Shine

NOTE: This story was written for the Scribes and Scribblers Writing Competition. You can find them on Discord. Awesome group of people.
The prompt for this was Not Quite Human with an idea of writing from the perspective of something that isn't human, pet, object, et al. So here is mine, for what it's worth. If you want to see the winning entry, and you do - check out this post, Drone by @jrhughes.

Shine

I hope today is the day. My twin is tangled to me, holding on, the way he’d been for the last two months. Since our birthday. Even when they had put us into a box, atop tissue paper that crinkled in the most unpleasant way, my twin and I were holding hands. The humans around us called them shoelaces, but in those moments–to us–we were holding hands. I felt his presence through that touch, and I know he felt mine, and we hoped that whatever they do to us, that wherever we end up–it would be in the same place.

Last week the human we belonged to took us out of the box, and briefly untangled our hands. I felt the cold of the absence, but I could no longer tell if my twin felt it. If he felt anything at all. The human placed us on the metal shelf, side by side, not quite touching, but close enough to where I could see my twin, see him watch me, and then the human tied our hands together again. I must have sighed in relief loudly enough for the human to hear me, if he were made the way we were, where we could hear those like us. Outside the box was too bright, the wrong kind of bright. It was hard to keep from blinking, not that anyone but my twin could see me do even that much.

The human had an ugly smell about him, the opposite of good leather. Like something designed to cover up rot, to mask the unclean of him. The way the other humans, the ones who made us, smelled of sticky yellow food they’d brought in paper boxes sometimes, using wooden tools, not metal, like the ordinarily did. But it was nice to be out of the box, to be able to stretch and look around. As far as I could see, there were my cousins and brothers and sisters, in pairs with their twins, on metal shelves. They looked ok. Clean, polished, new. I was proud of how good they looked, and hoped I looked clean and new and polished. I could just see my reflection in my twin’s shine, and I seemed alright. My twin looked nice.

“Expensive, for kid shoes,” the human had said when he’d taken us out of the box. I didn’t know what that meant. Still don’t, but it sounded good, like a thing I should want to be.

My twin and I stay on that shelf for what feels like a very long time. I’d gotten a knack for counting time and have learned that we’d been unboxed exactly two day and seven and a half hours ago. The human had made the brightness go away when he left. The darkness was nice, familiar.

When the human came back, the bad smell of him was even stronger. And he looked not good; scuffed, somehow. He was holding a container of something with steam coming out of it. We’d seen the humans who’d made us do that when the light coming in from the outside place was at its most uncomfortable. He drank out of it now, wincing, then did something by that giant gate I could almost see to the outside through, only it was a bit too far and fuzzy.

I felt a buzz in my blood, like something good was going to happen today, the kind of good that would take my twin and me out of this place, into that outside place I couldn’t quite see, but I felt it…. It felt wonderful, like a soft, soft cloth over my skin at the very end, right before the humans who’d made me put me on top of the noisy thing, and then put my twin on top of me, so I could barely breathe.

I hear a tinkle, a noise that sounds oddly pleasant, though this, too, is loud, and I watch other humans, though not smelling like the one we belong to, and not so rumpled, come in from that wondrous outside place. Some of these humans look small, much smaller than ours, and there is something about them that makes me feel warm inside, a kind of belonging. These smaller humans smell good, not leather good, but that outside place good, something watery and crisp-clean about it, a lingering but subtle thing, and I want to keep smelling it. I watch my twin watch the small ones, and I feel him feeling all the things I’m feeling.

I watch in silence as the humans walk from shelf to shelf, touching my cousins and brothers and sisters, flipping them upside down, and I feel nauseated when they do that, but I can’t help but watch. Nobody has touched me or my twin yet, but I have a feeling it’ll happen soon, and I want to be ready.

For now, I watch. And I’m feeling good inside, because every single human who had taken the others off the shelves–they took their twins too, and our human put them in the box, together and then they were gone, to the outside place, the watery, warm-feeling place that already felt like home.

It has been three hours and not one human had touched my twin or me. Our human, looking a little less scuffed, comes over and changes something on a non-crinkly paper below us, too far down for me to see it.

“These are on sale,” he says to a tall human with a lot of lint on its face, holding a small human by his hand. I look over at my twin and the warmth comes back. This small human feels right. We would go to the outside place with him, I know it.

“I only need the right one, though,” the human with the linty face says to our human, and his face looks strange when he does. Like he never wants to go to the outside place kind of strange. I search again for the small one, and he is right there, looking at me with the wanting his human doesn’t have. He brushes his hand softly, tentatively, as if I’d break, over my sides and lifts me up, holding me up to his human. “I want this one, dad, if I can have it.”

“Of course you can, Danny. You’ll outdance them boys in this, you will.”

The small human’s face breaks into lines and dimples and dents that I know mean he’s what the humans call happy. I feel the small hands untangle me from my twin’s hand. I want to scream at what I know is coming next. And I wish I hadn’t wished for that place beyond the gate, the smells of it. Or for the touch of the small human’s hands on me. I wish I could take it all back….

“You know,” our human says to the small one who’s now holding me up, close to his chest, where I can hear the knocking the human’s insides are doing, “you might as well take the left one…. You know, put them next to each other, so it feels like you have both feet, the way the other kids do, even if you know you don’t, but for that moment, you would.”

The tall, linty one walks over to my twin, then turns, and I see something watery in his eyes and I feel the warmth of my twin when the human puts him on top of me in the box, and the crinkly loud paper doesn’t bother me, and the human’s not leather smell is almost nice now, as if he’d washed all the ugly out of it. And the darkness, too, when the lid closes on us is alright.

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