My heart beats in my chest. I feel it like a rough river, torrenting, querying, something vicious, something impossible to really describe without merely restating something I knew already.
I was alive. Looking around my room was all evidence to the contrary. Half finished sketches like half born souls took up every inch of a drawer next to my bed, undisturbed like a graveyard never touched by thieves. In irony, they were more like ghosts, half completely dreams, like wisps in the air.
At my most lucid, I laughed at what I was trying to do. I was trying to put a price on imagination, bind it without the guise of reason, put a cork on life itself and spread its essence amongst pages.
Among sketches.
Among my creations.
And the only thing to do when you realize you are ridiculous is to laugh at them all, and take joy in the fact that you created something unique, that I created something unique, that somehow, all of use, we are unique in some way, perfectly idiosyncratic.
My room is the opposite of alive. The most important thing that grows in it is a mound of dishes on my dresser, a desecration of the death of ideas. The house is similar, suffering from a kind of decay which only happens from living in an area where maintenance is a fond dream brought on by severe storms, and where detriment was something to be relished, like an old broken tombstone-trophy.
Most of the residents of this town, the ones who truly stay here are marked with the masks of old age, a fleshy rubbery face that seems fake with obvious seams at the smile, like some sort of alien has replaced the previously functioning human with an unchanging, husk, desperate to remain hidden and relevant, but rarely managing either.
The roads are buckled and cracked with age, trees trying to reclaim them. In many places, there is a veritable canopy where the trees have intertwined in defiance of humanity.
On a nearly unrelated note, tomorrow is the first day of school.
This is going to fucking suck, to put it politely.
More directly, I highly doubt you are here for anything less than something more visceral than a discussion how completely wasted my life is, albeit filled with minor idiosyncrasies like the feathers on my wall being some sort of representation for the freedom I crave on a daily basis, or the large splotch of blood on a single note card representing the last time my nose had bled, kept on a card of paper for all eternity.
So, I’ll skip past my dreams of blue skies and calling voices and ignore the frequent tropage that pops up in my everyday boring life filled with people far lesser than myself, very much like sheep of people, like people who hunt and kill in just the same way that they used to before civility and instead move on to something that’ll interest you all the more.
My heart was pounding. The cars around me were acting less like cars and more like stubborn cows, bumping into each other, or rather, nearly doing so, in a jostling that invaded the precious personal space I fought to maintain around the cars.
Then, they all moved away, the red cadillac to my right turning at an exit that went to nowhere of real note in the town. and the blue bug turning to the left into a fast food restaurant, and the ugly poison green van turning off, leaving me with breathing room for miles around.
I do mean miles. There were no cars in sight, which was odd, considering this was to be the first day of school. More so odd was that there was nobody around at all. No bikes, no people walking, no lone person taking a motorcycle…
What? There’s always the one loser with his motorcycle making his way towards the school. What the hell gives?
That was before.
This is now.
There is someone in front of me.
I don’t mean car, or anything of the sort, I mean a man, standing in the middle of the road, a bare 15 feet in front of me, standing stupidly triumphant like a ram over a rockslide, standing stupidly there in the middle of the road.
I had less than 2 seconds to think about what I was doing.
My only thoughts?
I suddenly understand what people mean when they say the tree sprouted out of nowhere.
Then the front of my car hits him and crumples like a cheap tin can, crackling in like a broken mirror, bits of a fine paint job turning into fine powder just as easily. For a few haunting fractions of a single second, it almost looks like the single human is going to be perfectly fine, even as glass shatters around him impossibly.
Then the engine block hits him, and despite the fact that I am going deaf from the sounds of screeching twisting metal, he is sent flying, rather bodily. He careens comedically through the air and hits the side of the robe on his face, grisly gore painting a perfect pretty picture, a trail of carnage.
He rolls a few times, then slips off the side of the road, flopping into the ditch.
My car goes another hundred or so feet before stopping, my feet hitting the break finally after a delayed reaction to just what had happened.
Then I stop dead, cold, dead and cold in my tracks, broken glass littering everything around me, defying my normal expectations of exactly how my car would break. The doors open on their own, then fall off of their frame.
“Today… Today is clearly not meant to be my day.” I mutter.
I sit inside the cooling car contemplating and clarifying the situation, elucidating my choices. I either run, run away from my car and make a break from it, since I doubt that any sort of explanation will get anyone to believe that the idiot literally appeared directly in front of my car.
So, I either run and make a break for it, or go and see what remains of the magically teleporting idiot.
Then it hits me.
The fucker fucking appeared in front of my car!
… Then it hits me again that I should’ve thought about that before I contemplated running away to save my own skin.
Whatever. I’m hardly awake. My head is rattling around my skull, glass is sticking out of my skin, prickling faintly, fractured, hurting, damning. I brush it out.
It’s odd. I’m really not feeling the pain yet. I think I might be in shock.
I giggle a little. What can possibly be more shocking than hitting someone with a car, and your car getting destroyed? Who’s ever heard of anything like that?
I mean, the car isn’t supposed to fall to anything less than a car. That’s just… a basic assumption. Unless you hit a deer, in which case, if you are farther north, the deer is going to be pretty dead. It really does depend on what you hit, except if you hit a person…
...and before I know it, our have thought about it, I am outside of my car, blood trickling down my arms like a hundred thousand little claws have cut into my skin.
A cold wind blows and I feel every single one of them. Like salt on a wound whispering pain, panic, pandemonium.
My feet are walk walk walking against my will towards the downed form, like a mirror broken, he looks like a dead body in a mirror, not really there but my shaking hands want him to be there, to feel what he is, to know that I killed him.
Oddly, I feel no real remorse. How can I? He appeared in front of me, impossible for me to get out of the way in time. It’s not MY fault the guy is dead. In fact, I’m probably going to be absolutely covered in infections once I get all the glass out of me. My insurance isn’t going to cover this…
I look down at the body, dispassionately staring at it.
It’s still breathing.
“Shit.” I curse.
I say it so I don’t have to comment on its gender, so I don’t have to comment on the fact that I had hit someONE someBODY, that somebody was going to die wastefully, his life expended the same way my momentum had been wasted.
I’m going to be late for school.
Then the thing, body, human, person, stands up, its broken knees and grotesquely disfigured form turning to stare at me.
Staring at me is the best way to describe it, since it was missing an eye and the other one was brutalized.
“I fucking hate you right now.” It says in a clear voice, despite the fact that most of the things required for it to speak are a smear on the road at the moment. “I came here to offer you a deal, and what do you do?”
“I hit you with my car.” I say evenly, more for the fact that I had just hit something with my car that was now talking to me than a response to his clearly rhetorical question. “How the absolute fuck are you even talking right now? … Where the fuck did you come from?” I don’t even sound upset, just mildly confused. Either I’m missing something, or… there was a pile of flesh talking to me.
“A deal.” He repeats curiously.
“A deal.” I nod at him, waiting for him to even say a word to me.
“Either you come with me to a magical land full of wonder and whimsy.” He pauses, looking at me with a face like raw hamburger.
“Or…”
“I kill you, leave you in a compromising position, maybe a bit of auto erotic asphyxiation, and make your memory a disgrace above all others.” He finishes.
Autoerotic… Ew…
Then my only answer is obvious, since I highly doubt anything I can do, short of hitting him with another car, would do anything more than just make him minorly upset compared to what he already is.
“I accept.”
Then the scattered bits of his face flew off of the road, so much raw hamburger baking on the hot black top cleaning itself of the blackness and forming the man’s face again.
The man had red eyes. Just the cornea, just the colored part, they were red. A red that was almost brown, indeed. It was not terrifying, merely unsettling.
I was a bit past terrified, given that I was standing in front of someone that had been reduced to a bloody smear on the road, but had just gotten back up to his feet.
Then he smiled, showing off a set of teeth that were far too sharp, and possessed far too many teeth, like his mouth was bigger on the inside, and hundreds of teeth ready to rip and tear.
He made a single cutting motion with one of his arms, his right one, one that was no longer damaged, and I felt a slicing, deadly, death sensation.
Then I fell like a bird suddenly missing a wing, spiraling through reality like it was nothing more than a colander passing water.
Or a god pissing water.
Spinning like a dirt devil
slamming
down
up
left
right
like a secret code, I twisted and flipped until I was sure my stomach would’ve voided itself if I had actually eaten breakfast, and either by the destiny of the day or sheer luck, I had skipped breakfast to get to school on time.
down
up
left
rightdownupleftrightdownupleftright
then invert
invert
spin spin
invert
upside down, with whites where darks are and darks where whites are until everything was the same color of black-white, and red and green were indistinguishable, a sort of in between color.
Then I was in between worlds and everything tasted strongly of… of… not quite battery acid, but a bloody sort of acid that clung to the tongue to the tongue to the tip of the tip of the tongue.
Then the next barrier hit me with a sound like thunder’s murmur; both loud and soft.
Then there was a sound like a bird. A bird hit by a steam train. Feathers flying.
Falling.
floating.
faulting.
