Another one that didn’t quite pan out the way I’d hoped. Maybe it was too much metaphor. Maybe it was something else. Either way, here it is.
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
The light. Gray, softly, white, partly. A form pulled from the wall. A bench. The shadow it cast looked inviting, almost enough to crawl into. He wondered what was on the other side of that shadow, inside that shadow. Or did it end with the wall, all an illusion? A cold hard space.
He contemplated that space and who might have used it as shelter, dove into it, existed through it. He thought he would sit, listen to their tales, feel it in the stone, maybe tell some of his own, though his weren’t interesting.
No one answered. He took comfort in what he could, alone. Alone wasn’t comforting. He smiled when he heard it: voices, footsteps, laughing, sighing. He smiled when he saw it: faces to keep him company, to share this spot, for there was plenty of room. Endless room.
They didn’t ask to sit, piling around him, left and right, some even finding their spots on the ground, using the bench as a the back to the chair that was the ground.
“Nice to meet you,” one said.
Then he realized he wasn’t talking to him. His attention was beyond, directed at someone sitting beside him, and he was fine with that. The conversation, the laughter, the breath that smelled of old breakfast and coffee. Quantum particles taking every possible path, colliding with what they sought or didn’t. He was caught in the middle, a screen that they flowed through. All but a few. At least that was the explanation he told himself. Why he felt something at the back of his throat. An itch he tried to reach with his tongue. But it migrated to the back of his skull before he could scratch it, holding there, waiting. For what?
He waited for them. Patiently. The faces that looked everywhere. At the street, at each other, at the sky, at the wall. It was loud, this existence he found himself in. An observer only, and he found himself confronted only with white noise.
“Hello,” he said, thinking if he spoke, maybe they’d hear, and he was sure to enunceate clearly, evenly, and directly. The one closest to him smiled and nodded, almost caught his gaze before it slipped away to somwhere else. Someone else.
He felt the loss in the his teeth, and he thought it was the pain at the back of his skull, leaping out to taunt him, to see if he would chase it. It wasn’t. It was something else. Something new. He clamped his teeth down to catch it. Or to ignite it.
It did have the spirit of flame, writhing, searching for something to help it grow. He felt like he had discovered something. A fact that no one around him knew, and he was happy again in his solitude among the rabble.
“Hello,” he said to his hands, but those immediately went to the back of his head in response, massaging that spot at the base of his skull that suddenly hurt so bad. He closed his eyes to concentrate on it, to visualize its shape, color, size, so that he could grab hold of it. Take control of it. Mold it into what he needed it to be.
“What do I need it to be?” he said.
To his surprise the one to his right looked at him, acknowledged him as if he were more than an smudge on the wall that had been there for years. A stain.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” the Right One said. “Here, let me explain.”
Right One said all manner of thing, until his words divided into letters, then to meaningless sounds, then to nothing at all but white noise.
“It does make sense,” he said, hands at the back of his head again while he worked his jaw to kick the hornet’s nest that grew there beneath the enamel, beneath the gumline.
He thought that would have been enough, to respond, to assert himself, but when he turned to address Right One, he was faced away, spewing his sounds onto someone else, and that someone else appeared pleased with the sounds, open-mouth smiling with attentive fascination.
He felt a bump on his knee, and looked down to see another pushing him aside. “Can you move over a little?” this one asked, but instead of waiting for a response, he turned to someone else, firmly planted in his new spot, which used to belong to him and him alone, back when there was plenty of room, to think, to feel, to exist.
The sensation in his jaw broke through the flesh and met the other at the back of his skull. There they intermingled, and he watched with his eyes closed, because it was the only way he could see.
Others throttled him apolegetically until his seat on the bench had been whittled down to a sliver. He envisioned that sliver as a physical object, sharp and indestructible. It had to be to finish what needed to be done. He drew it back. An arrow, a sword, a bullet. Unleashed it.
Ignition. So quick. So silent. No ringing in his ears. They lay around him. Sat around him. In heaps. He liked that word. It had impact, much like the spears had that drove through the stone wall to find flesh, to find an end. Quantum particles finding every possible path, and every path was right.
The pain was gone. The sounds were gone. The smells. He didn’t mind the one on the ground, lifeless head using his knee as a pillow. He didn’t mind the Right One lounging against him as a friend. It was an illusion, like the space beneath the bench, which he no longer sought, because he had his own space in beautiful solitude, which he had missed.
He didn’t look up to see the others, preferring the view of the ground, the area between his feet, which was vast and calm. Gray, softly. White, partly. So right.