C h r y s a l i s
Hey there! Thanks for coming to check out my short story, Chrysalis! This is a condensed version of the story, sitting at about 2,500words, whereas the full version will be about 6,000 words long, and will be published in my short story collection, "With The Light, The Shadows Also Come. I recently submitted this story into a competition run by The Short Story Project, a platform that hosts over a million readers, and has hundreds of short stories available to be read, so be sure to check them out!Again thanks for coming to check this story out, and I do hope you will enjoy! Don't forget to hit play on the soundtrack :)
Clementine peels litter the floorboards, a half hearted attempt to cleanse the room of the putrid smell that balloons his cheeks, skin stretching like fish bubbles. The room plasters against his shoulders, the bed creaking as he carefully lays on the damp sheets, old cotton resembling brackish sink water; his broken leg shifting uncomfortably in his cast.
He read in the medical book that he keeps under his bed that, when healed, bones that have been broken will heal stronger.
Those words comfort him.
This was why he wrote his name carefully in the front plate of the book.
Matthias.
Son to no man.
He’d heard those words thud heavy from his father’s teeth between gulps of cleansing alcohol, no bother with medical swabs. Matthias liked how they sounded, and scrawled them beside his name.
Son to no man.
He slips his hand between the mattress, removing a worn journal; licks a pencil stub and makes a few brief scrawls. His eyes narrow in the wonky light; rain sleets over his window; smearing the world outside.
Tibia, femur, patella, fibula.
He crosses out fibula with a shaky hand, a subtle smile crossing his face as he studies his cast. He’d made it himself, like he did for every bone he broke - ground calcined gypsum that he’d milled down and poured water over it, making it calcium sulfate. Encased his lower limb in fiberglass, wrapped plaster of Paris round the splinter; hands chalky and flour like powder dusted his palms.
He ignores his chafing skin, ankle swelling under the cast as he lies down, the scent of rubbing alcohol and clementine oil drumming his skull and he fades, anesthesia buzzes through his head.
We do not know how long he sleeps for.
The bird came to him in the cloves of the moonlight, ghost pearl broken open from a rusted clamshell, and tapped on the window. Three sharp raps, akin to the tinkle of a dull cowbell, was what made Matthias start awake in the pooled moon, bed sheets lassoing his calves as he awoke.
The first thing he did was name the bird.
“Starlight.”
The word drifted from him like a prayer, and the bird, while not a god, at least, not in this world, answered him.
“There is something you must see, medicine boy.”
The floor had something to add to the conversation, it seemed, giving an unholy creak as Matthias crossed the floor, his feet looking as if they were carved from wood themselves, aged tree rings around his toes and ankles like permanent mandela's that decorated him like a war hero, which, in a sense, he was.
The window shook in the wind, glass like shimmering clear candy that if you dared to plaster your tongue against it, you might find that it indeed did taste sweet.
Witches houses often did.
Starlight, the god bird, or simply a sparrow, depending on whose version of the story we deem myth or creation, flew in between the crack of the two windows, and perched on the iron bed frame, looking almost ornamental for a moment.
Perhaps that’s what the gods were. Simply ornaments to decorate the celestia with.
Starlight nestled among the bedsheets, her head tunneling through a frayed tear in the linen, her wings pinioned against the mattress.
“You don’t want to get sick, now do you?”
His mother’s voice had tilted and swayed like sour honey coating the inside of a glass bottle, hand forked through his blunt hair as she yanked his head back and forced the cold spoon between his lips, choking him on her latest infusion.
“You’ll be well now.”
Her voice was a rasp as she let the spoon fall from her fingers after she’d siphoned the entire bottle of it down his throat, his stomach swimming with cold fluid, texture like fish brine.
"Don’t be sick," she told him.
The medicine had tsunnamied out of him several hours later, the back of his throat sour and alkaline, hands cupped the toilet basin, knees stiff against cold tiles as he wretched his mother’s medicine.
He would never be well.
“Are you ready to see yet, Bonebreaker?”
His eyes opened, clouded, limbs milky and limber as they moved from bed to floor, eyes glazed over like seaglass. At three weeks pregnant, the dosage had been half a cap a day, and then after a month it had been two caps a day. First it had been liquid and then pills the size you would feed to a horse, and she’d began to vomit up the decadent truffles and marinated deer meat; and even in the womb, he had begun to rot.
He came into the world already dead.
“What do you have to show me?”
Starlight lingered at his feet for a moment, wings brushed his neck like parched grass, a sacred hush as she carved out the words in his ear.
“Your Reckoning.”
Matthias was sure that he had received his reckoning when he was five and his father had broken his arm, soothing him afterwards as he sat him in the plush doctors chair, applied plaster to his arm, reverse sheep shearing.
But who was he to argue with the words of a bird that could very well be a god?
“You’re helping me become a better doctor, Matthias. Don’t you want to help me?”
Even then, the rot had begun to spread.
Deep fungal twists and turns that tunneled in his skin and his throat, bacterium sealing his blood in an uncomfortable vacuum, protea that swelled and pulsated in hums and lulls behind his eyes.
Yes, it had taken root.
Matthias doubted his father owned a set of pliers large enough to pull it all out.
Starlight led him down the fog soaked highway, low roads abandoned and slick with rain, the chalky moon cupped in the sky. Matthias often thought that animals that were too scared to live on land had fled to the sky, that the clouds were long forgotten behemoths with overgrown, matted fur that collected the pollution and toxic waste from the mist, and of course, after a while, when the weight was too much for them, must be wrung out.
The cycle was endless.
Much like washing clothes. They would become dirty, and be cleaned, only to become filthy once more.
Rinse and repeat.
Starlight hopped alongside him, occasionally sheltering under his collar or up his sleeve, feathers rustling like dust against his skin. He thought that funny, a god taking shelter with a human.
He should like to take shelter.
His prayer, or request, he didn’t quite know which, was answered in the next footfall, as they made a sharp turn in the road, heel scraping mud as they trudged up a hill, tracks from long gone cars dented the dirt and grass, stalks of chaffed reeds poking up sluggishly, winding around Matthias’s ankles like tapeworms.
He stopped at the crescendo of the hill, Starlight’s sodden feathers collared around his neck, her head nestled inside his empty collarbones, and he stared through the mist, shelter before him.
Hulked bricks rose up from the earth, busted glass windows fogged over, clumps of reeds spewed out of ancient chimneys that stood dead.
The smell of matted fur blew through the air towards him, rain pressing tightly against his skin like shrunken bullhide; and Starlight whispered in his ear.
“Go. It is waiting.”
Wood threatened to splinter his skin as he shoved the door open, plaster loosening on his clothes and coating him in scabbed paint, a cough shuttling from his throat as he shouldered the door again, a grating howl ringing out against the rain; and the door finally opened, straining against the concrete floor.
This place had once been alive.
Starlight clung to the edge of his fingers, fisted under his sleeve, her eyes regarded him softly, her beak softer than moth wings as pecked his hand tenderly, more like blessing than curse, and spoke again.
“Quickly, now. You must see.”
His mother swallowed capfuls of cyanide along with toasted hazelnut truffles and braised deer meat when Matthias nestled in her womb, and when he hooked his hand like a shepherds crook around his mother's cervix in the doctor's room, he’d been as pale as bluebirds eggs.
They never found out why.
She knew.
She knew.
The warehouse felt like a submarine, buried at the bottom of a sandbank, pressure weighing on him as he finally saw.
It was a cocoon.
Except, swollen. Once hatched, its wings would be able to make a small boat set sail, and Matthias simply stared at it, his throat seizing up; lungs cracked.
It was as if some maiden had spun goat hair and dove feathers on a spindle and wrapped it round herself, encasing herself in a ghostly sort of chamber, determined to nurse herself into the afterlife.
His face and hair was still damp with the rain when he took a step forward, eyes glued to the chamber hanging from the rafters.
“What is this?”
The words fell from him in a confused hush, vocal chords whiplashing against each other as it held him closer still.
Starlight leaned towards him from her nest, which was to say, from under his sodden jacket, words the sound of a muffled hurricane in his ear.
“You know the answer to that.”
He decided to leave a burnt offering under the cocoon. It reminded him more of an angel, however, and he wasn’t quite sure of the rules for leaving offerings for angels, since he was well aware of the lambs and oxen that gods usually demanded.
Angels were softer, required nectar instead of blood, sweet herbs instead of bitter wormwood.
Perhaps that is why they were so good for being guardians. Imagine having a personal god for a guardian.
Terrifying rather than comforting.
This is why Matthias was very careful about what he left for the offering.
He did not want to burn.
He went back the next day to find the offering gone.
A smile settled on his lips, and he pulled the sacrifice out of the sack that still bore the faded label that read “Billy Brown’s Bulbous Potatoes.”
It wasn’t an offering of potatoes, of course. He had never really liked them much, since his mother usually mixed arsenic in with them. The creamy spoonfuls of sour cream and crumbled feta masked the taste of arsenic rather well, his mother had found, and after dinner she would serve the her latest antidote for arsenic, which last time had been cracked pomegranate seeds, burnt rosemary, chamomile leaves and a cap of peppermint oil.
It didn’t work, of course.
They never did.
The cocoon swayed from the rafters, a scent much like rotting wildflowers perfumed the air around him, and Matthias placed the carved bird under the cocoon and pulled out his tinder box, licking the flint and sending the bird up in flames.
If you had privy to the inside of Matthias’s mind at that moment, which looked much rather like a spider web, you would have seen that rather than him being the spider to his own web, he was the fly.
He didn’t know who the spider was, even as he was wrapped for burial.
Funeral rites were strange things.
The buttercups Matthias had planted last winter bloomed the day he and Starlight returned to the warehouse. He returned almost every evening for weeks on end, to bring an offering to it, or to simply watch it sway from the rafters. Every offering he bought vanished when he went back the day after, and it made the poison easier to swallow, the broken bones easier to bear. Matthias’s father had broken his ankle, his knee, and his tibia. He tried to break his fibula as well, but the medicine book wasn’t lying when it said that broken bones heal stronger.
The cocoon was convulsing when Matthias arrived, breathless, frost locked on his lips and wind trapped in his lungs as he watched the milky sac split and fracture.
Wings first, monarch and lofty, fluid coating them amniotically, sail like as they whiplashed back and forth in the air; and Matthias watched with the godbird.
Her eyes were glued shut, wings erupting waterfall like from her back, as if she were drowning in mid air and no ship would come along to save her, but she must drag herself to shore.
Matthias did not know this.
She struggled, her wings beating against the remains of her cocoon, her hair tangled like fishnets around her pale face, half painted and murky, elbows pinioned to her sides by her wings.
It was then that Matthias began to tear at the cocoon, milky strands of web bandaging themselves around his arms and chest as he tore them away from the girl, her hair spilled like a firestorm down her back, wings falling limp, fluid soaking her wings, sputtering, they seemed.
She tumbled from the cocoon, her chest heaving from exertion; weak gasps rattling in her throat.
Matthias keeled over, her hair pooling in his lap, fingers spangled like dying flower stems, her lips pinched blue; eyes fluttering against needle thin cheeks.
“I don’t understand,” Matthias whispered, his breath turning sour in his mouth, stomach sick with old medicine.
He reached for her wings, hands trembling as he ghosted his fingers over outstretched wings like torn sheets that blanketed the ground, and she whimpered; shaking her head as she stared glassy eyed at him.
Matthias flinched, his throat cavernous as the air was sucked downwards out of him, hollow skull that he wished to fill with water so that he might drink to soothe himself.
Why should you drink when she lays dying?
Lap not from our river, Bonebreaker.
He leant closer, his hands cupped under her neck, skin that seemed to ripple as he touched it.
“How can I save you?”
She opened her eyes, milky pale, pupil absent as she cradled his jaw, fingers languid and searching like a blind insect, and leant up to whisper in his ears.
“Stop drinking poison.”
Matthias leant out of the top galley window in the centre of a city we dare not name, the bird in a cage next to him, his eyes warm, wind filling his cheeks.
He had not tasted medicine in three months, and his arm had healed six months ago.
He’d slipped out of his boxroom at quarter past midnight, slunk past the sorrowful chimney and the candy glass window, ignoring the stench of medicinal alcohol coming from his father’s study, and with the bird fluttering at his shoulder, he had vanished. He left the medicine book behind.
He followed her instructions.
And so later that night, when he heard the faintest scratching at the window, and opened it; a monarch butterfly perched on his windowsill, wings gently opening and closing in the dusty night air, he smiled.
Weep no more, medicine boy.
Weep no more.
Thanks so much for reading my short story! I truly hoped you enjoyed it, and if you have any questions or feedback for me, I'd be more than happy to listen!
Much love, Bella.
We are divine creatures that marvel at the stars, when it should be the stars that marvel at us.