Chaos is really a lot harder than it looks.
The shadow we cast stretches and falls, stretches and falls too many times to have counted. Baby's mangled equations add to my own until we're sifting through flakes of scratched paint to find our designs. Our machinations leak down the staircase, they carry themselves over the monkeybars. They unfurl as far as the make believe police car, embed themselves over the poorly painted siren, carve themselves into the fake rubber wheel, and although these letters and numbers feel silly falling from my lips, quaking from my fingertips, they grow older with each new sunrise. They mature themselves into our minds.
They've been set in stone, put in my hands directly from God's, and it would be folly not to believe in them now.
It's getting too cold outside for jungle gyms and spiral slides. Not cold enough to ward the children off, but what we lose in stature we make up for in smiles. We are left well enough alone. It doesn't make the metal burn any less when the wind blows, and it doesn't make our bodies shake any less. Even together we are incomplete. Pieces are missing. When we awake with chicken scratch and awful plots embedded to our cheeks it is always with a sense of sorrow, a misplaced hope that turns in on itself when we remember where we are.
It's a terrible thing to see a person grin and frown all at once.
Baby paints my face on the last morning. I watch my reflection nervously in what's left of the lacquered sheen of red. I've seen her make-up jobs before. I pretend they're what has landed us in this predicament. I don't tell her it's my own fault.
"Remember to get a flashlight," she instructs me, "because it'll be too dark to read the map otherwise, and if you don't find the exact place I've rigged the cameras and the explosives it'll all be ruined." She pushes the pencil too roughly against my skin, and a trickle of red leaks from the circle she's been drawing on my cheek and disappears between stitches, into the corner of my smile too far from my lips.
"It'll be fine," I tell her nonchalantly, tonguing the stitches. "I've got the easy part."
She scoffs, but is too preoccupied to actually look me in the eye. She's rummaging through a small black bag I'm not sure when she's acquired, but there's a nostalgic scent wafting off of it, and my heart clenches at it. She slides a small piece of metal into my hand. I don't have to look down to know what it is. My fingers trace the engraving on the bottom, sharp angles feeling like they should be able to cut, but the emotion that slices through me is something different from fear. It's a subdued sort of hate, more aggravation than anything else, swaddled tightly in a thick blanket of amusement.
Whatever it is, it's shaped like a bat.
"Press the button once to activate it, twice to ignite it." She pauses at the staircase with one hand gripping the outside of the roof, and gives me a small smile. We are unkempt and deranged, and our sad, waifish appearance is at least twice as terrifying as our disillusioned giggles and bad jokes were.
I smile back because I'm a dutiful reflection if nothing else.
"Good luck," Baby wishes.
"Good luck," I mirror listlessly.
