Brutalist Stories #34

“Green Skull, why do you wait, what’s the issue? What’s the problem?” I say, I know what the reply is going to be, something to do with not seeing things the right way. It never plays out like it should.

“It’s the dream I had, everything was so much simpler. Nothing had this shattered edge that it has now, there was a softness.”

She always says this, that there should be this softness to things, in these realities that we travel through, and there never is, not in any of them. Not once. “You know why we travelled here. You know what you have to do.”

“But it’s not the same.” She says and lowers her head, a tear dripping from her face.

“It never is.” I try to reassure her, but she won’t listen. “The dream is never the same. You see what you must see, but you know when we arrive it will never be the same. We come because it’s our mission, it’s our purpose. You know what you must do.”

She raises her head, looking out of the window and points across the way. “The women there, those mothers clutching babies surrounded by this shattered reality, the crumbling buildings...” She drifts off and begins to cry.

“And this is why we come. I know you hope. I know you try to hope that there will be a softer version, that there will be will be some time and some place where your dream, your version will be the real version, but there never is.”

“Does that mean I have to stop hoping?” She asks and turns her head to me, eyes swollen red with sadness and anger.

“It’s a torture that you must endure. You have your purpose, just as I have mine. You must see what you see and I take us there. You must do what you do, and I must move us on.”

“But these people, all these people across all these worlds!” She screams at me. “Is there no better way?”

This is the other part of my task, the part that goes unspoken. This is the part in which I try to help stabilise her. The Green Skull, that has been tasked with destroying the worlds that are broken.

We created so many, we failed so many times and so many were lost, so they made her too. A perfectly bitter solution, to dream where the worlds came to rest, to see them and know where to go. So, they created me too, HoundsTooth, to be able to take us there, but when they did, when I came to being, they whispered in my ear. They said, you’ll have another task, she’ll not be willing to use her power, you have to ensure she does. So, I say. “Come now, Green Skull. This is our point, our meaning, give them peace, give them rest. The reality is never the same as the dream.”

Building inspiration:

• Trinity Square Gateshead Car Park