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Mr. Grey opened the door to his apartment in the Seven Gardens workers’ prison. A lizardskin-patterned letter, an invitation, lay mute and dull just inside the door. The letter had been crumpled when forced beneath the jam. Mr. Grey picked it up and looked closer. He turned 50 percent of his mind to closing, bolting, and keylocking the door. But the same door was unceremoniously opened against his hand with a hard shove.
The prisonkeeper pushed her way past Mr. Grey with only the slightest nod. She wore a thin, pine-washed robe, and carried a sootdark broom and a bucket of sudsy acid inside with her. These were the tradecraft tools for cleaners of prison apartments.
Mr. Grey closed the door behind the prisonkeeper. He didn’t lock or bolt it, thinking she would take that awkwardly. He gave her a half-hearted wave, but she was already busy rooting the dust from between the floor brick seams with violent shoves of her broom. Mr. Grey didn’t try a second hello. Experience told him it would fail. The prisonkeeper was deaf to Mr. Grey. She was deaf to the whole general population of the workers’ prison. In short, she was deaf.
Knowing that the prisonkeeper would clean his apartment most efficiently without his getting involved, Mr. Grey stayed as out-of-her-way as possible. He edged along the wall to the writing desk in the corner of his cell. He began sorting the letter and other work documents tucked into his robe pockets into a small, neat stack on the hard metal surface.
His hands hadn’t sorted a quarter of the parchments onto the austere desk, however, when the prisonkeeper swooped over to dust that same surface.
Mr. Grey wore a face of slate as he stepped aside to give her the space. Any normal laborer might have withered under Mr. Grey’s expression despite his conceding withdrawal. The prisonkeeper only continued dusting. She did not wither. Firstly, because her business was cleaning other people’s messes, a career for those of only the strongest backbones. Secondly, because she fixed her eyes on the desk when she swooped in, and didn’t so much as glance at Mr. Grey.
The diminutive, sparsely-furnished, one-room cell offered no shelter from the whirlwind prisonkeeper. Mr. Grey looked for safe harbor on the three-legged metal stool, which stood in the corner by a three-legged round table, and a four-legged old bookcase. No sooner had he sat himself stiffly into the nook than the deaf woman scented his trail. She assaulted his refuge with cleaning bucket and acid. Mr. Grey fled to a different seat; a bean sack hammock with dry gorse padding poking through rips in the cloth. The prisonkeeper tornado pursued him from that sanctum too. She swept at the loose gorse fallen to the floor, whipping more dust into a sneeze-making cloud than into her pan. Mr. Grey at last retreated to the small, barred window set in the incorrigibly sooty bricks of the exterior facing wall. No furniture sat by the window for the prisonkeeper to attack. Mr. Grey found relative, out-of-the-way safety.
While the cleaning persisted in a whirl through the small space behind him, Mr. Grey cooled his fingers against the metal rods securing his window from intruders. He poked his face between the bars.
The thin layer of glass separating Mr. Grey’s stone head from the rest of Starharbor did nothing to hinder the outside temperature from coming inside. The air felt crispy against his cheeks. The cold face of Mr. Grey reflected the bitter weather of the city.
Beyond the glass and bars, a perpetual lichyard chill suffused every beholdable feature. Frost spread in blooming, bleachy patches across canals of gloomy jelly, like hairy mold growing over rotten piles of fruit. Spikes of icicles with the opacity of drool bared their fangs in every doorway and window, and dangled threateningly from the bent gutters of the houses. The classes of citizens Mr. Grey had seen through the dragon tram’s window made a second showing now through the glass. Wolf gangs, city bouncers and their clattering carriages and blaring bugles, stoop-dwellers, finders, wheelmen; all traversed the cold city street beneath Mr. Grey’s window.
Mr. Grey turned. He watched the prisonkeeper light a pine mulch censer. It did its job, thrashing the rotten-meat smell of the street which had sidled through the seams in the windows and walls. The prisonkeeper moved to Mr. Grey’s glassware cabinet. She began disorganizing its contents as she scrubbed them with hissing acid.
Mr. Grey had seen this prisonkeeper’s show too many times to count. He turned back to the window view in search of distraction.
Even the workers’ prisons’ greatest detractors - if the word ‘great’ can even be used in the same sentence as such persons - must have admitted that the establishments fulfilled their purpose. The workers’ prisons separated the workers within from the distractions without. The barred, bricked, tepid blocks of cells advertised themselves: bastions of security and opulence! Stalwart cliffs, standing against the crashing tides of pale-faced horrors scurrying through the common streets! A laborer with a mind bent to work and a careful eye on her finances could purchase a safe cell in the workers’ prison. The residence even came with cleaning and vittles services wrapped into the bargain.
Mr. Grey flinched at a sudden explosive bang from behind. He turned from the window reflections to see his cell door going through a final, convulsive shudder. The prisonkeeper had left without ceremony and slammed the door on the way out. Mr. Grey crossed the room with striding, measured steps. He bolted and keylocked the door. He turned back and looked over the small and empty space.
Then a change seemed to slink across the room. Partly it was an unworldly cold settling down in the small box, and a kind of sacred stillness too. Like a tomb. The little censer etching pine-scent into the room’s brick bones poured forth low light in a steady stream instead of with flickering undulations. A laminar glow, like the soulless shine in the marble eyes of a taxidermied animal. Every shadow lay perfectly unmoving against the room’s surfaces, as though painted. The parchments Mr. Grey had begun organizing had been scattered by the prisonkeeper. The documents lay like giant flakes of ash in a massacred sprawl over the shiny iron surface of his desk. Even Mr. Grey himself stood with such unflinching stiffness, and such an unblinking stare, for such a long, long, long stretch of moments, that the stateliest not-existing corpse in the marblest of coffins could not have worn a less-disturbed aspect.
It seemed to Mr. Grey that, in this state, the room took on its truest form. As though his apartment itself was happiest when it most closely resembled a mausoleum. This was the day’s conclusion for which Mr. Grey had striven. He’d at last vanquished all diurnal commotion. Mr. Grey was finally safe. Finally beyond the city’s other occupants. Finally happy.
Was Mr. Grey safe, though? Or had he found only ephemeral refuge from the city’s notice? The grey eyes twitched to the direction of the window. That tiny flicker of motion disturbed the stable state of the room, as the movement of an existenceless man’s eyes would disturb the serenity of a real coffin. The cell shuddered convulsively, perhaps caused by a passing dragon-tram? Mr. Grey couldn’t say. His angle from the bolted door left the street out of sight. But even with the fastened door at his back and the window under his watchful eye, was Mr. Grey safe? Not from those siphoning influences which lorded over Starharbor. Those powers still danced in shadow on the building wall across the street from the prison. Mr. Grey saw them through the bars and the glass. The flames of the wheelhouses vomited their dancing lights on the bleak bricks of that view. The noises of the barking wolf gangs and the advertisements of the Finders for Hire thumped just beyond his locked door. The moment Mr. Grey stepped from his warded cell, the rosy and beguiling front face of Starharbor would set upon him in full force, offering a sickly-sweet smile and a promise of fortune. Mr. Grey’s tiny, cellular hollow in its abstract corner of a workers’-prison was no safe home, only short shelter in the midst of night.
And with that consideration, was Mr. Grey beyond the Starharbor citizenry’s clench? His eyes twitched to the lizardskin missive, nestled on his desk in a bed of ash-flake work parchments. The room shook with rage at the grey eyes’ flicker to the letter. That letter certified the maintained influence of those other city habitants in Mr. Grey’s existence, though he might array an armada of bolts and bricks between them and himself. Some second-hand acquaintance might, at any moment, break the room’s lull by pounding a fist, or a foot, or a particularly solid head against his cell door. None of which even touches another theory; that Mr. Grey was more alike those other residents than he might wish. Even in this domicile of distinction, where men and women worked themselves above the moral corruptions paling the stricken street masses, the prisoners found only temporary shelter. Mr. Grey never sacrificed his treasure on the wedges of the wheelhouses. He never choked his frustration away with bitter, tavern beer medicine. And yet the subtle workings of Starharbor burrowed into the unconscious of every citizen, even one as upright as Mr. Grey. The flashing flamelights made the only bright spots on the brick wall beyond the cell window. Each day the promise of those lights sucked some new worker in the prison through the door of a wheelhouse. Those houses first drained the workers of their treasure, then their vitality. Every chipped and chiseled soul in Starharbor shared the universal destiny of bloodless, hollow faced poverty; fitted in the fabrics of orphans and widows. One by one the workers’ prison inmates adopted a veneer of pale and gloom, turning into half-existing reflections of Starharbor itself. Mr. Grey lived in the exact same cell as every other worker. In his mien, he looked half-drained already, to the unfamiliar eye.
These reflections germinated in Mr. Grey’s mind in the close, still room. Mr. Grey’s eyes jumped about for some distraction from them, and the room recoiled at each move of those wandering grey orbs.
Was that gorgon’s gaze - that pair of wandering orbs with its panic gossamer - a happy one? A monstrous, many-many-headed question. The eyes sprung on the four-legged bookcase and its books bound in earthy leather. The room gnashed its teeth, hating the eyes. The old tomes questioned the eyes; did they please Mr. Grey? The eyes moved to a fiddle, a luthier’s work of real wood, gathering dust on a stand in the corner. The room roiled and spun around the dancing eyes. The fiddle begged Mr. Grey to approach, to wipe that layer of dust. The fiddle promised Mr. Grey he wouldn't regret it; he'd enjoy performing a small enchantment. The fiddle didn’t know Mr. Grey had emptied his pockets for a stoop dweller. He had no treasure left to enchant with.
The eyes wrestled with the room's pervasive, enraged, serene pall. There shone a gleam of open distress in those grey orbs now, in the heat of their battle with the room. How could Mr. Grey be unhappy? How, when he'd finally found that hard-striven conclusion of the day? Had he not fought through ‘Ms. Maysey’s and ‘Bugwitch’s to find this exact stillness, this precise isolation, in this very room? What imagined rumble did those eyes confront in that cold, still prison cell?
In a word, Mr. Grey was bored.
Bored. Even grey men who sit very still know the feeling. Bored; the one flavor of mental agony less palatable to Mr. Grey in that moment than a second scene with Jodee Coats.
His face ignored the books on the shelf by the three-legged stool. His eyes passed over the dusty fiddle. Should he once more count and name the bricks in the wall? What else was there to engage Mr. Grey?
Among the ashes on the desk, there was the lizardskin invitation.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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"If only I could get away from everything and isolate myself, I'd be so much more productive."
I've heard some flavor of this many times over my life. It's easy to think that way when the things you want and need to do compete against each other regularly, but such is the insidious madness of boredom - it's forgotten once its gone, and only when it returns do we realize how truly insufferable it is.