A Woman Dreaming Between the Walls

One

The bailiffs led him out of the courtroom, to a windowless office, orange jumpsuit and multiple kinds of cuffs. They left, leaving him alone to stew in his sentence. He dropped his face to his knees in despair, the walls of the yellowed drywall and cracked wooden bench closing in around him. He tried not to consider the years ahead, helpless and scared before the prospect of his being foreclosed upon.

His cuffs slipped off. He startled as metal slid down his jumpsuit’s pants and muffled its clatter onto the carpeted floor. There were no cameras in the room. The door the police had left through was ajar, the courtroom’s door sealed and no doubt deadbolted. Down the hall through it - the courtroom was gone. The courthouse couldn’t possibly be this long, as he looked upon the beige carpet and yellowing drywall extending empty for as long as he could see, disappearing down any number of turns and identical unmarked doors and branches.

Aimlessly, he wandered, dying fluorescents shining like a sickly moonlight, carrying him into the shadows of the strange labyrinth behind all walls. 

Through door after corner after door, long stretches that should have doubled back on themselves, concrete stairwells that wound up and down with no clear orientation in space, offices with outdated computers and furniture stained as though it were in use currently, stale coffee, the hum of windows XP and motivational posters tacked into the walls, he finally came upon the end of it, through a bookcase of binders of A4 printouts, a an open garage door found him to a parking lot’s loading bay, the low-lying ramp cloaking him from the rest of the world.

It was high night. The stars fogged over by the usual light pollution. Moonlight and streetlight came together in the same yellow angelglow backlighting the woman smoking against the concrete wall of the ramp.

“You lost?” She said.

“Yea, who’re you?”

“Who do you think? Daughter of that judge that just put you under. I’ve been looking for someone like you for a while.”

“Someone like me?”

She laughed, putting a hand on his shoulder to lead him into the parking lot. “Welcome to Moonlight.”

They walked together, under flickering lamps down the empty streets of a suburb without a metropolis.

“Moonlight?”

“The sun never rises here. We’ve been looking for you. My father and all his compatriots, they want you with them, in all that bright light. He’s a rigid man, all see-through skin and everything. I hate seeing it! And I hate seeing boys like you suckered through his sunlight systems! He wants you out on some concrete examination table, all laid out like a piece of lab specimen. It’s barbaric! You’re coming with me.”

“Can I head home?”

“To the sun? Where they’ll just pick you up again? This is your rare chance, sink or swim in Moonlight.”

“Doesn’t look like anyone lives here.”

“Houses just aren’t active. Look I’ll take care of things, make the arrangements, alright? Just pick a door and settle into whoever’s partying. I’m sure you’ll make the groove.”

Two

The Judge cocked a hand back and swung it down across his daughter, sprawling her to the floor, red-throbbing in sobs. It wasn’t clear that the justification for it could be, though she suspected it was nothing beyond that he came home in a shitty mood. He babbled on and on, spewing a few choice slurs and kicked her, stepping over her to ascend the grand staircase of their home.

At the vanity, she alighted upon her wounds, carefully on the throbbing flesh. It still stung, it would for days to come. The sun was descending and the Judge would soon be asleep. She waited, on the edge of the bathtub, silent, scrolling porn on her phone, hoping to stave off the boredom and doldrums until the night would fall and leave her to her own realm.

The newcomer was on her mind as she saw the first glimpses of shade spill from the low places of the yard outside her bedroom. They came into Moonlight every so often, falling in their lust or anger or despair, like flies to be picked apart by her spindly forelegs. She didn’t have much respect for them, except a certain kind of affection, that of a dog owner towards the miserable creature bred to think of a human as its mother. 

It was sink or swim in Moonlight, a town of ruthless rulebooks that weeded out new ones to be dropped off the face of the Earth in the tall grass of ignored ditches under perpetual shade of eternal midnight. She had the rulebook, spiral bound and handwritten, under her bed. A world of her design, a world where she was the roads and homes and signs, where she won by virtue of dictating the game.

Moonlight was ready for him, a maze he had been searching his entire life to be seduced into losing his way in. She would check on him later. For now, he was a little too fresh for her to deal with. He had to acclimate. Learn to let go, learn to start dissolving in the acidic fog she had spit over the town, a little bit of venom in his veins before he was ready for true digestion. Her pedipalps twitched as she salivated. She rolled over on her bed, scared for the sound of footsteps. She watched the sun go down and twitched her spinnerets, ready for the night to deliver her to her silent throne between the walls.