confetti.

[rewiiired]

You can't think, thoughts have become heavier, so heavy you can't lift them. All is wordless, imageless. The static sound of silence buzzing in your ears, the way the night light in the hallway makes everything glow green, the way the eerie green light crawls into the room through the open doorway, it all burns into your mind. You cannot blink, it seems, and your eyes feel sore and large as watermellons. Right now, you feel as if you are all eyes, nothing but those two ocular solos.

In thoughts that are wordless whispers, you wonder whether this is reality or this is a dream. Then you begin to seriously contemplate if there's a difference between the two at all. It makes no sense at all, nothing about any of this does. You could scarsely recall a time when things actually made sense, and that residue, that fading phantom of a memory was merely a forged sense of security that had arisen out of a blissful ignorance you had since lost.

All mom's lies, like dreams can't hurt you, monsters aren't real.

There's nothing to be afraid of, everything will be all right.

All of them: lies, lies, lies, lies, lies.

You try to look to your left, but you can't move your head. Is your face even there? You can't make a twitch of expression. You can't feel your body at all, not the slightest of pin-prickles, and the swinging teeter-totter of breath, the in and out, the back and fourth, it all calms, slows, sleeps to a standstill. You've forgotten how to swallow, but that doesn't matter. You can't feel the spit in your mouth or you can't feel the dry, you can't even get a vague sense of what you can't feel. Your body is a fading memory and you can't even get a sense of its demensions, what it feels like to be connected to it. Right now, you're just trapped in it, enprisoned there in paralysis.

Not only is reality some fucked up illusion playing on a huge screen in an empty theater, where you sit in the back row all alone, but you, the passive observer, you aren't even real. You're a lie glimpsing a lie.

You've lost first person. You hang onto second person in regards to yourself to try to avoid becoming third person to everything.

Again, you try to scream for her, to call out for Ellie, but you can't even form the words in your mind.

What happened doesn't matter. What happened is that you were forced to watch horrors yet again, without being able to do a damned thing about anything that transpired. Without being able to help your friend and his brother.

Like those dreams where you run in slow motion, all this chaos swirling around you, all this maddness spinning about in a insane rush, and the harder you try to run the slower you move, until you're frozen, your feet nailed to the floor.

When they'd first come barreling through that wall, you were certain they were here for you.

But they aren't real. Nothing is real. Every sight or sound or scent or taste or thought or feeling, it is all suspect. None of this is real at all. Not this room, not you, not your two dead friends. They are dead, aren't they? Isn't that what those things did to them?

You can't wake up out of this. No matter how hard you try, you can't pull yourself out of this trance, this altered state of consciousness. Why can't you move? Why can't you scream? You just want to scream.

I, I just want to scream.

Are they dead? They were stiff as logs when you tried to wake them, when you called out their names, poked them, punched them, punched them harder and harder. Without so much as a snore or a breath in return. And now you can't move, either. Something happened.

Something dancing on the tip of your mental toungue, ready to leap off into oblivion, and you have to catch it. The green nightlight from the hallway, you focus there, looking for shadows, hoping for morning, hoping for sleep, hoping you're alive and they're alive and none of this is really happening. Its then that your mind begins to come back to you, slowly but surely, in snippets, like confetti in a whirlwind. You reach up and grab them, one by one.

 

[rewiiired]

safe.

A swingset. In their backyard, beneath a big tree, they had a wooden swing set that rested atop a thick layer of wood chips. From a big limb hung a tire on a rope, and I remember swinging back and fourth it all the time. Above the swing set, above the limb that held the rope there was the tree house. That’s where Cole showed me something very special to him once.

It was this tiny safe. He refused to tell me the combination, and if he told me what he kept inside of it I'll be damned if I can remember. He hid it there in the tree, though, and made me swear never to tell anyone of its location, even its existence. I knew why it was so important to him, but it took time to sink in.

You see, the safe was private. It was his secret, now our secret. It was important because it was something that was his and his alone. This kind of thing I took for granted, but this was a rarity in his life. This safe was the extent of his privacy. In his life, he had to hide things in order to have them for himself. What's more, he had to hide them three times over. He had to hide something in a safe, lock it with a combination, and then hide the safe high up in a tree.

 

[plazma]

This is really damn powerful stuff. The imagery and way it flows over the tongue are fucking impressive. Gave me a couple of shivers up the spine.

-plaz out-

 

[rewiiired]

playground.

Something seems off, something seems wrong.

I'm in the day care where my mother works, but I'm alone. No one's around, and its dimly lit in here. I have this creepy feeling rising up in me, something horrible, but I just can't trap it in words. I just cannot define it for the life of me.

I've got to be about five years old.

Walking through the day care center to the dark, back room, I still see no one. No kids, no adults. This room I'm in, its a small maintainence room, and there's an exit that leads to the back, where the playground is. A bit of light escapes from all edges of the door frame, illuminating the dust and coming to a rest on the floor, on my legs, on my arms and on my face.

I check, but the door's not locked.

I open the door, and there is a rush of color and life, but also something twisted, something horribly wrong.

It's daylight out and the sunlight shines down in a comfortable brightness. The grass is a beautiful, lush green. The sky is a brilliant, lucid blue broken here and there by white clouds of cotton. The trees are thick with green leaves the soft summer breeze sends clapping like some pleased but distant audience of this unearthly, unprecedented moment.

And the birds are chirping and the kids are laughing and the swings are making that familiar creaking noise as they swing back and fourth and back and fourth and everything seems to play together in the harmony of a grand and happy and peaceful and idealistic summer day.

And all I hear and feel is cacophany. And all I see is creepy-perfect in every aspect, so normal it can't be real.

None of this, none of it can be real.

Seeing what I see in that setting, I know, I just know this has to all be a facade. Something is incredibly wrong, for beneath those summer skies, beneath the green leaves of those trees, atop the grass, within the breeze there is action, animation, as one would expect on any playground. But there are unexpected visitors to this playground.

Not strangers to me, not strangers at all.

And they are everywhere.

Scattered everywhere, seemingly randomly among the children. A herd of them are swinging over there on the swings, playing on the monkey bars, teeter-tottering, throwing frisbees with the kids.

Its so odd, so real, yet so surreal. So wrong. To them, it all seems natural and normal.

Are they really there, or am I just seeing them there? Are these really just certain kids in the playground, kids that are not what they seem, kids who's masks I can see right through?

This has to be a dream.

 

[rewiiired]

last supper.

Peas, broccoli, corn. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberries, apple sauce. Steak or chicken, I just stare down at my plate, trying to tell myself I have to eat, I have to be strong, I have to play like nothing is wrong. Though it seems to take all the effort in the world to just reach out and take in hand that cup of water or milk or apple juice to wet my dry throat. So close, not a few inches away from my trembling pale hand, but so fucking far away, light years away, lies that cup. To wet my dry and narrow throat. Something to clear the lump that has for some reason formed there, choking me.

Some time before I sat down at this table, I'm certain, this lump in my throat had been my rapidly beating heart. It had risen, for some reason, to try and reach my mouth, only it had stopped halfway. I want to throw it up, but I know it will only erupt as a scream, and I hardly have the will to move. My jaws ae locked, and my throat has narrowed, so it just sits there, that lump, pulsating, bulging, pulsating faster.

When I finally usher fourth the strength to swallow, I push it back down through my chest, where it keeps descending, deeper and deeper, until it becomes this horrific knot in my stomach, twisting, twisting.

Twisting.

My palms are clammy, and I'm drenched in a cold sweat. I can't blink for the life or death of me and things are getting blurry. Every muscle tense, every joint locked, it seems I've just frozen as the rest of the universe goes about buzzing around me. The static silence of the table. My breathing, it seems to be irregular, why is all this happening?

Him, I know why, its him.

I can feel his reptile eyes on me, I can feel his blazing eyes burning right into me, his thoughts directed right at me. My greatest, most perfect enemy, I can't decide if I hate him more or fear him. Both emotions seem so deep and intense that they overtake me, they possess my every pore. I am somewhere in between fight and flight now, in that all-too-often overlooked realm of playing dead, of playing opossum, the bardo of the damned.

To my left is my best friend in the whole world. Beside him, his older brother, the eldest of the kids. Beside him, the mother, Ellie. And to my right, his sister, then his little brother, the youngest of the bunch. Between the youngest and the mother, there he is. There he sits, all high and fucking mighty. The father. The carptenter. The provider.

The fucker.

I could take this fork, I could take this knife, and I could lounge my puny fucking stick-figure body across the table and stab him in the face. The neck. The eye. I would be doing all in life and love a favor by murdering and mutilating the bastard. Evolution in action. I could carve him like a fucking pumpkin. Dissect him right here at his own kitchen table in a super-speed mad rage. And they would all cry, because they are all in some trance, they're all his fucking little slaves, but I would be doing them a favor, and some day they would thank me.

These are pretty graphic thoughts of mine, for a five or six-year-old.

I can't even look up at his face, I hate him so much, he frightens me to the bone so much. I look at the plate, at the potatoes, the carrots, the corn, the whatever the hell is on my plate, it doesn't matter. I can't eat, and I can't drink, and I just can't look at him. And looking at the plate, I'm not really looking at anything, I'm just gone, zoned out, dissociating the world away.

If I don't feel than you can't hurt me. If I'm blind than I can't watch what I've already seen.

I know there's no way I can ever allow myself to step inside his shoes and walk a mile. There's no way I can extend my empathy to try and understand the crude and twisted mechanics of this inhuman bastard. This fucking, abusive bastard. The empathy has to stop here. I don't want to know him, I don't want to understand. Why did I come here again? I'm in fucking hell, fucking, fucking hell. Mom and Dad, why did you let me come back here, after all I told you?

I'm not here. I'm watching all this on television. I'm a passive spectator, a people-watcher extreme. I'm in the back row of an otherwise-vacant movie theater, dark as dark can be, watching all this play out on the screen.

And, oh look, a flashback sequence, motion-picture-memory time travel.

There's me, hiding under a bed. This is in the bedroom that my friend and his three siblings share, and I'm hiding under the bed as they all run around in a frenzy like caged animals that had just been set free. The youngest of the four of them, the little curly-haired boy, he climbs atop this old trunk. A blanket wrapped around him, the Bible held to his chest, he holds up in his one hand a flashlight and begins to sing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Funny, but as much as I'm not there, as much as none of this is real, as much as all this is an illusion, a dream, I feel the tension. I feel myself cringe, and I have this horrible sinking sensation in my chest and tears are running down my face and my nose is running as sobs come up from my super-thin little throat like popping bubbles from some vile stew boilding in the darkest depths of my soul.

Of course, this is all on the inside, this crying, this sobbing. Outside, at the kitchen table, I'm just kind of like a corpse with a pulse

Back in the movie's flashback sequence, the door bursts open. Shock, screaming, me crying and curling into a ball and dying inside. And, fade to black.

Carrots, peas, pork chops, what the fuck ever.

Every dinner time at this place, when he was home and not office on business, doing his carpenter thing or whatever, it was like this. Me being unable to move or look at him or talk to him. Fucking hating and wanting to kill him, and the rest of the family confused.

This evening, though, I don't know if he noticed, but I refused to say my prayers.

I look at my food, but it seems dead and abused. I can't eat. Still can't move.

My parents never make me say prayers, and that was reason enough not to do so here. Until tonight, I had always done it out of respect, and later out of fear of the possible repercussions of my defiance.

Tonight was the ice-breaker.

Tonight I didn't do it, didn't put my hands together and interlock my fingers, didn't stare down as he did, and all out of spite.

All his stupid beliefs. All his stupid rules. Like to spare the rod was to spoil the child, as the insipid, violent bastard was always liked to say. Like having to finish your dinner before leaving the table, it was fucking mandatory. Like having no television, and minimal visits to other friend's houses. No privacy, hardly any at all. The kids, they even took showers together.

Admittedly, their lifestyle was drastically different from my own home life, and one could cough my reaction up to some unjustified discrimination on that basis. I mean, at my house, we never said prayers before dinner and we never had to ask to be excused. I did all that when I was over at this house for awhile, as I said, but the fact is that I would have never said prayers at that table because I truly thought that it would get you into heaven or not. I would’ve only done it out of respect for the family. The same went with asking to be excused and the thousands of other stupid `rules' that family members and guests alike had to follow while under that asshole's roof.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized why I had to bite my lip every time I did something `out of respect' for that family, especially in front of him.

Fear, it was all about fear. About wanting to belong. About being accepted.

Just like the other monsters in my life, this man, he had no respect for privacy or individual freedom. He used and abused people in one way or another, breaking them down so he could feel higher and more powerful. Making them feel meek so he could be strong in comparison. So he could be like his mythical fucking god.

He had to remain king, and the family his servants. He was the shepherd, and he'd grind you into sheep. He was the father, the provider, you were the weak children, damn it, and you owed him.

His strong hands went away from the family for long stretches of time to do what I was told was some great carpentry, but when he came home with those strong hands, they immediately went to the belt he kept in his dresser drawer, and that belt inevitably met with the bare backs of his children.

`Spare the rod,' he liked to say, `and spoil the child.'

At the core of it all was that this man was asking to be respected, but he never showed a sign of respect himself in order to inspire it or return it. Everything about him and all that he did seemed to be done with the objective of remaining in control of his surroundings at all times. Power by any means necessary.

Power by fear, love through pain, none of it made any sense to me.

Do wrong to us, we'll outdue the wrongs by doing triple unto you, he seemed to say.

They say the wrong word, he'll beat them.

Though it certainly plays a role, it isn’t just the abuse that makes this guy so sick to me, but all his little ways of manipulating the people around him. I am sickened by the grip he has on his family. Its the way he makes the kids live. And they live very, very sheltered lives.

In order to do anything a kid usually does, they have to be daring.

It was the only way you could enjoy life, and chances were that the father would find a reason to beat them anyway, so the kids figured they might as well take the risk and try to actually live life. So in the sight of that catch-22, they took any opportunity they had away from their parents and went wild, running around in a frenzy.

When they weren't under supervision they seemed to let everything out at a high level. Like caged animals that had just broken free of the prison they were locked in.

But the frenzy of freedom, I knew, always ended in the same way.

And he beat the fuck out of them right in front of me when I was over. I'd hide behind that door or that bed as he sought his own children who were hiding from him, their father. He'd take that belt or paddle or whatever from his dresser drawer and he'd beat the fuck out of them as they cried and screamed. Welts on them. Criss-crossed slashes on their back.

The smack of this, the snap of that, leather on skin, wood on skin, skin against skin. It peirces through your head, shoots through every thought like a bullet, leaves you cold and empty.

And then its like someone suddenly turns me back on.

I just snap out of it.

I get up out of the table, twelve eyes staring into me, pick up my plate and my cup and walked it to the sink. I hear conversation, but I keep moving, calmly, slowly, without looking at any of them.

I hear his bickering, her trying to calm him down, his raising voice. I place my cleaned-off plate over the trash can. Peas, broccoli, corn, mashed potatoes, steak or chicken or whatever, its all a meaty and vegitable colorful blur, and I scrape it all into the trash with my fork. Then I place the plate in the sink.

I take a swig of the water, milk, apple juice, it didn't matter, I couldn't taste it anyway. I feel it wet my throat slowly, traveling down it at a snail's pace, like a few small and slender and slowly slithering snakes or tiny trails of trickling blood, and I can almost breath again. My eyes are still blurry, but they're clearing, and I'm looking regardless, just not at him. At any of them.

I put the cup in the sink and calmly walk passed the table, on my way to the restroom, those six pairs of eyes still on me the whole way. Someone is talking, but I'm ignoring. All the volume is turned down, all I hear is a hum.

Go ahead, I think to him, get in my face. Stand up, hit me. Try it. Beat me, I'll fucking kill you. Maybe not now, maybe not until I'm a lot older and track your insane ass down, but I'll put that bullet in your head, I'll slash your throat, but only after the most severe amount of torture my twisting brain can think to subject you to.

I will be the embodiment of your karmic fucking backlash.

Memory, I've come to learn, is never a sure thing, but I don't think he was ever so unwise as to raise a hand to me.

But admittedly, sometimes, I almost wish the sonuvabitch had.

 

[rewiiired]

the camp.

Eventually you just think the world is this shimmering blur of bleeding trails, and the incessant, hypnotic tapping becomes the soundtrack to all of existence. you don't think of yourself or the building you're inside of, you don't think of the dark world outside in the night and all the life and death out there. All that exists for you is the meeting of the window and the rain, and you wonder how something so simple and beautiful could make you feel so solemn and lost.

Then you see the tip of the finger in the glass seemingly touch the finger on the other side. you look up and you see those deep and dark eyes stare at you, and you realize that this face, its your face. This finger is your finger.

You hear some kid yelling at you, and you look down below, from the window sill where you're sitting, the side of your body pressed against the glass. The kid is yelling at you to come down, and you look at him just long enough to scowl, and then go back to gazing at the window. The rain hitting it first like bullets, and then a light tapping.

Zombies. They're all fucking zombies. Robots, slaves.

And now the priest is yelling at you, scorning you, and the kid is standing just behind him. This man in black and white, this oversized Oreo cookie with volume, he's red in the face and pointing his finger and telling you to get down, get down immedeatley.

You don't want to be here. It was your best friend that got you to go, and your parents were all for it. You'd waited in a school playground under a tree playing with toys and then you'd rode in a bus with a brown interior.

You don't remember to where. And you can't say exactly what's happened to make you feel so angry at him, at the priests, and at all of them.

It was hot all throughout your two weeks at the bible camp, that you remember. You were in the room for awhile, with all the kids and the teacher, who was pointing to this kid, and to that kid. Every kid was telling a sentence of the story, and she'd write it on marker on this big peice of paper on the wall. She drew a circle around it. Then the next kid, he'd tell another sentence, and she'd draw a circle around it. Then she'd connect the bubbles with lines.

One day it got too hot, the air conditioner was broken, and you had all moved out into the hall on the long tables to write or draw or whatever. You just remember the fan, tick-tick-ticking every few seconds, blowing that cool air on you. You remembered the priest, the man in charge, coming up to the lady heading the class, his hands behind his back, his chest out, all prim and proper. You were in total fear of him. You hated him, and you didn't know why.

Your parents, years later, they'd tell you the frightening story of what happened when they came to pick you and your sister up. How they sat in that weird, circular chapel with the rest of the parents, eagerly awaiting the return of their children after two weeks. How they saw these men in black suits at the sides of the walls, standing perfectly still, faces pale and expressionless.

Zombies. Robots. Slaves.

When the children came out, they came out in single file. They were marching like robots, your parents would tell you. The kid's faces were just as expressionless as the faces of the men in black suits, and one of the kids, none of them were waving to their parents.

Your parents, they would tell you how their mouths fell open in horror, how your father's hand went to grip your mother's.

A Reverend came up on the podium, bald head and all, and began saying how he was lucky enough to have been taught under the infamous Bob Jones.

The children still stood at attention, not moving. Two weeks of being separated from their parents, and not one kid waved or even looked in the way of the audience. And your parents would tell you how the hairs on the back of their neck stood up on end. None of the other parents seemed concerned. To your parents, though, it all seemed surreal.

As soon as they could, they got you and your sister and got the hell out of there.

And they'd tell you how a few days later a man came to their doorstep. He asked to be let in. Your father, he locked the door. The man, he pretty much demanded that your parents let you and your sister come back to the church, that they couldn't give us up.

Your father bolted the door, and yelled how him and his wife and children, they had their own religion.

And that, your parents would tell you, was when you all stopped going to church.

 

[rewiiired]

superman.

I always got the distinct impression that Ellie truly liked me. I had come over once after not being there for some time and she remarked on how much she missed seeing me. She wondered, in all sincerity it seemed, why I didn't seem to like visiting anymore. She spoke in an excited manner to me about how they'd gotten their first television and how she had the movie Superman, which I'd wanted to see. She did some subtle bribing, telling me that if I stayed to play with Cole for awhile that I could watch it.

I felt really guilty about the fact that remaining at that house for any length of time brought feelings of absolute terror to me. I told her as carefully and kindly as I could that I didn't want to stay over. She asked me why, and I told her how I didn't want to be around her husband. He was often away on business, but he could show up at any time.

The tall woman, she kneeled down and looked at me, revealing the hurt she felt in her eyes.

"You know we'd never do that to you, don't you? Is that what you're afraid of?"

I felt any hope she had for understanding my position in this situation had just revealed itself to be futile. She just didn't get it, and she simply never would. It hadn't taken me long in my youth to realize that though Ellie was a kind lady, she was irreversibly blind.

She didn't realize how unnecessarily vicious the man she mindlessly married really was. She didn't realize the hurt her husband caused her children, or how wrong it was that she held the threat of her husbands' abuse over her children’s heads when they did something `wrong'. It was tremendously difficult, too, not to do something in that house which she or her husband interpreted to be `wrong'. Kids could simply not be kids.

My mother and her talked, and Ellie left the telvision on for me. she had put the movie in. I was somewhere at the scene where Clark Kent throws the little green crystal into the ice and the Fortress of Solitude transforms out of nowhere.

I was connected to Cole. What affected him in turn effected me. I saw the pain in their eyes; I felt the emotions in that room when his father did what he did. These children were horribly scarred over what went on in that house. Look at them. Cole always sucking his thumb, Junior and his temper. And the only memories I have of Lana is her crying, her fragile soul always breaking in my eyes.

And how could one expect any less, considering the conditions in which they were raised? They lived such sheltered lives, with so little freedom or privacy. They were to be seen, but not heard; the were expected to follow orders rather than learn by the example their father supplied. They all lived in the same, small room, they all had to play with one another and had little contact with other children outside of myself.

It's not at all what she was doing to me. It's what she was doing to them, what he was doing to them, and what that did to me.

My mother, she said I'd be fine.