short story. longest thing i have written - ever.
"Jon had always been a dreamer."
The winter was bearing down on him as he sat down on a porch that belonged to some girl whose name he couldn’t recall. The sun was finally setting on an empty gray sky, the tiny dot of impotent white light that had traveled the air all day was finally letting itself die as it smothered into the ground and disappeared all together. The air was snapping at his eyes and hands and ears, and he shuffled around in his oversized coat twiddling his exposed fingers together and shaking his left leg up and down to feel the warmth of his own failing energies. He was leaning against one of the cold white pillars that had diligently held the bricks and iron of the balcony above elevated for years upon years. He nestled into the hard surface making its silence and its strength his own. He kept his eyes still, and his mouth shut, trying to stay inside of himself and has far away from his surroundings as possible. Inside his pocket, his hand was pressed so tightly into a ball that his knuckles were white and his hands were bleeding from the pressure of his fingernails. He was shaking, but barely.
Not twenty feet away from him, a small, rusty, antiquated little gas guzzling machine was huffing and puffing and sputtering gas into the atmosphere as it was piled full with people just old enough to drive it. The smell of it made him choke, he could feel it tinting the air and painting his lungs black. The sound of the little machine sputtering made him feel like he was watching a death. It was a grandiose and somewhat romantic idea for him, only because he had always been enamored by the complexities of the life cycle. Death had recently become a very strange and beautiful concept to him.
Inside, a tiny little girl that went by the name of Jen was climbing on top of some kid that Jon had never seen before, wrestling with the fringes of her unseasonably short multi-colored skirt. Her hair was wrapped up in lace, the dark black strands curling up and weaving in and out of the course white fabric. Her eyes seemed to glow, just like always. The curve of her brow ran along her forehead through a gently sloped arc revealing an inquisitiveness and intelligence deep within her that few people noticed. Her lids slipped down and up revealing brightly colored, sparkling dust that just barely out shown her dark green irises, tiny little slits of black cutting up and down them as if bleeding from the dark pools of her retina.
There were six people in the car, but she was the most important. Jon had learned that there was always a girl.
“Get up, we’re going to be gone soon”. The words danced through the frigid air, and hit him with a distasteful amount of force.
He calmed, “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to go”.
There was silence after that. The idea was simple. He was supposed to jump into the tiny black engine and rocket off to someplace only God knew where. He was supposed to stand up, put one foot in front of the other and inch his way to the little death toy. He was supposed to stuff himself inside among people he didn’t know, face the girl that was killing his twisted little innards, and let the thing take him along. He was supposed to sit in the smell, the sound, and the filth of all these people he didn’t know. He sat there and closed his eyes.
“Ok”, the sound of the car trailed off and disappeared.
Suddenly Jon was blinded by the glaring light of the sun he had just seen whimper, crawl, and die into the night. His bare feet were being scratched and cut by the sand and rocks of the beach. Waves slowly bashed the shore, their motion retarded to the point that he could take the time to see individual droplets of water. Everything else moved at a normal pace, the wind blew through him and lifted his spirits, as he sat back and let the smell of the salt water, the sound of ravenous birds in the air, and the gritty taste of sand in his mouth infiltrate him. He was somewhere he had never been before, but it was a beautiful day.
He sent his gaze from side to side, exploring the infinite expanse of water, looking for the thing that had sent him there. He found it almost immediately. There just above the slowly crashing waves was a butterfly. It was so large that its wings were more like a bird’s than an insect’s. On it was painted the faces of long dead men in every color of the rainbow. The colors themselves were dull and worn, but the faces were vividly drawn, the decay of each one expertly detailed, eyeballs melting in sockets, thin strands of hair hiding the dirty old skulls of these men. As the wind changed direction Jon swore to himself that he could smell the death of it.
The butterfly floated above the ocean, beating its giant eagle like wings back and forth, and Jon had resigned himself to watch. It was a glorious day. But the butterfly began to move. It nonchalantly fluttered across the watery expanse for a few feet, and slowly plunged into the salty waters, resisting as it was sucked down and seemed to drown.
Jon blinked, and he was floating underwater. The butterfly was directly above and ahead of him by miles and miles. It seemed to fly in the water as effortlessly as it would have in the air. Wings beat back and forth not even disturbing the waves, and it began to sing a soft poignant melody that pierced the silence of the ocean. As it sang, fish began swimming towards it, many fish, soon hundreds of every feasible color. All seemed to be colored with the radiance that the wings of the butterfly must have lost a long time ago. The fish seemed to form a sort of sphere around the butterfly, their colors organizing from light to dark, as the intensity of those colors grew to a sharpness of unbearable beauty. The butterfly hovered in the center; it’s melody forming a sort of melancholy that brought sadness along with this vision of beauty. Suddenly the faces upon the butterfly’s wings each solidified and flew head on into a particular fish. And as the fish would meet these decaying images their jaws would unhinge, their mouths pulling back so much that their skulls would be crushed and their hearts would lie exposed in the salty waters making everything around them red.
The fish continued to each turn inside out as they met the ghosts from the butterflies wings, and the butterfly itself became increasingly radiant. It’s beauty was soon unequaled by anything Jon had ever seen. He wanted to cry. He wanted to laugh. Jon woke up, in darkness.
The gas-guzzling car was gone, how long he had no idea, but long enough for the air to clear. He hadn’t really been asleep because his left leg was still bouncing up and down, his fingers were still twiddling and he was still in the mood he had been whenever it was that
he had successfully dodged this reality.
“You’re an idiot”. An old friend was standing over Jon. His name was Sam or Samuel or something (he changed preference by the month). His hair was just a little lighter than little Ms. Jen. He was wearing something dark and earthy, just like he always did, his round face was fixed in a seemingly permanent frown that suggested some vague sense of completely insincere concern. He leaned upon his right foot, which stood upon the top step of the porch with the other on the sidewalk below. The heavens were frowning down upon Jon, for this man was in the mood to talk. “You should have just gotten in the car, you should have just talked to your girl”.
Jon yawned.
“But you didn’t, and-“
Jon muttered, “I don’t think I ever will”.
“This is stupid, pointless, if you feel need to talk to her then you need to talk to her, but if you’re not going to then don’t sit here acting like your freaking world is caving in. You’re so melodramatic, you love this little bit of conflict you find yourself in because it makes you feel important. But look how small you are, crying yourself to sleep on the steps of some house that belongs to only god knows who”.
“I’m not crying myself to sleep, and I don’t feel I need to do anything, I’m just sitting here”.
“You and I both know what’s wrong with you, but you’re not going to admit to it.”
“If there was something wrong with me, first of all it wouldn’t be any of your business. Secondly, anything of the nature I assume your talking about would be too big for me –certainly too big for you- to touch. So just back off if you please. What are you still doing
here anyway”?
“Jon, you’re really good at reminding me just how much you get on my nerves”. His face turned red, his eyes grew focused and still with anger. He closed his own eyes and reached down for Jon’s throat, his fingers searching for whatever grip would do the most harm. He tried to knock Jon back, force him down and place him in the most humiliating and painful position as possible. Blood was draining from Jon now, staining him all over. But sadly, his dream ended and returned him to reality before he could commit his final act. Jon was sitting just as he was the last time he had had his eyes open, and there was nothing to be done, no feasible action to atone for his rage and frustration.
Jon smiled and closed his eyes again, “Go away Mr. Sammy”.
This time the sun was a billion times worse than it could ever be; his eyes were burning and now melting from the sheer brightness. Tears, blood, and the gelatin that had made up his sight were now nothing but pools of liquid pouring from the sockets. He crawled into the warm earth, screaming bloody murder and trying to control his pain. He lay there for hours, waiting for the pain to go down from unbearable to merely excruciating. He could handle that because he was strong. He was also blind, but he soon came to realize that he had spent most of his life that way: blind, living in the earth, burrowing wherever he pleased, always feeding upon some sort of flesh. He went back to the place that his instincts told him had been his first home, clawing his way through dirt and being guided by god only knew what senses. After all, his eyes were destroyed; his sense of smell and hearing both rendered useless by the dirt that so efficiently smothered his face. He made his way though, and when he reached his destination he felt around to more fully understand what and where he was in this world. He felt two bodies, one belonging to his mother, and one belonging to his father. His mother was no longer anything but bone, he realized that he had spent the first years of his life feeding upon her and growing in strength. His father’s body lay their untouched; he realized that he must have only finished his mother recently. He must have spent his entire life down there in the dirt, which would have explained why the sun had been so unbearably harsh to him.
He had never seen the sun before.
He woke up alone. He didn’t really know what to do with himself. soon practical worries began to take their toll on him. How he would get home, where he was exactly, whose house he was sitting in front of. He laughed at himself, at first quietly, then with a growing sense of discomfort. The moon was now bright in the sky. It seemed closer to him now than ever before, and he wished that he could be there. The moon was empty, a place where he could be empty and weightless. The night was getting colder, and the slender crescent of the moon was now dipping in and out of the first clouds Jon had seen in days.
“As the world turns there is no distress.”
Jon closed his eyes. This time he was outside of himself, he saw himself lying face down in a puddle. There was a crowd standing around his motionless body. Silence reigned. There was light yet no sun, nothing at all. There was no hot, no cold, there were no smells or sound to plague the moment. Jon panicked as he realized that he was witnessing his own death. There was nothing he could do; there was no enemy to fight, no argument to make, no words or images of beauty to understand. Jon felt the sort of rage well within his incorporeal mind that he had always manipulated and shoved somewhere unimportant. In this world he was powerless, ineffective. But he soon realized that his body was still breathing. Slowly he could see his mouth taking in breaths, each one more shallow and farther from the last breath than the one before. He realized that he was trying to kill himself, finally, once and for all. He would drown in the slowest way imaginable, keeping himself alive as long as he possibly could so that he could fully experience this profound occurrence. Something was coming, but before he could be reborn, first he had to die. He watched himself for hours, vaguely wondering why no one in the crowd would try to help him, though not particularly offended by this. Someone did eventually come to his aid, but his soulless body rose and knocked the large man down on the concrete floor of his dream. He saw himself return to his puddle, no closer or farther away from death than he was before. He could see his body shutting down, but as the world turned there was no despair.
His body did die, finally his last breath rushed directly from his collapsed lungs and back to the air. The crowd that had so loyally stayed by his side now left the scene, they remained free of emotion, they did not understand how profound this was for him, but he was not concerned. His body crumbled, and from the placed where it lay now came an ugly, dirty rat.
Jon understood then. He knew what he had never done before, what he had to do at that moment. He opened his eyes, knowing in the pit of his soul that Jen would be there, standing over him, waiting to be enlightened. By the end of the night he was confident that he would enter the beginnings of a new kind of love.
Jon opened his eyes, and no one was there.
i got through this week. thanksgiving is coming. you cannot stop it.
run.
