'OIL'

‘‘Remember the good times?’ She asked, prompting my head, basking in the glow of the moon, to tilt a little less perpendicular. I licked my lips.

‘No.’

She scowled, and flung her bob back with her one free hand, before tussling cack-handedly with her dressing gown. ‘You wouldn’t, would you? You wouldn’t remember. Or is it because you can’t? Has this changed you? It’s changed me.’ She drew breath. ‘Has this changed you?’

‘No.’

I wasn’t feeling particularly numb anymore. We’d been sat here far to long for the pain to remain a substantial issue. The blood ceased to sear across the skin on my left hand, like her ‘good times’. There weren’t any good times. This used to be fun. This used to be fun? It was never much fun. There wasn’t much here to call ‘fun’.

The tank whirred, the sound of a knob clicking to the left. Almost like the creak of some alien door. I presume. I never saw it. There was nothing to tell me it was a tank at all.

She raised that hand, the one that meant a great deal. The one with the tube sticking out of it. Her other palm remained on the left armrest, no sign of collating mould under either of her young, yet forcibly old hands.

‘How long have we been sat here? How long? Have we-?’ She began to ask questions. Again. ‘How long have we been sat here? Has it been – seven?’

‘No.’

‘Seven- eight?’

I failed to reply.

‘Eight years? Eight years! We’ve been sat here for eight years.’ She grinned, with a vacant, yet overtly psychotic grin spread across her tired face. Her blonde hair, the best part of a decade ago, now a delicate, shattering silver, unkempt and twisted across her furrowed fringe. A manic smile, perhaps. ‘Does..’

‘No.’

‘Does Daddy…’

‘No.’

I knew what she was going to ask. Daddy wasn’t coming back. Daddy had work to do, remember? He told you to be brave. He told me to look after you. I have, haven’t I? I have. I never had to ask these questions; I couldn’t.

‘How old are you?’

I didn’t answer. She knew the answer. Eight years with our thoughts, you’d’ve thought she could have remembered.

‘I’m… I’m eleven.’ She smiled, continuing to giggle a little. ‘You’re twelve, aren’t you?’

‘No,’

I wished she could do math. She couldn’t. Too many years sat in a chair with a needle and a blood tube stuck in her hand. At least hers wasn’t lodged in her forehead, I used to think. At least hers wasn’t lodged in her forehead. She was nineteen, I was twenty. The years had passed us by, these seats the breeding ground for all the bad things to happen, to cancel out, and to stop. I guess that’s what the tank was for!

‘Make it stop.’

‘No.’

I didn’t want to. Whatever the tank was doing, it was doing it for a reason. Daddy wouldn’t lie. It needed our oil. It needed it so that the world wouldn’t die, Daddy said. Daddy wouldn’t lie. Daddy never lied. Except when Mummy died.

‘Make it stop.’

‘No.’

She was verging on being innocently adamant, every whisker of her girlishness now in some wheel of panic at the door of my perpetual shoot-downs and morose defiance. The tank needed our oil! Listen to yourself! We’ll go, soon. Daddy’ll be back to save us. Save us? Relieve us of our duties. We must obey the tank. It needs our oil.

The tube leading from my forehead grew tired and sore, again. Every night for eight years at eleven PM. It felt as if the only useful ointment available was death. Horrible. Grinding against my skull. The tank was killing me, but it needed our oil. The tubes led there. It sat behind us, apparently. Its noise never stopped. If we ever fell asleep, it woke us up, pinpointed to the exact hundredth of a second. What did it run on? Did it run on our oil? No. It needed our oil, it wasn’t about to waste it, was it?

‘Why does it do what it does? Why? Why is it doing what it’s doing? Our oil-‘

She finished abruptly. Possibly as her neck had finally allowed her to turn, for the first time in eight years, to clap eyes upon the behemoth. She spun back around, and didn’t utter another word for three months. Peace and quiet. The room was never quiet, and always smelt of something. I don’t know what, but always something. The wallpaper showed us happy clowns and elephants and seals on bouncy balls. That was fun, for the first eight days. The next few hurt. The pain of seeing such whimsical amusement and eternal, ungraspable hi-jinks in such a duty-consigned, conscious, yet constricted state became an endless tirade of date-rapes to the cerebellum, forcing out all of my positivity… squeezing out my joy with a definitive ‘pop’, and filling my emptiness with a thick, black, bitumen-based substance called abject misery.

I used to think Daddy wasn’t coming. I used to think a lot of things. The room became everything and nothing, more so the latter. We lived to live. We lived to serve that abominable machine behind us, taking our oil because it needed it. I grew bitter, and hungry. She never stopped asking questions. I could only answer in one way. It hurt too much to say the ‘Y’ word. So I didn’t try. I cherished negativity. I loved it more than her. I never loved her. You couldn’t.

I now had a mission, following her abject silence. Two weeks in, I chose to try and turn my head to view the tank. Pain. I tried again, three weeks later, with a small portion of hope (which I found following two nights in a row where my headaches were non-existent), to carne round and take a glance at the dungeon master and keeper of keys.

No such luck. I sighed. She merely continued to breathe. I hated her now. I hated her to the point that a strange, animalistic feeling within me wanted to tear her down from her chair and… I daren’t say the rest. That had been there a while, to say the very least. It was bad. It was one of the bad things Daddy said was coming.

The hooks in my back began to chafe a little, each of the five pulling a tad on my now flaking, positively dormant skin. The silver often rubbed up against my naked spine, providing cold relief on freezing days. The sun always came, but then, so did the moon. And that stayed the longest. I always thought Daddy’d come when the moon was out. He said he’d come once we’d filled the tank with oil. Said it needed it to keep the world spinning on its axis. We believed him, until the doctor sliced these hooks into our backs. We were stuck, for eight years. It soon became canon for us not wanting to move. The blood in us didn’t flow as freely as it once did. It froze in perpetual horror, in the sweet, yet frequently sick ambience of nothing. Try looking at nothing but pictures of clowns and animals performing for entertainment against their own will for eight years, then say the ‘Y’ word. You can’t.

Daddy said we weren’t alone, and that this wasn’t the only room. There were others, millions, just like this. One day, all our Daddies would come, and we could go out and play again. I hadn’t eaten in eight years. Food. We grew incumbent to never needing it. We became so used to the opportunity of sustenance not being there, that it never killed us. We were immune to starvation and liquid depravation. I don’t know why. We were impossibly gaunt, our throats dryer than Martian deserts… we were dead siblings sitting. Just sitting. Nothing else, just sitting. That’s all.

I stopped trying to see the tank. I thought it best to never try and look, maybe only get a little glance when Daddy came back, if at all. He would. He promised. As soon as the tank no longer needed our oil, we’d be free.

Four more weeks passed. The loneliness wasn’t particularly bothersome after year five. It got better. It started to unnerve me that she was to never talk again, and set me to ponder what the tank actually looked like. I know I said I stopped. I lied. I forgot how to tell lies a long time ago. I tilted my snapping skeleton to the right, thin enough to finally get a glance… that month helped matters greatly in that particular department. My eyes were shrouded in cloudy, clown-ridden cataracts, the circus being my only sensory delight for the good part of a decade. I prised them open at will, catching light at last of the machine that was keeping us captive.

It was horrible.

I couldn’t read the words on it, though it was built right up to the ceiling and into the floor. There was a huge wheel on the front, red and rusted. It was purple, though extremely flaking, in colour. It looked domineering, it had an air of parenting malice about it, an Orwellian overlord… I was sure it grew more malicious the longer I stared into the cracked glass panel above the wording… the wording! I recognised the letters, but not the words. I forgot words a long time ago. There were three words. One started with an A and ended in an E, the other two in P and N, and U and T. The last word… was really short. An anticlimax for that first word, which I’d never heard of in my entire life. Hell, I couldn’t even read it. I’m sure it had a few ‘C’s in it. No matter.

The glass window didn’t show any of our oil, but a foggy, yellow gas, slowly and perpetually billowing up and down the inside of the purple beast… Daddy had lied. He’d lied. He wasn’t coming back. That wasn’t oil! That wasn’t-

We sat in silence. Again. Time moved on, and on the day of her regaining speech, she said the first thing that made me feel empathetic towards her being in the same room as me.

‘Daddy!’

What did she mean? Had she folded, finally after these years and nights of endless preoccupation with absolutely nothing?

No.

Daddy was back. It was morning, and a tall, bearded fellow, who seemed to have cried a fair boulevard’s weight of blood and tears before entering our veritable cage, stood before us.

‘Look at you…’ he sniffed. ‘You’re all… you’re all grown up!’

She giggled at his first words to us in eight years. He was back! Dare I smile? Not yet. I needed and wanted answers, though knew deep down that he wasn’t about to let me have my wedding cake and eat it.

‘C’mon… the tank’s got all your oil. Let’s go home, kids.’

Just like that. No other words, just the ones we needed. He did, however, apologise as our paper-thin bodies carefully yet contentedly slid into the back of his car. That felt nice. That was fun. No more circuses, he promised. He told us a story of how he himself came out of the room thirty years since, then questioning us if we thought he’d turned out okay. I didn’t want to answer. He was here, we were free, and that was all that mattered. The ordeal had finished, and maybe some of the other prisoners were to get their freedom someday. I found hope to wish so. He was fine, he was fun, he was healthy. He had been in the room, too! Wonderful. I smiled, it hurt, though I smiled. I never even questioned what happened in between him being in the room and our joining him on the drive home…. It wasn’t a necessary deed to pursue, I guess. I could learn to love him, and her, in a few years. For now, to merely glance through those blue-tinted windows at an alien speed was enough to satisfy me… to break my thoughts away from clowns, hooks and purple machines…

Thirty years! They go so fast… what is it they say? When you’re having fun, that’s it. Anyway. It’s time we were off. Come on, Son. Once it’s got all your oil, I’ll come back. I promise.