Writer: ok, here it is.
Story:
It was an odd feeling, like slipping into water. I'm not sure if it's because of my eh… 'overactive imagination' (anything I imagine miraculously becoming solid objects and real things) or because Abe was trying to keep me calm about my mind being raided by another person's. Either way I could sense him inside my head, like some sort of freaky smaller person. He seemed to swim through my thoughts, and as he did so did I. It was weird, having my own personal tour of my own personal mind.
Inside my completely rattled head, I tried to sort of close certain doors that were my own thoughts, like I imagined the doors being there in the first place. Weird different little sections labeled by vibrations and sound and smell. Abe didn't seem to be able to navigate very well inside my head though, and kept bumping into the sides of thoughts I had actually succeeded in closing up, like a person who's used to seeing with their eyes walking around in the dark. Which this might actually be like. The only colors in my mind were in words, and the nightmare, lost somewhere in my head.
It's a really crazy 'image' to think up, my head being like a house or something, but I did. Either by the sheer force of my own imagination or maybe even because that was pretty much what was happening right now. Huh. Like I said, nothing surprises me anymore.
And then the thought of him in my head, like some outside feather light touch, seemed to stop in front of a section of thought that was closed to him, and me too.
My heart skipped a beat.
It was memory. Groups of memories, and in the end, a year of memories with incredible pain and confusion at the end of that, the things that seemed to be locked up in the bottom of my mind.
Hope is the thing with feathers that rests upon the soul…
The words came to me then, some stupid poem Theo used to like. He had liked Emily Dickinson because when he was a little(er) kid our mother used to read it to him. And I didn't really know if these memories in the bottom of my mind could be called a 'soul', but there was something resting on top of them, light as a thing with feathers.
I didn't even know then if I believed in souls, but right now wasn't really the time to get involved in all religious and spiritual matters.
The thing had a quality that seemed to shiver between warm and freezing. I wondered if it was my 'powers' for a moment, but then I felt myself almost being tugged into it. It was an incredibly insane feeling, which is saying something because having someone trying to navigate inside your head is an incredibly insane feeling I was already experiencing. I was falling asleep inside my own head almost. I could still sense Abe there, almost as though we were both swimming down some path through my own bizarre mind.
And then there's this weird stop, and I hear a sobbing. It's a muffled, familiar sobbing in the back of my mind.
"Theo…" I whisper. I hardly whisper it though, the words come like a whales body against sand inside my head, paper whispering against paper. An echoing quality added as though I was inside a cave.
I hear Abe shuffling beside me, and am completely freaked out for a moment; we actually seem to be solid. Solid, living, human beings with heartbeats and everything you're supposed to have in real life, and apparently also have in this section of my head. I can hardly even detect the room where 'real life' must still be going on.
I hear a squelch of leather shoes, and labored, muffled breathing to the side. It's penetrated sometimes by Theo's small sobs to the side, tiny gasps.
The leather shoes step forward on floor boards, and I feel my heart beating faster and faster, terror rising in me.
I feel my powers then, stronger then I've ever felt them, throbbing inside me with a heartbeat like a bird's after flying. I feel memories of touch, smell, taste, everything coming with the one squeaking floorboard. Everything but the end. I remember this place, memories come back at me like being punched in the face. But there is still one last blank period I can't seem to penetrate. I can't tell if it's me or something else. It doesn't matter though. I know enough. I remember vibrations rising from the wood on my bare feet. I remember people here, soft voices, loud voices.
This is a place where every once in a while, I would call it home.
The same place I called home only a few weeks ago.
I'm inside a room in the Les Miserables apartment building and record store. A familiar, terribly, painfully familiar smell of chemicals sneaks up my nose like a bug, dying in the bridge of it.
There's the heavy smell of blood and a bad cologne. I recognize the cologne as Mr. Springfield's, the smell coming from lower on the floor, and I step back realizing his body is there, just another inch of pain searing with the rest of it inside me.
A terrible voice comes then, a gasping, nonsense speaking voice. Sounds formed with gaping, tongueless mouth. My father is next to Theo, saying something incoherently. I hear Theo sobbing more, and through a muffling piece of fabric I hear something, a word, a single name cried out as though the name, the person coming would make everything all right. The same way the people in comics yell for their heroes, Superman or Wolverine or some other hero.
"Meggie!" I hear through his choking sobs.
Writer: ok, so the plot thickens again. I'm sorry for taking so long with this chapter, I wrote half of it about a week ago and had Thanksgiving and everything, so I never got a chance to finish it until… well now. And I'm not getting any mail through right now, so I can't answer reviews, so here's responses here. If you didn't post a review you can just skip over this, because the laws of reality say this is not your review. But think, if you post reviews, I respond to them on the story. It'll be like being famous.
…ok, never mind, it's not really anything like being famous. I'm a liar. Just please review.
Destiny: you'll see. Uh… ok, I didn't mean to make that sound ironic. Thanks for reviewing.
Mimi: thanks, I hope you keep reading
Epallidino: thanks for the review
-H. Valentine
