Jagged Glass Ballet

By Brendan Detzner

43

They walked around the world a few times, then crawled down a ladder to the next floor. There was very little music that day- Dragon could only hear one group warming up. There was a horn and a piano. The band began to play.

The horn floated a few feet off the ground, not into the sky, but still somewhere it hadn't always been, somewhere it deserved to be looked at and wondered about. The piano hopped in and made itself comfortable, and the whole thing just sort of spun, just out of reach, flawed and strange and pretty. Somehow Dragon and Scraps began to talk again, and the topic changed to Mike.

Scraps only halfway knew what to say. "He's alright, and he was fun to hang out with, but it's like I said, you have to go with the flow." She paused for a second. "Except that's not quite right. It's not what I was talking about before, it's just that..." She was getting frustrated. She stopped for a second and calmed down before she continued. "It's just that Mike doesn't know anything! He thinks and he talks and he smiles and he looks good, but he doesn't know! And…" She looked up, like she had been caught someplace she wasn't supposed to be. "I'm sorry, this is stupid..."

"No, wait!" Dragon was desperate. He looked into her eyes again but the thing he needed to see was going away. "Keep talking, please keep talking!"

Scraps took a deep breath. "Well, it's just that... Do you ever wonder why we're here, why any of this should be? You know, where, why, how, all that stuff."

By now they had walked through two complete floors of the world. They still hadn't found Crazy.

Dragon looked at Scraps again. "What about if?"

Scraps recoiled. "Huh?"

"Look, Scraps, has anything ever happened that made it seem like none of this is what is, really, like anything you've ever done is just moving in circles?" He paused. "Like life doesn't make any sense?"

They looked at each other's eyes again. Dragon looked straight to the center of Scraps eyes and saw a dark space there, a spot so dark that even the blacksuits would've stood out, where nothing could hide.

They stopped talking and just kept walking together. They walked for hours.