THER IT IS IT IS VEYR LONG AND I APOLOGIXE #2

Chapter 1: January




I hate my folder. Everything about it. It’s where I keep my homework, but whenever I open it there is always that one piece of paper I don’t have. Isn’t it a sad part of life, parodied in a million comedies and satires, that it seems that whenever you are about to do something, life has a funny way of preventing you from doing it? Many people have said that it is life’s way of helping you be stronger. Maybe to be stronger, yes, but not to finish my homework.




As a matter of fact, so many things have been lost in my folder that my mom knows that whenever I am not in the house it is probably because I am asking Hannah or Adelaide for a photocopy. I jumped unto my bike and raced down the streets to the depilated house that is not depilated because of the years or because of bad management, but because it would just not be right if it was as clean as Adelaide’s.




I knock on the door and Giang opens, swinging it gently. He looks at me with those black eyes of his that manage to express his feelings better than his words, and goes upstairs to look for Hannah’s homework. I ambulate throughout the house. That’s what I love about this house, the way that despite the fact that basically everything is lopsided in one way or another, you always find new things.




I came to a heavy-looking door, and even though it was slightly ajar, it gives a sense of impotent protection of whatever is inside. I looked through the crack into a dimly lit room, smelling of dust and mildew. The walls are empty, except for one, which has a blood stain on it. The roof is low, but yet somehow, all the shadows of the world seem to be projected unto that area. A lone lightbulb hangs from it.




The only two people in the house are Hannah and her mom, but the air is wrong, the whole place is wrong, and the dark sense of foreboding is clawing at my heart. But not nearly as much as what happened afterwards.




Hannah is murmuring something, repeating it again and again and again, but everything and everyone in the room realizes that it no longer means anything, that it is a false sense of hope. Hannah’s mom, she walks forward slowly and surely, raising her hand like a weapon. I can see my fear reflected in Hannah’s eyes, and in the swarm of shadow on the roof. Oh, no. Then there was a push.




The wall Hannah fell into was painted red, her back was painted red, the world was painted red. Now, there was a rope, swinging rope writhing in fury and crashing upon the poor girls back indiscriminately, and the rope did not care if it hurt, and the rope did not care if it hurt the mother or the child more, because the rope’s job was not to feel. Hannah’s mom, she roared. Hannah screamed. And both merged into one sound that reverberated through the house. The mother grabbed the girl by the shirt, and orders came out of her mouth.




Hannah staggered into a door that was in the room, her back marked with pain. The door opened, and Hannah stepped in, slowly, as if that would stop the blood running down her shirt. The excuse was that the shirt was dirty, but I, resting in my place behind the world, could see the mother’s tears.




***




I had already gotten the homework from Adelaide, because I knew that if Hannah opened the door, my heart would be so wrought with sadness at the scene I had just seen, and I would hug her and cry for her. When I went to Adelaide’s house, she was watching a kid’s show, one for pre-schoolers.




I had finished my homework already, and it lay a ostracized pile on my desk, messy and long forgotten. I lay on my bed, back to the world, calmly flipping through a superficial magazine. It was almost scary, this whole moment, how fake it was.




Because you could tell it was just an act, a play presented to no one. The homework looked too much like an average math home work, my eyes and face looked apathetic, but it was easy to see the fear. The magazine that used slang so liberally was filled with smiling celebrities that you could tell had nothing to smile about. And yet, all the actors seemed to want to be fake, to value this reality more than their own.




I was done, looked out to the ceiling with eyes that were no longer intrigued by the world, my brain thinking at breakneck speed, but everything else said to stop, to learn, to quiet down and just close one’s eyes and submerge into nothing. But this silence was broken by a shrill sound bursting full of excitement. The phone.




“Yes, who is it?” I said casually playing with my hair. I could imagine the audience falling into the act of these inept actors.




“I won’t say if you don’t say. I want to make sure I called the right place.” The voice was half-recognizable, in that I had heard it before, but it drifted into the background of voices I hear. It seemed to be from a girl my age, but carried an underlining maturity. I guess this is what made it unrecognizable.




“Um... Josie. I mean, Josefa,” I bit my tongue. Stupid girl, forgetting your own name.




“I’m Willow Duncan,” Ah yes, Willow. The bespectacled girl with a ponytail. Why tell me your full name? “I presume you know me, yes?” Yeah, I know you.




“Why’d you call me?” I said. I imagined her sitting in her bed. What would her bed look like? maybe wooden. With a white mattress. And green sheets. She would be wearing shoes, and her legs would be swinging back and forth, the actress. Too bad. “I mean, you never talk to me, so...” I don’t need to explain the self-explaining.




“Mrs. Jenkins says I need a partner for the project we’re doing. I believe it would be in our best interest if we were partners,” Willow said, diplomatic. What project? What the heck? I don’t know any- Oh! That whole atom thing? I didn’t know we needed partners!




“Uh, Will?” I waited until I knew she was listening. With Willow, you don’t need to wait till she says “Yes?” because there is a whole different feeling, as if a knife had gone trough the air. “Um... I didn’t know we needed partners... And, uh, why would it be in my ‘best interest’ or whatever? Cause, y’know, I don’t know...”AGH! This is making my head hurt!




“Did you check your e-mail?” Willow said, but it was as if she wasn’t asking, as if this was an order. She knew I hadn’t. “Anyways, don’t call me Will. That’s a boy’s nickname.”




“Oh, I would rather be paired up with Addie and Hannah, sorry, but I barely know you,” I tried to look for a tactful way of putting it. “And, uh... You’re a pretty nice person so you can find someone else. I’m sure everyone values your smarts and stuff?”




Laughter rung trough the receiver. “Really, Josefa? Really?” the laughter continued, but it didn’t hurt. It only hurt the character, not the actor. I felt detached. “Listen, Cười and Lawrence are already working together, and no one’s working with me. I know you would rather jab a needle into your skin that ask someone not in your ‘group’, therefore I am asking you. So, will you or will you not?”




“Yeah, I think I will, Will” I heard Willow groan. “So, like, when do we start? And stuff,” I said all of this tongue-in-cheek. I’ll work with Willow, of course, I hate asking people to be partners, but I was going to make this experience torture for her.




“Tomorrow,” I heard something I seldom hear from Willow: determination. I don’t know why, but she wanted to do this. “At 3:00 PM. You better be there, Ramirez, Or I will hunt you down and drag you to my house,”




“Ay, do I haaave to?” I faked a groan. “Like, that’s when I do my nails. And stuff,” I stifled a laugh here, and Willow stifled a groan wherever she was. “Naw, I’m just kiddin’ and stuff. We will totally have, like, fun! And stuff,” I heard Willow hang up the phone, then I finally fell on my bed and laughed full and hard. No, I wasn’t acting. It felt good.



















Chapter 2: February




How did the project with Willow end up, you ask. Fake. We laughed, we did the things girls our age do when doing a project, but the tension was unbreakable, so we ignored it. There, you happy? Good. I would like to talk about something else that happened in February.




Whenever I open the door to the roof during the daytime, it always makes a squealing sound. At night, however, it opens effortlessly and silently, as if it, too, were sleeping. This night was no different. I went out, and there was Lorne.




“Go inside,” he said. His eyes were two narrow slits.




“I don’t want to, sorry,” I lay on my back. “Can you be quiet, just for tonight, need to think,” I didn’t let him answer. “thankies!” I don’t exactly remember what I was thinking about, I think it was nothing. I think I just needed a little bit of time to look at the endless sky with open eyes and become as blank as my hectic human life permitted.




“Tonight, someone is coming,” He said.




“So you can see the future now?” I laughed.




“When you’ve been alive long enough, the past and the future begin to merge,” Lorne said, but he finally fell silent, too. There was a moment of peace before a strong wind picked up. I looked at him and I think that I understood. What should I do? Say I’m sorry, say goodbye? Laugh, cry? Why ask questions like that, anyways. It felt as if there was some stronger force at work here, and so I let myself fall into whatever was going to happen.




“Hello,” The voice carried with itself a strange kind of anger, not that anger which comes quick and strong and overwhelming, but the anger that comes with boredom, and mellows out over the ages into a throbbing emotion that subconsciously guides a person’s actions.




Thick black smoke spread out over the quiet roof, rendering anyone in the area blind for all practical purposes. Gradually, the smoke drifted off and disappeared into the distance, so thinly spread out it no longer mattered. I could see Lorne again, but he seemed different. Whenever I had seen him before, his eyes carried with them the wisdom of the ages that life was but a game, that it lasted forever if you wanted it to. But now they revealed that pain was universal, and that life was too short to spend laughing. And anger, too.




He stepped over clumsily, eyes squinted, as if seeing the world for the first time and blinded by it. He crept over, a tiger in his stomach about to leap out. (God, I love rhetorical devices.) I felt a treacherously gentle hand on my shoulder, A flitting smile on Lorne’s lips, a knife over my head. If I were an ordinary person, my mind would be racing with ideas, an adaptation that allows us as humans to thrive due to being able to guess the future. However, my disadvantaged mind had no forethought.




“Just kidding,” another flitting grin, and the knife was gone. “I will avenge my death, Caoimhe, the one you caused in me so many years ago. I bet you don’t even remember, do you?” It was eerie how “Lorne’s” footsteps seemed shallow and unloving, even if they were only footsteps. “Hasn’t the rhythm of time dulled your memory yet?”




“I’m not Caoimhe!” This whole thing was indignant, and yet my voice was but a whisper, my body almost on the ground with shock. “Everyone thinks I am, but I’m not. Can you leave me alone?”




The air in front of me was completely empty except for the stars that miraculously never ceased to shine despite all the tragedy on earth. Poor stars. I wish I could lift myself with silent wings and comfort them with gentle words that will create a haven for them to let out all their feelings- Oh, look at me. I’ve been reduced to talking like a madman.




***




I never got all the publicity around valentine’s day. In my opinion, the plethora of merchandised products that somehow never creep their way into other holidays drive of people who just want a day to celebrate love. Even public education is subject to this propaganda. And I never quite liked valentine’s day anyways. Why am I telling you this? I’m not quite sure myself. It might have something to do with how to set up the place that had become of my school, or in order to give myself some cheap characterization, or just because I have nothing else to talk about.




Anyways, I maneuvered through the tables to reach mine, where Adelaide and Hannah sat, making valentine cards.




“Yo-sie!” Hannah laughed, leaving me and Adelaide rolling our eyes. “Did’cha catch the game yesterday?”




“I didn’t know there was a game,” I said, rapidly thinking of any Nevada sports teams.




“Yep,” Adelaide said after swallowing a seemingly nonexistent particle of food. “Baseball. Reno Aces against Durham Bulls,”




“The Aces won, Yeah!” Hannah grinned from ear to ear. “It was in the stadium, and it rocked!”




Why would a minor league baseball team FROM OHIO come all the way to Reno? That doesn’t make any sense at all, but I guess sports are weird. “Woot,”I said indifferently. “That’s great. Can I have some pink paper?” Adelaide handed me some. “Thanks, Addie,” My hands slowly folded the paper into quarters, then eights, and then I cut it into valentine cards. I got out some red markers and gave the card a heart.




























































































































Chapter 3: March




The school talent show poked its head round the corner once again. The bulletin board loomed above us, full of sign-up sheets and notices. On this particular morning, Hannah, Adelaide, and I were talking, completely oblivious to the board above us. After a few days, it becomes a part of life, until everyone notices the notices have changed. Willow was reading not too far away, and during a lull in the conversation I went over there and asked her what she was reading about.




“Carbon allotropes,” She said, barely moving her face at all. She seemed to be frozen in time, reading about whatever, while the hustle and bustle moved around us in a happy disarray that never seemed to cease. “They’re cool,”




“Um... You play an instrument, right?” I frantically tried to remember last years concert. Was Willow there? I can’t really trust my memory, though.




“Yeah. The guitar,” She responded. “The piano. I also sing and compose songs. I am musically minded,”




So you really are more than statistics and did-you-knows? “Oh? really?” I scrambled for a way to avoid Willow’s anti-conversation aura. “‘Cuz, you know,”




“I hate science,” She said matter-of-factly.




“Well, would you do me a favor?” Grunt. Is that a yes, or a no? “Um... like, it would be really cool... like, as cool as carbon allotropes, or whatever, if you-” My mind was exploding. “I would really appreciate it if you signed up for the talent show!”




“And I would really appreciate it if you stopped talking to me,” She moved slightly, as if there was something keeping her glued to the chair. “But we can only do with what we’ve been given,”




“Has anyone ever clapped for you before?” Her wide shoulders tensed for a fraction of a second, but Willow quickly resumed her original position, albeit a little bit less forbiddingly. “Um... because you are a great musician and all?”




“Are you fishing for gratitude?” There was absolutely no expression on her face, except for her green eyes that seemed to sharpen. How does she do it?




“Um... no? Listen, Willow, I try to be nice, I compliment your music skills, I politely suggest you might want to try out for the talent show, could you please not act like that?” I hold my breath. “Good-bye,”




“Mmhh-hhm,” There was a short wave, and then she went back to reading.

***




The night air outside was chilly. It crawled up my sleeves and rested on my shoulders. Lorne came.




“Do you even know how magic works?”




I ran back inside.




***




It was the night of the talent show. The sign-up sheet was full. Underneath a scribbly “Jackson Dubrick” Was a neat “Willow Duncan”, written in a sharpie. Yes.




I let myself follow the natural flow of the crowd into an auditorium full of life. My father, dressed in a business suit, was a million miles away from my distorted perception of reality. I convinced her. Willow. The most cynical girl in school. Until I saw Hannah.




“How are you doing, sport?” She asked. I smiled and waved, before I noticed she was limping. Pushing flashbacks of bloody shirts and crying mothers to the back of my mind, I asked why.




“Oh, I fell.” She grinned, her eyes slits. “So... How’d you convince Willow?”




“I dunno,” Shrug. “Why’re you here?”




“Gian is gonna perform or something,” She shrugged back. “Oh! And Adelaide is gonna dance! It was the only way I could convince mom of coming. She loves Adelaide,” Was she crying? Being sarcastic? Telling the truth? I don’t know.




“Wanna sit next to us? I think I have a chocolate bar,” Nod. Walk. Sit. Laugh. What a great thing it is to be alive and let one’s mind wander.




The performances passed uneventfully. Giang stood up with five other kids and played a song on some bells. A kid started jumping rope. Some teens sang a song with a happy tune. Adelaide danced, her movements flawless, her smile shining. Her hungry eyes scooped up the applause and sent pure gratitude back. No Willow, I am not fishing for gratitude.




Finally, The teacher said her name, a confused smile on her face. I don’t blame her. Willow has never performed before.




Her hair was still in a ponytail, her eyes still behind glasses, a frown drawn on her face. She stepped up to the piano in the side of the stage and began to play. Wait... what? She sang, along to the music:

This old man, he played one,

He played knick-knack on my thumb.

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played two,

He played knick-knack on his shoe.

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played three,

He played knick-knack on his knee.

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played four,

He played knick-knack on the door.

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played five,

He played knick-knack way up high

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played six,

He played knick-knack with some sticks.

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played seven,

He played knick-knack up in heaven.

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played eight,

He played knick-knack on the gate

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played nine,

He played knick-knack in a line

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.




This old man, he played ten,

He played knick-knack once again.

With a knick-knack, paddy whack,

Give a dog a bone,

This old man came rolling home.






















Chapter four: April




The anger from the talent show eventually left, as did easter, and spring break drew near. Following closely came the inevitable conversations of “What are you gonna do over the long weekend?” In our table during lunch, Adelaide started this conversation.




“So... what are you guys gonna do over spring break?” She said, smiling, as if everything in the world was fine. In her shadow, I could hide comfortably knowing the world was a great place to live and being alive was the greatest blessing on earth. It certainly was better than insecurity. “I think I’m staying here, but I might go skiing up north,”




“Um... I’m going to stay here,” I said. Ah yes, there was a certain boredom in staying in the place you knew, but also a bit of security, of knowing that even if a murderer came to attack you, you knew how to get home. The feeling of the pillow being warm from use and ghost versions of me laying down.




“I’m going to Vietnam,” said Hannah almost angrily. “It’s the Hung temple festival April the 22nd,” I could see a hidden melancholic fury in every fibre of her being, the way she smiled slightly to the side, but in a lazy and sloppy way, her tight skin, her narrowed eyes, how her voice dragged itself out of her mouth and stayed hanging in the air. The bell rang with a loud, angry noise, and Hannah laughed. “The bell sounds weird,” she said and smiled. Even though her eyes still narrowed.




The classes carried with them a thinly veiled vitality that wasn’t there a day ago. I say veiled because even though it was the last day of school before spring break, there were still classes to attend to, lessons to pretend to learn. However, there was still the excitement at the prospect of no school, so everyone tried to keep this energy hidden, and this caused the classroom to brighten up a little bit. The whole experience was surreal, and I don’t think anyone learned anything about electrons and electricity.




At last, school was over, and all dissembled liveliness broke loose. I’m not quite sure what happened, indeed, I think those few minutes were sent to another dimension, but I remember particularly well Willow standing in the middle of a crowd, trying to read a book. She looked up for a few seconds, Her eyes taking all of it in, her smile slightly sad, as if wishing she could understand what was so great.




Her eyes are green like the willow tree, I realized then. Aren’t the roots of the willow known for their toughness? Like Willow. But aren’t they also known for their persistence at life? And couldn’t I, Josefa Ramirez, make plants grow? I bet I can make Willow grow as a person. Yes. Those eyes are like hood Lorne’s, hardened by centuries of experience, yet wiser than most. I will make Willow grow.




“Willow!” I called, and she looked at me. “isn’t it great we’re gonna be able to rest from school for a week?”




“No,” She said. “I don’t get it,”




“Ah...” I said, “Um... well, it’s sorta like, you play your favorite game for a while, but your eyes start to hurt from the glare of the screen, so you take a break. You know what I mean?” Her eyes did not understand. So I left.




***




It was sunday 18th, and I was laying on my bed, reading. A shrill sound exploded through the air, and my hand flopped over to the phone. “Hello, this is th-” To my surprise, instead of a laugh or a business-like “I’d like to speak to Mrs. Ramirez,” there were some unfinished sobs that rolled over the receiver and fed me the talker’s scared misery. “Who’s this?”




Unconsolable shrieks reached my ears, a sound so sad it was barely human. Finally, after a couple of minutes, Hannah’s mother broken english slowly started to become coherent. There was one sentence she said that almost made me drop the phone.




I imagined her smile, always wide-eyed. Her misery and her happiness becoming the only person that acted like that. Her hidden strengths and weaknesses, the person I had come to know. I remember the way I would come to school sad one morning, and how she would be there to cheer me up. Her long rants and long laughs and shallow tears. How during lunchtime there were times I’d let go of every problem I carried with myself and just laugh and become part of the universe. I imagined all of that gone forever.




In April 22, 2010, eleven-year-old Cười Thị Hồng committed suicide.





































Chapter 4: April




If Hannah was here, she would stand up on the podium where everyone told stories of her life, and while most stories would be inspiring, heartwarming, sad, her’s would be a small moment, a passing glance, told with such comedic skill that we would laugh behind our tears. She would look at the dead person’s body, and the curiosity would be obvious. She would look at the whole mournful process like a new beginning, she would crack jokes and tell stories. But, she would be the last person to leave the tombstone. She would lace the tombstone as one would lace a person’s hair, say something, a punchline without a joke, and laugh that shallow laugh she has when trying not to cry. To bad this funeral is for her then, huh?




The funeral was to be performed in a vietnamese style, everyone wearing black armbands. A white gauze was worn by the blood family. It didn’t seem right, the whole thing, it all seemed fake and not understandable. Giang was there, looking down in fear, and Adelaide was there, perfect tears trickling down her face and somehow making her look as if she was the only one in the crowd.




Hannah’s mother was looking down with something that might have been recognized as fear, but couldn’t possibly be. Her eyes rested on the ground, filled with shock. Her shoulders moved up and down, methodically. Her hands trembled with some kind of disdain for everyone around her. “In three years time,” she muttered to herself, but the rest was in Vietnamese and I didn’t understand it.




Willow was sitting on a bench some distance off, and looked around with interested listlessness. Her eyes moved slowly across the whole scene, taking it in but never being a part of it. Why act so condescending, Willow? For a moment, I realized that she truly believe herself to be above htese “foolish mortals”, but this suspicion gave way to the more accurate one that she was simply bored.




“What’re you doing, Willow?” I asked.




She shrugged. “I guess nothing. Funerals can be so dreary,”




“Isn’t it sad, that she-sh-she d-?” I didn’t have to finish, because the air was heavy with the present, it hung over us and impeded us from thinking about the past or future. There was only this “dreary” present that never seemed to end.




“I will miss her very much, though I-” She stopped. “I do not want to hurt your feelings,”




“You hated her, didn’t you?” I saw her eyes slowly regard my angry face with superiority. “When she broke her arm, in 1rst grade, why were you laughing?”




“Your theory makes no sense,” She snapped, trying to hide her annoyance under false apathy. “I am the only person from the school to come here, apart from Adelaide. I obviously have a reason to come. Also, I cannot help my schadenfreude. Some people just derive more pleasure from pain than others, you see,”




“That is no justification for your acts!”




“No it is not,” She chuckled. “I cannot justify my ‘acts’ if you so choose as calling them. Why do we derive laughter from slapstick comedy, Ramirez? It is the same reason that I laugh. There is something terribly amusing about the world for me. Laughter is the best medicine,”




“No! It is different when the people you laugh at aren’t real!”




“Is that so? Then why do we cry at a sad movie? Obviously you have never heard of catharsis,” She turned her head. “It is hilarious that humans believe there is true happiness, or sadness in the world. Don’t they know their foolish ambitions won’t have any effect in the end? It is pathetic to have terms like ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’, since there is no such thing as good and evil. Those are just terms we humans have created in order to make the world seem more understandable,”




“I’m sorry? You lost me after ‘true sadness or happiness in the world’,”




“What I mean is, everything good must come to the end, and everything bad must come to an end, and everything must come to an end. When humans have gone, the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and others like him will be pointless for the universe. The universe has no morality. It qjust is,”




“I think I understand, but why are you-”




“Because you have to understand that, in the grand scheme of things, Hannah’s life doesn’t mean anything. Your life doesn’t mean anything, my life doesn’t mean anything, the earth doesn’t mean anything. Neither does anger, love, happiness. These three things are just here to help us survive, they are just illusions created so our species doesn’t end!” she held a stick in her hand and obvserved it.




“Anger is just a fabricated ‘emotion’, if you can call these things by a name, that helps motivate us into clearing obstacles and survive. Love is an even more primitive emotion that helps our species reproduce and survive. Happiness is probably the most primitive, all it does is help us not end our life sooner, and survive.” She split the stick into two, and threw it down unto the earth that reflected the sun and sky above us. I could see it rain, snow, shine, as the stick became dirt and another pointless particle floating around the universe. “There is no such thing as beauty in this world,”




“Wow, with that speech, which I really shouldn’t have let you finish, you have probably become a textbook definition of a cynic,”




“The world is a cynical place,” She stood up, averting her penetrating eyes from my face so I couldn’t see her tears. “Deal with it,”




***




That night, I woke up, and even though it had been months since I had gone to the roof, I had exactly this intention. My brain told me to return, but it was futile. If you tell a human that they can not do something and give them a plausible explanation why (for example, you tell someone not to swallow a knife because they will die) they will not do the thing in question. However, if you tell a human that they can not do something and give a ridiculous or no answer (like tell someone they can’t touch that pillow because I SAY SO or because you will turn into a purple chameleon) they will almost invariably do it, even if you are right and they turn into a purple chameleon. Therefore, as my brain had no plausible explanation other than “that guy, who looks scary and is almost surely the bad guy” I went to the roof and closed my eyes as the world turned around me.




I don’t know how long I was laying down there when Lor- no, wait, him, whoever he is, walked up to me. Do not ask why I knew it was him, and no, I didn’t “feel an icy breath down my shoulder,” or “experience a dark essence” I simply knew. I turned around with quiet fear and narrowed my eyes. The figure seemed blurred near the edges, as if a part of him were slowly vanishing into the sky. Tripping, I cut my arm.




“Hello, Caoimhe,”




“Good night, whatever-your-name is!”




“How rude,” he said, looking at me with those wild eyes that seemed to penetrate the universe, as if they weren’t part of this dimension, just a part of something infinitely bigger. “Look, this is your friend, Hannah, aren’t you glad to see her?” His voice, too, seemed to be spoken in a foreign language that used sounds that could break one’s mind just by hearing them.




Hannah came out, eyes widened and full of trepidation. She looked so much like how I had sen her last, her hair cut as short, her lips slightly relaxed, her eyes indicating whirring thoughts. Yet, she wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the fear that was drawn all over her face, it wasn’t how she wasn’t smiling, as a matter in fact, superficially she was the real Hannah, her emotions were pitch perfect, but there was something off about her.




It dawned on me that I couldn’t have understood it if I tried. This... This thing that was wrong with her wasn’t wrong here, but rather in another plane of existance that baffled basic human thought. Whatever was there seemed to be leaking into here, not much, but just enough so that you could understand that whatever was in front of you was certainly not human.




However this made it even more scary. If something is horribly wrong, like, let’s say, a water bottle is made out of chocolate, it is easy to explain what is wrong. It something is simply wrong,no more no less, like a water bottle made out of waterproof cloth, it is even easier. However, is something is wrong in such a way that it should be easy to explain, but actually seems pretty mundane, like a water bottle made out of something that looks like plastic but isn’t, it quite quickly becomes impossible to explain. So please, try to acknowledge that it is hard to describe this Hannah.




“Hannah, what’s wrong?”




She turned her head slowly, tentatively, but with some hidden security. She almost looked like a puppet, her arms hanging loosely by her sides, her whole body looking as if it was being pulled upwards by force and unwillingly, although that didn’t detract from her lifeless disposition. Maybe that was what was wrong? After all, her zany and energetic humor was a idiosyncrasy of hers. No, it went deeper than that.




She looked at me, thought, then despondently responded: “I don’t think anything is wrong, what are you saying? You’re as funny as you were when I last met you!” She laughed, a weary laugh, and then sighed.




I looked at her and stared at “Lorne,” “WHAT? WHAT IS THIS? I thought you just wanted to avenge your death, why kill her? Why not just kill me, even if I rather you didn’t?” I felt Hannah’s hand on my shoulder, but it didn’t feel as if it was really there, it felt slightly like an illusion or a magic trick. Perhaps the best way to describe it is by comparing it to frozen water that is not ice, if such thing existed.




He looked at me with unfeeling eyes, and for a second I felt a deep sorrow in them, a flying butterfly that was succumbing to a painful death as the years took their toll. He brushed away his hair, which was now something like a blurry blob of gas-like liquid. He shrugged, a painful expression on his face. “I don’t know, but the heart has it’s reasons,” At last, his physical body fell as whatever other dimension was plaguing this roof spilled out in all directions, and though I couldn’t see anything with my limited human senses, I felt as if pulled in all directions, as if I was boiling and freezing at the same time.




This horrifying experience only lasted half a second, though, as immediately after thisI was back in my room, sleeping. However, those events on the roof were not a dream. When you wake up from a nightmare, there is a moment of fear, but you are eventually left unscathed except for a few bad memories. In my case, however, this is not true, and I have a cut on my arm to testify. I also have a bunch of memories that followed this, but that will not be elaborated until further chapters.

Chapter 5: May




It was a few weeks after that, and thoughts of “Lorne’s” eye still lingered in my head. That had almost been human emotion, there. Almost. It was a lot more human than Willow, anyways.

It's long, may take me a while to read. I suggest you don't space that big