And Every Day a Little Closer

The leaves spiral earthbound through the air, enveloping them in a warm shower of scarlet and auburn, lurid and crimson. It’s been a dry autumn, something that bears little significance to eight-year-old Gwen beyond the fact that it means the foliage still gives a satisfying crunch when trod upon. And of course the extra bit of warmth means she hasn’t been forced to throw a sweater on over her costume, something that always puts her in a foul mood.

Of all the seasons autumn is the most transient, forever having its toes stepped on by its successor. Its very essence is that of change, of progression, of decay. The passage of time is hardest to ignore when sitting in an hourglass.

A knock on the door, two steps back. Wait until it opens. Trick or treat! The bag is held out, candy is deposited. Sometimes you have to act cutesy, sometimes you have to endure small talk or unnecessary questions. The most common: And what are you supposed to be? She’s a witch; that much is obvious. They just want to hear her say it, to exclaim it proudly and adorably. At eight years old Gwen is already showing signs of the cynical, darkly intelligent young woman she will soon become. Her parents see it; they aren’t sure if this is something they should be worried about. She’s eight years old, her mother tells her father. Whether this is meant to be a consolation or a warning isn’t clear to either of them.

It’s an illusion, of course. Observation, even obsessive, has no effect on how slowly or quickly time passes – at least not beyond perspective. If winter began with one massive snowfall that gradually melted away until spring it would feel just as fleeting. Instead it comes and goes in waves, as if time were tangible, brought to a sluggish crawl by the cold and barren stillness.

There’s a house at the end of the road, a sad and deplorable mess of splintered wood, peeling paint and loose shingles. As they approach it Gwen’s father nudges her mother. Looks like someone went all-out on Halloween decorations, he says. She rolls her eyes, knows he’s been waiting all year to make that joke. The woman who owns it has been around longer than anyone in the area can remember. Keeps to herself, rarely seen out and about. But this is a nice neighborhood, a good neighborhood, and Gwen’s parents aren’t the type to turn their noses up. Go on honey, her mom says, nudging her forward. Go on.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. And around again. A cycle, you’d be forgiven for thinking. But it’s not, is it? Only to the extent that water circling a drain is a cycle. Can a leaf falling through the air be considered flying? The term implies permanence, or even just temporary stability. A downward spiral may take its time, but it never detours from the final destination.

Gwen ascends the rickety wooden stairs. One, two, three, four. A porch, just as deteriorated. Time has not been kind to this house. Time has not been kind to you, says the newborn to the elder. How blissfully unaware we are of the limits of our perspectives. She knocks on the wooden door, steps away. A backwards glance at her parents on the sidewalk, who send her looks of encouragement. The door swings open and a woman stands before her. She has a kind yet morose face. Younger than Gwen was expecting, for whatever reason. The woman says nothing, only looks down at her with that small, sad smile. Feeling the need to break the silence, Gwen opens her mouth. I’m a witch! she proclaims as adorably as she can. The smile grows larger but not much happier. So you are, she replies, stooping to her level. Would you like to know a secret? The woman leans in close, putting her lips to Gwen’s ear. So am I.

A bug which spends its whole life in someone’s garden believes it to be the extent of the world – or it would, had it the capacity to conceptualize. Who are we to say it is wrong, if indeed it never sees beyond its borders? What difference does it make to the creature who cannot see its life from a distance?

Gwen eyes the woman dubiously. You don’t look like a witch. Where’s your costume? The woman titters. States of being should not be measured – not unless you’re willing to give equal weight to the negative. Gwen tilts her head, thoroughly perplexed, and the woman retrieves a small pouch from her pocket. Shall I demonstrate? Thumb and forefinger venture into the pouch, emerging with a pinch of fine, crystalline amber dust. She sprinkles the powder into her open palm as Gwen watches, transfixed. The woman takes a deep breath and exhales gently through pursed lips. The powder is lifted into the air, swirling like golden leaves caught in an autumn gust, enveloping Gwen’s face in an orange cloud.

She is nine, and her father isn’t coming trick-or-treating with them. He has to work, her mother tells her, but she knows better.

She is thirteen, and she doesn’t want to go out this year. The move was rough on her, and she has yet to make friends at her new school.

She is sixteen and she is going as a black cat. Her mother tells her that the costume is too sexy. A screaming match ends with Gwen slamming her door, burying her face in her pillow and sobbing.

She is eighteen and this is her first Halloween away from home. She hasn’t seen her father in over a year.

She is twenty-four and she realizes that she’s never been in love.

She is twenty-nine and she realizes that she is old.

She is forty. Happy Halloween, her co-worker tells her on his way out, and she blinks in surprise. Is it the end of October already?

She is fifty-five. Her doctor has found a lump. We’ll need to run some more tests, he tells her. It’s nothing to be alarmed about yet.

She is seventy-two. She never had children, was too scared of having to see the passage of time reflected on their faces. Now she wishes she had, wishes she had someone who could endure it with her. Does that make her selfish?

She is eighty-six. She cannot remember what her mother looked like. Her father’s face she forgot long ago, but every now and then she thinks she can hear his voice.

She is ninety-two. The orderlies stand around her bed as she breathes her last. They hold her hand, caress her arm gently, whisper soothing nothings. It will be okay, they tell her. She doesn’t need to be comforted though. She has lived her whole life on her deathbed – this moment now is no different than the rest. A falling leaf might be an inch from the ground or a mile: it is still falling either way.

Such a Small Thing

Brett Harris polished off the last of his Big Mac, stuffing the wrapping back into the drive thru bag with one ketchup-stained hand while the other steadied the wheel.  He washed it down with a sip of coke, making no effort to stifle the greasy belch that followed.  Finished with the main course, Brett’s groping fingers found their way to what remained of the hors d’oeuvre.

Fries disappeared down his gullet in an impressive display of unabashed gluttony, the salty edge driving him to scrape every last bit of grit from the inner linings of the red box.  Their nurturing completed, the iconic golden teats of American consumerism were reluctantly returned to the folds of modesty provided by the drive thru bag.  Another sip of coke, another belch.  The dregs were drained, the cup joined the rest.  He rolled down the passenger-side window, taking a casual glance around before crumpling the paper bag at the neck and tossing it out.  He saw it sail clean into the ditch from the side mirror, after which it immediately faded from both sight and mind.

He was trying to decide if he ought to pick up another six pack before heading home (he couldn’t quite remember just how much he’d had the night before) when he realized the van which had been trailing casually behind him for the last three miles or so had suddenly and rather aggressively cut the distance between them by more than half – and was still coming.  Must’ve realized he’s running late for some city-slicker meeting, Brett mused, snorting.  The van was modern; looked like one of those electric ones they’d started coming out with a while back.  Nice enough, he supposed – if you were into that sort of thing.  Personally Brett would’ve taken his classic (affectionate synonym for “old”) pickup over one of those fancy-ass foreign-made hipster toys any day.  If some naïve Richie Rich tree hugger types wanted to throw their daddy’s money overseas that was their problem.

It was all country roads out here, choppy enough to warrant straddling the middle and deserted enough to permit it.  Brett knew dirt-road etiquette as well as anyone who’d grown up around these parts, so when it became clear the van wasn’t playing catch-up for the fun of it he shifted aside to make passing room.  But it didn’t.  Instead it began to honk its horn, swerving slightly behind him as if hesitant to make the pass and blaming him for it.

“What the fuck?” he muttered, eyeing them askance in his rear-view.  The occupants were obscured by the tinted windshield, nothing more than darkened silhouettes.  Are they drunk or something?  He rolled his window down, sticking his arm out and waving them on.  No dice.

It occurred to him that the van’s motions almost seemed to be conveying a message or command – like they were trying to get him to pull over.  He scoffed at this thought.  Yeah, right.  Like that’s gonna happen, you nutjob alkies.  Calling the police never even crossed his mind – running to the boys in blue every time you had a problem was a chickenshit move that practically screamed city-slicker.  Folks out here weren’t pansy-ass: they could take care of themselves, and a run-in with some hopped-up dumbasses hardly constituted an emergency.

As if to challenge this notion the van’s advances began to grow more frantic, more aggressive.  Brett watched the vehicle in his rear-view, telling himself to ignore them even as he failed to tear his eyes away.  Maybe I should just pull over and let them pass, he thought, hating how much that felt like admitting defeat.  He slowed down, deciding he would flip them off as they went by.  This brought him a margin of satisfaction as he inched closer to what little shoulder there was before it sloped into a poorly maintained ditch riddled with bushes and saplings.

And then it happened.  Seeing their opening, the van pushed forward with unexpected intensity.  They were head-to-head with Brett’s pickup in seconds.  He had just enough time to catch a glimpse of the grim-faced woman in the passenger seat – her jaw set, his jaw slack – before the van cut right and he was run off the road.

The truck collided with a tree, Brett’s forehead collided with the steering wheel, and everything went dark.

…

Consciousness came in fits and starts, like a car engine sputtering back to life only to die again just when it finally seemed to catch.  The blare of the pickup’s horn rang faintly in his ears as if from a distance.  Dimly he realized his face was pressing down on the mechanism, keeping it on.  He raised his head, the skin peeling away from the wheel begrudgingly, sticky with a warm coating of blood.  Trepid fingers found their way to his forehead, prompting a dull jolt of pain as soon as they made contact.

The windshield had been shattered on impact.  Broken glass littered the dashboard, flecks falling from his hair as he moved.  Through the gaping hole that had been left framed in jagged crystalline teeth he could see the minivan, stopped only a few feet ahead of where he’d ended up.  They ran me off the road, he thought numbly, and then, almost sardonic: probably calling the cops right now.

“Whassa matter?  Never been in a fender-bender before?” he slurred to the immobile van.  It idled indifferent, the exterior betraying nothing of what might be happening inside.  Still, unhurried, self-assured.  Almost like a predator lying in wait.  No doubt in stark contrast to its occupants, he told himself, trying to quash that uneasy feeling in his chest.  Those city-slickers must be shittin’ themselves, thinking they killed me or something.  He tried to scoff, but the sound dried up in his throat as all four doors opened in synch and four very non-panicked individuals stepped out into the road and made their way to his truck.

“What, d’you wanna exchange insurance info?” he called out as they approached, failing to break their unnervingly calm demeanors.  He’d intended to sound snide, bravely accusatory, but there was a quaver in his voice that told him more than he was willing to admit.  Something was wrong.  He reached for his cell, unsure exactly what he intended to use it for.  To call the cops?  That would have required admitting that he was incapable, that he needed help, that he was afraid.

On bad days he would lament never getting the chance.  On worse days he would tell himself that he had gotten the chance, that if he’d only acted faster things would have been different.  He would curse himself for being so proud, so stubborn.

On the worst days of all he knew it wouldn’t have made a difference either way.

They forced his door open, grabbing him roughly by the wrists, the legs, the shoulders and pulling him from the truck.  He struggled feebly, still weak from the crash and too confused, too disoriented to put up a real fight.  One more thing to regret, to fixate on, to beat himself up over.  If only, if only, if only.

Before he knew it they had half-carried, half-dragged him into their minivan, faces stoic and unflinching.  Someone produced a roll of duct tape which was promptly used to bind his arms at the wrists and legs just above the ankles.  Another strip went over his mouth, followed by a cloth sack which was pulled over his head and then secured with more duct tape around his neck.

“All set,” one of his captors said, and the minivan immediately took off, jostling his unsecured body.  He tried to struggle, tried to push himself up off the floor of the vehicle, but every time he made even the slightest amount of progress someone would shove him back down again.  Deep down he knew it was purely reactionary and entirely pointless: he was blind, severely weakened, more than likely concussed, bound at the arms and legs, outnumbered three-to-one (not counting the driver), and stuck in a moving vehicle going at what felt like sixty miles per hour.  In short, he was well and truly fucked.

And still he struggled, because to do anything else would have meant conceding, relenting.  It would have meant accepting the futility of his situation, would have meant giving up and giving in.  But Brett wasn’t ready to give up.

That would come later.

…

Time plays tricks on us all, but it is especially fond of incapacitated minds.  Unable to watch the scenery zip by and unsure of the consistency of his own consciousness, Brett had no way of saying just how far they’d travelled before he felt the minivan coming to a stop.  The engine slid smoothly into silence, unmarked by any of the coughing and sputtering that would invariably accompany his pickup’s shutoffs.  An ominous voice in his head wondered if he would ever hear that familiar sound again, but Brett quickly snuffed this train of thought before it could take hold.  He knew that this moment – the moment of transition between the moving vehicle and whatever they had in store for him next – was his best (he refused to think ‘only’) chance for escape.  Now was not the time for defeatism.

He heard the doors being opened, felt them grab at his ankles and wrists.  When they lifted him he made no effort to resist.  He waited, waited until they’d carried him out of the van, waited until he felt the warmth of the sun on his body.  Only then did he make his move.  He kicked out, twisting and writhing in the air as he tried to wrench himself free.  Fuck running, he thought, gritting his teeth in exertion.  I’ll fucking hop if I have to.  Hell, I’ll fucking roll away if that’s what it takes.  Just please, Jesus, please let me get away.  The person at his ankles lost their grip, and if not for the tape Brett might have let out a triumphant yell.  As his lower body hit the ground he tried to use the momentum to yank his arms away as well, but their hold was too strong.  Someone swore and Brett felt a sharp jap of pain as he was kicked him in the ribs.  He curled in on himself, trying to protect his vitals.  The hands around his wrists let go, but before he could question the release the full assault began.

Feet rained down on his body from all sides.  He raised his taped-up arms to shield his head, but all this seemed to do was damage two body parts in one.  He tried to cry out, tried to beg for mercy, but he was voiceless.  His ears rang, his already sore and damaged body screamed in protest.

After what seemed like an eternity someone finally called for the attack to stop, but Brett had long since lost any awareness of what was happening.  Vaguely he registered being lifted up again and carried off, his hope left behind somewhere in the dirt and gravel.  It would be the first of a long cycle of separations and reunions, each making him warier than the last, until one day he would greet hope not as a trusted and uplifting friend, but a dark and deceitful stranger.

…

They forced him into a kneeling position, lifting the sack from his head and removing the tape from his mouth, arms and finally legs.  He was too far gone to even get excited at the opportunity this presented.  The fight had been beaten out of him, so much so that he couldn’t have made a move even if he’d wanted to.  It might have been for the best: as one of his captors cut the tape from his body two others stood off to the side, armed with sinister-looking cattle prods.

They were in a bare concrete room, nothing more than four walls and a ceiling.  A narrow indent lined the floor on the far side, the gutterlike space carrying on from left to right.  He had no idea what purpose the room had been designed to serve, but there was no question what it was now: a cell.  Brett moaned in protest, trying and failing to get to his feet.  He landed on his side, too weak to try again.  Behind him he heard his captors filing out of the room, heard them closing and locking the door behind them.

He was alone.

He stayed that way for a long time, curled up in the fetal position, sobbing quietly to himself.  Sleep came and went unbidden, never deep and never for more than a few minutes at a time.  People who were abducted in books and movies would always wake up in shock, not remembering where they were or how they’d gotten there, but it wasn’t like that for Brett.  He would open his eyes each time knowing exactly where he was.  He would have been glad for that brief moment of confusion and disorientation, for that split second of expecting to wake up in his own bed.  But it never came.  His mind never left that place.

When all his tears were spent and his body would accept no more rest, Brett wavered to his feet and had a proper look around his prison.  He started with the gutter, seeing that it was no more than a few inches deep and wide.  The space ran under both side walls, and when he put his head to the ground to peer down its length he saw that it carried on for quite some distance, presumably through dozens of identical iterations of his own cell.  There were no signs of life that he could make out.

A long, thin gap in the outside wall above his head let in daylight.  It was far too small to imagine fitting through, but he jumped for it all the same, if only to see his surroundings.  No luck; it remained frustratingly out of reach.

There was a slot in the metal door, but it was covered with a lid and couldn’t be opened from the inside.  He shook the door knowing it wouldn’t budge, and was still disappointed when it didn’t.  Some things you just have to do.

He called for help until his voice was hoarse, to no avail.  At one point he thought he heard someone cough, and later on what might have been the shuffling of feet, but when he called out again he was met only with silence.

…

The first meal they brought him sent him into a panic attack.  Not because of the food itself, which he devoured graciously after being starved for what he felt must have been at least a day, but because of the unspoken message that came with it, the underlying implication written in its delivery.

It told him that they were in no hurry.  It told him that they were going to take their time, that he was in this for the long run.  Whatever they were going to do to him, it wouldn’t be quick.

He threw the bowl of oatmeal against the wall, somewhere between crying and screaming.  He body-slammed the door until his shoulder hurt, and then he headbutted the wall until the pain overloaded his system and he careened towards the ground.

When he came to he crawled over to where the bowl had fallen, licking it clean before ravenously shifting his attention to the floor, scooping chunks of oatmeal directly into his mouth.  Once this supply had been exhausted he moved to the wall, eating it directly off the concrete.  The bowl was paper, the cup of water that followed Styrofoam.  The significance of this would only occur to him later on, when he’d wish desperately for something he could break, for sharp edges and sturdy structure.  You can’t cut yourself with paper; not enough to make a difference.  Not enough to get it done.

This he would come to know.

…

Food came twice a day, only enough to keep him alive, to keep him hungry, keep him weak.  They would bang on the door to signal for him to stand against the far wall, peer in through the slot in the door (never close enough for him to reach), and wait until he did as they commanded before opening it, sliding the food in, and locking it back.  If he refused to comply they would simply leave, and he would receive no food.  If he tried anything while the door was open they were always at the ready with their cattle-prods, after which he wouldn’t be fed for two days.

In the first few weeks he was strategic with his attempts, careful and stingy.  Later on he would act out of desperation, frenzied and frantic with no concern for his well-being.  Eventually he would do it only to feel something.  He wouldn’t even actively try to escape; he would simply be uncooperative and it was enough.  Perhaps he only wanted to prove to himself that he was still able to make his own decisions, that no matter what they did he would never truly be tame, never truly broken.  Perhaps he was simply bored.

…

It had been (by his shaky count) seven days when they came for him for the first time.  There was a banging on the metal door, and the familiar bark for him to stand against the wall with his back to them and his arms raised.  When he’d done as they asked he heard the door being opened, but instead of quickly being shut again he heard their footsteps entering.

“Stay where you are,” the man warned, and he did.  They’re releasing me, a tiny voice whispered inside his head, and though he was well past believing it, he wasn’t quite able to dismiss the possibility entirely.  He was still ready to believe that this was all some big mistake, or that it was finally over.

They grabbed his arms and forced them behind his back, securing them with a zip tie.  When this was done a sack was placed over his head and he was hoisted off the wall.  In his mind he imagined being led outside, being forced to his knees before a shallow grave, being shot in the back of the head.  The thought made him cold, but he made no attempt to resist.  By this point he’d been shocked twice, and the memory of the pain still sent jolts down his spine.  Besides, why would they feed him for a week only to shoot him now?  Something told him their plans for him were far more elaborate.

He was taken to another room in the same building (he never felt the flooring change, never felt the warmth of the sun on his body) where they sat him down in a chair and tied him to the frame.  Then the sack was removed, and he found himself squinting up at three of his captors, a sharp amber bulb hanging low from the ceiling.

“What is this?” he pleaded, on the verge of another breakdown.  “What do you want?”  He’d asked these questions and many more during the first dozen food deliveries, never receiving an answer, never receiving acknowledgment, but being face-to-face for the first time seemed to encourage the possibility of dialogue – even if he was tied to a chair.

They watched him silently.  His eyes darted from one to the next, looking for any sign of openness, of emotion, some hint as to what they were thinking.  Nothing.

“Why are you doing this?  Why am I here?”

“You answer the latter, and we’ll answer the former.”  The man’s voice was calm and gentle, yet Brett flinched – actually flinched – at the sound.  If his father could have seen the weak, snivelling creature he’d become he would have been disgusted.  Hell, the Brett from a week ago would have been disgusted.

“What?”  Brett blinked up at the speaker, the one in the middle.

“Tell us why you’re here – why you think you’re here.”

Brett sputtered, confused.  “P-please, I have a family.  M-my wife…”

“Your wife?  You think she’s the reason you’re here?”

“What?  N-no!  I don’t know why I’m here!  You kidnapped me, you sick fucks!”

The shock came out of nowhere, coursing through his system and wreaking havoc on his pain receptors.  His entire body tensed, the muscles aching with exertion.  An eternity, and then finally, blissfully, he collapsed into himself.  Dimly he saw the cattle-prod retreating, held by the woman on the right, the same one he’d made eye contact with in the passenger seat of the van.  At first he couldn’t even place her; the whole incident on the road felt like a lifetime ago.

“If you get agitated we’ll be forced to subdue you.  It’s best if you try to stay calm.”

Saliva dribbled down from his numb and open lips, pooling on the front of his shirt.  He lolled his head in an attempt at righting it.

“The sooner you tell us why you’re here the easier it’ll be on all of us.”

“I… don’t… know…”

“Then guess.”

Brett took in a breath, trying to sum up the strength to do as the man asked.  He didn’t understand what was happening or what they wanted from him, but what he did understand was pain.  He would do whatever it took to avoid it.

“You… you’re terrorists.”  They didn’t look like terrorists – they looked like college kids, exactly like the city-slicker hipsters he’d initially pegged them for – but who else kidnapped good, honest, hard-working American citizens for no reason?  Besides, Fox News had warned that the towelheads were recruiting more and more American youth, brainwashing them and using them as puppets from overseas.  It didn’t matter what they looked like.  Anyone could be a terrorist.

The man in the middle smiled sadly.  “No.  We’re not terrorists- at least not in the sense that you’re thinking.  And even if we were, it still wouldn’t have been the answer we’re looking for.  We want to know why you’re here – not us.”

“I’m not here by choice!” he yelled in frustration, realizing his mistake too late.  The prod was jabbed into his neck and held there for six agonizing seconds. When it was over his teeth ached and his jaw was locked in place.  It took several attempts before he was able to loosen it again.

“Why are you here?” the man repeated, after giving him a moment to recover.

“Jesus.  Did… did Otis send you?  Is this because I owe him that money?”

“No.  Guess again.”

Brett racked his mind, but it was blank.  He didn’t deserve this.  He hadn’t done anything to deserve this.  “I- I’m sorry, I just-”  The end of the cattle-prod came to life, crackling with malevolent energy.  Brett panicked, inching away from the tool.  “I cheated on my wife!” he cried out, saying the first thing that came to his mind.  It had been years ago, a one-time thing that she had never found out about – and even if she had, Sheila would never have gone to such lengths to punish him for it.  This was just too sadistic, too extreme.  But it had come to mind and so he’d said it.  “I cheated on my wife,” he repeated, encouraged by the sight of the prod shutting off.

But the man in the middle shook his head.  “No.  Guess again.”

In this way they made him list every bad thing he’d ever done, every person he’d ever hurt, every promise he’d ever broken.  Logic and reasoning were gone; each answer was blurted on the spur of the moment, unconsidered and unquestioned.  They came to mind in panic and he would shout them immediately, never quite believing that any of them might be the answer they were looking for yet desperate to buy time.  He told them about the time he drank too much and knocked his ex-girlfriend about, about the kid he used to bully in high school, about the dog he’d hit with his car and then left to die on the side of the road.  He told them things he’d never told anyone, things he’d long forgotten and things he wished he could forget.  Nothing was private, nothing was exempt.

He stripped his conscience bare and all it bought him was three minutes and fourteen seconds.

After the first shock he began making things up, saying whatever came to mind, but they seemed to know he was lying because the answers no longer spared him from being shocked.  Finally, when he could no longer keep his head upright or even sum up the energy to mumble excuses, they untied him from the chair and dragged him back to the room.

Seven days later they did it all over again.

…

On the third week, after telling them about the time he’d dine-and-dashed, once more left grasping for another delay, Brett told them that he used to litter.  Everything was ‘used to’ now; it was all past-tense, all from another life.  He would never litter again, not because he’d ever really stopped, but because he’d never get another chance.

“I used to litter.  I used- I used to just toss my garbage anywhere,” he rambled, squeezing it for as many seconds as he could.  He was worried it sounded too pathetic, too much like he was grasping at straws (which, to be fair, was exactly what he was doing).  They’d recently taken to shocking him anytime he said anything overtly meager, or anything that was obviously an attempt at stalling.  Instead the trio exchanged looks, and the cattle prod retreated.  It was the first time he’d seen them react.  His eyes jumped from one to the next, settling finally on the man in the middle.

“That… that can’t be it.”  His voice was that of a stranger, hoarse from screaming and practically trembling with fear.  “Littering?”  Dumbly he recalled the moments before his abduction, when he’d tossed the McDonald’s bag out of his window.  Hadn’t the van sped up to meet him almost immediately after that?  “It can’t be,” he whispered.

“A deal’s a deal,” the man in the middle said, as the other two turned to leave.  “You tell us why you’re here, and we’ll tell you why we’re doing this.”

“I’m here… because I threw that bag out my window?” he asked slowly, in bewildered disbelief.

“That’s correct.  Well- to be precise, you’re here because we saw you throw that bag out.”  He grinned.  “We’re not omnipotent or anything: if we hadn’t seen you do it I’m afraid you would have gotten away with it, just as you did every other time.”

Brett shook his head.  “I don’t understand.”

The man went over to the corner, grabbing a stool and carrying it back over.  He sat down directly before Brett, facing him eye-to-eye.  They studied one another’s faces for a long time, neither quite knowing what the other was searching for.  Finally he began.

“There was a stray dog that used to hang around our neighborhood when I was a boy.  Knackers, we called him.  A little Russell-Terrier mix.  He was friendly with all the kids, and we used to feed him scraps and stuff whenever we could.  But it wasn’t enough; you could see his ribs poking out of his side, and we worried about how he would do once the cold settled in.  So one day I took him home with me, thinking I’d adopt him as my own.”  He shifted atop his stool.  “Only thing was, my old man hated animals.  Hated them.  Thought they were all disease-infested vermin.  I was worried he wouldn’t let me keep him, was worried that he would yell and shout and put up a big fuss.

“Instead he sat me down, and he told me that it wasn’t for him to tell me what to do with my life.  He told me that I wasn’t responsible for his happiness, anymore than he was for mine.  He said it was up to each man to take their happiness, their well-being, their lives into their own hands.  I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but it didn’t matter.  I was ecstatic.  My blissful incomprehension lasted right up until the next morning, when I found he’d beaten Knackers to death with his baseball bat.  Only then did I understand.”

Brett shuddered.  “Why are you telling me this?”

“So that you understand.  I don’t blame you for being a selfish, conceited asshole.  I’m sure if we went over your life with a fine-toothed comb we’d find some tragic reason for your lack of concern, something pitiful and sad and human.  This isn’t about that.  It’s not about you, understand?  Just like your littering wasn’t a malicious act.  It was just you being you.  Just living your own life, completely devoid of any responsibility for anyone else’s.  That’s what this is.  It’s us living our own lives, completely devoid of any responsibility for you or yours.  It’s not personal.”

“For littering?” Brett sobbed, the sheer absurdity of the situation finally hitting him full-force.  It wasn’t fair.  “You’re doing all this because I littered?”

“Well, yes.  It’s such a disgusting, pointless, selfish thing to do.  That kind of blatant disregard and disrespect for Mother Nature is unforgivable in our books.”

“But it was such a small thing!” he cried.  “I don’t understand!”

“Neither do I,” the man replied stiffly.  “If it was such a small thing, why didn’t you just wait to throw it out once you got to your destination?  Where was the urgency?  Why couldn’t you just have waited?”

In that moment Brett was too overwhelmed with incomprehension and disbelief to consider anything the man said, but in the weeks, months and years that followed they would give him plenty of time to think about it over and over and over again.  It all boiled down to one word: why?

The question would resound in his head for the rest of his days, but he would never manage to give it an answer.

…

And in every room a narcissus, seeing only their own reflections, seeing only the features, fears and flaws they look for, blind to everything else.

Exercises in Futility

There are stories in this world that will never be told, tales which will never be realized, never be concluded, never be shared.

There is the story of a family on vacation in the Honduras, who stop by a food stand in the middle of the night and purchase some kebabs to stave off the hunger of a long drive.  The meat is greasy and moist, practically falling off the stick as they consume it, still steaming.  They nod to one another, praising the decision.  They will never know the truth of what they eat, will never suspect.  They will live on for many years, this meal a happy albeit insignificant blip in their lives, just as it is for every other person who happens to drive down that rural strip of road while the owner’s stock is still ample.  The food stand will continue to operate for fifteen more years until the owner passes away in his sleep, peaceful and painless, by which point all evidence of his operation will have been destroyed in knowing preparation.  No one will ever know, and his secret will die with him.

Nothing will ever come of it.

There is the story of a man on a hike, who sees something in the woods from a distance.  It is too far to make out details, but he sees enough and is smart enough to know that nothing its size lives in this region, and nothing its shape lives in this reality.  He might not be able to place it (not quite, although there is an itch at the back of his head, a primal sense that knows what he is looking at even if it won’t share that information), but what he does recognize is the scream of a fellow human.  He also recognizes what comes next: the sound of flesh tearing from flesh, cutting off the person’s voice mid-cry.  His face pallid and limbs shaking, he walks, not runs, back to his car and drives home, where he locks the door behind him and crawls under his covers.  He will call in sick to work the next day, and the next, and the next.  It will be a week before he is able to step foot outside his house again, and even then he never speaks a word of what he saw, and he never steps foot into the wilderness again.

Nothing ever comes of it.

There is the story of a tomb which lies beneath the Sahara Desert and has remained untouched for millennia.  There is no surviving legend about it, no secret set of clues to be followed halfway around the globe before finally leading to its location, no clandestine society entrusted with keeping its existence hidden from the world.  It simply sits there beneath the shifting sands of time, and whether this is for the best or worst will never be determined.  When the end comes and the Earth is swallowed up by the Sun, it will occur without the contents of this chamber ever having seen the open sky since the day they were so carefully sealed away all those years ago.

Nothing will ever come of it.

There is the story of a woman born in Little Rock, Arkansas who has the ability to read minds.  It is faint and indistinct, but it is there.  She catches glimpses into the heads of others, overhearing such snippets as I wonder what we ought to have for dinner tonight, or I wish I loved her half as much as I used to, or The Beatles are so fucking overrated it’s an injustice.  In this way she grows up, and having no other point of reference for how the human mind works but her own, she thinks little of the intrusive thoughts which seem to pop up out of nowhere on the daily.  Eventually she will chalk them up to an overactive imagination, and then, later, a fear of mental illness, but will never guess at the truth.  Coincidence dictates that she will never overhear something specific or detailed enough to place it as belonging to someone else.  As her power grows and she moves to the city, the barrage becomes too much.  I’m-cheating-on-him-and-he-doesn’t-even-know-I-hate-myself-I-hate-myself-I-hate-myself-I-deserve-that-promotion-I’ve-earned-that-fucking-promotion-I-should-really-look-into-buying-a-new-God-I-wish-I-knew-what-it-was-like-to-kill-someone-maybe-head-down-to-the-playground-later-try-to-convince-them-I’m-clean-  The endless torrent of voices will drive her to the brink, and believing she has gone mad, she will hang herself in her closet.

Nothing ever comes of it.

Every day, every minute around the world things happen that will bear no witness.  People go missing and are never found.  Lives are led that amount to nothing.  Secrets are kept and stories go untold.  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it even make a sound?  Or does it go quietly into the nothing, the only testaments to its existence a hollow carcass that will soon decompose and the atoms it happened to displace while it stood?

There is the story of a boy, a boy who loves a girl.  She might love him back, if only he could sum up the courage to tell her so.  He comes close, too.  They sit in a café, the summer sun shining down on their table by the window wall, people on the sidewalk outside passing by on their respective ways to and from engagements, or maybe just wandering aimlessly on their way to and from nowhere at all, without destination or purpose.  Who is to say?  Will you get up from your seat, follow one of them on their walk to see where they end up, to see if they don’t just evaporate into thin air as soon as they are out of sight?  No.  There are other things, things that feel bigger than anything else, on your mind today.  She sits across from you, smiling, radiant in the golden glow.  Her hand rests on the table, and you think; I could reach across right now, slide my hand over the table to hers, and take it.  I could tell her how I feel; I could tell her everything.  You love her.  You love her, and she might love you too.  Your hand shifts, starts to move…

…and takes up your cup of coffee.  You raise it to your lips, averting your eyes as you drink.  The light is too bright.

There is a boy who loves a girl, and a girl who might love him too.

Nothing will ever come of it.

An Exercise in Imagination

Let us try something.

Imagine, if you will, that you feel like a failure all the time.  Imagine feeling like you are constantly treading water, struggling to break the surface and avoid sinking down to the murky depths beneath while all about you people are sailing by on boats or casually backstroking in the pleasant summer sun.  Imagine working a production line without the slightest clue as to exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, constantly sneaking glances at the people beside you, trying to copy them, trying to figure out how they do it, knowing that you are a fake and a fraud and that before too long the farce will be discovered.

Now imagine you have something – one thing, really – that takes you away from all that.  Imagine you have one thing in this entire wretched existence that gives you a genuine and legitimate feeling of well-being instead of just distracting from that void, from that hollow part inside your chest.  Imagine this thing gives you a sense of fulfillment and of belonging, like you might have a part to play in this life, might actually have meaning, have purpose, have value.

Now imagine you can’t do it.  Imagine this thing, this one and only thing, can be whisked away from you on a whim.  Imagine you set about it one day and find you simply can’t.  Imagine it comes and goes without logic or reason, erratic and spontaneous.  Imagine wondering each time it goes away if this is it: if today is the day it finally leaves you for good, the day that tiny spark of magic inside you is snuffed out once and for all and you are left with nothing, nothing but the empty, hollow, husk of a person you’ve always been.

Imagine being a painter who suddenly forgets how to paint, or a mathematician who forgets how to count.  Imagine how you would feel, knowing the one thing that gives you any sense of self-worth was as fleeting and unpredictable as a feather in a tempest.  Imagine knowing the joy of discovering your purpose after years spent going numbly through the motions of life, a pantomime of a person – and not even a good one at that, but a half-assed pantomime, one who acts and exists out of habit alone – and then imagine being unable to fulfill that purpose.  Imagine failing at the one thing that doesn’t make you feel like a failure.

Now imagine if this was all just in your imagination.

You open your eyes,

hoping to escape a terrible reverie,

only to find yourself in the world you’ve created.

Is it a failure of the imagination

or an excess?

Does it matter any less

if it’s all in your head?

Hallowed

They came again on the third night, though this time they did more than lurk around the outskirts of the campsite, snapping twigs underfoot and branches in the trees overhead, only ever briefly caught in the beams of their flashlights as fleeting shadows.  No, this time they took Gregor as he was relieving himself on the edge of the site just before the treeline.  A massive hand emerged from the darkness, skin like wrinkled leather and darker than tar, the fingers wrapping over his shoulders and embedding themselves into the small of his back.  It picked him from the earth as one might pluck a grape from its stem and withdrew into the thicket, all in the blink of an eye.  Gregor hadn’t even had a chance to cry out before he was gone, though the creatures made sure to make up for that fact afterwards.

The others laid awake as sounds of his agonizing and drawn-out demise reverberated off the trees and through the thin fabric of their tents, lasting long into the grey hours of the morning when they were finally and horribly cut off.  Tired eyes stared into the maze of trees and bushes as the morning fog rolled in, at first wary of the silence then ashamedly relieved as they realized it was finally over.  Without so much as a word among themselves, the squadron set to work packing up camp and preparing for the day of travel ahead of them.  No one spoke of the events, or of the fact that hung heavier in the air than any fog: that it wasn’t over, not by a long shot.  Indeed it had only just begun.

They came upon his remains around midday, finding them strewn about the branches of a tree along their path.  He’d been mutilated beyond the point of recognition, disassembled and then carefully rearranged into a distinct yet unfamiliar symbol, held together by a combination of sticks, entrails, and muscle sinews.  At the base of the tree, folded into a neat pile, was his unmistakeable red uniform.

Some of the others wanted to take him down, to bury what was left, but the treant cautioned against it.  The remains have been tainted by darkness, it warned.  To come into contact with them now would be unwise.  Some of the humans lashed out at this warning, tapping into years of bad blood and recycling the same insults that had been used for centuries: heartless, inhuman.  They all knew better, most of them having served together for the better part of a decade, but for humans it was all too easy to lash out when drunk on a cocktail of mourning, guilt, anger, and fear.  Gregor had been their comrade, their brother-in-arms.  He deserved better, they cried.  The treant said nothing to defend itself, as was typical of their kind’s nature.  Just when things seemed on the verge of breaking down, the daemon stepped in, pointing up at the remains with its pale, spindly arm.  That, it said with callous assurance, is not Gregor.  Not anymore.  The others finally quieted, and they settled for taking up his clothes before carrying on.

Two more nights passed without incident, the creatures apparently content to fall back to their initial strategy, keeping only just out of sight as they stalked the perimeter of the camp.  Some of the men were encouraged by this development; they’d been expecting the creatures to grow more brazen after the success of their first attack.  They attributed this success to the extra precautions they’d been taking – always having at least one non-human on guard with a pair of humans, digging a latrine pit closer to the centre of camp, putting over two feet of open space between the camp and the treeline.  Those among them who knew better kept this knowledge to themselves: it would do the others no good to know the truth.

On the sixth night they struck again, snatching up one of the tents from above like it was nothing and then taking advantage of the ensuing chaos to nab a woman who’d stumbled a little too close to the treeline in panic.  The tent had contained Orion, a sprite and Devin, a human.  The woman’s name had been Isabelle.  By the time the others recovered from shock the screams had begun.

Once more they found their remains the next day strung up among the trees, mixed and matched to form three different symbols.  No one suggested taking them down this time – indeed as the group stared up at what remained of their friends no one spoke at all.  They gathered up their clothes, each uniform folded neatly as Gregor’s had been, and pressed on.

By the ninth night they were prepared, or at the very least anticipant.  When the creatures struck the group fought back as best they could.  The night sky was alight with gunfire, the air thick with the stench of blood and energy.  Trees and enemies alike were burnt to a crisp by the wickerman, the hobgoblin and the drake, the flames raging long into the hours of the morning.  The revenant wielded its scythe with deadly elegance, severing anything and everything that dared cross the treeline into their camp.  The daemon disappeared early on and was presumed dead until dawn, when it returned to the clearing covered head to toe in the creatures’ black blood.  Man and beast, human and inhuman fought side-by-side against the unrelenting onslaught of darkness, yet for all their efforts they only managed to delay the inevitable.  The creatures kept up their assault until six of the group had been captured, at which point they immediately retreated back into the darkness.

As soon as it became clear the battle was over the group wasted no time in taking stock of the damage: the creatures had gotten what they’d come for and they knew there would be no second wave.  In addition to the six who’d been taken (Sarah, Ackerby, Lukas, Ignacio, Visciri, and Elarra) they found eight dead and four badly injured, among them the hobgoblin.  All four eventually succumbed to their injuries, their last hours in this world spent listening to the tortured wails of their six friends.  Near midnight the last of the humans finally snapped, taking it upon themselves to march into the woods on a misguided rescue attempt fuelled entirely by madness, frustration and desperation.  They told no one else; it was only as their own voices joined the cacophony of anguish that the others realized what had happened.

When dawn came at last, the survivors woke to an acrid wasteland of cinder and smoke.  A thick layer of grey ash coated the forest floor, and still more of the flakes fell from the sky like powdered snow.  The charred remains of trees jutted up from the ground like warped obsidian spires, monuments to the great and terrible battle fought there the night before.  Among these only a handful remained unscathed by the fire, their trunks and branches coloured grey with soot.  This nightmare landscape seemed to stretch on for as far as the eye could see, smoke still rising from the ground in several places and hanging heavy in the air.  As the survivors took in the foreign and ominous world to which they’d woken, standing amidst tattered tents and scattered supplies, their eyes slowly turned upwards.  There, up among the surrounding trees, was the pièce de résistance of this hellish scene: the third and final marker, the last of their friends.

The runes spanned the full circle of their clearing, an unbroken ring of carnage with no apparent beginning or end.  Dispersed just as evenly were nine folded sets of uniforms, set along the ground before the treeline encircling the camp.  Three of the uniforms, set apart at intervals of two, were folded inside out.  The survivors knew without having to check the nametags on the inside of their collars that these had belonged to the three humans who’d struck out in the night hoping to save the others.  Six had been taken, three had come of their own volition.

Thirty of them had stepped into the woods ten days prior.  Now, only five remained: the treant, the drake, the wickerman, the daemon, and the revenant.  They knew it was no coincidence that they were the only ones left.  Their blood was old blood, stretching back long before the time of man, to an era when the Great Old Ones still roamed this plane of existence.  Their kin had been there when the way of the Earth was chaos, when the skies rained brimstone and unfathomable horrors writhed in oceans of fire, when caves and canyons ran deep into the core of the planet and colossal beasts taller than the tallest skyscrapers roamed the continents.  They were of the Drevni, the Kth-ul M’naar.  Their kind remembered, kept vigil over the eternal twilight which had withdrawn along with most of the earth’s magic when their age had given way to the age of man.  It hung ever on the horizon of their reality, a malevolent and vengeful darkness which would occasionally seep back into the world through momentary gateways.  Out of sight but never truly gone, the Great Old Ones were always watching, waiting for the opportunity to return.

Mankind was too young to remember; even the goblins, sprites and other faefolk were too young to remember, but the Drevni remembered.  They would always remember.  It was for this reason and this reason alone that they’d been allowed to live thus far.  The others had been judged undeserving of anything more than serving as sacrifices in their blood rituals – only the Kth-ul M’naar were worthy of taking part in what would come next.

Discarding their uniforms and their equipment they left the ravaged campsite, taking with them none of the supplies their team had so laboriously carried up to this point.  They travelled through the wastes in single file, paying no mind to the shadows which occasionally flitted between trees in their peripheral.

It was dusk by the time they came upon the temple, a massive slab of polished torbernite stretching as far up as the eye could see.  A single opening was carved into its face, large enough for six aircraft carriers stacked one atop the next to pass through without so much as buffing the doorway.  The monument was old, older than the Earth itself, yet what awaited the quintet inside was far older still.  They could feel its presence even there, like the faint pulse of a beating heart – only it wasn’t alive, not in the conventional sense at least.

The five Uncommons stopped before the edifice, and for a moment even they of the old blood were unable to press on.  The malevolent thrum reverberated in their bones, shaking them to their very cores.  There was a reason Kth-ul M’naar translated into the human’s language as God-fearing creatures; knowing what they were up against may have helped steel their minds, but it did quite the opposite for their nerves.  In this case, wisdom did not grant them invulnerability: only caution.  Caution and terror.

It would do them no good to put it off: encircling them on all sides the shadow creatures lingered closer, emboldened by the coming nightfall and subsequent darkness.  Soon they would corral them into the temple’s heart, deep beneath the Earth’s surface to where it waited.

Sharing one last look at the sky, each knowing it would be their last, the Red Cloaks began their descent.

The Beach House, Part I

My dad used to say that standing in the surf looking out over the ocean was the closest he ever felt to being free.  He’d tell us that we were never really free, no matter what they said.  Putting a fragile stamp on a brick didn’t turn it into glass, he was always fond of saying.  It didn’t change what it was.

We owned a beach house down in Malibu, a nice, secluded place right on the beachfront that always felt more like home to me than our real house.  It was a cozy place, spacious but elegant in its simplicity and authenticity, not all decked out in technology and modern things the way a lot of the “nicer” ones usually are.  The walls were wood, both inside and out, so coarse and rough that you might think the entire house had been built up from driftwood planks washed ashore from a shipwreck.  I used to press my face up against the walls, closing my eyes and inhaling deeply through my nose, swearing I could still smell the salt from the ocean, soaked deep into the wood.

The house was painted a beautiful azure blue, like the bottom of the ocean on a hot summer’s day, with doors and window frames and the like painted white.  If the walls were the ship’s sides then the floors were the deck, built from dark, polished hardwood, worn and smoothened by all those years’ worth of feet treading across it.

The house was as close to the beach as you could get without being subjected to the tide, and the water was literally a stone’s throw away from the front door.  Granted not for me, not at that age at least.  The porch was my favourite place in the entire house, and it was where I’d spend the majority of my time when not at the beach itself.  Sitting under the canopy, lazily swinging back and forth in that old white rocking bench, its paint peeling and cracking around me as though time itself was passing me by, the sway of the chair synching with the push and pull of the ocean’s tide.  That was how I’d spend my summer afternoons, all those years ago; looking out over the horizon to where the sea met the sky.

It was just the three of us, most of the time.  Myself, Tara, and our father. Mom didn’t come down too often; she was never particularly fond of the beach.  She was the kind of woman who was more at home in a shopping mall or a country club, not so much the outdoors.  You know the one; tight, pursed lips, prim and proper personality, with designer dresses covered in colorful flower print, large sunhats and even larger sunglasses.  She had been raised into the lifestyle, her family the proud owners of a decent fortune dating back several years after a certain investment took a turn for the best.  A downside of her personality was that she could sometimes come off a bit pretentious, but behind the cold front was a very warm interior, and she was full of love, especially for us.

Dad was always the rough-and-tough one, the big lumberjack-type who was always on the verge of enveloping those around him in a crushingly nurturing bear hug, eager to take us camping and fishing and hiking and whatnot.  He had come from close to nothing but had built his name up in his trade and passion of choice (carpentry), and when the day came had knelt before our mother with a ring of sizeable worth and a bank account reflecting it, having earned every last penny.  Naturally she hadn’t cared much one way or another about this, but he had known it was important to her family that she didn’t marry “beneath her”, and indeed with this peace offering he managed to win them over as well.  Friends would often tease that they were the oddest pair that ever lived, but whether or not their differences had any effect on their relationship, either constructive or destructive, it couldn’t be denied that they loved one another terrifically.  That much was always obvious, even after.  Especially after.

The beach house was always the favourite of all the outings our father would take us on, and whenever we got the chance (and the say-so from Mom) we’d be out packing the car sooner than you could say “vacation”.  Mom would often watch from the front doorstep as we made the final preparations, a small smile plastered on her face.  Sometimes she’d come along, just to be there with us if not to take advantage of the beach, but most of the time she’d make excuses, some of which would be legitimate.  We didn’t mind too much though; it wasn’t that she was an absent parent figure, just that the beach house wasn’t her thing.  She made up for it tenfold the rest of the time. And there was something special about her staying behind.  I know how that sounds, and I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, but there was something intimate about it just being the three of us.  Dad would slide his massive frame into the front seat, squeezing behind the steering wheel, and he’d start the car, turning his body around to face us as he pulled out of the driveway, and he’d give us this wink, like there was this big secret that only we knew about, something only we were a part of.  It was a wonderful feeling, being part of something exclusive.  It’s strange, isn’t it? That to feel included we feel the need to exclude others?  That the more select the group is, the prouder you are to be a part of it?  It’s like you’ve passed some kind of test, and immediately if not always consciously, you feel superior to those who aren’t a part of it.  I guess that’s what it’s all about.  Feeling better about yourself, if only by feeling worse about others.  But I digress; of course I considered none of this as a child.  It’s only in looking back that we see how naïve we were.  Naïve and fragile.

My dad loved the beach house as much as we did; maybe even more.  Like I said before, while my pastime of choice was sitting on the porch, his was to stand right out in the surf, usually at sunrise or sunset.  Seeing him standing out there, hands on his hips or hanging limp at his sides, the back of his head betraying none of his thoughts, you couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking.  I would often watch him from my perch, wanting to go over to him, to see the expression on his face as if to get some kind of clue as to what he was thinking about.  I’d stare at the back of his head for what seemed like eternities, imagining what might be going on inside, what might be transpiring behind that wall.  Sometimes I’ll wake up in a cold sweat, chest heaving with each panicked breath as I try my best to shut out the image of my father’s head over the eternal spread of the ocean, of my arm reaching up, of my hand grabbing him by the shoulder, turning him around, his face the last thing I see before I wake.

He’d stand out there early morning or evening, ankle-deep in the sand as the waves rushed up over his shins, coming in strong and then retreating, leaving behind the froth which would cling to the mass of coarse hair on his legs.  I remember being fascinated with his leg hair when I was young.  Whenever he would settle down to read a book or watch television he’d set me down on his lap or at his feet, and I’d gently pick at the dark entanglement, brushing it gently down with my small hands.  Sometimes I’d pull too hard and he’d cry out, making me giggle.  Then he’d smile and place his hand atop my head, the already massive palm seeming enlarged in proportion to my tiny skull.  He’d rub it gently, my head shaking around a little as he did so.  Every now and then I think back to those times, and I think about all the force and power behind those hands, the same hands that would lift massive pieces of wood and operate heavy tools and machinery, and I wonder what might have happened if he had pressed just a little harder, or squeezed just a little tighter, and I wonder just how much effort it would have taken for him to crush my skull in his hands.

Last but not least was Tara; my younger sister by three years and a bit.  She had dark black hair that seemed to flow like ink spilt from a writer’s glass jar, an effect that was (to the best of my knowledge) unintentionally doubled by the feathers she would often braid into it.  She’d wear a different one every day, only going without when the formality of the family’s destination called for it, such as church or one of the many lawn socials held by relatives on our mother’s side of the family.  They were always feathers she herself had found; never store bought or artificial.  She’d collect them in this big old vintage trunk she had found in the beach house’s attic on our first stay, an ancient thing whose ivory-green shell was littered with old postage stamps and stickers, charming in its ugliness.

Whenever she’d come across a new feather, an occurrence that happened most if not always during walks along the beach front, she’d stoop down and gently pluck it up by the stem, raising it up in line with her eyes.  She’d study it for a while, looking for breaks in the barbs or damage to the stem or caked-on dirt, her small lips parted slightly in what could only be described as childlike awe and fascination.  Then she’d brush it off, preening the barbs so that they were all perfectly aligned and smoothened out, and she’d take it and race back to the house where she’d wash it with soap, being careful not to rip off any of the barbs.  She used to leave out washing them at all, but once mom found out she insisted on it, for fear of fleas or ticks or other such things.  Which, to be fair, was a reasonable enough concern, and in her added defense not once did she even consider suggesting that Tara throw out the feathers. That was the thing about our mother; with so many quirks and peculiarities herself she knew what it was to be eccentric.

When they had been sufficiently cleaned the feathers would be left on a windowsill to dry, often anchored beneath a small rock lest a sudden gust whisk away her cherished find.  Sometimes she’d forget to collect them, and as their numbers grew you’d see dozens of them littered all about the beach house.  They’d flutter across the floor with drafts, settle lightly on armrests and stairs, decorate the counters of the kitchen.  There was something magical about them, like the forgotten effects of fairies who’d been passing through the house.  Eventually they’d all be collected again, and carefully placed in that old trunk with the others, to be chosen as a hair accessory at a later date through a process understood only by Tara herself.

So there we’d be, the three of us: my sister on the beachfront, my father in the wake, and myself settled safely beneath the shade of the porch roof.  The rest of the time we’d spend our days playing in the sand, swimming, chasing one another in and out of the tide, our shrieks of joy and amusement echoing far across the beach.  We’d take walks along the beachfront together, going as far as the lighthouse peak where the sand turned to rock beneath our feet.  When the sun had dipped low beneath the horizon we’d retreat indoors for dinner and a board game, sometimes a movie.  They were good days, and the memories forged there have remained with me unblemished by the blur of time even to today.  Not a single one lies out of reach should I have the notion to recall it.

God help me, not a single one.

The Beach House, Part II

After it all came out I think what surprised us most (the obvious aside) was the informality of it all.  Just a curt process server with a letter from Tara that we read in the living room, a letter that my mother couldn’t finish through her tears, that made my father as quiet and somber as I’d ever seen him, that made me shake my head in disbelief, unable to stop repeating the phrase “I don’t understand”, like a mantra designed to protect from all things out of my comprehension.

It had been my first visit home since accepting the journalism position at New York Times, and the family had been planning on a reunion-of-sorts, part congratulatory for my new job, and part time to play catch up with Tara, whom no one had seen or heard from for some time.  I remember the last real conversation I’d had with her before the letter: she’d mentioned having trouble sleeping and was seeing a therapist.

“A therapist?” I remember asking her, only half listening as I leafed through a report for work.  “For sleep problems?  Don’t you think that’s a bit drastic?”

“It’s not just the sleep.  There’s… other things, too.  Besides, Kimmy says everyone should see a therapist anyways.  It’s good for you.”

“Yeah, sure.  Okay well, listen, I gotta go, but let me know how that works out.”

“Will do.  Bye.”

“Bye.  Love ya.”

…

Fast forward three weeks, and we were crowded around the letter in the living room of my childhood home, a room that would never be the same again.  My father was the first to try and take control of the situation.

“I think…” he cleared his throat, voice shaky and eyes misty, and started over.  “It would mean a lot to me, Jesse, if you spent the night.”

I nodded, head bobbing up and down one too many times, like a buoy caught in rough waters.  “Jesus, dad, of course.  I’m here.  I’m here.”

He nodded, managing a tight-lipped smile as he clasped my shoulder, for whose support I still don’t know.  My mother was still on the verge of hysteria, so I sat down and did my best to comfort her.

“Why would she do this?” my mother was saying between sobs.  “How could she do this?  How could she say such… such terrible things?”

“I don’t know, Mom.  I don’t know.”  But as I held her close, her tears soaking into my shirt collar, I realized I did know.  Her therapist, Kimmy.  That bitch had filled her mind with bullshit, planted seeds of darkness where before there’d been nothing but good memories, memories of a pure and innocent childhood.  I didn’t say anything then, for fear of upsetting my parents anymore than they already were, but it was in that moment that my mind was made up.

Not even once did I consider the possibility.

…

I went to see her the very next day.  I didn’t talk this through with my parents, and if they knew they made no effort to ask me about it – not even after.  Mom was still borderline hysterical, sobbing throughout the night, but dad had an air of defeat, of numb resignation that somehow struck me as even more depressing.  I remember thinking how terrible it was, that the claim alone could completely shatter them, shatter us.  Technically nothing had changed – not yet, not officially – but even so nothing would ever be the same.  The lives we’d lived up to that point, the relationships we’d forged with one another, had been shattered beyond repair by nothing more than a few words printed on a letter.  How fragile we are.

I drove down to her flat in the city, just over two hours from mom and dad’s, and hammered on her door until she answered.  Her eyes were red and puffy, cheeks stained with mascara and tears, and I remember being struck speechless by just how much she’d looked like our mother the night before.  For a moment I forgot that Tara was the one who’d inflicted this pain upon us, and my heart ached with the nonsensical thought that we were in this together, that I had to comfort her just as I’d comforted our mother the night before.  Then her face crumpled in on itself and she fell into me, locking me in a hug as her body shook, and I remembered with something like disgust that it was her fault all this was happening.

I pushed her away, suddenly overcome with a terrible rage.  “Tara, what the fuck?”

She wore an expression of puzzlement, still too confused to be hurt.

“How could you do this?” I continued, stepping forward aggressively.  “Why would you do this?  Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us?  To mom?  To dad?”

At this a flicker of understanding flashed across her face, and she took an instinctive step back into her apartment.  “Jesse…”  But this seemed to be all she could manage, and like a hunter closing in for the kill I took full advantage of her hesitation.

“How could you?  How could you let this… this bitch fill your mind with these lies?  How could you be so fucking weak?”  She flinched at my words as if each stung with the force of a whip, eyes downcast as she closed in on herself.  In my rage I took this for a sign of guilt, and feeling I’d made my point, felt my blood start to cool.

“You… you don’t believe me.”  She spoke so softly that at first I thought I’d misheard her.  “I thought… I thought of all people, you’d stand by me.”  Her eyes stayed down, refusing to meet my own.  “I guess I should have known better.”

…

There isn’t much more to tell.  The case never made it to trial, coming to a close on the district attorney’s desk – lack of evidence, too much time had passed, etc.  In the end it boiled down to he-said/she-said, and there was no way to prove anything.  I don’t remember feeling happiness though; in fact I don’t think any of us were happy, really.  Relieved, maybe, but with everything that had happened it was hard to imagine us ever being happy again.  It was like coming home to find your house had been broken into: there was a lingering sense of violation, like your sanctuary, the one place you were supposed to be safe, would never be the same again.  Something was stolen from us, something that could never be returned.

I didn’t see Tara after the encounter at her loft, and to the best of my knowledge our parents never saw her either.  There were times I thought about going over to talk but they never came to fruition – I was always stopped by the thought of what I would say, what I could say.  Part of me wanted to apologize, to let her know that it wasn’t her fault, that she’d only served as the patsy in a sadistic attempt by her therapist to con a rich family out of some cash.  Part of me was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to look at her without feeling my gut clench and my throat clam up, and so long as I put it off I would never have to admit to myself that some things could never be forgiven.

Eventually I drifted away from my parents as well, a process that began with my inevitable move back to New York but which continued as my calls grew more and more infrequent.  I could have blamed it on my work, on the time-difference, even on the simple fact that life moves on, but the truth was it became too much to talk to them, to see them.  Our phone calls and video chats felt strained, almost forced, and no matter what we did the inescapable shadow of all that had happened hung over us like a dark cloud.  I think it was the same for them, because pretty soon they stopped calling too.

…

It’s hard to say exactly when I realized it.  Like most things in life it crept up on me, advancing upon its prey in the form of nagging thoughts, vague feelings at the back of my mind.  Part of me thinks it was always there, tucked away in a dark corner of my mind that I’d simply refused to acknowledge, just as Tara had refused to acknowledge it up until the moment her therapist dragged it out into the light.  Sometimes I’ll wish it wasn’t so, and I’ll try to convince myself that I didn’t know, that there was no way I could have known, but deep down I know this is just my guilty conscience trying to relieve itself of the burden.

Regardless of how long it had lingered in the back of my mind, the realization struck me in its full one night just over a month after.  That same night I went to the airport and caught the first flight back on an impulse.  No, not an impulse; it was something I had to do, something I’d been meaning to do for a long time, even without realizing it.  There was none of the excitement or passion that came with an impulsive move – it was a numbing calm which settled over me as I paid for the ticket, which remained even as I slept through the flight, landing in California sometime around four in the morning.

I paid for a rental at the airport and drove straight there, like a puppet on a string, filled with the sort of resolute purpose one can only find in a creature without a choice.  Because there was no choice – not for me, at least.  There was no question of what I had to do, only that I had to do it.

I made one stop along the way, at a gas station, where I bought and filled a canister before carrying on my way.

…

The beach house was just as I’d remembered it.  Even in the quiet stillness of the night it stood defiant against the dark, a landmark of my childhood.  We’d sold it some years back, and this was my first time seeing it in over two decades, but it could have been yesterday.

I stood with my back to the shore, the quiet roar of the tide like a great and powerful beast just behind me, like the edge of the universe itself nipping at my heels, a dark oblivion into which I could fall back and cast all my memories to the void.  I closed my eyes, felt the wind brush over my skin, allowed the waves to rush over my mind, enveloping my thoughts and washing clear all I’d ever known.

“It really is a beautiful place.”

I turned, knowing who I’d find but wanting to see her face all the same.  “Is it?”

She smiled, eyes never leaving the house.  “Of course.”

“Oh.”  For a moment I felt confused, embarrassed even.  “I’m sorry.”

She laughed, and a vision hit me then, a vision of feathers blowing in the wind, more vivid than anything I’d ever seen with my own eyes.  “Don’t be.  What it is and what it represents are two different things, and even if destroying the latter also requires destroying the former, it was still a very nice gesture.”

I considered this for a moment, turning back to the house.  “I did love it.”

“Me too,” she agreed softly.  Through the windows a faint orange glow had begun to light up the dark.  “Not much longer now,” she remarked, almost to herself.

“I’m sorry.”

“I already told you; you don’t have to be.”

“No- I mean, about everything else.”  My voice cracked and before I knew it my face was streaked with tears.  “God, Tara, I’m so sorry.  I should have been there for you.  Even if I hadn’t known, I should have been there.  And instead I called you a liar-”

“Jesse.”  She took me by the shoulders, looking at me for the first time.  “It’s not your fault.  It was never your fault.”

“But I should have been there for you!”

Her expression softened.  “Yeah.  Yeah, maybe you should have.  But you’re here now, and that’s all that matters.”  She pulled me into an embrace, holding me tight as I cried, holding me as I should have held her that day.  “Shh, it’s alright.  It’s alright, Jesse.  It’s alright.”  We rocked steadily together in the light of the orange glow, two broken people holding onto one another for support.  Fragile, but not alone.

…

When the police finally came the house was gone, reduced to a smoldering black pile of ashes and ruins.  I knew it had to be done, but looking at it my heart ached all the same – as much for what it had become as for what it had been.  I made no move to resist as they pulled me gently to my feet from where I’d collapsed in the sand, slapping a pair of handcuffs on and leading me back to the main road.

She was standing out in the surf when I looked back, the water lapping over her ankles.  The sun had started to rise, seeming to emerge from the waters as it made its way up into the sky.  At first I thought she might leave me with that sight, my last vision of her forever incomplete, but at the last second she turned, a smile on her face.

│

The face of a blank white page stares back at me.  I am thankful at least for the small mercy that the screen is not black, lest it be my own blank face which fills my vision.  Nowadays it is no small matter to look myself in the eyes.  Only when I must make myself presentable before a run to the store for provisions and the occasional accidental passing glance do I find myself observing my reflection, and even then I never, ever make eye contact with that other.

The text cursor winks back at me, taunting my stagnation.  Like a metaphor for my motivation it flashes on and off, on and off, caught in a never-ending routine that gets old fast.  It stands out, black and bold and strong against the plain white background, but is swallowed up once more before anything of significance can happen.  Oh, and the best part: when I start to type the line disappears completely, only flickering back into its routine when I’ve run out of things to say.

They tell you the first step in overcoming writer’s block is simply to write.  Just write something.  It doesn’t matter what, it doesn’t matter if it’s any good or not, it just doesn’t matter.  As long as you’re writing.  I call bullshit.  Clearly whoever said that never actually had to struggle through sentence after sentence of unrelenting and unforgiving shit writing.  It’s painful to read, far less to write.  No matter what you do the words just don’t seem to want to work together, the sentences sound bland or repetitive, the whole thing feels forced and fake.  It’s like a sweater that fits too tight, or a piece of food lodged in your throat.  You want to take it off and feel the relief of your constraints being lifted, you want to spit it out and sing, but you can’t.  You’re stuck with it.

The house is empty.  It has been for a while now.  I’ve stopped keeping track of the days as they lazily float by, tiny white boxes on a checkered paper, seven-by-five, month after month, year after year.  It’s all just time, and it no longer has any bearing on my life.  It’s curious how quickly the things that once seemed so important, the fundamentals that made up the basis of your life, the structural guidelines society not only built itself around but thrives upon, fall apart and crumble the second you turn your back on them.  It really gives you a sense of how fragile everything is.

The lights are off, have been off since she left.  The blinds are drawn, haven’t been open for just as long.  As a result the house is always dark.  It makes it easier for me to avoid accidental run-ins with that other, and to turn a blind eye to the mess I’ve been living in.  I’ve been sitting in front of this damned white screen, like a moth to a flame, for as long as I can remember.  It’s the last bit of light left in my world.

I want to smother it out with darkness.

I want to coat it in the oil slick of my black words, to fill it with the dark whispers in my head, to corrupt it and corrode it and beat it senseless simply for being light in a dark world.  I love it.  I envy it.  I hate it.

I know that if I don’t do this, it will leave me too.

“I can’t stand to see you like this,” she told me that day, tears in her eyes.  “You can’t ask me to stand by and do nothing.  I won’t do it.”  I said nothing as she packed her things, standing in the bedroom doorway and watching her work, her body shaking.  I did nothing when she kissed me on the cheek, a gentle caress that felt like goodbye because it was, her lips softly brushing against my skin, her tears wiping off onto my face.  I made no move to stop her as she walked out of the apartment, her suitcase trailing behind, head hanging low.  I didn’t wave as she looked back one last time, just before pushing open the front door and vanishing from my life, her scarf blowing in the wind.

When she was gone I proceeded to trash the place, sweeping ornaments off of tables and counters, whipping dishes against the wall and taking feral satisfaction in watching them break apart, shattering against the wall and falling back to earth in pieces.  I kicked the furniture over, punched holes in the walls, drank myself into a state of inebriation so severe that I was unconscious before my rampage could go any further.

She doesn’t get it, you see.  No one gets it.  They all want another bestselling novel, another critically acclaimed masterpiece, but none of them want to wade through the grime and shit to get to it.  They all want the diamond at the end, but none of them want to press that filthy grit into shape, to have to suffer through the suffocating pressure of it all.

What they don’t understand is that what makes it great is that it’s real.  You don’t just make that shit up.  It comes from an ugly hole inside of you, a festering pit of putrid, rotten filth, like a gaping mouth demanding nourishment.  It is my God, my unforgiving, cruel, merciless God, and it demands sacrifice.

Without warning the laptop dies, and I’m left staring into the eyes of the other.

“No, no, no, no.”  I scramble for the cord, but I lean too far in my chair and it falls, taking me with it.  My head hits the table corner on the way down, and I’m out like a light.

…

When I come to I’m lying on my side, and directly across from my face is the laptop.

“You know what you did,” the other whispers.  I shake my head, tears welling up in my eyes.

“No.  No, I didn’t know.”

“How could you not have known?”

“I didn’t know!”

“Yes you did.”

“It was an accident!” I scream, slamming the laptop closed with such force that the screen breaks, scattering bits of the broken glass across the floor.  There is a moment of silence, in which my heave breathing seems doubled, and then I see him again in the largest of the broken pieces, staring up at me.

“She was only trying to help, and look what you did.”

“Please, stop.”  I’m sobbing now, tears and snot running down my face.

“LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID!” he screams, and I look.  God help me, I look.  In the dark I can just make out the contours of her figure, lying where I left her.

“It was an accident,” I say again, but now the words sound weak even to me.

“You knew what you were doing.”

“I didn’t, I swear I didn’t.”

“You were stuck in a rut, and you took your frustrations out on her.  She was just trying to help, and look at what you did.”

“I only wanted her to stay.  I didn’t want her to leave.”

“I bet now you’re wishing she had left though, aren’t you?  That’s why you tried to convince yourself she had.  Because you couldn’t face what you’d done.”

“I JUST WANTED HER TO STAY!  God, Jesus Christ, I just wanted her to stay.”

“Well she’s certainly not going anywhere now, is she?”

“LEAVE ME ALONE!”  I grab the piece of glass and bury it in my neck, desperate to stop the voice.  And it does stop, at least for a moment.  Then it comes back, one final taunt barely intelligible from the blood welling up in my throat.

“I’m sorry, can I just cut in here for a second?”

“Hm?  Yeah, sure, go ahead.”

“Well, it’s just that… look, I’m not going to sugar coat it, Bill.”

I laugh.  “That’s what you’re here for, Mike.”

“Right, well- the psychotic writer plagued by his own demons, it’s been done before.  A lot.  Honestly by this point is a well-exhausted cliché.  And the story has no flow.  One minute it’s a monologue on writer’s block, the next it’s straight dialogue between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?  I mean, come on.”  He grins, realizes he’s being a dick, and tries again.  “Look, we know- I know, that from someone like you, this is fodder.  Compared to your old stuff?  This is amateur hour, Bill.  It’s good, but…”

“But not from someone of my caliber,” I finish.  He raises his palm in my direction, as if displaying what I’d just said.

“Exactly.  Not from someone of your caliber.  Truth is, you can do better.  I know it, you know it, everyone knows it.”

“So, scrap it?”

“Well… maybe not scrap it, but definitely back shelf it for now.  I’m sure we can work it into a short story anthology or something later on the line.  We’ll see what comes up.  Alright?”

“Alright.  Hey, thanks Mike.  I can always count on you to be honest with me.  Brutally so,” I add, and we laugh.  We talk a little longer, finishing our coffees and discussing other things, and then we say our farewells.

“Oh, Bill?” he asks, just as I’m turning to leave.

“Yeah?”

“What’s with the scarf, man?  It’s like, thirty degrees out there.”

I grin, making a bow.  “Dramatic effect,” I tell him, still bowing as I back out of his office, passing just beneath the mirror on his wall.

Memoir into Madness / Ashes

She’s the girl you see in lecture hall, the one at the far end of the room with whom you make brief eye contact once and whose eyes haunt you night after night as you lie awake in bed staring up into the darkness. She’s the girl you pass by as you make your way down the airplane’s rows, looking for your seat, and who occupies your thoughts the entire flight though you never see her again. She’s the girl you pass in a crowd, whose face seems to draw your gaze like a moth to a flame just before it is blown out by the wind, as much gone from sight as it isn’t from mind.

You pass her and you find yourself thinking, I could love you. I could be there for you, I could know you, I could hold you in the night and stand by you in the day. You imagine a life together, you construct a personality for her and a situation in which you happen to start up a conversation, and your eyes meet and you fall in love. The flame is gone, but the fire’s only just started.

It hits you one day, but you only recognize it later if at all, like the delayed development of a bruise from a punch inflicted during a drunken bar fight several nights before. The faces have piled up, the stories lie atop one another like slides on a projector, each word and letter blurred and unidentifiable from the next, until all that is projected is a mess, a shapeless blob of dark figures faceless in the crowd. You forget where fiction ends and reality begins, and some days you can’t distinguish memories from imaginations, fantasies from realities. But the faces keep coming, the stories keep rolling out. I could love you. You fall for face after face, and some of the old ones make reappearances, surely a sign that they are significant, a sign that you are meant to be. Coincidence is a foreign concept, fate is all you know, blind to the irony of your own ignorance, the tragic flaw in your beliefs ever evasive beneath your nose.

You’re convinced in the existence of true love, of destiny, and yet the impossibility of this is reflected in each face you fall for. But you ignore it, so preoccupied with falling in love that you don’t realize that you’re not. And the fire rages on.

You no longer sleep at night, spending the time vainly sorting through the stories, trying  to organize and sort them in order of likelihood and appeal. Your days are no better, and you lose your grip on life as you trade it for something that doesn’t exist. You feel alienated from the world, which inexplicably remains stagnantly contradictory to the fantasies you entertain, as though it has betrayed you.

You stop making eye contact with the people you pass by, afraid you’ll feel that all-too familiar click again, that brief cry which echoes on inside your skull for an eternity afterwards, adding to the already deafening screams of those who have already contributed. I could love you. You fear your head will split open at the seams if you fall another time, and whether through your own imaginings developing a placebo effect or simply a symptom of the sleep deprivation, you suffer raging migraines on a regular basis. Your appearance acts as a reflection of your descent: your eyes are permanently shadowed, the sockets hollowed; your skin pale and at times clammy; and your hands shake so violently that you have developed a habit of firmly gripping onto whatever is in reach to still them, lest they betray your weakness.

The fire consumes you. Soon you stop going out in public altogether, only making runs for food and other necessities before scurrying back to your room like a rat fearing capture. You imagine you can feel them staring at you, their eyes boring holes into the back of your skull, cracking open the bone and exposing the stories hidden beneath, pouring through the holes and flowing out into the air like black ink in water. Your secrets, exposed. Vulnerable. You start imagining that you can hear their thoughts, their cruel whispers behind your back as you pass, hissing their contempt for you. They can see it, they know you are pathetic, you are unlovable, you are unfaithful. They see you for what you are and they laugh and sneer.

You sit on the edge of your bed and pick through your stories, broken and incomplete, feebly lifting them like dead things, half expecting them to come to life in your hands. But when you loosen your grip they drift downwards like fragile, crumpled ashes, as lifeless as they were from the start. They litter the ground, empty husks and hollow duplicates of something living and beautiful. They offer you no consolation. You stare down at the fragments of lives you have never lived and will never live, and you whisper five words, your voice hoarse and broken, scarcely more than an exhale, the sound of a dying flame, the final snuff of a fire as it is forever extinguished.

I could have loved you.

Cheshire

My brother used to have a mug; one of the ones with a picture on the side that changes when it heats up.  The picture on this particular mug was of Cheshire Cat (the original by John Tenniel, mind you; not the Disney one), sitting up on a branch, staring down at a young and rather startled Alice.  In one corner of the mug there was the quote “Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat!  It’s the most curious thing!”  And, of course, in accordance with the words of Alice, when the cup was filled with the hot beverage of choice (in Alphie’s case it was always straight dark roast) dear old Cheshire would disappear, leaving only his grin, floating in the air.

Looking back now, I see with equal amounts of surprise and understanding that I had never really questioned its presence, or more specifically its origin.  Understandable under normal circumstances, I suppose; after all, it was a mug.  As far as I know people don’t usually keep track of their sibling’s dishes.  But in this case it was more than that.  It had been a constant in my life, something that was always there, always in the background.  For as long as I could remember he had had it, even as far back as when we were kids.  With every memory I recall the mug makes another appearance, and I can’t help but think how blind I had been, not to have noticed it for so long.  And yet I know why I’d never acknowledged it, or more accurately never allowed myself to acknowledge it.  Hence the equal amounts of surprise and understanding.  To make use of an old cliché, it all makes sense now.  The mug had always been there, lurking in the background, but like a lot of things in my life, I’d simply never brought it up.  At least, not until about a month ago.

…

I had spent the night, a drunken mess afraid to go home to a girlfriend who had warned of the last straw.  It wasn’t the first time either; Alphie and I had reached a sort of unspoken agreement that I could always count on him to cover my ass, especially my drunken ass, and that his door was always open to me, no matter the time of day (which more often than not was sometime around two in the morning.

Immediately after waking, sprawled out over the couch in his living room, I was overcome by that incomparable sensation of a right powerful hangover, the kind that washes away all other thoughts as though wiping the slate clean of the night before.  It was a feeling so intense and so foreign (yet uncomfortably familiar) that my mind could not cope.  If I had to compare it to anything, I would say it was probably how a computer might feel when being reset.  For the briefest of moments nothing else existed, not even a concept of pain.  Everything else was gone.  There was no sense of who I was, where I was, what I was feeling.  It was like my mind was so overwhelmed that it couldn’t even decide what it was feeling, and was so preoccupied with sorting through the sudden rush of incoming data that it couldn’t be bothered with even the most basic of functions.  I was nothing but a series of reddish blurs in the darkness, an indescribable sensation in a series of nerves.  I was nothing.

It was a release.

Then it was over , just as soon as it had begun, and like a druggie coming down from a high the real world rushed back in with painful vengeance.  Suddenly the feelings were being processed, categorised, and the overall consensus was discomfort.  Intense discomfort.  The sensations were so powerful I felt as though my body would be incapable of containing them all, that I would expand or explode.  Unfortunately neither of these things happened, and instead my mind adjusted accordingly to match the almost global proportions of my sensation overload.

I was the Earth.  My mouth had become the desert, my head a volcano on the verge of eruption, and my bladder home to all the ocean.  I shifted onto my side with a groan of pain, bringing my wrist up in line with my eyes, and squinting through the tears and blurriness to read the time on my watch.  7:00 am.  Fuck.  Thirty-four years, and it still happened every morning.  No matter what time I went to bed, no matter how tired I still was, no matter how much I had had to drink the night before.  Always 7:00.  My arm went limp, swinging back down to my side, and my vision settled on a bottle of Advil and a glass of water set on the coffee table in front of me.  Despite the pain, I managed a grin.  The old bastard never let me down.

I sat up and the volcano erupted, and the searing white burst of pain was almost enough to knock me back down, but I held fast, gritting my teeth and squeezing my eyes shut, one hand pressed to my forehead and the other reaching blindly for the Advil.  I took three, washing them down with the water, and then took three more after a brief reconsideration.  I sat there for a while, completely still with my eyes closed, waiting for the drugs to do their thing, taking the time to think about what I would say to my girlfriend.  I stayed like that for what felt like an hour, just sitting there thinking, waiting, until eventually the bladder urgency outweighed the pain of moving and I was forced to go to the washroom.

The ocean successfully drained, I spent some time at the sink, washing my face in cold water and combing my fingers through my hair in a rather futile attempt to make myself more presentable.  It really didn’t matter, after all Al had seen me a hundred times worse, and it wasn’t like I cared.  But I did it anyways, and I knew Alphie would approve, even if he didn’t really care.  It didn’t make sense, but it was what it was. We were a strange pair, my brother and I.  Such dedication to appearances. It’s strange that I only see these things now.

He was out on the back porch when I came out of the bathroom; I could see him through the window wall in the kitchen that overlooked the entire backyard.  He was sitting at the table with his back to me, facing the sunrise over the forest at the edge of his property line.  I stood there for a moment, watching him, wondering what he was thinking as I so often did.  The coffee maker’s click startled me back into the real world, and I noticed he had set out a plate for me for breakfast, with scrambled eggs and bacon.  I grabbed cutlery from the drawer and a mug from the cupboard, and in accordance with one of our many unspoken agreements, grabbed the coffee pot and brought it out with me.

“About time,” he said, without turning his head from the sunrise.  “I’d been beginning to think you may have finally cracked it.  Come on then; I’ve been dying for that coffee.”

I smiled, making my way over.  “Good morning to you too brother, it’s always so good to see you.”

“Oh, dispense with the socially compulsory pleasantries, why don’t we.  Why do we always have to say things that other people already know?  I think conversations should be about saying things that the other person doesn’t already know, and about avoiding the sharing of mutually known information as best we can.  Now, bring over that coffee.”  I obeyed, revelling in his presence.  It may have been childish of me, but even then I had looked up to my brother, had practically worshipped the ground he walked upon.  Not to say that there was an imbalance in our relationship as adults, but sometimes I would just find myself marvelling him.

“Thanks for breakfast.”

“Again, with the mutually known information.  I know you appreciate the breakfast, and you know you appreciate the breakfast, so why say it out loud?”

“Because it’s only right to show other people your appreciation.  Don’t you feel good when I thank you?  Doesn’t it make you feel good?”

He shifted in his chair.  “How I feel is inconsequential.”

“Ah. You’re in a mood.”

“Shut up and eat your breakfast.”  We were both grinning now, and again I obeyed, shovelling the scrambled eggs into my mouth and thinking that nothing had ever tasted so good.  He poured the coffee, first in my mug, and then his own.  “Sleep well?” he asked, filling the mug to the brim before levelling out the flow.  I opened my mouth to answer him, my eyes briefly catching on the picture on his mug, and suddenly the words dried up in my gaping mouth.  Cheshire had begun to fade away in front of my eyes and Alice’s, and soon only his grin was left, hovering in the air between a suspiciously cat-shaped space in the tree’s leaves.  “Hello?”

“Huh?”

“You okay?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?  You just… zoned out for a minute there.”

I blinked, still staring at the mug.  “…Yeah.  Yeah, no, I’m good.  Listen; where did you get that mug?”

“What?”

“That mug,”  I said, pointing.  “The one with Cheshire.”

He frowned, clearly perplexed by my question, but after a moment he just shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I can’t remember; I’ve had it so long.  Why are you freaking out?  I mean, it’s not like this is the first time you’ve seen it.  Not that freaking out would be an acceptable reaction upon seeing it the first time either.  I mean, it’s not exactly a ground-breaking advancement; it’s a mug that changes colour with temperature change.  Whoop-de-doo.”

“I’m not freaking out.  And yes, I know I’ve seen it before, but that’s just it.  It’s only just occurred to me that I have no idea where it came from.”

“So?  It’s my mug, and I’ve had it for a long time, and even I don’t know where it came from, so it’d be weird if you did and I didn’t.  I assume I bought it one day, just like every other piece of dishware I own, as is hopefully the case with you and everyone else.  I mean, do you know anyone who keeps a detailed account of every dish they buy?  Do you have any idea where that mug came from?”  He gestured to my own mug, a rather plain if not bright orange one in comparison.  “And before you respond, I have to say, it’d be rather strange if you did.”

“No, I don’t know where this mug came from, but it’s different.  For as far back as I can remember, you’ve had that mug, and yet neither of us can remember where it came from.  I don’t know, it just struck me as odd for some reason.  Forget it.”  I took a sip of coffee, ignoring his gaze as he studied my face, presumably looking for a glowing neon sign that said ‘losing my mind’.

“You okay?”  he asked eventually, as I had known he would.  “Is everything… okay with Cheryl?”

I sighed, resting the mug back down on the tabletop.  “If by okay you mean same as usual…”

“Don’t I always,” he quipped.

“…then yes.  Everything is more or less the same.  But the same gets exhausting, doesn’t it?  After a while, you start hoping for some change.  Any change.  Good, bad, ugly, anything.”

“Then why didn’t you go home last night?”

I scoffed.  “Because man was made a coward, and because I don’t intend on facing change of any kind when I’m drunk.”

He laughed, raising his strange, omnipresent mug in my direction.  “I’ll drink to that.”

“I think that saying only applies to alcoholic drinks.”

“Says who?  The act of drinking is the same regardless of what you’re drinking.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you, I just think that’s the way it is.”

“Fuck the way it is.”  We chuckled together, under the light of the morning sun in the brisk chill of the morning air.  That was the last good memory I had of us together, just the two of us, happy.

He killed himself two weeks later.

His neighbour found him, quite by chance, when he went over to return some household appliance of one kind or another.  I don’t remember what it was.  A lawnmower, maybe. Al’s car had been parked in the driveway, so after a few minutes of waiting, the neighbour started to get worried.  Later on he claimed he had ‘had a bad feeling from the start’ otherwise he wouldn’t have thought that much of it.  In other words he would have just assumed my brother had been on the shitter, rather than lying in a bathtub filled to the brim with a mixture of water and the blood that had flowed from his own slit wrists.

He ended up calling Al a few times, both on his cell and on the house phone, and when that didn’t work he called the cops.  The knock on my door came about four hours later.  My girlfriend held me in the doorway where I collapsed, held me as I cried like a child, cried with no regard, no thought for the two policemen awkwardly standing before us.

At the funeral, I kept hearing the same phrases muttered under heavy breaths over and over again, numb and disbelieving.

“…he was such a happy man…”

“…how could this have happened…”

“…always had a smile on his face…”

“…didn’t see it coming…”

The realisation hit me halfway through my eulogy, and it hit me hard.  My speech cut off, and I began to choke up, staggering backwards as though hit by a physical blow.  I imagine the crowd’s reactions would have been interesting, but I can’t remember any of it.  Suddenly all I could see was that mug, that damned mug being filled with darkness, Cheshire fading away, his smile fixed in place with nothing to support it.  Other visions began to flash through my mind, visions of an approaching shadow outside a bedroom door left ajar, visions of thin, pale hands buttoning the top buttons of white collared dress shirts, visions of two young boys standing side by side in a church pew, hair combed neatly to one side, visions of red lips pursed tight in a grim, ominous smile.  And then they were gone, and I was back in my childhood, to a memory I hadn’t even known was there.

…

We were at the zoo, the three of us walking side by side.  I was young, somewhere around six, my brother no older than ten.  Our mother, a prim and proper character who seemed to tower over our world, could have had the entirety of her essence summed up in one word: stick.  Her figure was as thin as one, her patience just as quick to snap, her lashes just as severe, and she lived like she had one lodged firmly up her ass.  The Stick. Had we been more creative (or rather more daring) as children we might have called her that behind her back, in hushed tones and giggles beneath bedsheets at night, the security of our small world illuminated by a tiny flashlight.  But we had been raised better than that.

The zoo was one of many regular family outings we would partake in throughout the week, none of which were for the benefit of the family itself, ironically enough.  We all knew what they were really about, even at that young age.  We knew, but never spoke of it.  That was one of the great rules of our family: certain things were never spoken of.

Despite the rather unfortunate underlying intent of our outings my brother and I still managed to enjoy ourselves, or at the very least as best we could.  After all, we were young boys, and such matters held little sway over our perceptions of the world.  And the zoo had always been one of our favourites.  Even then, I like to think that we had felt more than just the usual fascination for the creatures, that somewhere in our subconscious minds there was an awareness of a kindred relation between us and those poor creatures, both locked away behind bars which everyone saw yet no one acknowledged.

We were in the felidae section of the zoo that evening, walking between the cages of magnificent beasts, docile and submissive behind their bars.  We did not stop to watch each one in turn, did not pause a moment to read the signs hung over the cage doors containing little tidbits on the creature hidden in the shadows before us.  We walked forwards, my mother possessive of a purposeful stride poorly disguised as a leisurely stroll.  We had learnt long before that straying behind (or ‘lollygagging’ as our mother called it) was unacceptable to the highest degree, and as such out of the question.  So we kept pace, our eyes quickly darting from side to side in an attempt to gain their fill of each creature we passed before they were gone again, passed by with no chance of returning for a second look. That was how things were with us.  We passed things by and never looked back.

You see, we didn’t go to the zoo to see the beasts.  We went to the zoo so the beasts could see us.

It was on that particular day that a wrinkle arose in our mother’s plans, the plans she so meticulously ironed.  My brother tripped and fell on a crag in the concrete walkway.  I saw it happen, because I happened to be looking in his direction to the creatures there.  His body fell forwards, and his bare knees scraped against the ground, his hands opening up before him, the skin on his palms grating.  He shot up almost as fast as he had fallen, looking startled and rather dazed, as though unsure of what had just transpired.  I watched him, my mouth agape, and then simultaneously, like trained dogs, we both looked to my mother for an indication of what would happen next.  She was staring at him, and while I couldn’t see her face from where I stood I knew she was pursing her lips.

“I- I’m sorry, mother-” poor Alphie began, stuttering as he so often did when talking to our mother.  Tears welled up in his eyes as he fought to come up with an adequate apology, stammering through unrecognisable words and phrases.  I realised he was going to cry, and a feeling of dread formed in the pit of my stomach.  Suddenly she crouched over, grabbing him by the shoulders.  Passersby would have seen nothing more than a mother comforting her son, making sure he was okay.  Only I could see the indents in my brother’s shirt sleeves where the fingers dug in hard and deep.  Only the three of us heard my mother’s tone, her voice low and dark, like a cat crouching in the shadows of the undergrowth as it crept up upon its prey, the eerie and ominous calm before the explosion.

“Don’t you dare cry,” she had said that day, looking right into my brother’s eyes.  “I don’t care how much it hurts.  Don’t you dare cry.  I want you to smile.”  She spoke through gritted teeth, bared in a menacingly fake smile.  “I want you to smile, even if it hurts.  Especially if it hurts.  I want you to smile and I want you to never stop smiling.  Even when there’s nothing behind it, I want you to smile until the day you die.  Do you understand me?”  Alphie looked up to her, the tears drying in his eyes, and he nodded.  And then he smiled.

Later that day we found ourselves in the zoo’s gift shop, and my mother bought Alphie a gift, “for being such a brave little man.”  It was a mug, the kind with a picture on the side that changes when it heats up.

…

They put me in the mental-health clinic almost immediately after the funeral, under suicide watch.  I’ve been here since, wasting away in a bed that can move up or down whenever I want.  It’s been a month now, 31 days since my brother killed himself, 45 days since I noticed the mug and brought it up.  I spend my days going over that moment again and again, wondering what I had done wrong, wondering if I could have stopped him, wondering if it was my fault somehow, for noticing the mug and bringing it up.  I know the answer, but it’s easier to pretend I don’t and to keep dwelling on it than it would be to accept the truth.  I’m not ready for that.  I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for that.

People come and go, visiting me for a little while every few days just to make sure I’m still alive, just to say that they made the effort.  It’s all about appearances, darling.  There are no repeat guests; once is enough, and they never stay longer than is required to realize they’re not getting anywhere.  My girlfriend is the only one who comes more than once, and even she has stopped coming as often, the days between visits growing exponentially since the first time.

“They’re thinking of letting you go,” she said earlier today, sitting on the bedside, idly picking at her fingernails to avoid having to make eye contact.  “They say you’ve been okay, but they want to make sure it’s okay with you.  They just need some sign that you’re going to be alright.”  I didn’t respond.  I was staring directly ahead, at the wall, at something that wasn’t there.  She started to cry, sniffling quietly.  “You’re breaking my heart, Chester.”  She turned to me, eyes red, looking for a reaction, a sign that I cared, a sign that I was still alive.  At least we had that much in common: looking for things that weren’t there.

She cried for a bit longer, her stifled sobs echoing through the dead room, but eventually she stood up to go.

“Oh, I’d almost forgotten.”  She reached into her purse, looking for something.  “They found this at your brother’s house.  There was a note beside it.  He said- it said it was yours now.  I thought, you know, you might like to have it here.  To remind you of him.”  She finally retrieved the item, holding it up to show me.  I didn’t look, didn’t have to look, didn’t want to look, because I already knew what it was.  My eyes started tearing up, but I blinked them away, refusing to avert my gaze from the wall.  She held it up a moment longer before giving up, placing it on the windowsill with a sigh.  Then she left.

I could feel his eyes on me, boring into my soul, could feel his smile, the teeth grinning back at me from the darkness, waiting for me there.  I resisted for as long as I could, but he was strong.  I sat up, pushing the bed sheets aside and turning to my side, my legs sliding off the side of the bed.  For a moment I stayed like that, hesitating one last time, then I stood, walking over to the window, to the mug.  His eyes followed me as I approached, his smile never wavering.  There was no kettle in the room, but there was the knife I had kept hidden beneath my mattress after sneaking it back from dinner several nights before.  I dragged the edge clean across my wrist, watching as the hot blood flowed down my arm, pouring into the mug’s gaping, thirsty mouth.  I watched as the mug was filled to the brim, watched as the surface of the dark liquid caught the reflection of the moon and seemed to glow in the moonlight.  I watched, and I waited.  And, in accordance with the words of Alice, dear old Cheshire disappeared, leaving only his grin, floating in the air.