The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

“Beyond lies the strange,” he says flatly. He gestures to the shabby piece of industrial carpet draped from the trailer’s roof, weighted with cinder blocks. “Tickets please.”

Owen and Jake give him their tickets. He stands with visible effort and pulls back a corner of the carpet. Enough so Jake, who’s done this before, can lift it to let them in.

The trailer is dim lit with black lights. Their buzz puts Owen’s teeth on edge, reminding him of his cell, the green lights that pushed down on him, that felt like someone shoved bees in his mouth and duct taped it shut. The black lights pick up garish fluorescent signs hanging above a row of standing shower stalls. Each is fronted with two-way glass, mirror side out. THE SKINLESS GIRL! screams the first sign in hot pink horror movie lettering. Paint drips from the dot of the exclamation point. THE LIVING SPECK! THE BONEYARD! THE WOLF-FACED GIRL! At the end, a larger cell, a double wide, with red curtains hung over it. THE ANGEL OF SILENCE, the sign proclaims. The words are rendered with care. Each letter has rounded little feet. Owen steps toward it immediately, but Jake holds him back.

“Save her for last,” he says. “She’s something.” He presses a doorbell button on the first cell. An overhead light comes on. It’s too strong for the room, making Owen blink. In the cell, there’s a girl whose skin is transparent, a thin slick of clear snot over her muscles and blood vessels. She holds up one hand to shield her lidless eyes from the light. With the other she covers as much of her body as she can. She retreats to the back corner.

“Does the light hurt her?” Owen asks. Jake shrugs. The possibility has never occurred to him. The null twitches in Owen’s gut. Jake points to the next sign, THE LIVING SPECK. Under it, there’s a card table with a two-eye microscope like the ones they used in chemistry class.

“That one’s boring,” Jake says. “She’s little, but she’s also fat. So what the fuck?”

Jake steps up to the booth that contains THE BONEYARD. Owen walks past him to the end of the trailer. THE ANGEL OF SILENCE. He presses the button, and buttery yellow light pours into the cell. Robed in white, there’s a girl, her dirty blond hair done up like a woman in a gladiator movie, a mountain of spiraling braids. Her head hangs, and she eyes Owen like a puppy that’s been kicked. Her arms are wings, gray and wide, folded across her chest protectively. Owen can see the layers of feathers on them: soft down that extends from her shoulders and biceps, a tufty band below that, and then the long ones, like fingers splayed wide. It hurts to see her cramped into such a small space. Owen wants her wings spread. He wants her in the air. He puts his hand on the glass.

“She doesn’t talk,” Jake says. The words are barely out of his mouth when Owen’s mind is caught on a hook, dragged out of his body into a vast, shimmering room.

“What the fuck?” he screams with a mouth that is not his mouth. The Angel stands in front of him, wings tight around her body. “Where the fuck are we?”

“The Hive,” says the Angel. “You’ve been here before, right? I mean, you’re one of us.”

“This isn’t what it looks like,” Owen says. He walks a small circle around her, watching as people appear and fade out in the shimmering room. “It’s so big. Where’s the black bone room?”

The Angel looks at him, confused.

“Why are you here?” he asks her. “Why are you in a cage?”

“It was my boyfriend. Bobby,” she says. “We started out with the circus idea. We lived in the Commune, and we were seeing Resonants on late-night shows, doing stupid pet tricks for laughs. Like circus animals, Bobby said. He was born in the Commune, but he didn’t have to stay. He looked normal. Not like the rest of us. It was his idea to go on the road like a freak show. It was going to be subversive. Confront people with who we were. It was going to be some fucking art project. Bobby was the manager. Because he’s the pretty one. The one who looks normal.” Owen struggles to keep up with this barrage of new terms. The Hive. The Commune. We have our own language, he thinks. There’s a pang of betrayal, too. If they have their own language, why hasn’t his friend taught it to him? Why is he learning it only now? “Bobby can make you do things, want things, by touching you,” the Angel says. “That’s how he got me to even date him. He’s such a skeev.”

Owen thinks of the brush of a finger on his, the urge to fork over more money for no reason. The boy in the powder blue suit. Bobby.

“He made me want to get into the cage,” she says, crying. “It looked so beautiful. He held me by my wing and said, Wendy, step in, I built it for you. Then he closed it behind me. I was the first. He brought us in here one by one: me, then poor little Gail, then Andre. We were all so happy when he put us in here.”

Owen is half drunk on how beautiful she is, on how beautiful this place is. The Hive, she called it. It feels the same as the black bone room. But this place is different. There’s air to breathe, space to move. The black bone room is like this place in the way they vibrate, the way they’re gauzy to look at. But it feels like confinement. This shimmering room must belong to everyone like Owen. For all he’s thought about the cattle, for all he’s thought about enemies, he’s never thought about people like him except