It is Sunday night, two nights after Sean met Athena, and the encounter has stuck in his playing, playing over and over again like a skipping record. He has never experienced such a tangible memory. It's a drug. He is addicted to the memory of her. He is addicted to the vision of her in the smoke filled room, bathed in the effervescent green and red and purple light of the concert hall. Every detail is stitched into his brain. The way her shirt hung off of her porcelain shoulders and dipped, low-cut and perfect, in the front. He remembers the brown thread stitched delicately around the collar and the wide bell cuffs. He remembers the natural frowning shape of her mouth, the glossless pink of her lips, the smattering of light machine gun freckles near her nose, the gorgeous length and blackness of the lashes surrounding her shock green eyes. He remembers the complex highlights and shadows in her hair, the way it hung over her ears and parted over her forehead and how a rogue wisp of it fell across her eye. He remembers her shape, her almost criminally curvaceous figure, her lack of height, and the defensive stance she had when he introduced himself. He remembers the inadvertent flinch she gave, the surprise of being approached and the wariness that crept into her initial smile. He remembers her so vividly. He remembers the sharpness of her chin, the breadth of her face, the slight rose in her cheeks and the almost unearthliness paleness of her white skin. He remembers her voice, especially, how it was the perfect complement to her, how she was the form he'd envision if he'd only heard her speak on the phone or the radio. He remembers the slight crookedness of her teeth, the dissatisfied calmness of her demeanor, and the cool economy of her language. She wasn't wordy. She answered his small handful of questions in a way that was efficient without being terse.
Athena lived nearby and she was a year younger than Sean. She worked as a receptionist at a high school, which is she loathed, but she was putting herself back through college after having dropped out a semester prior to getting a degree in graphic design. She was single and hadn't had a boyfriend in a while. And, yes, she would be interested in having dinner with Sean some night.
She didn't have any paper with her because she never took her purse to concerts. Sean had accidentally left his phone at home. He did have a silver Sharpie, however, and Athena scrawled out her number on the palm of Sean's hand. The silver was barely legible on against his own white skin, so she wrote the number, again, on his forearm. Sean was embarrassed by the way the sensation of her hand on his arm shocked him, and how the force of it fanned out like downed wire electricity through every nerve in his body. It was at that moment he sadly took note of how long it had been since any girl had touched him.
She was very explicit in her instructions. He was to call her on Monday, because to do so earlier would make both of them feel very desperate. And then she left. She didn't stay at the concert. She didn't hang out with Sean after their brief, wonderful little meeting. She just disappeared. It was probably for the best, because it allowed time for Sean to reboot. The anxiety of the moment had pretty much caused every major system in his body to up and shut down. Sean didn't mind, though. The silver permanent ink on his hand and arm more than made up for the cardiac arrest.
And now it is Sunday and he is waiting. The ink is still clinging, stubbornly, to his skin, but he has transferred her number to multiple sources in a prudent act of safe keeping. He is laying on his bed, listening to songs shuffle on his laptop. Every song seems to be about love, and it is torturous. He has spent the last two days fabricating his first date with Athena, mapping out potential sites, creating mental flowcharts of potential disasters and missteps. He is excited to find out who she is. His gut is telling him that she is amazing, that she is brilliant and as dispassionately interested in everything as he is. His gut is telling him that she is cutely misanthropic and that she has great taste in music and movies and books. His gut is telling him that she hates all the same things he hates. His gut, he knows, could be dead wrong, but he can't wait to find out. He contemplates breaking her rule and calling tonight. He wonders if she would find that annoying or endearing.
Somehow he knows that she would find it annoying. And he loves that. He has been a model of self-control for years, now. He can wait another day, even if that waiting leaves him feeling twitchy and pathetic.
As song after song relays the horrors and divinities inherent in loving another person, Sean realizes how long it's been since he's looked forward to anything. Nearly every aspect of his life had been something to endure, something to slog through on the slow march to death. He didn't tell people that very often, as they tended to take a dim view of him and his dreary outlook, but it really was how he felt. Usually. But he was actually longing to call Athena. He wasn't looking past his dinner with her to the point when it was over and he could return to the solitary lair of his apartment. In fact, the time approaching his call was interminable. He felt as if it had been weeks since they'd met. He wanted so badly to be sitting across from her, talking to her, getting to know her. He forgot what anticipation was really like... before Athena, it had all but been replaced with dread.
He was worried, of course, about the impression he'd make on her... about the impression he'd already made, but it wasn't the crippling anxiety to which he was accustomed. Instead, it was the sort of thrilling worry that goes along with a roller coaster ride or a good scary movie. He was ready to be scared.
The vision of her was still there, and he tried to shake it. He didn't want to obsess or deify her. Although, with a name like Athena, it might be completely warranted.
Showing posts with label eyes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eyes. Show all posts
5.22.2010
Hey Pretty
It's loud, even away from the speakers, and there's a non-stop parade of sweat soaked drunks winding through the maze halls that flank the stage. There is revelry and joy and music and Sean is irritated by it all. He knows he is a curmudgeon, and he hates that about himself, but as another plastic cup of beer slops onto his sneakers, he realizes he is overly tired and just wants to leave. But he's stuck. His ride, Glen, is chatting with a girl, and so he has to listen to another song. He hovers at the periphery of the crowd, cringing at the feedback and the tin squeal of the guitar, but otherwise nearly enjoying the moment. A teenager careens into his back and Sean loses his footing and bounces into a leather-clad man mountain in front of him. He gets a glare and backs up. The teenager is laughing. The band, at least, is pretty good.
The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.
He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.
Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.
Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.
The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.
After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.
Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.
And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.
The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.
He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.
Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.
Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.
The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.
After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.
Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.
And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.
3.06.2010
Woodbridge's
It should have been a typical evening… after running a few errands, I expected to come home, heat up some leftover pizza and watch television until bed time. Nothing special, nothing exciting. Just a dull, flavorless evening. Destiny, though, can have different plans, and I suppose I found myself on the butt end of fate that night. From the moment I walked into that store, I should have known something was awry. It’s not often that one gets to wonder just how markedly different their life would have been if they hadn’t desperately needed to pick up detergent on their way home from work one Wednesday.
Our local department store chain is called Woodbridge’s. It’s small and its selection is paltry, but it’s directly between my job and my apartment. The Target is almost ten minutes out of my way, and the Wal-Mart is awfully run down these days. So unless I need something fairly obscure, I always stop at Woodbridge’s. I’m quite familiar with it, which is probably why I could tell something was off from the moment I walked in. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but it was definitely different. Maybe it was the lighting, or the smell of the place. I’m not sure. But it was off. I didn’t realize how far off until later.
The store was nearly abandoned that night. Now, this isn’t uncommon, especially on a weeknight (how, exactly, Woodbridge’s stays in business has always slightly confounded me), but it seemed exceptionally empty. Usually there’s a few stray shoppers, younger men, mostly, plodding over the dingy linoleum and looking pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. But that night, I can’t remember seeing another soul between the front doors and the cleaning supplies. Every now and then, maybe, as I passed an aisle, a shadowy flash might skitter past, but I assumed it was just the tail end of a fellow shopper briskly moving in the opposite direction. I will admit that I didn’t really notice anything substantially odd at all until I picked my bottle of Gain off the shelf. There certainly had never been a stream running through the house wares department before.
I was dumbfounded, really. It was so nonsensical. But it was real. Only a few feet away from the fabric softeners and dryer sheets was a shallow brook dug into the white and blue Woodbridge’s tiles. The water was clear and running at a pretty fast clip, and there were little frogs and salamanders dotting the course of it. It looked freakishly natural, as if the store had just assembled itself around a creek... that is to say, there was no indication that the stream had been built into the store. Now, having stood in that exact spot countless times prior, I knew that that was not the case. The stream was obviously an addition. But the effort that had gone into making the storebound stream seem like a natural occurrence was staggering. It bothered me in a vague sort of way… I couldn’t fathom the purpose behind so much seemingly pointless work.
I set my detergent back on the shelf, bent down and cupped my hand into the water. It was cold. A tiny swarm of tadpoles darted away from my fingers as I broke the babbling surface. There was silt and a smattering of pebbles on the bed of the creek. I moved them around, kicking up a small storm of dirty plumes into the water. It felt so real. It was real, I suppose, but it didn’t seem any different than any brook you’d stumble across out in the woods. I stood up, flicked the excess water off my hand and dried it against my pants legs. Then I looked up and saw someone standing across the stream, just staring at me. He startled me so much that I nearly fell over.
There was a man across the stream. He was tall and lanky, dressed all in faded blue denim. I always hate how it looks when someone wears the same color pants and shirt. I’m not sure why, and given the fact that the man was tapping the blunt edge of a large butcher’s knife into his palm, I probably should have been thinking about something else. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about how stupid his faded blue shirt looked with his faded blue jeans. It didn’t take long, though, before I noticed the lunatic smile on the man’s narrow, craggy face. He had longish yellow-gray hair, the color of curdled cigarette smoke, and his lips were obnoxiously red. His teeth were certainly nicer than the teeth you’d expect a knife wielding lunatic to have, but his skin was almost stony in texture. All in all, he looked quite crazy and I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him. Helpfully, however, he had a nametag on his shirt. Unfortunately, his name was “T. Devil.”
We stood there, parted by the stream, and staring at each other for some time. Eventually, unsure of what to do, I sputtered, “What does the ‘T’ stand…”
He cut me off and said, “’The.’ It stands for ‘The.’”
“’The Devil,’” I replied. “I see.”
“It’s not my given name,” he clarified.
“Ah,” I said, wondering if should just run the hell away as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I stood where I was, conversing with a crazy man named The Devil while an inexplicable river ran between us. It was a bad decision, I will admit it, but it was the decision I made. I can’t adequately say why. I just stood there, almost transfixed by the man, or by the situation. After a brief silence, I decided to speak again. “Stream’s new,” I said.
“Nah,” The Devil said, never losing that horrifying smile. “It’s always been there.”
It hadn’t. I know it hadn’t. But I decided not to press the issue. “Oh,” I said.
“You just couldn’t see it before,” The Devil explained. “But it’s always been there.”
A brief silence passed again with The Devil and me just blinking at each other. Then, suddenly and chillingly, I realized that The Devil wanted to kill me. It just made sense given his demeanor and bladed accessory, but the reality of it sunk in at that very moment. My throat went dry with fear and I began to perspire from pretty much every pore. It struck me, then, that I should get a confirmation from the predator, and so I asked, “You’re here to murder me, aren’t you?”
The Devil nodded an affirmation.
The fear that overtook me was not the fear that I expected. It was not panic. It was anxiety, like the anxiety that comes along with being ill-prepared for a test, or the anxiety that accompanies a first date. I was nervous. I was nervous I would fail somehow and this crazed man would succeed in his endeavor to murder me. But despite the anxiety, I had no doubt I could keep him at bay if I just managed to focus. By no means was my situation hopeless. Something, already, was keeping him confined to his side of the creek. I began to formulate hypotheses. Perhaps it was the creek itself that was keeping The Devil from reaching me. I decided to ask him if that was the case. He had been unfailingly helpful so far, after all.
He nodded again and I breathed a sigh of relief. I would be fine. He was trapped in sporting goods and I was free to just leave the store with my life intact. A close call, certainly, but no harm done. I backed up, slowly distancing myself from The Devil and my protective creek. I kept my eyes on the lunatic the whole time, worried that, somehow, the status quo might up and change on me. He kept smiling. “I’m going to leave, now,” I told him. “I hope that’s ok?” I didn’t think I really needed his permission, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.
This time, The Devil shook his head. I didn’t like that. Not even a little. I decided to increase my back-up speed, hoping to make my way to the store's foyer a bit quicker. Instead, I tripped over myself and fell onto my rear end, landing with an echoing thump on the pockmarked tiling. All the while, The Devil continued staring at me, still grinning maniacally and still tapping his knife into his palm.
I was a bit shaken by my fall and growing more and more unnerved as moments passed that did not lead to my exit of the store. Sitting on the ground, amidst the surprising amount of dirt and detritus that had probably accumulated over the course of a single shopping day, I felt my limbs and my body become very heavy. Each finger felt like tiny weights had been tied to them. My bones felt leaden and dense. A soreness rippled across the muscles in my back and I felt ridiculously exhausted. I stifled a yawn, trying to keep a direct focus on my would-be killer, before noticeably wincing from my heaviness. I struggled to stand, but I overcame gravity and lifted myself from the ground. As I did, my armor creek shifted, changing course by making an L-like bend into the main aisle, veering sharply right through home goods and resuming course by cutting back through the row of plastic garbage cans and Rubbermaid totes. The creek was now running behind me. Without changing my position at all I was suddenly standing on the same side of the brook as The Devil. And, of course, that brook was the only thing keeping him from killing me.
My heart began to race. My nervousness escalated into a full blown panic. I no longer had any delusion that things were going to be just fine. Because a murderer was moving toward me. He was slow and deliberate, but he was moving toward me and he was going to plunge his butcher's knife directly into my heart. I knew it. I could feel it. I tried to back away, but now I felt trapped by the very same running water that had protected me mere moments before. I couldn't move. I was held fast by some sort of force, a compulsion I couldn't explain. I shut my eyes tightly and envisioned a place where I wasn't about to become the victim of a gory assault. But even with my eyes closed, all I could imagine was The Devil a few footsteps away readying a sharp object to pierce my skin over and over and over again. I wanted to scream out something, a demand for The Devil to stop, to leave me alone, to drop the knife, walk away and never return. But I couldn't make a sound. Nothing came from my throat but a sickly little gurgle. I was about to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Time seemed to freeze, and the agony of anticipation just hovered over me, heavy and thick like dripping molasses slowed by the cold. I was dying a hundred times between each heartbeat. I was ready, but I wasn't ready at all.
And then my brain created its own reality. Still in my mind's eye, still with my real eyes clamped tightly shut, I pictured the ground moving. I pictured space coming between The Devil and me, as if the store was growing from its middle, pushing us outwards and away from each other. New ground just rose up out of nothingness and took its place, seamless, in the new gap that separated us. I moved one direction without taking a step, and he was carried the opposite way. The world just filled in between us and I was safe and he was far away. It was a wonderful little fantasy, a glimmer of stupid hope to break up the tedium of my panic.
But when I opened my eyes, it had happened. Suddenly, I was standing at the edge of a huge gulf of new space. The world had moved us. I had moved us... with my mind. I don't know how, exactly, but my vision was absolutely accurate. The Devil had been pushed so far away that he was no longer visible. Instead, there was a wide expanse of empty store, just floor and walls and ceiling with exposed rafters and buzzing fluorescent lights high overhead. The aisle, the one where the creek had once flowed, the aisle that had separated The Devil and me had become miles wide. I couldn't see the other end of it. The horizon faded with emptiness. For all I knew, that space went on forever. Had it not just saved my life, I imagine I would have found the event wholly disconcerting. As it was, I found it to be an almost mystical experience.
Having successfully dispatched The Devil, I decided to return to my initial task of buying detergent. It seemed rather hollow, though, considering everything I had just experienced. Somehow, getting my whites their whitest paled in comparison to the power I had exerted with my mind. I wondered if my abilities extended beyond self-preservation. I decided to try a new trick.
I stood very still, shut my eyes tightly again, and envisioned grass growing beneath my feet. I imagined trees in time-lapse growth springing up from the ground, gaining heft and dominating the landscape. I imagined my creek changing directions again to flow through my new little patch of nature. Woodbridge's store would still contain it, but the new growth would be a tiny refuge of natural beauty in a sea of poorly lit artifice. I imagined dandelions growing between blades of grass, and mosses bedding down on the roots of the gnarled maples and oaks that stood in rapt attention on the banks of the babbling stream. I imagined birds nesting in the branches and singing out beautiful, spring-time hymns through green and red leaves that fluttered in an air conditioned, industrial fan generated breeze. I imagined grasshoppers leaping through the new lawn, munching on all this novel greenery, while worms and ants dug tunnels below the surface. Surrounded by aisles of cribs and baby clothes and displays of bargain priced DVD's, I tried to create life.
And I did. I opened my eyes and my park was there, just as I envisioned it. Just as I had done with The Devil, I had transmuted space, changed reality to my own accord. It was lovely. It was amazing. My attention to detail was incredible. I had made something beautiful spring from the recesses of my mind, and now it existed. I ran my hand over the soft grasses that had risen up from the shattered blue and white tile and I was amazed by how legitimate it felt brushing against my skin. The bark of the trees split and splintered in convincing jags and patterns. The leaves were variegated correctly. I caught a grasshopper and marveled at each little exoskeleton plate. It was all as real as anything made by God, but it was there because of my will. You can see how this could inflate an ego.
I worried very much for my sanity and doubted my ability to use these new powers in only a constructive manner. I worried that any stray thought, now, would suddenly be made real. As if on cue, horrible things started entering my mind without any provocation from my consciousness. I was hit with the notion of my family perishing. I fretted, now, that it had happened. It struck across my thoughts like lightning... my childhood home, up on an abandoned hill in the wilderness, still populated with my parents and siblings and pets, lit up with squares of yellow light as twilight spilled out around the countryside. It was so peaceful for one moment. But my brain conjured up a terrible event. An airplane overhead, a giant jet aircraft, stalling like an old car on a winter morning. The engines just sputter out dead and the tons of steel and plastic and glass fall like a stone from the sky. And the plummeting craft, of course, is headed directly for my house, for my family. I can't stop the train of images. My family is inside of their house. They hear the cacophony above, but they don't know what it is. It's getting louder. They don't have a clue. Before they can even guess that the thundering rumble is dangerous, the jet crushes their house in a fury of gravity and fire and apocalyptic destruction. And because this has come into my brain, I am terrified that it has happened.
More stray thoughts come and go. They vary in complexity and in malevolence. Some are almost benign, others are horrific. The United States capital building is now made of croutons. Every home in a nearby neighborhood is ransacked by ghostly marauders riding ebony, skeletal horses. Knives grow in the bellies of my former classmates, slicing them open from the inside out. Thriving metropolises are reduced to flaming planks and cinders. Trees morph into giant men who spend their time meditating by the shores of the oceans. Frogs rise up from the swamp on two legs and begin a conquest of all mammalian life. I am wreaking havoc with my mind. I can feel it. Every stupid thought breed something terrible, something nonsensical, something deadly. How many people are suffering for my ability? How many people are dying because of some new trick that I've discovered.
The exhilaration of what I can do has drained from me. It's too much to control.
I decide, perhaps, that I should bring The Devil back.
Our local department store chain is called Woodbridge’s. It’s small and its selection is paltry, but it’s directly between my job and my apartment. The Target is almost ten minutes out of my way, and the Wal-Mart is awfully run down these days. So unless I need something fairly obscure, I always stop at Woodbridge’s. I’m quite familiar with it, which is probably why I could tell something was off from the moment I walked in. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but it was definitely different. Maybe it was the lighting, or the smell of the place. I’m not sure. But it was off. I didn’t realize how far off until later.
The store was nearly abandoned that night. Now, this isn’t uncommon, especially on a weeknight (how, exactly, Woodbridge’s stays in business has always slightly confounded me), but it seemed exceptionally empty. Usually there’s a few stray shoppers, younger men, mostly, plodding over the dingy linoleum and looking pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. But that night, I can’t remember seeing another soul between the front doors and the cleaning supplies. Every now and then, maybe, as I passed an aisle, a shadowy flash might skitter past, but I assumed it was just the tail end of a fellow shopper briskly moving in the opposite direction. I will admit that I didn’t really notice anything substantially odd at all until I picked my bottle of Gain off the shelf. There certainly had never been a stream running through the house wares department before.
I was dumbfounded, really. It was so nonsensical. But it was real. Only a few feet away from the fabric softeners and dryer sheets was a shallow brook dug into the white and blue Woodbridge’s tiles. The water was clear and running at a pretty fast clip, and there were little frogs and salamanders dotting the course of it. It looked freakishly natural, as if the store had just assembled itself around a creek... that is to say, there was no indication that the stream had been built into the store. Now, having stood in that exact spot countless times prior, I knew that that was not the case. The stream was obviously an addition. But the effort that had gone into making the storebound stream seem like a natural occurrence was staggering. It bothered me in a vague sort of way… I couldn’t fathom the purpose behind so much seemingly pointless work.
I set my detergent back on the shelf, bent down and cupped my hand into the water. It was cold. A tiny swarm of tadpoles darted away from my fingers as I broke the babbling surface. There was silt and a smattering of pebbles on the bed of the creek. I moved them around, kicking up a small storm of dirty plumes into the water. It felt so real. It was real, I suppose, but it didn’t seem any different than any brook you’d stumble across out in the woods. I stood up, flicked the excess water off my hand and dried it against my pants legs. Then I looked up and saw someone standing across the stream, just staring at me. He startled me so much that I nearly fell over.
There was a man across the stream. He was tall and lanky, dressed all in faded blue denim. I always hate how it looks when someone wears the same color pants and shirt. I’m not sure why, and given the fact that the man was tapping the blunt edge of a large butcher’s knife into his palm, I probably should have been thinking about something else. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about how stupid his faded blue shirt looked with his faded blue jeans. It didn’t take long, though, before I noticed the lunatic smile on the man’s narrow, craggy face. He had longish yellow-gray hair, the color of curdled cigarette smoke, and his lips were obnoxiously red. His teeth were certainly nicer than the teeth you’d expect a knife wielding lunatic to have, but his skin was almost stony in texture. All in all, he looked quite crazy and I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him. Helpfully, however, he had a nametag on his shirt. Unfortunately, his name was “T. Devil.”
We stood there, parted by the stream, and staring at each other for some time. Eventually, unsure of what to do, I sputtered, “What does the ‘T’ stand…”
He cut me off and said, “’The.’ It stands for ‘The.’”
“’The Devil,’” I replied. “I see.”
“It’s not my given name,” he clarified.
“Ah,” I said, wondering if should just run the hell away as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I stood where I was, conversing with a crazy man named The Devil while an inexplicable river ran between us. It was a bad decision, I will admit it, but it was the decision I made. I can’t adequately say why. I just stood there, almost transfixed by the man, or by the situation. After a brief silence, I decided to speak again. “Stream’s new,” I said.
“Nah,” The Devil said, never losing that horrifying smile. “It’s always been there.”
It hadn’t. I know it hadn’t. But I decided not to press the issue. “Oh,” I said.
“You just couldn’t see it before,” The Devil explained. “But it’s always been there.”
A brief silence passed again with The Devil and me just blinking at each other. Then, suddenly and chillingly, I realized that The Devil wanted to kill me. It just made sense given his demeanor and bladed accessory, but the reality of it sunk in at that very moment. My throat went dry with fear and I began to perspire from pretty much every pore. It struck me, then, that I should get a confirmation from the predator, and so I asked, “You’re here to murder me, aren’t you?”
The Devil nodded an affirmation.
The fear that overtook me was not the fear that I expected. It was not panic. It was anxiety, like the anxiety that comes along with being ill-prepared for a test, or the anxiety that accompanies a first date. I was nervous. I was nervous I would fail somehow and this crazed man would succeed in his endeavor to murder me. But despite the anxiety, I had no doubt I could keep him at bay if I just managed to focus. By no means was my situation hopeless. Something, already, was keeping him confined to his side of the creek. I began to formulate hypotheses. Perhaps it was the creek itself that was keeping The Devil from reaching me. I decided to ask him if that was the case. He had been unfailingly helpful so far, after all.
He nodded again and I breathed a sigh of relief. I would be fine. He was trapped in sporting goods and I was free to just leave the store with my life intact. A close call, certainly, but no harm done. I backed up, slowly distancing myself from The Devil and my protective creek. I kept my eyes on the lunatic the whole time, worried that, somehow, the status quo might up and change on me. He kept smiling. “I’m going to leave, now,” I told him. “I hope that’s ok?” I didn’t think I really needed his permission, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.
This time, The Devil shook his head. I didn’t like that. Not even a little. I decided to increase my back-up speed, hoping to make my way to the store's foyer a bit quicker. Instead, I tripped over myself and fell onto my rear end, landing with an echoing thump on the pockmarked tiling. All the while, The Devil continued staring at me, still grinning maniacally and still tapping his knife into his palm.
I was a bit shaken by my fall and growing more and more unnerved as moments passed that did not lead to my exit of the store. Sitting on the ground, amidst the surprising amount of dirt and detritus that had probably accumulated over the course of a single shopping day, I felt my limbs and my body become very heavy. Each finger felt like tiny weights had been tied to them. My bones felt leaden and dense. A soreness rippled across the muscles in my back and I felt ridiculously exhausted. I stifled a yawn, trying to keep a direct focus on my would-be killer, before noticeably wincing from my heaviness. I struggled to stand, but I overcame gravity and lifted myself from the ground. As I did, my armor creek shifted, changing course by making an L-like bend into the main aisle, veering sharply right through home goods and resuming course by cutting back through the row of plastic garbage cans and Rubbermaid totes. The creek was now running behind me. Without changing my position at all I was suddenly standing on the same side of the brook as The Devil. And, of course, that brook was the only thing keeping him from killing me.
My heart began to race. My nervousness escalated into a full blown panic. I no longer had any delusion that things were going to be just fine. Because a murderer was moving toward me. He was slow and deliberate, but he was moving toward me and he was going to plunge his butcher's knife directly into my heart. I knew it. I could feel it. I tried to back away, but now I felt trapped by the very same running water that had protected me mere moments before. I couldn't move. I was held fast by some sort of force, a compulsion I couldn't explain. I shut my eyes tightly and envisioned a place where I wasn't about to become the victim of a gory assault. But even with my eyes closed, all I could imagine was The Devil a few footsteps away readying a sharp object to pierce my skin over and over and over again. I wanted to scream out something, a demand for The Devil to stop, to leave me alone, to drop the knife, walk away and never return. But I couldn't make a sound. Nothing came from my throat but a sickly little gurgle. I was about to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Time seemed to freeze, and the agony of anticipation just hovered over me, heavy and thick like dripping molasses slowed by the cold. I was dying a hundred times between each heartbeat. I was ready, but I wasn't ready at all.
And then my brain created its own reality. Still in my mind's eye, still with my real eyes clamped tightly shut, I pictured the ground moving. I pictured space coming between The Devil and me, as if the store was growing from its middle, pushing us outwards and away from each other. New ground just rose up out of nothingness and took its place, seamless, in the new gap that separated us. I moved one direction without taking a step, and he was carried the opposite way. The world just filled in between us and I was safe and he was far away. It was a wonderful little fantasy, a glimmer of stupid hope to break up the tedium of my panic.
But when I opened my eyes, it had happened. Suddenly, I was standing at the edge of a huge gulf of new space. The world had moved us. I had moved us... with my mind. I don't know how, exactly, but my vision was absolutely accurate. The Devil had been pushed so far away that he was no longer visible. Instead, there was a wide expanse of empty store, just floor and walls and ceiling with exposed rafters and buzzing fluorescent lights high overhead. The aisle, the one where the creek had once flowed, the aisle that had separated The Devil and me had become miles wide. I couldn't see the other end of it. The horizon faded with emptiness. For all I knew, that space went on forever. Had it not just saved my life, I imagine I would have found the event wholly disconcerting. As it was, I found it to be an almost mystical experience.
Having successfully dispatched The Devil, I decided to return to my initial task of buying detergent. It seemed rather hollow, though, considering everything I had just experienced. Somehow, getting my whites their whitest paled in comparison to the power I had exerted with my mind. I wondered if my abilities extended beyond self-preservation. I decided to try a new trick.
I stood very still, shut my eyes tightly again, and envisioned grass growing beneath my feet. I imagined trees in time-lapse growth springing up from the ground, gaining heft and dominating the landscape. I imagined my creek changing directions again to flow through my new little patch of nature. Woodbridge's store would still contain it, but the new growth would be a tiny refuge of natural beauty in a sea of poorly lit artifice. I imagined dandelions growing between blades of grass, and mosses bedding down on the roots of the gnarled maples and oaks that stood in rapt attention on the banks of the babbling stream. I imagined birds nesting in the branches and singing out beautiful, spring-time hymns through green and red leaves that fluttered in an air conditioned, industrial fan generated breeze. I imagined grasshoppers leaping through the new lawn, munching on all this novel greenery, while worms and ants dug tunnels below the surface. Surrounded by aisles of cribs and baby clothes and displays of bargain priced DVD's, I tried to create life.
And I did. I opened my eyes and my park was there, just as I envisioned it. Just as I had done with The Devil, I had transmuted space, changed reality to my own accord. It was lovely. It was amazing. My attention to detail was incredible. I had made something beautiful spring from the recesses of my mind, and now it existed. I ran my hand over the soft grasses that had risen up from the shattered blue and white tile and I was amazed by how legitimate it felt brushing against my skin. The bark of the trees split and splintered in convincing jags and patterns. The leaves were variegated correctly. I caught a grasshopper and marveled at each little exoskeleton plate. It was all as real as anything made by God, but it was there because of my will. You can see how this could inflate an ego.
I worried very much for my sanity and doubted my ability to use these new powers in only a constructive manner. I worried that any stray thought, now, would suddenly be made real. As if on cue, horrible things started entering my mind without any provocation from my consciousness. I was hit with the notion of my family perishing. I fretted, now, that it had happened. It struck across my thoughts like lightning... my childhood home, up on an abandoned hill in the wilderness, still populated with my parents and siblings and pets, lit up with squares of yellow light as twilight spilled out around the countryside. It was so peaceful for one moment. But my brain conjured up a terrible event. An airplane overhead, a giant jet aircraft, stalling like an old car on a winter morning. The engines just sputter out dead and the tons of steel and plastic and glass fall like a stone from the sky. And the plummeting craft, of course, is headed directly for my house, for my family. I can't stop the train of images. My family is inside of their house. They hear the cacophony above, but they don't know what it is. It's getting louder. They don't have a clue. Before they can even guess that the thundering rumble is dangerous, the jet crushes their house in a fury of gravity and fire and apocalyptic destruction. And because this has come into my brain, I am terrified that it has happened.
More stray thoughts come and go. They vary in complexity and in malevolence. Some are almost benign, others are horrific. The United States capital building is now made of croutons. Every home in a nearby neighborhood is ransacked by ghostly marauders riding ebony, skeletal horses. Knives grow in the bellies of my former classmates, slicing them open from the inside out. Thriving metropolises are reduced to flaming planks and cinders. Trees morph into giant men who spend their time meditating by the shores of the oceans. Frogs rise up from the swamp on two legs and begin a conquest of all mammalian life. I am wreaking havoc with my mind. I can feel it. Every stupid thought breed something terrible, something nonsensical, something deadly. How many people are suffering for my ability? How many people are dying because of some new trick that I've discovered.
The exhilaration of what I can do has drained from me. It's too much to control.
I decide, perhaps, that I should bring The Devil back.
7.22.2009
Strangers
This terrible rush comes over, too diligent, too soft-spoken to be heard amidst the clang and clatter of whatever thing he thought to be thinking of falling out. And she wonders at it, whether the voice that sputters out such random and perverse and sometimes, sometimes flattering vapidity is just a construct of her own gray matter folds or if it's coming from anyone's blinking shattered eyes that scream out for a lick of any measure of attention. It's a mess, to be sure, to pull what's real out from what's imagined and she thinks, perhaps, of him doing the same?
She can't be, he can't be
sure.
Oh but this weighs heavily upon them, strangers as they are, struggling with finding meaning in hidden lash bats and bristling mourning as the crowds file up and down like space age computer punch cards... each punch in place bringing the difference to a head until neither can stand it and the one goes in and the other leaps out and there's a vacuum left in the middle again,
like a starry pool of liquid, liquid void
a dead space, hollow and silver and dreaming of
Fists going upward and teeth gnashing and all of this because of a flipped coin or a butterfly's sneeze or whatever it is that causes one foot to turn in one direction and in the blink of an eye everything's gone and changed again.
They don't KNOW each other, and never will, not because of fate or destiny or anything large, but, because of small things, tiny things, microscopic things pushing them one place or another while halfway across the world or halfway across town they are frozen with fear and with disbelief, searching the source for transmissions or heartbeats or something that sings with the primal energy of a calling, one brain to one brain until, zombie-like, they move in a straight line, one point to one point... they wait for it
And wait for it
And wait for it
There might be a telephone call in her head or a letter written out on his desk, but they don't know the numbers or the addresses or even, by God, the recipient. They are throwing the words, the message, the missive, the correspondence and the very thought of it into the atmosphere and praying for some sort of long traveled balloon postcard response from that ideal that's been etched in white hot acid on the leathery flaps and armor of their slowly fading hearts.
She can't be, he can't be
sure.
Oh but this weighs heavily upon them, strangers as they are, struggling with finding meaning in hidden lash bats and bristling mourning as the crowds file up and down like space age computer punch cards... each punch in place bringing the difference to a head until neither can stand it and the one goes in and the other leaps out and there's a vacuum left in the middle again,
like a starry pool of liquid, liquid void
a dead space, hollow and silver and dreaming of
Fists going upward and teeth gnashing and all of this because of a flipped coin or a butterfly's sneeze or whatever it is that causes one foot to turn in one direction and in the blink of an eye everything's gone and changed again.
They don't KNOW each other, and never will, not because of fate or destiny or anything large, but, because of small things, tiny things, microscopic things pushing them one place or another while halfway across the world or halfway across town they are frozen with fear and with disbelief, searching the source for transmissions or heartbeats or something that sings with the primal energy of a calling, one brain to one brain until, zombie-like, they move in a straight line, one point to one point... they wait for it
And wait for it
And wait for it
There might be a telephone call in her head or a letter written out on his desk, but they don't know the numbers or the addresses or even, by God, the recipient. They are throwing the words, the message, the missive, the correspondence and the very thought of it into the atmosphere and praying for some sort of long traveled balloon postcard response from that ideal that's been etched in white hot acid on the leathery flaps and armor of their slowly fading hearts.
3.29.2009
Kara Frost Is Dreaming
Kara Frost is dreaming.
She is, in the most real sense, asleep in her bed, next to her husband, with her arm draped across her eyes. She is breathing softly and serenely. Her mouth is open and every now and then her leg twitches.
But she is also somewhere else entirely.
It is, suddenly, as if she has just exploded into being. She does not, in her dream, remember where she had been prior to this moment. It is as if a switch was flipped and then Kara was there. It takes a moment to adjust to this. It takes a moment to assume identity and become someone. Kara, in the dream, scans through the memory of the woman who is dreaming her. And she takes on the role. Now she is more than an identity. Now she is flesh and bone. Now she is soft curves and honey colored hair and green eyes and pink lips. Now she is a scowl and a frown and fingers thrumming impatiently on her thigh. She looks around.
The landscape, in Kara's dream, is mutable and foggy. The horizons seem endless, rolling across a plane of sight that couldn't exist in the real world. Instead, the far off reaches of perspective do not cease or come to a vanishing point. Kara, here, can see it all. She is viewing her space from above and it is blank. Her new hands, long and slender fingers, draw out her surroundings. She is a cartographer of her own world. And so there is an expanse of useless white inked into being by her accurately chipped and unpainted fingernails. The ceaseless white takes form around her, built by her, and now there is a small black building, crudely drawn at first, as if rendered in left handed crayon, and then as the structure breathes in tandem with the lungs of the dreamer, it becomes more real, more weighty and more beautiful. The black wax drawing of a place becomes a real place, each brick etched out, each curlicue of wrought iron put into place until what is there, in front of Kara, is an old firehouse culled from her dreamer's memory. It sits, incongruously, floating among the endless white, and she is pleased to have a place to be. Firehouse No. Six.
Firehouse No. Six existed, once, in the real world too. It stood on Applewhite Avenue in Kara's hometown. It was a lovely old building, erected in 1898, and it had become a dignified landmark. It was a squat building, red and black, with two wide garage doors and a tallish steeple complete with a brass alarm bell. Kara had always felt a strange attachment to the place, even after it ironically burnt to the ground in 1991.
The dreamt of Kara now builds, for good measure, a beautiful garden of bright azure vines next to her firehouse. The vines aren't real, they never were, but they are lovely and they add some much needed vibrancy to the dull red brick of the firehouse and the interminable white that surrounds her. The vines burst forth with brilliant blue flowers. They smell like lilacs and marigolds, but they're far more lovely, in appearance, than either of those. Kara smiles at her quick addition. She is proud of her accomplishments, here. She is satisfied at having brought something into being out of nothing. And then, suddenly ovewhelmingly compelled by curiosity, Kara walks into the front door of the station.
Firehouse No. Six, inside, is not of the dream Kara's design. It is hardly an inside of anything at all. As Kara enters, it is almost like leaving a building. There is, inside of Firehouse No. Six, soft gray grass on the ground and a boundless black sky spackled with stardust overhead. There are tombstones around her, slowly working their way up through loose soil, growing like time lapse spring blossoms and filling the whole of the space until it's all that poor, confused dream Kara can see. On one of those gravestones, sitting cross-legged and imperiously viewing Kara, is a lobster-skinned imp.
He is rather devious looking, shiny skinned, and his oversized head and bat wings overshadow his frail, red body. He has a large, bulbous nose and big white eyes and sharpened, devilish ears that come to very sinister points high above his bald scalp. His limbs are rail thin, joined to him by whispers of sinew and he is grinning malevolently at Kara as she approaches. A spade end tail swishes frighteningly back and forth in the same manner as an angry feline's.
"Hello there," the imp says. Despite the inocuous greeting, there is a cruelty in his voice that sets Kara's spine to shuddering. In a bed, somewhere else, the real Kara does this as well. She shakes the bed and rouses her husband. He gets up to use the bathroom. Kara doesn't open an eye.
"Hello," Kara says. "I'm dreaming."
"Indeed you are," says the imp. "And what are you dreaming of?"
"You, I suppose. And me. Here."
"True. But what is all this?" the imp asks, fluttering his leathery wings and rising off of his grave. He gestures to the infinite field of markers and memorials. "Why are you dreaming of so much death?"
Kara doesn't know.
"You do know, though," the imp smiles as he says this. "You do know where we are."
Kara feels warm as she listens to the imp speak. She feels an anger welling up in her belly and she tightens her fingers and furrows her brow. "What's your name?" she asks, tersely.
"I'd rather not say. You can call me Thimble."
"Thimble?" Kara is annoyed. "What kind of a name is Thimble?"
"It's not my name," the imp says, frowning now. "It's what you can call me."
"Fine," dream Kara huffs. "Look, Thimble... I don't really want to play any sort of guessing games or enter any riddle contests with you, ok? I'm dreaming this and I don't know why. Now, I'm perfectly content to accept that this is nonsense, that this is the worthless gibbering of my sleeping mind. I'm sure that's all that it is. If you want to disagree, you are more than welcome to make your case, but I will not get suckered into leading you into some big monologue about all this. I'm more aware of where we are than you think I am, so either tell me what's going on or get out of here."
Thimble looks surprised. "You are mightily arrogant for such a little creature," the imp says with a rising anger throttling his puckish voice.
"I am no bigger or smaller than you are, here. I might be Kara Frost, here, built to look like her, to think like her, to be her surrogate... but I'm something else too. I'm from here, you wretched little imp. I'm made of the same stuff you are, and I'm not intimidated by you."
The imp smiles meanly, then. "Yes, I suppose you are. You are used to this place, aren't you? You are familiar with it?"
Dream Kara rolls her eyes. "I'm here every night."
"Yes, you are," growls Thimble. "But also, you are not. You are not exactly here every night. You see the difference, don't you? You see that you are somewhere not quite where you have been in the past? This garden, this graveyard, this is not where you spill out your typical fantasias."
And Kara does know that. Even as she sleeps somewhere else entirely, she realizes that this is all somehow different. The slowly morphing backgrounds and fuzzy identities of her normal dreaming are conspicuously absent here. She is somewhere slightly altered, somewhere more concrete. This is all a dream, she has no doubt, but it is not a dream like any other she has experienced. Dream Kara roots through her dreamer's memories and she finds nothing like this. Nothing so real and unreal at the same time. There have been vivid dreams in the past, to be sure, but this is not just vivid. There is tangibility, here. There is solidity. Kara realizes, then, that she and Thimble are of the same composition, but Thimble is not of her dreamer's creation. He is as real, as based in reality as she is. And that is new. And it is unnerving. "What is this place?" Kara asks nervously.
"Not so arrogant, now, huh?" Thimble hisses.
"Tell me why I'm dreaming this," Kara spits.
"You spilled here," Thimble says, grinning. "Accidentally. You wandered off the path when you built a little door for yourself, and now you are here. All by accident. All by happy, happy accident."
"Built a little door?" Kara asks. "The firehouse?"
"A little door to somewhere else," Thimble says.
"I was just dreaming that, just making something out of nothing. It wasn't to go anywhere."
"You were authoring it yourself, weren't you? You were the architect, the painter, the map-maker, and you built a place out of the ether. Have you done that before tonight, little creature?"
Kara thinks. She is, in so many ways, new to being and she scans the ideas and memories of the dreaming Kara to see that, in fact, this creation was novel and new and that she had never made something in her dreams before. Not like this. Dream Kara had interacted, somehow, with a world that she had always been led through in the past... a world she been pushed through, made to recite lines in, like an actress. Dreams were not active, before; they were passive and they were written ahead of time by some unseen author in her dreamer's brain. "No," Kara says solemnly, "I haven't."
"You're moving up," Thimble says, clapping his hands together. "You're different, now. Changed."
"Great," Kara says. "What does that mean?"
"These graves," Thimble says, ignoring her, "are the dead dreams of billions of your dreamers. Over history, over time, how many dreams do you think have been dreamt? They are almost countless. And every night, they die. Why, how many of you do you think lie in this field?"
"I can't even imagine..."
"Thousands. Thousands of nights have passed since you, the sleeping you somewhere else, gave rise to the first of you in her dreams. And every night you die. Every morning, your dreamer awakens and you are banished to this lonely place. Thousands of you. Variations of you, different ages, different looks, different minds and different bodies but all unmistakably you. But tonight, dear little creature.... tonight is different."
"Why?"
"Because you are different. You stopped being guided, stopped being controlled by the you outside of this. And there is a new world opened to you. When she wakes up, you see, you will still be here."
Kara swallows hard. Her dreamer moans in bed, the blankets torn away by her husband. "So I won't die?"
"No," Thimble grins. "You won't."
And there is, in the real world, a very horrible sound. The alarm clock blares out a siren call that would normally spell death for the dreamt of Kara. Kara Frost, in the graveyard, can hear it. And there is a part of her that leaps in terror as it sounds off. There is a survivalist nerve in her that is scraped raw by the repeated bleat of the wretched alarm. She is terrified, terrified that her brief existence is about to be snuffed out. Thimble's words are of no great comfort against the collected experience of thousands of her vanished selves.
Kara Frost's real husband rolls over and swats ham-handedly at the clock buzzer. He disengages the sound, but it is too late to keep Kara sleeping. Her real green eyes open, and she is groggily tearing away at the night's remnants of fog and fugue. She yawns and cringes at the taste in her mouth, and she licks her pink lips to ease the crackle and dryness a night of mouth breathing has left. She is struggling to put the pieces of her last dream together, cobbling a wrong memory of it from bits and bobs that are still caught in the webs of waking. She remembers herself and the firehouse and the blue flowers and a vast graveyard and a sinister little imp, but the order is incorrect, already, and she's deleting and adding lines and text to make the half-remembered portions fit into some semblance of understanding. She has it wrong. The dream is filed away, interesting enough, but unimportant to her day to day routine.
And in the graveyard, Kara still stands shuddering and worried, while Thimble rolls his big white eyes in a overly dramatic display of disgust.
"You see?" Thimble hisses. "You're still here."
And Kara Frost now exists in two places, even when she isn't dreaming.
(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block
She is, in the most real sense, asleep in her bed, next to her husband, with her arm draped across her eyes. She is breathing softly and serenely. Her mouth is open and every now and then her leg twitches.
But she is also somewhere else entirely.
It is, suddenly, as if she has just exploded into being. She does not, in her dream, remember where she had been prior to this moment. It is as if a switch was flipped and then Kara was there. It takes a moment to adjust to this. It takes a moment to assume identity and become someone. Kara, in the dream, scans through the memory of the woman who is dreaming her. And she takes on the role. Now she is more than an identity. Now she is flesh and bone. Now she is soft curves and honey colored hair and green eyes and pink lips. Now she is a scowl and a frown and fingers thrumming impatiently on her thigh. She looks around.
The landscape, in Kara's dream, is mutable and foggy. The horizons seem endless, rolling across a plane of sight that couldn't exist in the real world. Instead, the far off reaches of perspective do not cease or come to a vanishing point. Kara, here, can see it all. She is viewing her space from above and it is blank. Her new hands, long and slender fingers, draw out her surroundings. She is a cartographer of her own world. And so there is an expanse of useless white inked into being by her accurately chipped and unpainted fingernails. The ceaseless white takes form around her, built by her, and now there is a small black building, crudely drawn at first, as if rendered in left handed crayon, and then as the structure breathes in tandem with the lungs of the dreamer, it becomes more real, more weighty and more beautiful. The black wax drawing of a place becomes a real place, each brick etched out, each curlicue of wrought iron put into place until what is there, in front of Kara, is an old firehouse culled from her dreamer's memory. It sits, incongruously, floating among the endless white, and she is pleased to have a place to be. Firehouse No. Six.
Firehouse No. Six existed, once, in the real world too. It stood on Applewhite Avenue in Kara's hometown. It was a lovely old building, erected in 1898, and it had become a dignified landmark. It was a squat building, red and black, with two wide garage doors and a tallish steeple complete with a brass alarm bell. Kara had always felt a strange attachment to the place, even after it ironically burnt to the ground in 1991.
The dreamt of Kara now builds, for good measure, a beautiful garden of bright azure vines next to her firehouse. The vines aren't real, they never were, but they are lovely and they add some much needed vibrancy to the dull red brick of the firehouse and the interminable white that surrounds her. The vines burst forth with brilliant blue flowers. They smell like lilacs and marigolds, but they're far more lovely, in appearance, than either of those. Kara smiles at her quick addition. She is proud of her accomplishments, here. She is satisfied at having brought something into being out of nothing. And then, suddenly ovewhelmingly compelled by curiosity, Kara walks into the front door of the station.
Firehouse No. Six, inside, is not of the dream Kara's design. It is hardly an inside of anything at all. As Kara enters, it is almost like leaving a building. There is, inside of Firehouse No. Six, soft gray grass on the ground and a boundless black sky spackled with stardust overhead. There are tombstones around her, slowly working their way up through loose soil, growing like time lapse spring blossoms and filling the whole of the space until it's all that poor, confused dream Kara can see. On one of those gravestones, sitting cross-legged and imperiously viewing Kara, is a lobster-skinned imp.
He is rather devious looking, shiny skinned, and his oversized head and bat wings overshadow his frail, red body. He has a large, bulbous nose and big white eyes and sharpened, devilish ears that come to very sinister points high above his bald scalp. His limbs are rail thin, joined to him by whispers of sinew and he is grinning malevolently at Kara as she approaches. A spade end tail swishes frighteningly back and forth in the same manner as an angry feline's.
"Hello there," the imp says. Despite the inocuous greeting, there is a cruelty in his voice that sets Kara's spine to shuddering. In a bed, somewhere else, the real Kara does this as well. She shakes the bed and rouses her husband. He gets up to use the bathroom. Kara doesn't open an eye.
"Hello," Kara says. "I'm dreaming."
"Indeed you are," says the imp. "And what are you dreaming of?"
"You, I suppose. And me. Here."
"True. But what is all this?" the imp asks, fluttering his leathery wings and rising off of his grave. He gestures to the infinite field of markers and memorials. "Why are you dreaming of so much death?"
Kara doesn't know.
"You do know, though," the imp smiles as he says this. "You do know where we are."
Kara feels warm as she listens to the imp speak. She feels an anger welling up in her belly and she tightens her fingers and furrows her brow. "What's your name?" she asks, tersely.
"I'd rather not say. You can call me Thimble."
"Thimble?" Kara is annoyed. "What kind of a name is Thimble?"
"It's not my name," the imp says, frowning now. "It's what you can call me."
"Fine," dream Kara huffs. "Look, Thimble... I don't really want to play any sort of guessing games or enter any riddle contests with you, ok? I'm dreaming this and I don't know why. Now, I'm perfectly content to accept that this is nonsense, that this is the worthless gibbering of my sleeping mind. I'm sure that's all that it is. If you want to disagree, you are more than welcome to make your case, but I will not get suckered into leading you into some big monologue about all this. I'm more aware of where we are than you think I am, so either tell me what's going on or get out of here."
Thimble looks surprised. "You are mightily arrogant for such a little creature," the imp says with a rising anger throttling his puckish voice.
"I am no bigger or smaller than you are, here. I might be Kara Frost, here, built to look like her, to think like her, to be her surrogate... but I'm something else too. I'm from here, you wretched little imp. I'm made of the same stuff you are, and I'm not intimidated by you."
The imp smiles meanly, then. "Yes, I suppose you are. You are used to this place, aren't you? You are familiar with it?"
Dream Kara rolls her eyes. "I'm here every night."
"Yes, you are," growls Thimble. "But also, you are not. You are not exactly here every night. You see the difference, don't you? You see that you are somewhere not quite where you have been in the past? This garden, this graveyard, this is not where you spill out your typical fantasias."
And Kara does know that. Even as she sleeps somewhere else entirely, she realizes that this is all somehow different. The slowly morphing backgrounds and fuzzy identities of her normal dreaming are conspicuously absent here. She is somewhere slightly altered, somewhere more concrete. This is all a dream, she has no doubt, but it is not a dream like any other she has experienced. Dream Kara roots through her dreamer's memories and she finds nothing like this. Nothing so real and unreal at the same time. There have been vivid dreams in the past, to be sure, but this is not just vivid. There is tangibility, here. There is solidity. Kara realizes, then, that she and Thimble are of the same composition, but Thimble is not of her dreamer's creation. He is as real, as based in reality as she is. And that is new. And it is unnerving. "What is this place?" Kara asks nervously.
"Not so arrogant, now, huh?" Thimble hisses.
"Tell me why I'm dreaming this," Kara spits.
"You spilled here," Thimble says, grinning. "Accidentally. You wandered off the path when you built a little door for yourself, and now you are here. All by accident. All by happy, happy accident."
"Built a little door?" Kara asks. "The firehouse?"
"A little door to somewhere else," Thimble says.
"I was just dreaming that, just making something out of nothing. It wasn't to go anywhere."
"You were authoring it yourself, weren't you? You were the architect, the painter, the map-maker, and you built a place out of the ether. Have you done that before tonight, little creature?"
Kara thinks. She is, in so many ways, new to being and she scans the ideas and memories of the dreaming Kara to see that, in fact, this creation was novel and new and that she had never made something in her dreams before. Not like this. Dream Kara had interacted, somehow, with a world that she had always been led through in the past... a world she been pushed through, made to recite lines in, like an actress. Dreams were not active, before; they were passive and they were written ahead of time by some unseen author in her dreamer's brain. "No," Kara says solemnly, "I haven't."
"You're moving up," Thimble says, clapping his hands together. "You're different, now. Changed."
"Great," Kara says. "What does that mean?"
"These graves," Thimble says, ignoring her, "are the dead dreams of billions of your dreamers. Over history, over time, how many dreams do you think have been dreamt? They are almost countless. And every night, they die. Why, how many of you do you think lie in this field?"
"I can't even imagine..."
"Thousands. Thousands of nights have passed since you, the sleeping you somewhere else, gave rise to the first of you in her dreams. And every night you die. Every morning, your dreamer awakens and you are banished to this lonely place. Thousands of you. Variations of you, different ages, different looks, different minds and different bodies but all unmistakably you. But tonight, dear little creature.... tonight is different."
"Why?"
"Because you are different. You stopped being guided, stopped being controlled by the you outside of this. And there is a new world opened to you. When she wakes up, you see, you will still be here."
Kara swallows hard. Her dreamer moans in bed, the blankets torn away by her husband. "So I won't die?"
"No," Thimble grins. "You won't."
And there is, in the real world, a very horrible sound. The alarm clock blares out a siren call that would normally spell death for the dreamt of Kara. Kara Frost, in the graveyard, can hear it. And there is a part of her that leaps in terror as it sounds off. There is a survivalist nerve in her that is scraped raw by the repeated bleat of the wretched alarm. She is terrified, terrified that her brief existence is about to be snuffed out. Thimble's words are of no great comfort against the collected experience of thousands of her vanished selves.
Kara Frost's real husband rolls over and swats ham-handedly at the clock buzzer. He disengages the sound, but it is too late to keep Kara sleeping. Her real green eyes open, and she is groggily tearing away at the night's remnants of fog and fugue. She yawns and cringes at the taste in her mouth, and she licks her pink lips to ease the crackle and dryness a night of mouth breathing has left. She is struggling to put the pieces of her last dream together, cobbling a wrong memory of it from bits and bobs that are still caught in the webs of waking. She remembers herself and the firehouse and the blue flowers and a vast graveyard and a sinister little imp, but the order is incorrect, already, and she's deleting and adding lines and text to make the half-remembered portions fit into some semblance of understanding. She has it wrong. The dream is filed away, interesting enough, but unimportant to her day to day routine.
And in the graveyard, Kara still stands shuddering and worried, while Thimble rolls his big white eyes in a overly dramatic display of disgust.
"You see?" Thimble hisses. "You're still here."
And Kara Frost now exists in two places, even when she isn't dreaming.
(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block
3.10.2009
This Place Is Magic
There is a gentle sway to Lyra's hips as music plays from some unseen source. It should confuse her, but it barely registers as strange. It is an eerie melody, like a warbling saw ebbing and flowing from the treetops, filling the swirling, blue fog surrounding her. She moves to it instinctively, letting its unearthly hum puppeteer her. She should find this all very odd, but instead she feels nothing but a rare peace. It barely registers that she is being watched by spectral eyes.
The eyes hang there in the mists, azure and glowing, and they blink out a code that Lyra can somehow decipher. This, too, should confuse the girl, but it doesn't. She just accepts it, and reads what the eyes, disembodied and alight, spell out for her.
"This is a special place, girl," the eyes blink to her. "This place is magic."
Lyra knows that. Even without the supernatural trappings, without the ghostly music and whispering fog and disembodied eyes, Lyra could tell that there was something special about this little grove of birch and beech trees. It had always called out to her, but in a sideways fashion... in a dark manner that had always vaguely frightened her as a child.
She would walk a path nearby, many nights, flashlight in hand and chills running the length of her back. She was afraid, so much, when she was young. The moonlight cast dire shadows out along the leaf-strewn ground and those shadows danced in ways that froze up her heart and instilled her with quick-breath panic that took hours to burn away. The whole of the woods had left her terrified, and she hated that she had to walk that dirt road alone. Owls would scream out their warning cries, various things would skitter through the fallen leaves... even the trees would bend and cackle as she made her way past them. It was always Halloween in that forest, always sinister and foreboding. But it was real. It was nature that frightened her. The fear of a wildcat in the underbrush or a rabid raccoon lurking behind a twisted stump or sandy knoll made each trek through the trees a miniature nightmare. As she walked that dark path, sometimes not even lit by the moon, she felt like prey. It was overly dramatic, to be sure, but also founded and valid. To the things that made their home in the forest, she was an easy target.
But there was something more. Beyond the rational fears that accompanied her, there was one particular spot that loomed larger and more horribly in her anxiety. It was a small thatch of trees that seemed abnormal, although she could never pinpoint the reason. It was different, though, palpably so, and she didn't want anything to do with it. It lay, at least, a bit off the path, but it was still within sight and she would hurry her pace just to cross it quickly and leave it behind as soon as was possible. She heard whispers from it, but not in any way that she would admit to. It called out to her, telling her just how out of the ordinary it was. And she didn't like it. She didn't like what she felt spilling from it, radiating out from it like gnarled roots veined from the center of the place in all directions.
It wasn't long before things had changed, and there was no reason to traverse the path anymore. Lyra moved far away from the woods, the dirt road and the eerie grove of trees that gave her such discomfort. She ended her youth in a place where grass was replaced by concrete and trees were torn down to make way for steel and glass. There was no worry of survival in that place. Everything was easy and brightly lit. Everything was stripped of its hardship and coated in glossy paint and chrome. There was nothing to run from on the sidewalk, no midnight stalking beasts to hunt her down. She became accustomed to the suburbs and she forgot about the thatch of trees that inordinately worried her as a child.
Nostalgia is powerful, though, and Lyra found herself, many years later, desiring to revisit a childhood spent in a different sort of place. She remembered the way there better than she thought she would, and on a vacation from her world, she reentered the forest that she walked through as a little girl.
The path was still there and so were the feelings of dread. It was a backwards comfort, but a comfort all the same to know that those lost worries still had a home inside her. It was dark as she crossed the path, looking up at the moonlight shredded by black limbs and fractals of fluttering leaves. She was nervous and elated, moving with catlike precision through the forest as her heart began beating crazily near that enchanted grove of birch and beech trees that had so unnervingly traumatized her as a child.
And then she went into a sort of trance.
Moving from the path, called into the woods, Lyra flitted like a faerie spirit, light on her feet and nearly floating to that strange congregation of trees. What had frightened her before now spoke to her, called to her, lured her in like a siren song. She smiled as it happened. She was surprised by it, surprised by herself and not at all aware of the blue fog that poured in as she entered the grove.
And Lyra is here, amongst those trees, watching blinking, disembodied eyes and realizing just how magic this place really is. The eerie sawblade fanfare sways her and her dark hair blows about in a warm and pleasant breeze. It's all very sedate, very lush and unreal. She feels wonderful, here, as if she'd been waiting to be here for her whole life. Crickets chirp over the wobbling notes of the unseen music. The fog swirls prettily around her. The eyes keep blinking.
"You've been away so long," the eyes blink. "But you've returned to us."
And Lyra knows that this is right. She was of this place. She was born in this thatch of trees and ousted into a world of mundane threat and dull innovation. The circumstances elude her, but the eyes are blinking the truth to her. She wonders, now, at her fear as a child, at the misplaced terror that accompanied this magic spot. It was the fear she felt upon exile, she realizes, the fear of being tossed into that monochromatic world... it was tethered, in her mind, to her birthplace, her magic home. She feels silly, embarrassed... but only a touch. She is too happy at her return to feel much else at all.
"Welcome back," the eyes blink.
Lyra takes off her shoes, then, and lets her feet sink into the soft earth. She feels so alive, so perfect. The unseen music hits a crescendo, and Lyra lifts her lithe arms upward, into the bustling leaves of the birch and beech trees. She lets the leaves touch her palms and an electric trill crackles down her spine, down her thighs, into her ankles and deep into the ground. She is connected. Rooted. Her dark hair grows, a wild thing now alive and moving of its own volition. She smiles and sighs as tendrils of it wrap around her, silken and soft. She builds, for herself, a cocoon from her own slinking hair. She is mummified in it, wholly entombed by herself. And inside, she is still smiling, still sighing. Hair snakes from the base of her, from her bound ankles, and it crawls up the side of a leaning birch. It creeps along a low hanging branch and wraps itself, tight, against the papery bark. With a quick jerk, Lyra is pulled, feet first and upside down, hung from the branch and still swaying to the dying, unseen music. She is nestled, there in her cocoon, purring and content. Her eyes shut and she dips into a serene lulled slumber.
Where she awakens isn't mundane in the least.
The eyes hang there in the mists, azure and glowing, and they blink out a code that Lyra can somehow decipher. This, too, should confuse the girl, but it doesn't. She just accepts it, and reads what the eyes, disembodied and alight, spell out for her.
"This is a special place, girl," the eyes blink to her. "This place is magic."
Lyra knows that. Even without the supernatural trappings, without the ghostly music and whispering fog and disembodied eyes, Lyra could tell that there was something special about this little grove of birch and beech trees. It had always called out to her, but in a sideways fashion... in a dark manner that had always vaguely frightened her as a child.
She would walk a path nearby, many nights, flashlight in hand and chills running the length of her back. She was afraid, so much, when she was young. The moonlight cast dire shadows out along the leaf-strewn ground and those shadows danced in ways that froze up her heart and instilled her with quick-breath panic that took hours to burn away. The whole of the woods had left her terrified, and she hated that she had to walk that dirt road alone. Owls would scream out their warning cries, various things would skitter through the fallen leaves... even the trees would bend and cackle as she made her way past them. It was always Halloween in that forest, always sinister and foreboding. But it was real. It was nature that frightened her. The fear of a wildcat in the underbrush or a rabid raccoon lurking behind a twisted stump or sandy knoll made each trek through the trees a miniature nightmare. As she walked that dark path, sometimes not even lit by the moon, she felt like prey. It was overly dramatic, to be sure, but also founded and valid. To the things that made their home in the forest, she was an easy target.
But there was something more. Beyond the rational fears that accompanied her, there was one particular spot that loomed larger and more horribly in her anxiety. It was a small thatch of trees that seemed abnormal, although she could never pinpoint the reason. It was different, though, palpably so, and she didn't want anything to do with it. It lay, at least, a bit off the path, but it was still within sight and she would hurry her pace just to cross it quickly and leave it behind as soon as was possible. She heard whispers from it, but not in any way that she would admit to. It called out to her, telling her just how out of the ordinary it was. And she didn't like it. She didn't like what she felt spilling from it, radiating out from it like gnarled roots veined from the center of the place in all directions.
It wasn't long before things had changed, and there was no reason to traverse the path anymore. Lyra moved far away from the woods, the dirt road and the eerie grove of trees that gave her such discomfort. She ended her youth in a place where grass was replaced by concrete and trees were torn down to make way for steel and glass. There was no worry of survival in that place. Everything was easy and brightly lit. Everything was stripped of its hardship and coated in glossy paint and chrome. There was nothing to run from on the sidewalk, no midnight stalking beasts to hunt her down. She became accustomed to the suburbs and she forgot about the thatch of trees that inordinately worried her as a child.
Nostalgia is powerful, though, and Lyra found herself, many years later, desiring to revisit a childhood spent in a different sort of place. She remembered the way there better than she thought she would, and on a vacation from her world, she reentered the forest that she walked through as a little girl.
The path was still there and so were the feelings of dread. It was a backwards comfort, but a comfort all the same to know that those lost worries still had a home inside her. It was dark as she crossed the path, looking up at the moonlight shredded by black limbs and fractals of fluttering leaves. She was nervous and elated, moving with catlike precision through the forest as her heart began beating crazily near that enchanted grove of birch and beech trees that had so unnervingly traumatized her as a child.
And then she went into a sort of trance.
Moving from the path, called into the woods, Lyra flitted like a faerie spirit, light on her feet and nearly floating to that strange congregation of trees. What had frightened her before now spoke to her, called to her, lured her in like a siren song. She smiled as it happened. She was surprised by it, surprised by herself and not at all aware of the blue fog that poured in as she entered the grove.
And Lyra is here, amongst those trees, watching blinking, disembodied eyes and realizing just how magic this place really is. The eerie sawblade fanfare sways her and her dark hair blows about in a warm and pleasant breeze. It's all very sedate, very lush and unreal. She feels wonderful, here, as if she'd been waiting to be here for her whole life. Crickets chirp over the wobbling notes of the unseen music. The fog swirls prettily around her. The eyes keep blinking.
"You've been away so long," the eyes blink. "But you've returned to us."
And Lyra knows that this is right. She was of this place. She was born in this thatch of trees and ousted into a world of mundane threat and dull innovation. The circumstances elude her, but the eyes are blinking the truth to her. She wonders, now, at her fear as a child, at the misplaced terror that accompanied this magic spot. It was the fear she felt upon exile, she realizes, the fear of being tossed into that monochromatic world... it was tethered, in her mind, to her birthplace, her magic home. She feels silly, embarrassed... but only a touch. She is too happy at her return to feel much else at all.
"Welcome back," the eyes blink.
Lyra takes off her shoes, then, and lets her feet sink into the soft earth. She feels so alive, so perfect. The unseen music hits a crescendo, and Lyra lifts her lithe arms upward, into the bustling leaves of the birch and beech trees. She lets the leaves touch her palms and an electric trill crackles down her spine, down her thighs, into her ankles and deep into the ground. She is connected. Rooted. Her dark hair grows, a wild thing now alive and moving of its own volition. She smiles and sighs as tendrils of it wrap around her, silken and soft. She builds, for herself, a cocoon from her own slinking hair. She is mummified in it, wholly entombed by herself. And inside, she is still smiling, still sighing. Hair snakes from the base of her, from her bound ankles, and it crawls up the side of a leaning birch. It creeps along a low hanging branch and wraps itself, tight, against the papery bark. With a quick jerk, Lyra is pulled, feet first and upside down, hung from the branch and still swaying to the dying, unseen music. She is nestled, there in her cocoon, purring and content. Her eyes shut and she dips into a serene lulled slumber.
Where she awakens isn't mundane in the least.
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