InsaneJournal

Week Twelve -- Saturday
Who: Blaze ((Narrative))
What: Blaze is snooping through Junk's place and finds something unexpected that changes everything.
When: Saturday afternoon
Where: Junk's abode

Blaze was making plans to clean up the city and so he needed some tools. He remembered the pointed sticks that his fellow carnival workers had used to gather trash and he figured something like that might at least help the younger kids who couldn’t move the heavier pieces of debris and trash. There was only one place for him to go looking for such a thing and that was Junk’s place.

He generally avoided Junk and her son like the plague but sometimes necessity called. They had a history together that most of the time Blaze proffered to forget. He wasn’t sure what the rest of the tribe knew about said relationship but he was sure that Hazard was the only one who had any kind of conception of the truth. There was a sense of tremendous guilt that settled onto Blaze every time he was around Junk and Tootles. He couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, place his finger on the cause of it. In his mind he parred it down to a bad break up and a general dislike of small children- especially small children that clung to you like death when you were around and kind of looked like…

No, that was territory that he wasn’t willing to go into.

He hated using the sewer to travel but he’d never quite succeeded in befriending Junk’s dogs and it was better for the other Carrion to keep a low profile when traveling to and from Junk’s place. He normally brought his brother with him to Junk’s but Hazard was nowhere to be found that afternoon and his brother had been rather terse with him lately. So he traveled the sewers alone that morning, attempting to kick rats that were too slow to get out of his way. It was a fairly long walk and the few lights that still worked down there weren’t the most reliable so there was a lot of flickering and buzzing. Blaze always felt like he was walking onto the set of some monster movie when he was down there. Then there were always the booby traps that Hazard and Hollywood had set up along the way. Every Carrion was well versed in where the traps were and how to avoid them but they were still a danger.

When he finally reached the tunnel that lead up to Junk’s he climbed the bar ladder that Junk had welded and installed herself until he reached the wooden man-hole cover. He knocked and waited, then knocked and waited again. After a few minutes he retrieved a blunted letter opener from his pack and popped the latch from the outside. He threw his bag in first then pulled himself up into Junk’s back room. He shut the manhole cover behind him, no use in giving the rats another way inside.

“Hey Junk, are you here?” He called out and shouldered his bag once again. “Junk?” He left the backroom and knocked then entered every room in the house without finding her or the kid. He returned to the living room and looked around with a contemplative sigh. He didn’t want that long walk to have been for nothing. He made his way to one of her many indoor workshops and poked around in there for awhile for anything that they could use as pokey sticks for the trash but he found nothing. His best bet probably would have been to go outside but that was where the dogs were and he didn’t feel like putting up with them on his own.

He looked over his shoulder out of reflex, then went back down the hall to her bedroom. He opened the door slowly and stepped into the room. He walked around it, looking at all of Tootle’s drawings that were on the wall, a picture of her dad, Tootles and her on the nightstand.

Though most people assumed that Blaze didn’t really like Junk, it wasn’t true. At one time he had loved her, and the spring and summer months that they spent together in Sundance were the highlights of his existence. She had also been the one girl that he’d met during his traveling life that he’d kept in contact with through letters and the occasional long-distance call. They’d shared so many plans, so many dreams together. But sometimes Blaze forgot about that. Most of the time he tried to avoid those facts.

He ran his fingers along the bedspread as he walked to the corner of the room where her desk was. He stood in front of it staring. He wondered how many times she’d sat there to write to him. A strange feeling was creeping into his chest and throat but he quickly pushed it down to replace it with anger and hurt. She’d stopped writing to him. He didn’t know how many of his letters had gone unanswered until he had finally given up.

He normally wasn’t one to spy but the moment was too perfect to deny his curiosity. Had she kept any of his letters? He carefully opened each drawer without finding anything until he came to a locked one. A lock had never stopped Blaze though; he pulled a curved wire from his pocket and worked at the lock for a few seconds before it gave a satisfying click and he was able to open the drawer. In the drawer there was a stack of his letters to her. They’d never been opened. That was strange.

Blaze took the pile and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Postmark May 2016:


Postmark December 2016:


He couldn’t read the letters that he had opened in their entirety, especially the one from December. He sifted through the pile. Every letter he’d sent her from May 2016 to early 2017 was there, untouched. Why would she have stopped reading them all together? He didn’t understand it at all. Underneath his last letter was a letter addressed to him from her. It was stamped but never postmarked. He hesitated a moment before tearing it open and reading it too.



The first two paragraphs of the letter helped to clarify his confusion as finding his letters. It seemed as though her father hadn’t given them to her. She’d believed that he hadn’t wrote for months when in fact he’d been writing her almost every week for the nine months prior to the date on her letter. He put the letter down for a moment and rubbed his temple with his free hand. He didn’t want to read these things, he didn’t want to be reminded of the gaping hole that she’d left in his life. Besides, he figured she couldn’t have missed him that much since she’d hooked up with someone else and had their kid while he’d been gone. He folded the letter and put it in his pocket, then replaced all of his letters back in the drawer which he left unlocked.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to not finish the letter and so he leaned against the frame of her bedroom door and opened it again.



It was after the third paragraph that he felt numb with shock. Somehow he’d always known… He shook his head and tried to calm his racing heart and thoughts enough to keep reading to the end of the final paragraph.

He had no words to describe what he felt in the moment. Every nagging question he’d had for the last five years had been answered in a one page letter that he was never supposed to find. She had loved him and she had stayed loyal to him. He tried to count out the months in his head to see if it was really possible the kid was his own, but he was too much in shock. He folded the letter with shaking hands and shoved it into his pocket, shut her bedroom door and made his way back to the hospital through the sewers. This was too much for him to face up to, and so, he would pretend as if this had never happened.