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God lied. The devil is not just my shadow. Her hands, my hands, don't attach with the logic of forearm-elbow-upper arm-shoulder, but they are connected to me by more than a trick of the light. I can feel them, and I can feel with them.
I want to feel my friends with them. The devil knows us all, even if there isn't really an us right now. I can see the light under Venus's skin, warmer and gentler than the antiseptic light of God glaring out from the coils of her radio. I can hear the pit in Neptune's stomach sloshing with something thick and decadent and so very unlike the crystalline holy water that flows from her radio's edge.
Their hands that aren't holding the radios hold each other, clinging together against the unfairness of everything. I love them and also kind of hate them for it, just like I always expected I would feel at the end. The surprise is how equally I love them, and how equally that makes me hate them. When groups were first assigned, I thought I knew how this was going to go: Inez, Estelle, and fucking Garcin. But that would have been easier, and of course we never get to have anything be easy.
Venus's limbs are like sheath-bound blood feathers. I want to scratch them open and stroke the downy softness beneath. Neptune is a calcification-strangled fountain spouting trickles of defiance. I want to shove a hand down her throat and dip my fingers in her source.
If I can hurt them even a little, then maybe I can survive this. They are going to say that it shouldn't have been me, that it wasn't really me, that I only took the fall to protect them. If I leave marks that say otherwise, then maybe I won't disappear.
I reach out with all of me at once. My hands are heavy enough to be ungainly, but somehow they are not quite solid, maybe not even properly liquid. They are the same stuff as the moist, skin-clinging breath of the deep woods. Their tangled mass fills the cabin so completely that splinters dig into my knuckles as I warp the walls around me, yet my own fog-like flesh warps around the even less substantial bubble of static from the radios. Never before have I felt so big, and never before have I been so weak.
The light from Venus's radio wraps around my wrists and squeezes tighter than I was ever able to bring myself to twist the band on my own. "Sorry!" Venus says when I cry out. "You aren't going to die, though. I promise." She's the one who said she would rather be hurt than embarrassed, the one who kept insisting she didn't care about getting beaten until I grabbed her neck and cut off the flow of words to her mouth. Now she's trying to tell me what I should think is the worst possible thing.
High-pressure jets of water strike the hands that Venus can't reach, drilling into my palms and bending back my fingers. "You'll be okay someday," Neptune tells me, her voice eerily soft and subdued. "It'll all grow back sooner or later." The well of poison at her core is inexhaustible, always threatening to choke her no matter how much she coughs up. Even so, she spits in the face of anyone she thinks might be suggesting an antidote. All this time, did she never really believe that my heart matches her own?
The coils of light contract, making my hands throb as the bonds dig into my wrists and draw vaporous plumes of blood. The water jets broaden and merge into a stream that slams me back against the wall and pins me there, stripping me apart in slivers when I struggle to push forward against it, crushing me when I try to stop struggling. Neptune and Venus lace their fingers together and hold so tight that they dig their nails into the backs of each other's trembling hands.
Half the pain vanishes the instant the coils snap closed and lop off the hands they bound. The rest of it fades gradually as the stream’s currents scrub me down into nothingness.
I am small again, even smaller than I remember being. It takes me a moment to realize that I've fallen to the floor. I look up and try to meet Venus's eyes, but my vision blurs. I think Neptune is saying something to me, but her words are drowned out by the ringing in my ears.
When camp ends, I will never touch either of them again. If I weren't the devil, one or the other of them might at least have called on occasion, maybe written a few letters before losing interest. Now they can't risk even that.
If the hands ever grow back, it will be someone else breaking them off next time.
The smoke hits me harder than it has since the first week of camp, when I hadn't gotten used to it yet and everything already sucked but nothing was ending. It even kind of seemed like something might be beginning.
("Please tell me someone here knows a campfire song that is not about Jesus." Perched on a rock that gave her maybe a foot and a half of height over the rest of us, Neptune spoke with the air of an enthroned queen demanding entertainment.
"Um," Venus said, and then suddenly burst out singing, "Black socks! They never get dirty! The longer you wear them, the blacker they get! Black socks! Someday I may change them! My heart says to try it but maybe not yet, not yet, not yet!"
We took a moment of silence to come to terms with the fact that that just happened.
"Oh my god," Neptune groaned. "That's the whole thing, isn't it? You just repeat it forever until your voice gives out or someone clobbers you hard enough to make you stop. Forget I said anything. All campfire songs are objectively terrible, even the non-Jesus-y ones."
"Some of them change when you repeat them!" Jupiter said. "Oh the horse went around with his foot off the—"
"No, fuck you, I know that one! Cutting things off until there's nothing left isn't changing. It just means I get to hear less and less of your dulcet voice that is the only reason any of this gross nonsense we have to sing is even a little worthwhile."
"You really like my voice that much?" Jupiter asked.
"I wonder how she'd react to you singing the stupid socks song," Venus mused.
"Don't you dare," said Neptune, but with a smile that said she actually wanted to hear it.
"I am going to sing until you clobber me hard enough to make me stop," Jupiter declared.
"I'll help!" Venus added. We didn't ask whether he meant with the singing or the supposed eventual clobbering, because we could already guess he meant both.
So that was what we did. Back then when it happened, it didn't symbolize anything.)
The air is full of incense and static. Between the two of them, I can't see or hear anything, so I lie still on what I hope is some sort of actual floor and not just a solid cloud of smoke. I know if I flail around, I'll probably touch and ruin something.
I don't know where I am or how I got here, but there isn't much point in wondering. I know what I was supposed to be doing last night, so it's a safe bet that I didn't try hard enough. Eventually someone will fill me in on all the mortifying details of how I fucked up this time, whether or not I want to hear them.
The smoke is as dry and crackly as crumbling bones. It crowds out the summer mugginess of the woods, sandpapers my throat, and burns all the way down to the bottom of my chest. I breathe as deep as I can and don't attempt to lift my head above it. Someone must have put me here because it's good for me. Besides, I'm actually kind of relieved that my nose is seared and clogged to the point of uselessness. It spares me from having to smell the camp's horrible incense blend.
Church wood and day lilies and old, used up wire. And the remains of monsters of the week. This week, I guess that means the parts of me I don't have anymore.