Blue Devil

“All of this stolen jewelry in your possession and you can’t produce a simple necklace,” the voice vibrated front he bottom of the plastic cup on the single counter table. “I feel sorry for you sometimes, blacksmith.”

‘It’s not stolen, the dead don’t own anything.” The blacksmith spoke up for himself. He stood over a metal dish on his bed with two remaining cotton balls in it. “Then you must be awfully poor.” The broken old television spoke from its speakers.

The blacksmith’s back cracked as he shifted his tired feet to turn to face his sizable underground bunker. His knees, too, popped with the sound of old neglect groaning. His thin skin, stretched tight over his bones, began to ache constantly under the tension and stress, pulsating with the fear of rapidly wasting his body away for nothing. “Look at you. What do you run yourself ragged for?” The dark crack in the floor taunted.

“He’s looking for answers,” The plastic cup responded. “He’s got to find his answers. It’s in his nature to find answers. He used to be a scientist, after all.”

“No, no,” the tv chimed in. “He wasn’t a scientist. He was an actor.”

“I’ve heard he was other things, though,” the floor crack said. “A politician. A really terrible politician. Haven’t you all heard?”

The objects’ voices faded into the dim and dull as the blacksmith picked up the last failed locket he’d crafted. “Blacksmith,” He grunted in his gruff, dehydrated tone. “I was a blacksmith.”

“You are a blacksmith now, in this life,” the old tv told the room. “In life after the food ran out. Life after the heat took humanity over.”

“My only life is this.”

“IThen why do you make the lockets?”

The blacksmith began walking over his piles of scrap metal and abandoned jewelry toward the other side of the bunker. He bit his lip as he hobbled over mounds of metal, grunting and holding his arm over his torso. “He’s sick,” The cup said woefully. “Look at him.”

“I forge the lockets so that I can feel it again,” The blacksmith found the strength to respond to the crack as he decided to take a break from his painful journey to the other side. “I want to get that feeling back. That unstoppable feeling…” He struggled to even describe it these days. “I”m chasing something that I know is worthwhile.” He grumbled.

“You don’t remember anymore.” the tv said without much opposition.

The blacksmith closed his eyes and shook his head in doubt. He was crumbling underneath the weight of the deserted world above him. With each breath he took, the past was carried out of his mind and into the heavy atmosphere around him, perhaps slipped down the talking crack in the floor or clogged in the speakers of the equally vocal television. Memories must have been jammed into every corner of this cluttered bunker--maybe even the memory of how it got so cluttered lay between layers of scrap. He thought of the crushing gravity that seemed to constantly surround him, its negative influence and gravitational pull, and wondered if it were those hiding memories eating away at his mind.

The lockets declined in quality over the years, mostly becoming masses of desperation and confusion. By now, they looked like nothing but lumps of metal to him. The blacksmith resembled these lumps of scrap in a number of ways.

Still, though, the blacksmith believed faithfully that if he could possess even a copy of that locket it would free him from his lasting misery and suffering. The behemoth of time spanning his mind, biting memories into pieces as it wreaked havoc, would let him forget all but this necklace.

“You’re not doing well, blacksmith,” the television beckoned. “You look as if you died long ago. Did you?”

The blacksmith realized he lay completely on the floor now. His eyes felt as though they were weighed with layers and layers of crust and exhaustion and his bones felt as though they were made of steel. “Maybe…” He said, his voice stripped of any moisture. “Maybe I am already dead.”

“And what of the locket?” The cup echoed.

“The locket is my curse,” The blacksmith shook his head. “It must be. Look at me, a withering old fool talking to ghosts of my mind. It controls and commands me. Perhaps I was a horrible man before the crisis...perhaps I deserve to be cursed.” He turned his head to look at an adjacent pile of failed lockets and felt as though they were staring back at him, locking eyes with him but not empathizing. Simply watching.

The blacksmith pursed his cracking, bloodied lips as he stared at the pile of metal beside him. His brows began to furrow as his throat churned with anguish and his muscles ached loudly enough to create a creaking in his mind. He blinked his itchy eyes and responded with shame, “I don’t believe I recall what it is to feel. But I know if I had the locket in my possession, I would be given the privilege.”

“But you have destroyed your body generating failures. Each locket you have created didn’t give the desired feeling you speak of. Perhaps it is time to let go.”

“That is correct…”

“You should honor them before you let go,” the television’s voice began to shift through the room as if it were changing location. “The lockets. You should make something of them.”

“Nonsensical,” the blacksmith snapped. “For them to remain buried and forgotten, like the poor soul who crafted them?”

“So that you may rot with their company.”

“I agree, make something of them,” the cup encouraged the blacksmith. “You toiled away at those lockets for God knows how long. You gave them life. Let your children be your final duty.”

“Line the walls with them and allow them to witness you,” said the crack. “Your efforts were not unnoticed, after all. In your previous life, you could have been a king and for that you will die a king’s death. Right?”

“A king?” The blacksmith lay flat with his eyes wide now.

“You could have been a king or perhaps a hero,” the crack continued. “Your death will reflect as such. Complete one last feat and give yourself a grave of metal.”

The blacksmith didn’t think much further after the objects convinced him to line the walls with the lockets. He simply got to work performing their suggestion, no matter how much pain his body was in or how ill he began to feel. Perhaps this final task would open the doors to the answers he needed, even though there were no answers in sight. At this point in the blacksmith’s journey, even the irrational may have led to some sort of clarity.

After hours of robotic adorning, the blacksmith couldn’t continue. He wasn’t sure just how long he had been at it but he knew that he’d run out of time. “I did as you said,” he said, looking at the lockets covering the wall. “And yet I still feel nothing. I see no answers, no clues, not even a hint as to who I may have been.”

“We never said you would achieve those things, blacksmith,” The crack in the floor sneered. “We simply suggested you be laid to rest.”

“You may not have said it, but it was what I’ve worked for!” The blacksmith tried to yell but the energy it required to do so brought him to his knees. “For all this time, I’ve tried crafting the answers, I’ve tried forcing memories from within me to find out who I was, and instead I’ve listened to you all guiding me to make these cursed necklaces while you all know nothing!” His voice strained as he began to weep and attempt to slam his weak fist against the floor.

The blacksmith struggled to get himself back onto his feet, glaring at the wall of necklaces before him as his anger began to grow. He felt robbed of fulfillment after completing yet another task for the necklaces that controlled him so and though they were completely inanimate, the blacksmith sought to destroy every single one. But instead, he collapsed before he could grasp a single one, and his last breath was breathed.

The room lay still with the corpse in the center for mere moments before the lockets on the wall began to pulsate in waves of energy. The waves gathered to grow into an arm, then a hand, constructed of the misshapen lockets. The blacksmith’s eyes began to peel open as the withered and lumpy pieces of metal shaped themselves into exactly what they were supposed to be--the beautiful, shining locket the blacksmith had been trying to recreate all this time. There they were in front of his face--hundreds of them, no less.

He lay still, watching the hand formed of lockets continue to pulsate to a heartbeat-like rhythm before him. He closed his eyes as the hand closed around him, feeling a warm trust toward it as it did so. “You may find peace,” a disembodied voice he’d never heard before called out to him. Darkness encircled him followed by the coldest breeze he’d felt in years.

When he opened his eyes the first thing he noticed was the silver heart pendant of the locket--except this time, it was on a young woman. “The locket!” He gasped, realizing that he was in the pre-apocalyptic world again, standing somewhere...familiar.

She acted as if he weren’t there, though he surely must have been connected to her somehow. Everyone around him seemed to look past him as if he were merely moving through as an invisible entity, unable to interact. Of course, he followed the girl wearing the locket, waiting to find a memory of himself with her. He followed her faithfully as she went jubilantly through her day, his eyes unable to break from the locket. Still, even in the presence of the one who connected him to the trinket, the blacksmith felt nothing.

“She could be my daughter,” He said to himself as he followed her through this memory. “Did I ever get to have such a magnificently beautiful daughter…?”

The young woman eventually met with her two small children that she embraced with a large grin on her face, shooting a tingling feeling at the base of the blacksmith’s skull. He watched the young woman hug and kiss her children excitedly and it caused an inexplicable feeling of...confusion.

He continued to follow the woman and her children as they walked into a jewelry repair store. “Come on, guys, I’ve got to get this locket fixed, Daddy paid a lot of money for it and he’s gonna be so angry when he finds out I broke it,” The young woman said as she led her children inside the shop.

When he followed her inside, he saw someone familiar tending the counter of the shop: himself. It all came back to him now as he watched the girl place the locket on the counter. “Oh, it’s beautiful!” The former version of the blacksmith said. “If I had a special lady in my life, I’d get her something like this!”

The hidden memories revealed themselves in an overwhelming wave of light as the blacksmith was transported again.

The blacksmith sat alone on a sunny porch, a beer in his hand. He turned to the doorway behind him and a labrador retriever came happily running out, carrying a toy in its mouth and dropping it at his feet. He felt breeze on his cheeks as the dog smiled up at him...and he began to laugh eruptiously. His body erupted with this laughter, tickling his cheeks and fingertips and filling him with a jubilance so powerful, he felt as though he were shaking. And as the tears poured down his face, the blacksmith said to himself,

“This is it. This is happiness.”