D: L&L - Part 23 | Tin Man: Hollow

Light warms on my steel skin like a man twisting his hands by a fire. I stagger on because I’m not allowed to tire, I warm to the fire, I turn my face to the sun and because I cannot stop I chop.

When she carried me my blood soaked her hair. Her hair like hay in the sunshine, soaked, red, deep dark heavy against her arms. She carried my parts. My parts are his parts now, she lays her head on a body with my echoing beating heart.

And there it is. Kiamo Ko. When I was here last, with the others, we knelt and hid in the hills before the fortress. We watched the guards. We watched the guards march back and forth, back and forth, as I worried and the Lion quivered and the Scarecrow jittered, watching, swearing we’d make it through. And Dorothy, sweet Dorothy, oh how I loved her then. Before she left us to this, left us dying, broken, empty inside. Hollow.

But now, as I stagger forth, I lift my eyes to the sky in a deep sense of silence. Where there were once guards, there is nothing; there are rocks; there is the deep sense of silence in her eyes as I lay dying, my blood on her mouth, my own limbs scattered like birdseed among the trees. She gathered me. She gathered me and carried me away, but it was too late to be stitched. To be stitched like the scarecrow, his material worn and new and bird-pecked. He rushed forward. He donned the uniforms of the guards, pressing their pants and hats into our hands. And he said he had no brains.

He was so brave. He was so smart. The Lion followed us blindly, listening, obeying, not thinking what could happen. And he said he wasn’t brave.

But me – I had no heart. I pretended and prayed and worried and thought – I watched the rain fall from the clouds and knew it would be a better fate. And then the Wizard floated away. And then she disappeared. And all I had left was a fucking ticking clock for a heart attached by a red ribbon.

It was only on the day that I made my first kill, just before the end of it all – the rust and the ruin – that I felt my heart beat. But now Jumbly’s gone, and I know not how to keep that heart beating.

His little flower hands. His yellow trusting eyes. All gone. Because of a bar, and a whore, and the return of the one who started it all.

“Fuck you, Dot,” I say, and climb over the last rock before crossing the bridge over the moat to Kiamo Ko. The castle, the fortress, the symbol of… what… what is that smell?

I push open the door, and it’s heavier than I thought. With closed eyes, I push my head inside.