Silence part IV of VI

Luckily, Karl worked Saturdays as well. It was Tabatha's only respite from his suffocating ever-presence and the one day she could do as she wished, since his absence prevented him from monitoring and restricting her activity. Most Saturdays, therefore, Tabatha headed to Jimmy's house, and today was no exception.

Jimmy's was down the street from Tabatha's apartment. While hers was a rundown building, dirty and disheveled, his was cozy, a place that was obviously somewhere for real families to create their homes. His inviting red brick exterior was such a change from her stark grey that it gave her a little smile.

Jimmy buzzed Tabatha in just in time for lunch. Linda, his mother, set a stack of grilled cheese and a fruit salad on their circular dining room table, and rested her ample bottom on a padded chair. Linda was special: she knew Sharon in high school, and they kept in contact even after Sharon married and moved to the suburbs. Linda knew a lot about Tabatha's mother, and was in fact the source of the tidbits Tabatha could gather.

"So, Tibbs, anything exciting?" Jimmy asked, his smitten gaze meeting her timid one as she ate.

"The dreams..." she started out. "They... oh, nevermind," she sighed, shaking her head. "I'll look stupid."

"No, go on," Linda said with amused eyes. "I've heard all about your blue... thing." She laughed. "What is it, anyway?"

"Well, as of now, real. I thought it was a delusion at first, but now I'm not so sure. It's not bad or anything, but I know it's something real," Tabatha said, the others' attention fully in her control. "It gives me memories... I touch it, and all of a sudden it's like I'm watching a movie of my past."

"Wow..." Jimmy breathed, eyes wide. "Maybe it's like, this presence that wants something from you... maybe you're s'posed to figure out a mystery." He paused, contemplating, smiling. "Wish I had a haunt."

"I think you might be right that it wants something," Tabatha agreed, nodding. "That's why I want to ask what you know about how my mom died, Linda."

Linda winced, then smiled. "I knew you'd ask eventually," she said. "Well, you know your mom was always a little off. I was afraid of her moving out of the city, because I wouldn't be able to check up on her as well as I used to. I was afraid of how she would hold up without the city as her security blanket."

Linda cleared her throat, and took a sip of her diet soda. "Whenever she had a bad day, she used to come over to talk. Being far away, she had to call instead. And call she did: Lord knows that her marriage wasn't ideal. Those two should never have been together, in my opinion." She looked at the ceiling, and Tabatha knew Linda had some unpleasant facts to give her. "After you and your sister were born, Sharon went off the edge. Her mother had schizophrenic tendencies, and Sharon's started to show. She would tell me all her crazy urges, and as long as she knew they were crazy, she thought, she'd be in control. She was on meds for a while, but stopped for reasons I never figured out. I think, to tell you the truth, it was the stress of discovering Karl's affair."

Tabatha cringed, thinking of the full-bodied blonde. "The orb showed me a memory of Karl's girlfriend."

"Well, your mother found her and Karl... you know. She was devastated." Linda shifted to a more comfortable position. "Without her medications, Sharon went downhill fast. Not only did she argue with Karl about getting a divorce (he wouldn't hear it), she argued with him about taking you twins from him and coming back to the city. When he finally snapped at her obstinance and slapped her, she called him violent, he called her psychotic, a shouting match ensued, and he took you, her tiny little favorite, to go to his mistress."

"Wait... her favorite?" Tabatha looked confused and guilty.

"Oh, she adored you because of how tiny you were." Linda said, flipping her hair. "You were the smallest of her dolls; she loved it." She screwed up her eyes for a minute, finding her train of thought. "So... he took you. She lost hold of reality, and made her delusions real. Three days after he left, she stopped calling me, and a week later killed herself and Kylie in her car, carbon monoxide."

"Why do you think Karl never said anything?" Tabatha asked.

"Guilt?" Jimmy suggested. "Of course, that doesn't mean he has to be so cold to you."

A thought struck Tabatha. "The orb-presence has to want something, right?"

"Sure," Jimmy said. "Else, why would it bother?"

"Well... it has to do with my sister and mom, those are the only memories I've seen."

"Maybe it just wants you to know the truth, Tibby," Linda said, the most obvious solution, in Tabatha's opinion.

"Well, of course," Tabatha conceded. "But if that was all, it'd have just shown me and gotten it over with long ago. I think it wants me to do something with what I know." She glanced at the clock, hit by a revelation that made her want to leave, strangely, as she usually stayed as long as possible. "Guys, I really need to go do something... I'll talk to you later."

Linda smiled, almost as if proud to see Tabatha make connections. "Come back soon, darling," she crooned as Tabatha left.

Silence, part III of VI

Tabatha jerked awake while it was still dark. The alarm clock shone fiercely; it was precisely 2:00 a.m. She sat up, no longer at all sleepy. A familiar high-pitched humming beckoned her out of her room and led her to the also-familiar blue orb. A slight smile combined with her puzzlement to create a paradoxical flicker of emotion across her face. The orb hovered in front of her father's bedroom door, and she eagerly reached toward it, hungry for more of the exquisitely clear memories of her dead kin. It retracted for an instant, like a scared cat retracts from a strange touch, then relaxed and connected with Tabatha's outstretched palm. An image of Tabatha's mother Sharon appeared in her mind. Sharon's face was wet with tears, the creamy skin Tabatha inherited flushed. She held a baby, Tabatha's twin Kylie. The pair rocked together, three-year-old Kylie scared silent.

Sharon's disposition changed suddenly: her sad gaze was replaced with a hardened stare that she surveyed her oldest baby with. Kylie blinked in fright at her mother. Sharon stood up with the baby, and Tabatha realized that not only was this in the suburban townhouse the family had inhabited in its early years, but the "memory" was also foreign in a more important way: she had never seen this taking place. She wondered vaguely if it had happened at all; after all, Kylie and Tabatha were never apart as children.

As though the presence sensed her doubt, it changed immediately, feeding Tabatha an image of Karl and herself. Here, too, Tabatha was three, though smaller than her twin was, and Karl had a full, curly head of hair and kind, worried eyes. The two exited a yellow cab together, Karl carrying a brown zippered suitcase, Tabatha wearing a pink Barbie backpack. Tabatha watched herself ascend some grey steps onto a concrete porch with Karl, and saw herself trying to whistle as he rang the doorbell of a small white clapboard house. The oaken storm door opened shortly after, and a full-figured, curvaceous blonde with pouty pink lips let them inside, stroking Karl's bare face with a soft touch and tender look, then ruffling Tabatha's hair with her pudgy, long-nailed fingers. Tabatha's stomach dropped as if from a roller coaster ride at the woman's appearance, and the strong vision vanished.

Tabatha blinked, eyes accustoming to the dark. The orb had disappeared. She felt drained, tired from the connection with the mysterious apparition, so she returned to her bed, sleeping for a few more blissful hours.

Silence, part II of VI

After school, Tabatha met Jimmy for the walk home. Their Friday debriefing was all too short, in her opinion, for she had to go home and make it through yet another miserable night with her father. Stepping over the threshold into her apartment, Tabatha paused to listen to an odd noise. A high-pitched humming filled the room, a sound like a chorus of bumblebees. She had heard it often in her dreams, but it was strange to hear it in real life.

Tabatha set her blue-grey backpack down and walked toward the source of the noise. It was coming from down the hall, in her bedroom. She opened her door slowly. When she walked into the room, her jaw dropped: a clear blue orb hovered, pulsating, moving closer to her.

The magnetic effect that pulled her to it in her dreams worked here, too, and she wondered whether or not this was, in fact, just a dream. Her left hand floated up to the electric spectre, and as she touched it a calming effect rippled trough her delicate body. Memories of her early childhood flashed back to her.

There was her mother, laughing at Tabatha's birthday party... but it wasn't hers, only, for her twin sister was still alive then, too, identically dressed, with an identical face and an identical grin. The involuntary reminiscing brought tears to Tabatha's eyes, and as she crumpled to the floor the blue presence left her.

Tabatha lay prone, rocking and grasping her silver locket, oblivious to the noise of her father's entrance into the apartment. She was still out of sorts even as his heavy work boot connected with her thigh, once, twice. She gradually became aware of his gruff voice, and scrambled to her feet and instinctively to the door with head down and hands covering her face.

"I come in here to find you blubbering on the floor! Who in the hell do you think you are?" Karl bellowed. Tabatha stood shaking, her eyes issuing salty tears, on their second wind due to his provocation.

"I'm your youngest daughter!" Tabatha shouted back, in marked contrast to her usual silence. She immediately regretted her decision to shout; she was still not herself.

Karl stared at her, eyes wide, face paling to nearly Tabatha's color from its previous anger-induced beet red. "Don't ever bring that up again," he muttered darkly before stomping out of the room, the slamming the door marking the end of his beating.

Tabatha couldn't believe the ease with which it had ended. Only her thigh was beginning to bruise. Usually her father would come home drunk, beat her around if she wasn't prepared with her door locked, and then leave to console himself with the television and more beer. When he did hit, she rarely got off with a single bruise, especially one so concealable.

Tabatha got her journal out from beneath her mattress, chronicling the incident while it was fresh. Afterward, she reread the long-winded entry to piece together what had happened.

Two questions sprang immediately to mind. First, she wondered, what was that strange blue presence? She absentmindedly fingered her locket as she thought. The action induced memories of her lost twin and her mother... all she knew about her twin, Kylie, and her mother, Sharon, was that the two died of carbon monoxide poisoning when the twins were just three years old. That brought up the strange reaction her father had when she mentioned her sister. He was always so evasive when it came to the past. Sure, she had her sad moments: after all, she lost her mother and twin. But Karl was even more closed off than Tabatha, and they hadn't ever spoken about it. Her eyelids grew heavy as she thought, and she drifted off to sleep with the events of the evening spinning through her mind.

Silence, Part I of VI

An orb of clear blue electric luminescence hovered about as the dark hair of Tabatha Burga hung over her legs, tears streaming off her face onto her knees. She looked up into it, drawn by some mystical force to its frightening absoluteness. A single slender hand reached up from her fragile, thin body...

The shrill screech of a red digital alarm clock brought Tabatha to a jerk out of her dream world. She sat up and shook her head, trying to get rid of the eerie feeling her recurring dream always left her with. Tabatha stood up, stretching her skinny arms before beginning the monotony of her daily routine.

"Hurry up in there, you slow bitch," the gruff voice of Karl Burga barked. He knocked on the bathroom door as Tabatha rolled her eyes and spritzed on some perfume. She left wordlessly, eyes downcast to avoid meeting the harsh gaze of her father. He was a large man, with broad shoulders, a thick neck, the bulging arms of a construction worker, and a buzzed blonde head. Tabatha knew his imposing presence well, and avoided it as often as possible.

Tall, lanky Jimmy Trescha met Tabatha on the corner midway between their respective apartment buildings. "Yo, Tibbs," he called out as she approached. "Lookin' hot!" She was, as usual, in a black tee and jeans, which hung slack on her tiny hips. He was in a t-shirt proclaiming "One Hit Wonder," his bright smile outshining all around him.

"Hey, Jimmy," Tabatha greeted him. "I had that dream again," she said, brow furrowed. "It's been strong this month." It was Friday, and the pair of juniors were off to school, where Jimmy would probably skip first period to smoke some pot with his friends. Tabatha didn't approve, but accepted him for a pal. Given her shy nature, she'd be hard-pressed to meet many other people.

"That dream sounds pretty freaky, for sure," Jimmy grinned. "Call me if you need moral support," he said with a wink.

"Oh, cram it, Jimmy," Tabatha replied. "We both know you would never have a chance to even set foot in my place."

"Just 'cause your dad's a psychopath..." Jimmy muttered as the duo neared the school. "Hey... catch me back here at 3:30, I'll walk you home. Have a good day, babe."

"All right," Tabatha said, waving as the two left each other. She trudged up the concrete steps to her inner city high school's front door, not looking forward to the day.

Gadget Man

I am a gadget man. I love to take things apart, see how they work, put them back together, make them better: I can't keep my hands off broken mechanical or electric toys, or even ones that haven't broken yet. Naomi, my first wife, was astounded by my automatic understanding of toys and gadgets. She was a dreamer, not a thinker like me, as disorganized as I was orderly. But we were a good pair, matched by our mutual love, bound by our son, born several months after the wedding he sparked. Naomi's father never fully forgave me for wedding his daughter after - God forbid - sex before marriage, but his old-fashioned beliefs never infiltrated Naomi's free-roaming mind, and she loved me to the edges of the universe, forgiving my quirks and lack of imagination and making up for my numerous shortcomings. She loved me until the day she died, and this I can never forget.

Naomi died a month and two days after our son Noah's seventh birthday. She had been diagnosed with leukemia, and her frail body couldn't handle the chemotherapy meant to save her, the chemotherapy that took the dreaded 70% chance of death and missed the prayed-for 30% success rate. Naomi fought her hardest to live for Noah and I, but my angel wasn't meant for this world.

I was numb and hardly operational after her death. The cogs and gears didn't mesh for me anymore, my wheels stopped spinning, my springs lost tension. In my mourning, I could hardly care for Noah and myself, so I married the first woman to come around -- Naomi's friend Kim, who probably married me out of pity and love for Noah than feelings for me. Her real estate agent salary allowed me to take the fall I did at work: I lost my job, devoting my time to the gadgets that made me a little happier - like candy for a starving man - in my basement workshop. The workshop was a room of concrete brick and floor, dusty painted wooden cupboards, metal shelves, and sawshorses linked with sheets of plywood and covered with my now all-encompassing projects. My love for Naomi was reflected in my work: clocks bearing her name instead of numbers, a toy train set chugging through her small Idaho hometown, the hopping bird toys she used to love so much. Kim was disconcerted with my obsession, and after a few months she confronted me about it.

"You're going to have to stop," she told me. "Naomi is gone. No amount of gizmos centered around her can bring her back." Her voice was hoarse, eyes streaming. "I feel like I hold no value for you." I held her in my arms, crying now myself. The opposite of her claim was true; I had grown to love Kim, perhaps not as much as my true love, my angel, but I loved her nonetheless. I promised her I would pull myself out of my worthless patterns and spend more time with her and less with my memories of Naomi.

And, for quite a while at least, I did. I stopped making my grief-trinkets. I got a job, got out of the house more often, spent more time with Noah. Sure, I sitll tinkered in my workshop once in a while, but I stuck mostly to toys for my son and eclectic clocks for Kim. She raided my workshop occasionally: I could tell because of a moved wrench, a clock out of place, the door wider than I left it. This is why, when I couldn't take it anymore, my final project for Naomi was hidden carefully. A metal hatch in the concrete floor of my workshop led to a tiny disused wine cellar, and this was my secret place that Kim would never find. I set to work on my last endeavor: a music box to play Naomi's favorite song, "Wind Beneath my Wings," a picture of our family before her death decoupaged on its lid.

I worked whenever I could steal a spare minute out from under Kim's hawk-like eyes. I could stop my projects forever, I had myself convinced, if I could finish this last dedication to my angel.

It was a cool, crisp January afternoon that my perfect plans went awry. It was a Saturday; I was finishing some budgeting work, while Kim organized her closet and Noah was... well, out of sight. The house was strangely quiet as I tapped away at my calculator. Finally I heard creaking stairs, the clicking noise of winding gears, then, unmistakably, "Wind Beneath my Wings." I looked up, horrified to find Kim holding Naomi's dedication music box, disbelief and disgust on her face. Noah had apparently found the panel in my workshop. Kim shook her head and cleared her throat.

"I thought you were finished," she said. "I thought I would mean more than this... thing!" She threw the music box across the room, and it smashed against the wall, toppling a framed picture of Noah, Kim, and I. Her wrath was powerful, her screaming painful. Sure, it had been years since Naomi's death, but I couldn't recover on Kim's terms. She left the house shaking, feeling unimportant, disillusioned by my lies and broken promises, jealous of Naomi and tired of being second-tier to a dead woman. She was the second love I lost, and while this loss didn't leave as gaping of a hole as the first, it still hurt. Kim had taught me that sometimes things end, and that one must move on eventually.

Kim came back after a while, but we didn't last long before she left me for good. I became an independent single father. Noah became the center of my universe, and he still is today. I aim to be a perfect, perfectly honest father. It might be the only way to prevent losing my only son. It certainly would have prevented losing Kim: my second love.

Emotion

Empty. It's tumbling sunflowers. The colors are happy, vibrant, trembling with uncontainable excitement, but they've come undone. Gravity beckons, and it's down-to-earth except for the fact that it isn't. Huge drooping heads. The pitter-patter of a cool, late-summer rain. Nothing can be contained now: this is the world, like it or not, for better or worse, more real than reality and it's neverending. It's explosive but subdued, like a fountain, spilling over into itself, reverberations of a single experience and the loneliness of the realization of the singularity. The initial shock was nothing less than shocking. And now an empty absence, a void, surgical removal, how I wish what I miss most could be implanted back into my life. Maybe not wholly: bits and pieces of what was, a pieced-together work, something more material and tangible than only my memories. It's a dark alleyway dead-ending into oblivion. It's the eternal reflection of mirrors bouncing off of each other, it's all of the above. It's beautiful. It's magical. It's terrible. It's powerful. It's indescribable but I still try, and I'll try forever, striving onward to just purge my cross, my mistaken identity. Emotion.

Ghost

A ghost, a wraith, my shadow in the night,
How comforting, a soothing sort of chill,
But herein lies an oft encountered fright,
My floun'dring heart cannot do what it will.
A struggle even masters shall not win,
And though I thought myself immune at once,
Decoding feeling others spark within,
Proves as elusive as the love one hunts.
So it is here that I myself am torn,
Tween friendly love and passion on this eve,
The shivers from which sizzling passion's born,
Or true love's warmth the loyal shall receive.
Oh, what's this trembling soul supposed to do,
But wait 'till free so it can come to you?

Starry Night

Three jewels like beads of light on an invisible string, the full moon a pearl charm accentuating the alignment of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. This was the last picture Rebecca feasted upon before retiring to her bed with crinkled solar system-patterned sheets. It wasn't long before she drifted off to a land of dreams, cat purring at her feet and fan buzzing quietly but constantly.

Rebecca's eyes jerk open suddenly after a peaceful sleep. It is still dark; the fan continues its buzzing. Wearily, she peers around her room. To her surprise, it is not her room at all. Gone are the planetary mobile and space posters, dresser and desk covered in charcoal sketches: these are all replaced with tall, clear sarcophagi holding sleeping people, deep breathing moving their simple silver-colored abdomens in and out. The soft breathing-sounds are muffled by the droning of a fan, likely cooling the computer system whose glowing monitor lights and control buttons line the ceiling in place of Rebecca's glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers.

"This must be a dream," Rebecca tries to convince herself, brain still addled by the disorienting stranglehold of sleep. She closes her eyes tightly, opening them to see not her room, but the same strange sight as before. She hesitates and coughs softly, hazarding the noise to gain an awareness of her own body. There is no doubt about it: she is awake, in a real but foreign and frightening place. Her cough has stirred none of the sleepers, bodies at relaxed ease, heads upright, clothed in skintight silver fabric.

Rebecca peers down at her own body. Her warm flannel pajamas are missing, replaced by the same synthetic silver as the other sleepers. Momentarily, she panics: her nine-year-old girl's body is now a curvaceous, mature woman's figure. Flat chest and narrow, boyish hips have transformed, fleshed out into a billowing golden ratio any woman would be proud to possess. Now she tries to move, to step out of her sarcophagus, an attempt to leave her own strange body, to fight her way back to the bedroom she is meant to inhabit, the life she knows she is meant to be in.

A laser pops on, instantly penetrating the clear, clean atmosphere of the room, so abruptly that the stunned Rebecca ceases her struggle, carefully regarding this intrusion into the calmness of the sarcophagi room. The pinprick of wise red begins its scan of the hold, an eye trying to detect the source of the minor disturbance. Its penetrating gaze skims Rebecca's face and skips back and forth across the length of her sarcophagus before drawing its conclusions and stopping the flow of invasive photons, receding once again into the wall from where it came.

A glance, a blink, a cough, a peer, a movement, a light, a realization. Rebecca smiles at her folly as a foggy gas floods her sarcophagus. This is not a dream, she knows; this is her reality, her home in the heavens, her destiny. The nine-year-old with flannel pajamas and charcoal sketches was a memory, and the young woman in this spaceship's hold is the real deal. She is one of a group with the passion and ability to step away from a doomed planet and seed the universe with the great gift they have to offer: the care and respect that these select few can grace the universe with in return for a new foothold and home for humankind. Several deep breaths of the misty gas and Rebecca sleeps, leaving the starship in a still, singly musical breathing peace.

...Uh, can you guys tell I wrote this in the throes of a possessed colon/semicolon/hyphen phase? Heh. Also, sorry about the long sentences. The original structures were much longer but I shortened several to make it, err, more readable...

Phone Booth

I sit waiting, watching, in the shadows of a scratched avocado airport phone booth. I've arrived from God-knows-where, my origin erased in a haze of drug abuse and first-class drinks. My instructions, only recalled a few hours ago when my pants dropped in the dirty salmon bathroom stall, are nothing more than blue symbols and characters penned into my thigh. Vague and distant echoes of the disembodied voice I know belongs to the man who wrote out my instructions rang through my head. "You'll know it when you see it. You'll know it when you see it."

The phone booth has the same thick, smothering stink of oil refineries and old carpeting. Gum is stuck in the keyhole of the blue and silver payphone, some asshole's idea of a joke. Slight movements of the stale airport air relieve my hot skin as I sway, still intoxicated but no longer hallucinating. I try not to let any part of my body touch the green-lacquered steel of the phone booth walls; they exude an aura of contamination and unpleasantness.

Suddenly, I spot it. Newly shined wingtips and a silky black suit, out of place in the permanent sleepiness and dishevelment of the airport. I rise up in my phone booth, black and white dizzy spots speckling my vision, hearing dampened momentarily, then it wears off and only the drugs are affecting me. I step out of the shadows, blinking into the light, as Mr. Wingtips draws nearer, having seen his charge. I nod, wordlessly affirming my identity, and Wingtips leads me away and out of the airport to wherea polished black Cadillac sits, tinted windows hiding the couple I know must lurk within. I close my eyes, take a steadying breath, and am astonished at the swirl of protest I feel from my drug-laden body. Of course. I had forgotten to stop walking. My balance is thrown for a hundredth of a second and the fall seems to take forever...

... I'll finish this sometime if you're lucky...

Obsession

My brother lives in denial. I visited just a week ago, bringing bread and sausage to his children. He's stopped eating now, hungering for nothing but the smooth amphibian skin of a mermaid that doesn't exist, that he has convinced himself is his bride-to-be. He sits silently when I try to speak to him, sad eyes staring at the bone comb he fiddles with, mouth sour from ketosis muttering incoherent half-sobs. His second wife, as everyone knows, has another lover; really, she is good to him for nothing more than raising his children and bathing him whenever his stench becomes overwhelming. His once robust figure has become gaunt and hollowy. He has ruined an entire perfect life.

His first wife, Matilda, was simply angelic. She had flowing blonde hair, a trim feminine figure, and a face that shone with childish wonder and magnificent radiance. She was a young girl, and her romance with him began at only 17: they eloped four months after she found she was pregnant, eight months after they first met. Their honeymoon was her dream, and as beautiful as she was herself. Matilda insisted on Venice; she wouldn't settle for anything less. The gondoliers, the art shops, the tiramisu under the stars: her Venice was magical.

One thing existed there that Matilda never anticipated: insanity. My brother came home from Venice a crazy man. He would refuse to speak of anything but a mermaid, a mermaid he claimed to have met in a canal, following him as he roamed Venice, a mermaid created completely in his expansive imagination. The mermaid consumed him entirely, drawing him farther and farther into sin and away from first his work, then his precious infant twin daughters, then his wife, finally from his own health, and all the while from the graceful saving hands of God.

All his behavior was apparently centered around a bone hair comb he found on the honeymoon, the sort that holds ladies' hair in buns. He started by carrying his comb with him everywhere he went. He was eager to present it to anyone and everyone, explaining that the mermaid he met had given it to him as a token of her love. He would then burst into a monologue about their meeting. The glittering notes of her harp drew him near her. She had coal-black hair, wore pearls about her wrist and neck, and ribbons around her waist. She had an onyx scaled tail and ivory skin offset by ebony eyes and scarlet lips. Her features were more delicate than even those of Matilda, he said, and he swore up and down that someday he would return to her. Eventually he reached the point that he became so obsessed with the mermaid that his friends would avoid him so they wouldn't be forced to listen to the same exhausted story that they had at first laughed off. His job was lost quickly due to his lack of focus. The final straw was his neglect of his wife the day she gave birth: he simply had no interest in anything but his mermaid and that always-polished bone comb.

Then his final, unforgivable sin was committed. His wife was found dead, stabbed thrice in the chest and once in the stomach, left lying in blood-stained bed, only three months a mother. There was no doubt who was responsible, but the incident was hushed up, insanity an ironic asylum for him to hide in to avoid the consequences of his dreadful action. to try and save face, my mother immediately married him to a delinquent young lady who wouldn't have otherwise had the chance to marry well, or at all, and who would serve mainly as housekeeper and nanny.

It has been fully four years since his trip to Venice, and my brother is unreachable. I sit now watching his frail self rock rhythmically, hands worrying the comb like a rosary. He is remarkably affected by his mind's creation. I don't imagine he has long to tarry in this mortal world. It is unclear whether filth or starvation will take him first, but it is obvious that his true killer is himself: the frolicking demon of his imagination and the obsession-turned-haunting that drove him to craziness, to murder, to death.

Creation

The young man, we will call him the Creator, stands alone on a jagged rock overlooking everything he has made. He has jet black hair and high cheekbones, eerie onyx eyes in narrow slits. His expression is transcendental; his gaze could as easily rise one to the heavens as hurl them into the sulfurous burning pits of hell. The Creator holds a pallette of the eight elements, flinging about wind, earth, ice, lightning as he paints out the demons within him, that, though he has created, haunt him continually.

Crack! White-bright lightning zig-zags across the sky. It's a signal, of sorts. This particular stage has been set for the Creator, and now he can do nothing but wait. The ether his jacket is composed of shudders, and the Creator falls headlong through the brane of this universe and into a parallel world, identical to his last but for the separate version of himself. The battle has begun.

Now two stand, paintbrushes in hand, pallettes ready, trying in any way possible to do the impossible: destroy an immortal being. The Creator delivers the first blow, and blow it is: a gale so powerful it leaches the color from the sky, crumbles mountains, reverses rivers. The enemy stands, waiting for his moment, and counters the windstorm with an equally powerful wind of his own. The two meet, the front swirling to create a vortex, destroying land, rising higher and higher until it is gone. The Creator attacks again, sending a lightning bolt out, but before he knows it a torrent of water comes back to him, the charge surging through it. A wall of land is erected in an instant, stopping both water and electricity. The Creator sends forth a final attack to finish off his enemy: a heap of earth and a fluid stream of fire. His enemy is crushed, the fire feeding on all available fuel before it dies.

At first there is no movement from the heap of charred black dirt and ash. Then small tremors shiver through the pile, and the enemy rises, covered in red and black burns, his clothing and hair burned to nothing, fingers useless gnarled claws and feet curled into cloven knobs. He issued a piercing wail before running off in concession.

The Creator views his destruction with satisfaction, and with a swish of his jacket transports himself to a world of blue, gold, and white, the Heavens he has created for Himself. The balance is perfect, complete. The Creator sits, and observes, and waits.

...I'm posting some stuff I wrote in Creative Writing. I won't post stuff I hate, though...

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*a single teardrop slides down my cheek*
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and that's how I feel right now