#wdwrm

This is Nidus, the adaptive, the scourge.

Broken Things by V. Akam It stretched below the pines across the coast of Caspian Sea. A desolate town crumbling under the onslaught of wavering grass. He didn't want us to come here, but I wanted to see.

It was a place he never dreamed of revisiting. The life, the light was at the horizon of the setting sun, and this lonely concrete monolith of silent birds and broken glass only brought back the waves of unwelcome memories. It was on the east.

He was angry with me because I thought it was important, no, it was pivotal for me to see it. It's not like it was a secret by any stretch - he just found nothing worthy to come back to. This was not a time productively spent, and yet, time was a ghost here. Streets were orderly variations of brutalist geometry and cancerous greenery, an endless hell of gray and green. Gray and green.

This was meant to be an intentionally accidental station on the otherwise colorful journey. Only too late did I find out that this place will leave the same scars on me that, a long time ago, it left on him. Okay, to be fair, my scars would end up being mild compared to his, but at least the pattern would be identical. I wanted those scars because it's the most brotherly thing I knew I could do. Finally, I understood why, not a particular “why” but all of them, and he was angry with me because he knew we had to come to this infernal place for me to understand why he would be angry once we arrived.

To the right was the building in which he grew up. To the left was the theatre he never visited. We entered the theatre. The spacious hall was stripped clean of any wooden furniture; all the doors were either pulled out of their hinges or pulverized into dust. The row of windows was spreading to our right - the portals of light with empty sills. There were no doors. Oh my god, no doors, and to the surprise of both of us, the heavy red curtain was still hanging from the canopy, it hid the stage. No doors but - by all means - red curtain for the stage. It was covered in decades of dust but it retained its majesticness. Is it even a word, majesticness?

As I ponder the passing banality of this thought, he ascends up the wooden stairs that creak under the weight of a type of creature they didn't support for eons and the entire stage groans as he steps onto it. It was a silent sound, yet it reverberated like a shouted whisper. This theatre was a lumpy head, empty of thought, and we were the first sparks of reason that dared rattle between its ears ever since it vowed a lifetime of solitude and meditation. People left, yet the theatre decided to be defiant by a mere act of existence.

He turned towards me but he looked high above my head, diverting his gaze inward, looking deep into his own mind, looking at an after-image of a full theatre hall, monochrome faces stretched into painful smiles, all of them. Holy shit, it was not an image, it was a movement. In this place lost in time, only he could be so batshit crazy to find such phantasmagoria without considering anything else. A beat. A variation. A magnificence. In moments like these, I saw it. He was so fucking alone. He smiled back. To them, then to me. I returned the smile.

He invited me to join him up there. My steps were more assured than his, yet my soul wasn't. He was already peeking behind the curtain. It was my idea to come here, yet this was his show. We both peeked, like cartoon characters out of some matinee marvel, half-expecting to find the unspeakable behind, to caress our beautiful nightmares, and for an infinitesimal stretch of time, it was embodied through the unflinching darkness. The unspeakable was there, exposing itself to us in the most profound detail, pitch black canvass of liquid thoughts, projecting through our eyes onto the darkness like embers. Would we even dare to pass through the curtain and enter this air-formed liquid tar if we had a chance? I cannot say.

The sound of creaking wood behind us broke the magic we perversely enjoyed. Startled by this sound wave impostor, we turned around to look for the source of commotion, yet no-one was there. The empty hall, the ceiling filled with endless arches, the onslaught of windows to our right. And yet, on one of the windows, right on its sill, we've noticed something that wasn't there before.

We descended from the stage and approached the portal of light to inspect this intriguing change. There were four weathered porcelain figurines standing on the sill of the window. We looked at each other, our gazes interlocking with acknowledgment of anxiety - these definitely weren't here a minute ago. Just to assure myself this wasn’t an illusion, I picked up one of the figurines, and he picked up another one. They were all beautiful and old - a ballerina, a peasant with a cat, a milk girl and a soldier. The colors were washed up, the smooth silky surface was pale and filled with discreet cracks, more discreet than the ones on the streets and buildings. Each of the figurines was damaged beyond repair - the milk maiden missed one jug of milk with a part of her smooth hand, the soldier's nose was nowhere to be found, the peasant's cat apparently lost its tail, a ballerina danced, appropriately, without her raised leg. We looked at these figurines with wonder, the anxiety melted away and he smiled once more, but this was a different smile. His eyes were downwardly rotated crescent moons filled with glisten.

"I've seen this before," he said, and I knew what he meant. I put my figurine down and he offers me his own - a ballerina.

"You collect these, don't you?" he asked.

"This one isn't good enough," I said.

"Right," he replied. "It isn't broken enough."

Now my eyes were crescent moons. I stopped him before he returned the ballerina on the sill and snatched it out of his hand. I placed it gently into my backpack. With this gesture, we nodded at each other slightly and left the theatre, we left the city of dust and ghosts, and we never returned together.

Many years later, I've heard, he returned to this place along the coast of Caspian Sea, intending to visit it for one last time. He explained to a mutual acquaintance of ours he was keen to find a particular porcelain figurine and take it with him to keep him company in his old age. There, on the sill of the window in old theatre, he left a note one of us had written:

"To Vlad,

who taught me that broken things