The Lanyard by Jake Carter-Thomas Page B

place them. Must have took more effort than collecting a few scattered rocks in a pile. She ignored his question and started to work her fingers around the edges, took hold of the plank and pulled.
    Underneath were crawling bugs, chitinous coins, legs wriggling over legs on darker mud that looked more like hardened black sugar, contrasting the pale bodies of centipedes burned out by the lack of sun. So many legs, jaws, arms, and yet the mass seemed to struggle to get anywhere at all, writhing around, like lines upon lines of cars seen from far away.
    "Gross," she said, pointing down to where a small spider struggled to clamber amongst the others, held back by the strange lump under its body, an egg that looked like a second head.
    Some straw had been thrown onto the mud underneath the plank. It had crushed and gone brown at the edges. A strange mist seemed to seep out of this straw, as if it was hot, composted down. And as he leaned closer something touched his hand, just brushed it, some of the legs, the spiders egg, the silk. He jumped back, shaking whatever it was off his fingers before he could see. But there was nothing there.
    The girl was smiling at him. It must have been her. She must have touched him, caressed him, with all the pressure of a fallen fly.
    "You ok there?" she said.
    "Yeah." he replied, rubbing his wrist. "Took me by surprise."
    "What did?"
    "Whatever touched my hand."
    "Oh, were you daydreaming? Thinking about me and all that straw?"
    "No... Just the bugs."
    "Yeah, sure you were."
    "Can we go now?" he replied, turning away from it all, away from her.
    "If we must."
    She dropped the plank so that it fell out of place, leaving the insects marooned in the open. He wanted to tell her that was wrong but didn't feel he could. Instead, he let her lead them up and out of another narrow valley that opened out to an area with more trees and rocks. She soon found a spot under one of the trees and reclined against a small mound, gazing up towards the sun, up into a sky still too light to see the stars, but white with wet clouds.
    She patted the ground but he didn't sit down next to her.
    "So now what are you thinking about?" she said.
    "What's out there, I guess." He was making it up.
    "In space?"
    "Yeah."
    "Mmm-K?"
    "Something like that."
    "Guess all boys think the same."
    "Huh?"
    "All boys think about escape, about the outside, always looking away, never in..."
    "".
    "I didn't mean to say there was anything wrong with that... Just not something that appeals to me, you know?"
    "Well, what do you think about when you look at the sky?"
    "Honestly?" She tilted her head back.
    "Yeah."
    "Mainly whether I have epilepsy."
    "Huh?"
    "You know what I'm talking about? Do you have it? Do you ever have any fits?" she said. "Any sudden pains in the back of your head?"
    "No..."
    "You've never stared up through leaves and wondered?"
    "Wondered what?"
    "How they got to be that way? How no two of them are exactly alike?"
    He looked up at them now, the sun twinkled behind them and made him squint to see. When he looked back to the ground he had the chasing twists of light still burning in his head, appearing over the top of the forest like he was looking at polaroid photograph about to burn in his hands. "Maybe they're like fingerprints," he said.
    "Yeah."
    He held out his fingers and wiggled them up to the sky. Each one seemed to move independently. There was brown mud down his palm in a long stripe. He imagined leaning closer to the stripe. The girl arched her head back to look at the leaves some more, exposing her throat.
    "I heard that if you look at sunlight through leaves it can sometimes trigger a fit. You know, people can die out in the forest. Really. They're just walking along, looking at the sky -- like this -- and, and... they don't even realise that they have this thing... this... condition."
    "Then what?"
    "Then they faint. Then they die."
    "But... what's that got to do with the trees?" he said.
    "Something about the