A series of poems + prose conjured from the minds of J. Evan Rogers + Bailey Gaus
“Bank balance, balance beam, beam double-you,” reverberated off the hollowed-out hospital walls, set forth from the squeaky larynx of the Underaged Alchemist. “This cannot possibly be the ‘easier path’ that ass-backward weirdo loitering in that strange alley spoke of,” he said to no one but himself as he explored every corner, swept every surface of the burnt-out building with a flashlight he had been using steadily for some hours now.
Double-YOU, eh? Hmm… where the hell are Hazel ’n Jade when you need ’em? He did not have the thought as much as the thought had him. It pierced him with its poignancy—this told him he was on the right track: a click of the mind, a hand in a glove, a key in a lock. Those two would make some sense of this, surely.
…and don’t call me Shirley! moaned either into or out of the back-left (forthright?) untouched underside of his brain, generations of hidden knowledge gleaming off its spongy surface in the flittering shadow dance of the ever-circling, horizon-riding, sweltering belt buckle of a sun. If only any of that light reached outside his skull. Gray matter, matter-of-fact, fact or fiction? He had no clue.
They’d at least have a joke to tell, even if it was only conceived to conceal the other’s pain, the roots of the Teenage Sorcerer’s mind sprouted out into branches, back to Jade ’n Hazel, Some levity at sea level to lift falling stone for but a moment while we somersault to safety off the smooth edge of a jagged cliff, it conjured blooming buds and allowed them to blossom whilst simultaneously withering into ash, An argument betwixt themselves over the origin of hair-dye, every woman who lost her life for it, and why that was somehow still important—no, more important—when they could change their entire aura at the snap of their thin, flinty fingers.
…yet, from time-to-time—one! Jade, and, one! Hazel—stepping out from the privacy of which performing such spells requires, finds her counterpart sporting a style and look identical to herself… Oh!—how embarrassing! The inescapable tragedies of being born incantationally well-endowed fraternal female twins!
This was one of those times, and as they materialized at opposite ends of the ophthalmology wing in the Murmuring Infirmary where the Young Apothecary strode, Hazel’s contagious smile dropped to a scowl, Jade’s face held its typical inscrutable beauty, and they both vanished before the enthusiastic lad even had a chance to check his eyes.
Jade was already putzing around her skyrise cottage. Hazel, safely lost within her favorite forest where all the best berries reside. They might as well have been light-years away as far as hearing the Youthful Mystic’s pleas was concerned. He may as well have been a scrapped idea of a vacated childhood dream—the untethered atmospheric space junk of a failed technocratic regime, hurtling through the ice-cold cosmos in the vast, pitch-black, unending darkness.
There was no way he could tackle these puzzles without the help of the Promiscuous Prodigy. If only he could recall that then.
His flashlight went out. He prodded on blindly, unable to check the maps drawn on his wrists he had already forgotten were there.
Multiple griping utterances came and went every which way—in, out, through, and around his head—like a chorus of aging cacti caught in Scarlet’s Ebb, but the one that lingered longest croaked, You should have seen it when we were kids—boy! oh, boy! lemme tell ya… and on and on and on as he scrambled to find a way out.