gothfaery3
Bluelighter
This started off being a short story...I now realize it doesnt have much plot on its own so I plan to make it a chapter in (hopefully) a short novel. I have avout 15 more pages written with the same character, but it dosnt go sequentially with this, so I wont post it until I get some more in order. With that said...here is the "first" chapter in Mirror (as of yet)
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“Nothing” I reply, and I reply it in such a manner that I know he is wondering exactly what deep thought I am pondering. I know how much smarter I am then he...I am smarter then all of these people-they just don’t know it.
I have been here for weeks. The worst part about it is not the reputation, on the contrary, I much enjoy being known as a patient of a “mental institute.” The worst part is, rather, the way in which I am spoken to by the incopetant peple who run this facilty. They talk to me as if I have done something to deserve to be here. They do not understand that I am on a higher plane. I am the wiser being of the two of us.
“Why do you refuse to be cooperative during out meetings?” he inquires. I receive questions like this a lot, and I usually answer them i such a way that I am deemed a “smart-ass” and am told that our meeting is over because I am not making any progress. They think that it is a punishment-to have the meeting be over. It is exactly what I want. I do not want to put up with this strange man’s probing questions. I mean, what does he know of me anyway? Nothing. And I intend to keep it that way.
“Brooke, I am speaking to you. Are you listening to me?” He is ajusting his glasses, like he always does after asking me something he really wants me to respond to. I think he does this on purpose so that I am forced to look at his eyes when I reply. There is just something about his hands on those wire frames and brown eyes, staring, scared, at me through inch-long lashes...I don’t know if it more enthrawls me, excites me or just plain turns me on. He stares at me and I stare right back-silent- knowing that he will back down before I will.
“Tell me how you feel, Sylvia.”
“Fuck off.” That will show him.
Silence.
He stares at me harder, unblinking. Its odd how much emotion an be conveyed in such a simple act. He is making me uncomfortable.
A few weeks ago a woman in the room next to me made me uncomfortable. She kept asking me why my skin was so oddly colored. She was, too, a black lady of about fourty or fifty. I only know her age because she has children, one of which died and made he act like she does now. One would tink she is sixty or seventy by the way she looks, and about twelve by the way she talks. She kept touching me with her long, yellow fingernails. I told her that I was just light and thats the way I was. At dinner that night she touched me again and I stabbed her with a fork right in the hand as she held it out to poke at me. It got her seven stitches. It got me ten more weeks here, and I was “punished” by having to stay in my room for two days. I don’t think it was punishment though; they brought me all my meals and I got to sleep all day. I don’t like the other people here anyway.
I guess doc got tired of the silence. He’s sick of me, and the meeting is over. I tell him to go to hell. “Go get some sleep” he says.
“Don’t have to tell me twice” I reply, and I am on my merry way.
It was so dark and I was running through the house all over again. I awoke to the noise of falling boards and glass breaking. It smelt like christmas time at first and I thought that perhaps I was dreaming of something but then I opened my eyes and they were stung by the smoke and heat. I cannot hide from this one. My hand extended to the door and it felt hot, but there was no other way out, except for the twenty or thirty foot drop out of my second story bedroom window. I would most likely have survived that jump, but at the time I thought nothing of jumping. I needed to get to her, there was no other choice but to get to her and get out. Without even my own realization I opened the door and, before anything else, I could see orange and red and blue jumping and dancing on the hallway floor. Flowers on the walpaper turned orange, peeling and falling off the walls around me like leaves on the oak trees during this very same month. Nothing inside me told my legs to move but before I knew it my bare feet were scraping on the hot wooden floors. My lungs were black with smoke my this time from what I could tell, but I had no choice but to run down this hallway and to the bedroom on the other side. Thninking back on it, I realize it was only fifteen or so feet, but it felt like I was running for hours, each step taking me backwards instead of forwards. I could hear her crying and it echoed in my head above the coughing. I fell to the ground and I could see her. Even with my head laying on the ground I could see her but it was getting dark. My eyes were full of tears and my chest was full of smoke, so full that when I breathed out it was as if I were blowing out nothing but grey. I breathed it in and out and in and out and in and out...
The next thing I remember was when I awoke in the hospital. My skin felt sticky underneath what I thought at the time was covers but later found out were yards and yards of gauze. I had been asleep for almost eight days, and they were surprised that I was alive at all. It didn’t matter though...she was gone.
I didn’t even go to the funeral. I couldn’t stand the thought of her tiny body laying there, lifeless. Even without being there I know that it was me in that casket. It was meant to be me there so it was.
The food here must have dopamine in it. After every meal the entire place shuts down and we all sleep for at least two hours, regardless of whether it is breakfast, lunch or dinner. Tonight’s meal is one of my personal favorites: fried chicken and mashed potatoes with a little dab of some sort of gravy like stuff and some desert. I always skip desert and have an apple instead. A girl must keep up her figure, even in a place like this.
I still remember how it felt to look in the mirror for the first time after the fire. I awoke that morning in the hospital bed to find myself surrounded by people who’s faces looked familiar, but who’s voices seemed very far away. My mother, a short, fat woman of almost sixty sat directly to my right, her hands running through what at the time I thought was my hair.
“Sylvia...are you there sweetie? Can you hear me?”
My eyes rolled into my head as a squinted at her. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words came out in halves, raspy, as if I hadn’t had a drink in years. “Yeah, Mom, I can hear you” is what I meant to say, but my speech was broken and my lips would not respond to the orders my mind was giving them to move and to make sound. She saw me struggling, and her face filled with both the joy of knowing that I was coherent and able to understand her and the pain of seeing that I, her only daughter, was unable to function at a level appropriate to a year old child. Her eyes told me that she loved me, but also felt a level of pity for the state that I was left in. I tried to turn away and avoid her gaze only to discover that every move I made shot pain through my entire body, so much that I could not even stand the deep breaths that my lungs were forcing me to take simply to survive-if this was surviving at all.
Around the small, sterile room were an assortment of other individuals, and at first I was shocked at the amount of people who were just sitting there, waiting for me to rise from my slumber and step forth into this new world, a stronger more beautiful woman then before. I quickly realized most of the crowd were nurses, doctors or other healthcare- professional, and, much to my dismay, my mother was the only person I recognized as a family member or friend. Im dreams, while I was sort of unconscious of my state, I had strange visions of waking up and being surrounded my people who knew and loved me, like some sort of scene from a movie. In actuality, there was just Mom and a group of men and women who I felt were watching me under a microscope.
If I had known at the time what I was going to have to wake up to I would have told them right then and there that I didn’t want to come back up. I wanted to be put on another morphine drip and go back into my land of sleep, forever laying here, motionless and thoughtless, left to swim on in my dreams of strawberry sunset-filled skies and nights on the soft earth under a velvet-black abyss with pinhole stars and crickets chirping ever so softly in the background. Sometimes, even now, I still go to the place where I lived for those eight long days, and I find refuge and peace, for those were the last memories I have before waking up. Those are the last memories of happiness that I have, the last memories before I became the oddity that I am now.
I gazed up onto the ceiling for what felt like hours while my mother talked to me, foolish things that she said only because seeing me made her uncomfortable. She talked about what I had missed during those days, superficial stuff like the who married who on the soaps we watched and how the weather had been shitty anyway so I didn’t miss much. She laughed to herself, I think to fill the silence.
All while she gabbed doctors and nurses came in and out, lifting pieces of gauze from my arms and legs, taking my blood pressure, asking me to take deep breaths and not urging me to try to walk, move around, or at least roll over in bed. I didn’t know at the time the damage that had been done but the pain on the surface told me that I surely was no longer the same woman. I didn’t want to move. I wish I never had.
She continued to talk and, for some reason that I will never know, I turned my gaze from the cracked white walls to her face and she began to cry. “They said you weren’t ever going to wake up. They told me that your lungs were too damaged and your body was in shock and maybe, just maybe you would wake up but here you are. I told them ‘not my baby, she’s a fighter, she’s strong like her mother and she wont go down like that’ and they laughed at me, but here you are...” her voice trailed off. She placed her hand on my face, but I could not feel her skin on mine and for the first time I noticed that it too was covered in layers upon layers bandages. For some reason knowing that this, my face, my shield, was covered and damaged made me feel as if I were dead, and at this point i decided that something needed to be done. I needed some actualization, some proof that I was really here and that I had not, in fact, died that night with the other half of my soul that I now knew lay dead in some mortuary, just waiting for me to join her.
“I want a mirror.” I said it with enough clarity to where both my mother and the nurse that was just exiting the room could understand. My mom looked at me, shocked, as though she had never expected me to speak again.
I half rolled, half slid my way into a wheelchair that was promptly brought to me by one of the countless nurses who had come to see the unveiling of my wounds. I wondered at this time if people who worked in this line of business-healthcare I mean-thrive on life, or, more realistically, on death. It seemed as though the doctors and nurses were more intrigued by the thought of me going trough tremendous amounts of physical or emotional pain, rather then healing. One most note that, after all, these professions would not exist if it were not for the seemingly disastrous act of death. I find more beauty in it now then I did at the time, but even during those brief moments that I was being wheeled to the wall-mounted mirror, I knew that something remarkable was to become of this all.
It was difficult to move my head or to see anything clearly, but through my hazy vision I was able to see my reflection, white, in the mirror. My bandaged hands ran across the combination night-table-desk that sat on the wall opposite to my bed, and through the mittens of gauze I was able to almost feel the grain of the wood. Looking back on it now, I realize that there was no physical way that I could have felt much of anything other then pain, and that the thought of feeling something that I knew was there was simply a trick my mind was playing on my senses, hoping to calm my fears that I was lacking one of the most basic aspects of being alive-the sense of touch.
My hands must have had more strength then I thought, because before my brain could even register the motion, they were removing the bandages from my face. Although swollen almost shut, my eyes were able to see and recognize aspects of my features that were familiar- my wide nose was one of the first things to be revealed, and, while red and somewhat peeling, it seemed mostly normal. Slowly, in what seemed like hours of unwrapping miles of bloody tissue, the rest of my face was revealed. My mother cried and the nurses around me forced a smile as I squinted into the mirror, struggling to focus.
And there I sat, unmoving, staring at a face that was half mine and half somebody else’s. The left half of my face looked back at me, the same as it always had been. My lips were still full. My left eye was still bright, with the exception of the fact that I had only a few eyelashes left and no eyebrow. If one was to see me peeking around a corner, they would think that nothing was wrong other then a few scratches. It was the other side that was not me, it was somebody else’s, and I shudder to think now that someone out there was given the other half of my face in exchange for theirs.
A line, almost perfectly straight, split my face down the middle, a little off center, leaving more of the left darker then the right. My face was white on the right half...totally covered in a whitish-pink scar tissue. The scar sat there like an Arctic continent in an ocean of black, a piece of land that was inhabitable, totally unusable to everyone, including myself. My beautiful skin, my heritage, was covered my this mask of paper and it took everything I had in me not to claw it off right then and there, because, for a moment, I thought that maybe it was just a joke and one of the nurses would speak up to tell me that it would go away- that my ebony complection would soon return and I could again be the person that everyone knew me to be. But instead I was there-paralyzed-sobbing because of the fact that I now knew that I would never be the same again.
That woman had seven stitches because she pointed out my difference. I have a lifetime of pain because I am unable to accept it.
Sometimes I miss myself so much that it hurts and I tell the therapists this. They double my dose of Valium and I sleep it off.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“Nothing” I reply, and I reply it in such a manner that I know he is wondering exactly what deep thought I am pondering. I know how much smarter I am then he...I am smarter then all of these people-they just don’t know it.
I have been here for weeks. The worst part about it is not the reputation, on the contrary, I much enjoy being known as a patient of a “mental institute.” The worst part is, rather, the way in which I am spoken to by the incopetant peple who run this facilty. They talk to me as if I have done something to deserve to be here. They do not understand that I am on a higher plane. I am the wiser being of the two of us.
“Why do you refuse to be cooperative during out meetings?” he inquires. I receive questions like this a lot, and I usually answer them i such a way that I am deemed a “smart-ass” and am told that our meeting is over because I am not making any progress. They think that it is a punishment-to have the meeting be over. It is exactly what I want. I do not want to put up with this strange man’s probing questions. I mean, what does he know of me anyway? Nothing. And I intend to keep it that way.
“Brooke, I am speaking to you. Are you listening to me?” He is ajusting his glasses, like he always does after asking me something he really wants me to respond to. I think he does this on purpose so that I am forced to look at his eyes when I reply. There is just something about his hands on those wire frames and brown eyes, staring, scared, at me through inch-long lashes...I don’t know if it more enthrawls me, excites me or just plain turns me on. He stares at me and I stare right back-silent- knowing that he will back down before I will.
“Tell me how you feel, Sylvia.”
“Fuck off.” That will show him.
Silence.
He stares at me harder, unblinking. Its odd how much emotion an be conveyed in such a simple act. He is making me uncomfortable.
A few weeks ago a woman in the room next to me made me uncomfortable. She kept asking me why my skin was so oddly colored. She was, too, a black lady of about fourty or fifty. I only know her age because she has children, one of which died and made he act like she does now. One would tink she is sixty or seventy by the way she looks, and about twelve by the way she talks. She kept touching me with her long, yellow fingernails. I told her that I was just light and thats the way I was. At dinner that night she touched me again and I stabbed her with a fork right in the hand as she held it out to poke at me. It got her seven stitches. It got me ten more weeks here, and I was “punished” by having to stay in my room for two days. I don’t think it was punishment though; they brought me all my meals and I got to sleep all day. I don’t like the other people here anyway.
I guess doc got tired of the silence. He’s sick of me, and the meeting is over. I tell him to go to hell. “Go get some sleep” he says.
“Don’t have to tell me twice” I reply, and I am on my merry way.
It was so dark and I was running through the house all over again. I awoke to the noise of falling boards and glass breaking. It smelt like christmas time at first and I thought that perhaps I was dreaming of something but then I opened my eyes and they were stung by the smoke and heat. I cannot hide from this one. My hand extended to the door and it felt hot, but there was no other way out, except for the twenty or thirty foot drop out of my second story bedroom window. I would most likely have survived that jump, but at the time I thought nothing of jumping. I needed to get to her, there was no other choice but to get to her and get out. Without even my own realization I opened the door and, before anything else, I could see orange and red and blue jumping and dancing on the hallway floor. Flowers on the walpaper turned orange, peeling and falling off the walls around me like leaves on the oak trees during this very same month. Nothing inside me told my legs to move but before I knew it my bare feet were scraping on the hot wooden floors. My lungs were black with smoke my this time from what I could tell, but I had no choice but to run down this hallway and to the bedroom on the other side. Thninking back on it, I realize it was only fifteen or so feet, but it felt like I was running for hours, each step taking me backwards instead of forwards. I could hear her crying and it echoed in my head above the coughing. I fell to the ground and I could see her. Even with my head laying on the ground I could see her but it was getting dark. My eyes were full of tears and my chest was full of smoke, so full that when I breathed out it was as if I were blowing out nothing but grey. I breathed it in and out and in and out and in and out...
The next thing I remember was when I awoke in the hospital. My skin felt sticky underneath what I thought at the time was covers but later found out were yards and yards of gauze. I had been asleep for almost eight days, and they were surprised that I was alive at all. It didn’t matter though...she was gone.
I didn’t even go to the funeral. I couldn’t stand the thought of her tiny body laying there, lifeless. Even without being there I know that it was me in that casket. It was meant to be me there so it was.
The food here must have dopamine in it. After every meal the entire place shuts down and we all sleep for at least two hours, regardless of whether it is breakfast, lunch or dinner. Tonight’s meal is one of my personal favorites: fried chicken and mashed potatoes with a little dab of some sort of gravy like stuff and some desert. I always skip desert and have an apple instead. A girl must keep up her figure, even in a place like this.
I still remember how it felt to look in the mirror for the first time after the fire. I awoke that morning in the hospital bed to find myself surrounded by people who’s faces looked familiar, but who’s voices seemed very far away. My mother, a short, fat woman of almost sixty sat directly to my right, her hands running through what at the time I thought was my hair.
“Sylvia...are you there sweetie? Can you hear me?”
My eyes rolled into my head as a squinted at her. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words came out in halves, raspy, as if I hadn’t had a drink in years. “Yeah, Mom, I can hear you” is what I meant to say, but my speech was broken and my lips would not respond to the orders my mind was giving them to move and to make sound. She saw me struggling, and her face filled with both the joy of knowing that I was coherent and able to understand her and the pain of seeing that I, her only daughter, was unable to function at a level appropriate to a year old child. Her eyes told me that she loved me, but also felt a level of pity for the state that I was left in. I tried to turn away and avoid her gaze only to discover that every move I made shot pain through my entire body, so much that I could not even stand the deep breaths that my lungs were forcing me to take simply to survive-if this was surviving at all.
Around the small, sterile room were an assortment of other individuals, and at first I was shocked at the amount of people who were just sitting there, waiting for me to rise from my slumber and step forth into this new world, a stronger more beautiful woman then before. I quickly realized most of the crowd were nurses, doctors or other healthcare- professional, and, much to my dismay, my mother was the only person I recognized as a family member or friend. Im dreams, while I was sort of unconscious of my state, I had strange visions of waking up and being surrounded my people who knew and loved me, like some sort of scene from a movie. In actuality, there was just Mom and a group of men and women who I felt were watching me under a microscope.
If I had known at the time what I was going to have to wake up to I would have told them right then and there that I didn’t want to come back up. I wanted to be put on another morphine drip and go back into my land of sleep, forever laying here, motionless and thoughtless, left to swim on in my dreams of strawberry sunset-filled skies and nights on the soft earth under a velvet-black abyss with pinhole stars and crickets chirping ever so softly in the background. Sometimes, even now, I still go to the place where I lived for those eight long days, and I find refuge and peace, for those were the last memories I have before waking up. Those are the last memories of happiness that I have, the last memories before I became the oddity that I am now.
I gazed up onto the ceiling for what felt like hours while my mother talked to me, foolish things that she said only because seeing me made her uncomfortable. She talked about what I had missed during those days, superficial stuff like the who married who on the soaps we watched and how the weather had been shitty anyway so I didn’t miss much. She laughed to herself, I think to fill the silence.
All while she gabbed doctors and nurses came in and out, lifting pieces of gauze from my arms and legs, taking my blood pressure, asking me to take deep breaths and not urging me to try to walk, move around, or at least roll over in bed. I didn’t know at the time the damage that had been done but the pain on the surface told me that I surely was no longer the same woman. I didn’t want to move. I wish I never had.
She continued to talk and, for some reason that I will never know, I turned my gaze from the cracked white walls to her face and she began to cry. “They said you weren’t ever going to wake up. They told me that your lungs were too damaged and your body was in shock and maybe, just maybe you would wake up but here you are. I told them ‘not my baby, she’s a fighter, she’s strong like her mother and she wont go down like that’ and they laughed at me, but here you are...” her voice trailed off. She placed her hand on my face, but I could not feel her skin on mine and for the first time I noticed that it too was covered in layers upon layers bandages. For some reason knowing that this, my face, my shield, was covered and damaged made me feel as if I were dead, and at this point i decided that something needed to be done. I needed some actualization, some proof that I was really here and that I had not, in fact, died that night with the other half of my soul that I now knew lay dead in some mortuary, just waiting for me to join her.
“I want a mirror.” I said it with enough clarity to where both my mother and the nurse that was just exiting the room could understand. My mom looked at me, shocked, as though she had never expected me to speak again.
I half rolled, half slid my way into a wheelchair that was promptly brought to me by one of the countless nurses who had come to see the unveiling of my wounds. I wondered at this time if people who worked in this line of business-healthcare I mean-thrive on life, or, more realistically, on death. It seemed as though the doctors and nurses were more intrigued by the thought of me going trough tremendous amounts of physical or emotional pain, rather then healing. One most note that, after all, these professions would not exist if it were not for the seemingly disastrous act of death. I find more beauty in it now then I did at the time, but even during those brief moments that I was being wheeled to the wall-mounted mirror, I knew that something remarkable was to become of this all.
It was difficult to move my head or to see anything clearly, but through my hazy vision I was able to see my reflection, white, in the mirror. My bandaged hands ran across the combination night-table-desk that sat on the wall opposite to my bed, and through the mittens of gauze I was able to almost feel the grain of the wood. Looking back on it now, I realize that there was no physical way that I could have felt much of anything other then pain, and that the thought of feeling something that I knew was there was simply a trick my mind was playing on my senses, hoping to calm my fears that I was lacking one of the most basic aspects of being alive-the sense of touch.
My hands must have had more strength then I thought, because before my brain could even register the motion, they were removing the bandages from my face. Although swollen almost shut, my eyes were able to see and recognize aspects of my features that were familiar- my wide nose was one of the first things to be revealed, and, while red and somewhat peeling, it seemed mostly normal. Slowly, in what seemed like hours of unwrapping miles of bloody tissue, the rest of my face was revealed. My mother cried and the nurses around me forced a smile as I squinted into the mirror, struggling to focus.
And there I sat, unmoving, staring at a face that was half mine and half somebody else’s. The left half of my face looked back at me, the same as it always had been. My lips were still full. My left eye was still bright, with the exception of the fact that I had only a few eyelashes left and no eyebrow. If one was to see me peeking around a corner, they would think that nothing was wrong other then a few scratches. It was the other side that was not me, it was somebody else’s, and I shudder to think now that someone out there was given the other half of my face in exchange for theirs.
A line, almost perfectly straight, split my face down the middle, a little off center, leaving more of the left darker then the right. My face was white on the right half...totally covered in a whitish-pink scar tissue. The scar sat there like an Arctic continent in an ocean of black, a piece of land that was inhabitable, totally unusable to everyone, including myself. My beautiful skin, my heritage, was covered my this mask of paper and it took everything I had in me not to claw it off right then and there, because, for a moment, I thought that maybe it was just a joke and one of the nurses would speak up to tell me that it would go away- that my ebony complection would soon return and I could again be the person that everyone knew me to be. But instead I was there-paralyzed-sobbing because of the fact that I now knew that I would never be the same again.
That woman had seven stitches because she pointed out my difference. I have a lifetime of pain because I am unable to accept it.
Sometimes I miss myself so much that it hurts and I tell the therapists this. They double my dose of Valium and I sleep it off.
