

He stared down at the stretched-out features of the dead child before him, focusing on the boy's face this time, taking in the terrible nature of the his deformity. God, he looked like he was only sleeping!

Maybe he was only unconscious...

Jeremy stroked the baby's thin chest, and felt the reality of the threadbare beat that began, slowly but surely, to assume the feel of a heart beat that shouldn't be growing.

What was there to do?

The baby was cold, and that was plainly obvious. This room couldn't be helping matters, but it did make it worse. If this child was alive, then the cold room would hurt his already surely critical condition...

He had to get him out of the cooled Extraction room.

Jeremy didn't bother to look around, to make sure that nobody watched him as he scooped the boy up into his arms, wrapped in the remnants of the trash bag. He walked, and would have run if he wasn't afraid of doing further harm to the child, who was badly hurt. Jeremy didn't want to do further harm to the baby, and he held the boy up as gently as he could, recalling how he had always been told to properly hold a newborn. He figured that based on the body of the boy, that what applied to the fragile neck of a new born could also apply to this child.

He walked out of the Extraction room, out through the locker room, holding the child in what was left of the trash bag as though it were his blanket, trying to get some semblance of warmth back into the small body. Down the hallway he walked, until, at last, he walked out through the facility doors, with the woman security guard yelling for him to pay attention to her.

He needed to take the boy back home, he needed to be somewhere where he was loved, kept warm, fed, brought back up to whatever sufficed as healthy for such a sickly child.

Who else would care for the baby, even if he had come back to life, miraculously as he did? They had taken everything that they had wanted from this boy, and all that was left for him was an incinerator in some dilapidated little town, a good truck drive away from the city. Couldn't let them take the baby, couldn't let them hide evidence of what they have been doing.

What he had seen in his dreams must have only been a manifestation of the truth, of what he had already known, on some level. They were alive as their lives were cut out from under them, kept in a near-frozen state, and were burnt alive if they had survived the ordeal.

Jeremy walked blankly across the street, and, not looking where he was going, he did not see or hear the car that sent him flying away, the baby falling from his arms, flying, momentarily, like the angel that it was to him before it hit the pavement with a sickening sound, akin to a melon splitting open. He did not need to look up from where he laid, in shock, in pain, on the pavement.

He wept for the baby, then wept for himself.

The Baba Yaga (Signs of Life) - Part Four

The facility was inconspicuous, most likely by design. Jeremy had initially felt warmed by its nonatmosphere that it projected onto the neighborhood where it existed, but walking up the pathway that lead to its glass doors, which were beneath a friendly, harmless sign that read, "Heath Driven", Jeremy felt a slithering dislike and fear for the building.

Going into the building itself, it is impossible, that day, for Jeremy to ignore the plethora of video surveillance cameras that are angled to see everything that goes on in the facility's lobby. The place looked like the secret government facility that it might as well be.

This had bothered Jeremy before, yes, but not in such a way that it thoroughly bothered him that day. Jeremy walked towards the back locker room, passing the many odd doors, all of which had the seemed to have the word "bio" on their plaques somewhere in the title. He at least knew what the word Bio meant, but he doubted, very deeply, that he would have any clue whatsoever as to what went down in any of the rooms that he passed by on his way to the locker room.

Walking up to the locker room's door, Jeremy nearly ran into his supervisor, John, as he tried to walk through the locker room door. John looked tired, which was not helped by the hfact that he already looked eternally haggard. Jeremy could not help but wonder if his supervisor had any of the same insomniac habits that he himself had.

"Hello, Jeremy," John said to him in his deep, and, again, tired voice. "I hear you'd like to talk. Would you be alright with going to the break room with me?"

Jeremy followed his supervisor back up the hallway that he had walked down moments before.

He was a nice guy - a little exhausted looking and lacking in any real passion, but it wasn't something that Jeremy could blame him for. He didn't know much about his supervisor in his outside life, only that the man seemed to perk up when someone asked him about his home life. From what the man had told him, Jeremy knew that he had a wife, two kids, and he was taking care of his parents, who stayed at him home with the rest of his immediate family.

Jeremy could remember that when John had told him about his home life, he had wished that he had a family to go home to at night, to talk about during his work hours. He couldn't deny to anyone that he still felt that way, as John pushed the door open to the break room and motioned for the smaller man to follow him inside.

Jeremy was bracing himself to talk, but was stopped, when John stopped him, asked him to take a seat at one of the tables, and then told him to wait, as he went to get his lunch from the break room fridge. Jeremy waited, as told, and John returned a few seconds later, holding a thick-looking cold sandwich and a can of root beer. John sat himself across the table from Jeremy, and, sighing, he unwrapped the cellophane surrounding his sandwich, and then simply said, "Speak."

Jeremy moved his tongue around in his mouth, uncomfortable with this kind of confrontation. He tried to summon the words that he had been rehearsing all day to come out of his mouth, and he, at first, failed at speaking. Finally, though, like a newly born horse trying to get its first bearings, Jeremy began to talk. "I'm not ungrateful for the chance I have to work here - trust me, I'm not - some of my friends -" Jeremy was speaking of friends who did not exist, or of ones that he remembered then that he did, at one time, have. "-aren't so lucky to find work that doesn't require them going back to school for Master's. It's just, uh - "

"Not what you expected?" John offered, clicking the tab on his root beer and taking a hearty drink from it.

Trying not to, Jeremy nevertheless sighed. "I wasn't told that... that this is what I'd be doing."

"Can't say I'm surprised." John shook his head, his gaze unlocking from Jeremy's eyes. What was the big man thinking about as he stared at the wall behind Jeremy? "Hiring has a way of taking a lot of things for granted. Like your panic for a chance to be hired."

"All I knew when I started was that I was going to be a part of extracting a, um, ingredient for the Fountain drug."

John seems to take deliberate care with taking a bite from his sandwich. Jeremy wondered if his wife, or his mother, had perhaps made it for him. It took him a moment to realize that he felt a hot, awful spite grow in him as he stared at his supervisor, who seemed no less of a broken shell of a man than he did.

Jesus, was he so lonely that he begrudged another man for a homemade sandwich?

"Again," John said, after swallowing the bite of the sandwich. "makes sense. But you had to have a clue about what was going on here. The worst of what goes on here," John gestured vaguely with his empty left hand, while the right one held the monstrous sandwich in his equally mnonstrous right hand. "is already all out there. Didn't you read the newspaper? I think I saw a piece in the New York Times, a while back..."

Jeremy swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly feeling bone dry. "But it sounded, so... all of the news sounded like something from some tabloid, like everybody was just trying to demonize the company."

John snorted, mid bite into another chunk of sandwich. Still chewing, John said, "This is company that don't NEED to be demonized. But I think that people - a lot of people - don't care where their good news comes from nowadays. Old people, I never would have seen 'em like people drowning, swimming for their life, before I started working here, before I heard of the Fountain. Now that I do, I kinda wish I could go back to the idea that death is a promise, not just another choice for whoever's rich enough to pay for it. Or steal it. But here it is."

"How do you deal with it?" Jeremy nearly whispers.

"I've learned to be grateful for what it's doing for my family. This job allows me to provide for my wife, my son, my little girl - " And there it was. They both were silent, as what had to be the exact same image came into their minds. The bodies of the nearly sex-less babies , images that were an everyday occurrences to people who worked in their part of the facility came immediately to mind when the thought of children came about. Jeremy swallows hard, and wonders what he did to deserve having the thought of children, especially the youngest, turned into the most lurid of real life nightmares.

And then John continued talking, this time with an unmistakable, hoarse timbre in his voice. "I am just happy to be able to take care of them." John's eyes once more fixed themselves on Jeremy. "Don't you have anybody who relies on you? On this job?"

"No, John," Jeremy says, his voice husky as he was unable to keep his emotions from coming to the surface. "I don't have anybody but myself."

"God, that's sad. I'm sorry, Jeremy, I didn't mean, uh..."

"No, don't be sorry. Like you said, you're the lucky one, it's just the nature of things, I guess you could say."

"Is there anything else you'd like to ask? To talk about?" Jeremy couldn't help but notice that John had, at this point, pushed his sandwich as far away as he could from himself, to the point where it sat, on its discarded cellophane, closer to him on the table than to the man who had eaten half of it.

"Yeah, can I ask you a personal question?"

Despite the haunted look that was in the man's eyes. John said, with remarkable amount of warmth, "Shoot."

"...How do you find anything good about what it is we do, specifically?"

John's eyes shut, and Jeremy was suddenly worried that he had just made one too many mistakes in asking that question. After a moment, however, John opened his eyes again, and stared at Jeremy. "You gotta do it in the belief that in something we do, there is... Compassion. It's a personal belief of mine, one that I haven't shared with nobody here, except you, right now, and I would appreciate it that if I tell you it, that you don't go around and tell somebody about it. Can I hold you to that?" Jeremy nodded hesitantly, wearily, and John continued. "Well, the way I figure it, those bodies, they didn't come from a home, like the one I go to every night, and leave from every morning. If they lived in the outside world for long - the ones who come in after birth, I mean - could it have been a happy situation, in any possible way? Now, don't get me wrong, I know this is a... warped way of looking at things, but if there's one trait I couldn't help but pick up from my wife, in the last fifteen years that I've been married to her, is optimism, and damn, I can't help but think that in the grand scheme of things, maybe their lives weigh a bit heavier than those of the old folk, who had to of worked a helluva a lot to be able to get ahold of the drug that this place makes, as awful as it may seem."

John took a deep breath, attempted a smile, and stared at Jeremy expectantly. Jeremy lowered his eyes from the older man's features, and tried to digest what he'd just been told. Without thinking, he sputtered out, "The facility doesn't give them proper burials, like you told me when I first started here, do they?"

There was a long silence that spread over the two men then, and Jeremy didn't look up from the table to see if it was shock that had kept John in such a state of silence then. Eventually, though, the man spoke up.

"No, it would be bad for any evidence - skeletons, the like - to be found, traced back here."

"But I thought that this place was supposed to be legal -"

"And it is. The problem is that if people find a little graveyard, or something like that," Jeremy couldn't help but shudder at the thought of what that something different would entail. "then people would be getting visceral reactions to what goes on here on a systematic basis. There's nothing inhumane that goes on here, you've got to believe me on this point, but seeing fetal skeletons... It'd do nothing but scare the most religious, and the most important customer base off of the company, the elderly."

"What does happen to the bodies?"

"The incinerator. It's out of town, quite a ways, so nobody has to smell the... smell. And from there on, from what I'm told, the ashes are supposed to be added to fertilizer for plants. I always thought that was nice, I guess you could say. Their bodies bring on new life, feed new generations."

Jeremy didn't know if the man was sincerely trying to comfort Jeremy, or if he meant to instill the nightmarish idea of children's bonemeal being slowly spread over a vegetable garden, only to reappear in the dinners of unknowing children. Jeremy began to massage his eyes slowly, breathing in and out slowly. From his mental state (Jeremy could vaguely recognize that he must be near to having a panic attack) John was asking if he was alright. After a while passed, Jeremy could raise his face from his hands, and he stared at John's face, trying to recognize elements of the man's face as a whole. Eventually, he became aware of his situation once again, and he told John that he was alright.

He tried to make himself believe that he was alright, he tried desperately to make himself believe it. Not being fully aware of what he was really saying, Jeremy mumbled out, "Do you... do they get the bodies, like in a collection, or is there somewhere... in the, uh, facility... where you guys do the abortions and the murders?"

"Jeremy... nobody kills anybody here. You believe me, right?"

It was hard to focus on anything, at first, but soon Jeremy was able to focus enough to begin thinking - and speaking - coherently. "Sorry, I, uh, didn't mean to say that. I apologize."

"Uh huh...”

“So, I got another question, if you don't mind.”

John sighed deeply, looking uncomfortable, unwilling. Wearily, John nodded, and said, “Go ahead, shoot.”

“That whole compassion thing. Do you think that you feel that way, specifically, because you have children?”

John smirked, but his eyes still looked unchanged from before, haunted and hollow looking. “Maybe. The only reason I do this is for them. They deserve so much better than what I can provide for them, and I'll work away here my entire life to give them that, if I have to.”

Jeremy lowered his gaze from John's once again, a numbing sadness and a feeling of loss penetrating his bones and skin. He began to understand why it was that he was so unnerved, compared to other workers in the facility. To his knowledge, literally everyone else that he met who worked in the facility had someone in their life, whether it was a spouse, a mom or a dad, or children. Jeremy had nothing, in a very real sense. No girlfriend, certainly no kids, and his parents had died when he was younger.

“So, is that everything you wanted to know, Jeremy? Jeremy?”

“I – uh, can I tell you something?”

“That's what I'm here for, man.”

“Since I started working here, I think I’ve grown a phobia or two.”

“Uh, like what?”

“I'm scared of – no, not exactly scared, but I really don't like old people. I started having these nightmares, I think a few days after I started working here. I see the faces of children, at first it was when I was just asleep, but now I also see them every once in awhile when I'm alone, at home. I don't like sleeping, anymore, and I don't like being at home. Jesus, John, how does someone go about fixing something like... like this?”

“Well, I'm not a psychologist, Jeremy. Would you like it if I asked my boss to authorize you to visit a company psychologist?”

“I have to admit, I was being a little... rhetorical. I don't know if there is a cure for what is going on with me. And if there's not, where does that leave me? Pilled up? I think I'd rather just deal with what I am now, rather than be doped up, made... compliant to my situation.”

“Well, I don't know about that, Jeremy, I think that it's important to keep your options open. Who's to say that someone couldn't help you?”

Jeremy shut his eyes, thinking, angrily, that John wouldn't have a clue about what he was going through, right then, when an image appeared in the black behind his eyelids, bright, outlined in white, as though it had been burnt into his eyes. A child's naked body (his hair is barely grown on his far too large head!) wrapped in a thin hospital blanket of some kind. Jeremy didn't have to focus on the image to know what was going to happen to the child in a few moments, as the image had been burnt into his memory, as a reaccuring dream that he had been having. In less than a minute, the boy, wheezing and delirious from the drugs that had been given intravenously to him, would be thrown into the mouth of a blazing incinerator. Would he scream?

In some dark way, although the dream always ended as the boy was being man handled into the incinerator, Jeremy always wondered if he was still lively enough to feel the flames licking and biting his pallid little body. Without meaning to, Jeremy let out a weak sob.

“What's the matter with you?”

John's voice shook him out of his stupor, and Jeremy took a deep breath before he opened his eyes. “I can't stop thinking of bad things. Awful things. Maybe this isn't the right job for me to have -”

“Jeremy, listen to me. Look at me.” Jeremy complied with the older, larger man, looking up into the man's eyes. “You cannot talk like that to any one else but me. You don't want anyone to think that you're ungrateful for the chance to be working here. Being job-less in a time like this is like a -”

“Death wish.” Jeremy supplied dully, humorlessly.

“...Right. You can't afford to have no source of income. And I like you, Jeremy, and I know how you feel. You can't let this place get to you. Do you understand me?”

Jeremy nodded, feeling like a kid who had just been punished for his overreaction. But he didn't feel as though he was overreacting.

Why couldn't he just do something else for a job?

John stood up and reached across to pat the dejected-looking man on his arm. “You think you can go back to work with me?”

“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

The Baba Yaga (Signs of Life) - Part Three

Pressure felt as though it were building up behind Jeremy's eyes – headache part deux? It didn't matter to him then, he just wished that it would go away. Go away and leave him alone, like the old crones that sat behind him.

The old man continued, speaking more slowly and in a more thoughtful manner than he had spoken in before. “Lemme tell ya guys, it smells really bad to me, and it should to you guys as well."

After that, thankfully, the conversation had all but died down behind Jeremy, but the damage had already been done. Unable to stop himself from doing so, his head lowered into his hands, his elbows resting on the cheap table top. His body shook uncontrollably, his breaths coming in in gasps.

He didn't know how long he sat there, but he was roused out of his shock by a hand shaking his shoulder gently. Looking up, Jeremy realized that the waitress had finally come over to him. She looked to be his age, which surprised him, because in his memory, the waitress who worked in the diner had always looked to be somewhere above forty whenever he had come to eat.

She was pretty; if Jeremy had been in a better mind, he might have tried to pull himself together so that he could make a good impression on the woman. Instead, Jeremy hoarsely asked, "I thought the waitress working here was a bit older."

The waitress had been frowning down at him, and his words only seemed to pull her lips down further. "You alright? You were worrying me."

Jeremy's mind grasped onto a weak, pliable lie, and he said it aloud. "I had a hard morning."

"Sorry I didn't come over earlier. There was a problem in the kitchen - are you sure you're alright?" Jeremy nodded weakly, and it was enough for the waitress to continue talking. "So, uh, you know what you wanna order?"

Jeremy ordered a coffee and took a chance by ordering the special, having not asked what it was and having no clue what it could be. After five minutes of waiting, staring blankly out of the window, and staring equally as blankly at the laminated piece of paper that was the menu, Jeremy kept glancing over at the salary man that sat facing him.

Jeremy stared rudely, trying to read the man's features and gait, but the man did not seem to take notice - or care - about Jeremy's staring. He looked tired, still shell shocked. It took Jeremy a moment to appreciate, darkly, the mirror image of himself who sat in the other booth, wearing a heavily creased and wrinkled suit, staring down at his mostly still full plate of food, taking a bite of it every once in a while. Jeremy supposed that every one his age wore a similar wrecked, tired expression as he and the salary man wore then. Even the waitress had looked haggard, near breaking in her own way.

It took a bit of self control to stop himself from turning around to face the group of old folks that sat behind him. He knew that the old timers wouldn't be looking haggard. It was as though their age groups had switched personas, general moods. The old man who had spoken last before still resonated in Jeremy's memory. His words struck a supremely bad chord in his mind, about how the rich and the old - and, soon, even the old and the poor - had a lot less to worry about than they ever had, historically. The fountain of youth existed, and the oldest were to be rid of their oldest enemy. And, what's more, he thought, darkly, hatefully, they were rid of less usurpers every time a batch of their beloved drug was produced.

The food, and the waitress, came by, dropping off his food. She was about to turn on her heel, when Jeremy's hand snaked out as fast as it could and grasped onto her slight arm. She turned around, looking shocked by the fact that Jeremy had actually touched her. Jeremy thought, quickly, of a way to begin talking to her, and he settled on a safe little question to begin the conversation. "What's your name?"

Looking a little nervous, but not simply a little annoyed, the woman pointed down to her chest. "I am wearing a name tag..."

"Can you tell me your name? Tell me it yourself?"

"Megan. "

"Megan. What happened to the last waitress?"

Megan yanked her arm back from Jeremy's grip, and said, "She got into a wreck, it messed her leg up bad, so she couldn't come back to work. She's still in the hospital, but she agreed to quit before she left."

"So she was getting old?"

Megan gave him a look that should normally have withered him on the spot. "She was in a car wreck, she was not getting old. Everybody here's gonna miss her, from what I hear."

Jeremy's mind spun. He tried to place a face and a body to his vague memory of the ex waitress who had served him his lunches before he had stopped coming to the diner. Black hair, always tightly bound, with streaks of silver.

Jeremy, all of a sudden, realized how rude he must've seemed to the waitress. And what's more, he also realized that he was being stared at by some of the other tables. His face reddened as he thought of other people eavesdropping on him.

He murmured something to the waitress akin to an apology, and he tried not to take her glare so personally that she gave him before she walked away stiffly.

I'm like a fucking nut case, Jeremy thought bitterly. What the hell is wrong with me, lately?

That was, of course, a false question, for he knew what was wrong with him. He had lost his appetite for the second time that day, and he did a lot more drinking from his glass than eating from his plate, and even then, he usually only took another bite after he played with his food with his fork. He kept trying to put a name to what it was that he was eating, but he couldn't quite stay focused enough to do it. Omelete? Pancake? It didn't really matter; he couldn't keep his eyes on the plate and its contents long enough to care what it was, any more than he couldn't taste what he was shoveling into his mouth.

He was grateful to leave; the waitress only returned long enough to drop the check off.

Jeremy picked it up gratefully, fished in his wallet for a while, and withdrew a five-dollar bill, which he slapped onto the table as he walked over to the cash register. He figured that she had done more than her job, dealing with his insanity.

After paying the old man working the cash register (oh, how Jeremy had to force his eyes down and then away from his hands, as the old man counted out the change from the money that he had given him, and how disgusted he felt as he felt those old, leathery hands touched his, even momentarily) Jeremy was out on the street outside of the diner, feeling delirious from lack of sleep. He had hoped that eating at the diner would clear his head, but if anything, he felt more muddled, awful. He was regretting skipping work, and he was at a loss for what to do for the rest of the day.

He had lost a whole day of pay, and now he was not even in the mood to enjoy playing hooky.

The thought of seeing a movie was discomforting - all of that dark, and he wasn't fully certain that he could even remain awake, even during an action movie, he didn't want to show up to work, already so late in the day for it, and he didn't want to be so out in the open any longer.

He suddenly felt fragile, near broken as it was, and he wanted, he wanted -

Jeremy looked over and saw a bus sign across the street. he walked towards it, and even though he dreaded a similar experience like the bus ride that he had dived off of earlier that day, the thought of being home and out of the agoraphobia-inducing streets comforted him.

He nearly fell asleep, resting against the sign, and was awoken when the bus driver herself was yelling at him, ordering him to tell her if he was going to be a fare or not. Jeremy got off of the bus a few blocks from his apartment, and he was grateful to be in a less bustling part of the city. He very nearly ran home, grateful to be so close to his home.

When he got home, he staved off sleep as long as he could, and when he could no longer help it, he regretfully slid into a long nap, managing to crawl back to his bed. It had been six at night when he had fallen asleep.

He awoke at eight the next day, shocked awake by the sound of incessant buzzing. When he checked his alarm clock (seeing the time turned him as pale as paper) he realized that the noise that had awoken him had been his living room home phone.

Nearly tripping over a sheet that was wrapped tightly around his legs, Jeremy made it out to the living room and had grabbed onto the phone before the other end of the line could hang up.

Before Jeremy could ask who it was, a curt, somehow memorable voice spoke up. "You didn't come into work yesterday. You're late now."

Jeremy swallowed hard, and leaned over so that he could see himself in his living room mirror. Despite what he thought had been a sound sleep last night, his eyes spoke differently. He must have been so out of it that he had no memories of the nightmares that must have awoken him several times the night before.

"Yeah, I know, I was just having some difficulty -"

"Do you need to speak with your supervisor, when you come in today?"

Jeremy felt like he could finally breath, like a great weight had been lifted from him. "Could I?"

The other voice chuckled sardonically. "That could be arranged, Mr. Cutter. When do you think that you could come in, at the soonest?"

Jeremy didn't know why he felt bold - maybe it was the day at work, maybe it was his curiosity, but he spoke up, "Why are you so worried about me?"

"Mr. Cutter, I hope you've been aware of how difficult it is to keep staff lately. We have had to resort to keeping tabs on our employees, when they exhibit signs of emotional fatigue. Are you emotionally fatigued?"

"When can I see my supervisor?"

"...Whenever you come into work today. He should be in the work area. Just get ahold of him, he will have been alerted to your situation, prior to you coming in."

Jeremy said a polite good bye to the voice, and he placed the phone back in its cradle, and then began to joyless process of getting ready for work.