Chapter Five

It was the day she became a realist. She was 13 and the safe haven she had grown up in, was sinking. She wasn’t going to stand around and watch anymore. She abandoned ship. She fled out the back door and cut across the fields. Her flip flops didn’t last long on the hard stubble. The fields had been recently harvested. The sun had hardened the dirt to stone. She didn’t even notice the bleeding until she had crossed the entire length of the field and collapsed in the woods.

“Ohh, damn,” she muttered, pulling herself into a sitting position and clenching her feet. She nudged herself closer to a tree and collapsed against it. She closed her eyes and let her breathing calm. She had to collect her thoughts. Everything was confusing, bemuddling. All she had believed in was crumbling, changing. “It’s not real!” she exclaimed, clenching her fists against the dirt. “It’s not real!” She didn’t want to accept the evil, the ugly, the pain. Her pounding feet reminded her that the pain was indeed real.

An increasing amount of flies began swirring by her. She looked around in irritation, only to find a swarm of them circling around a fallen, rotting tree. Slowly, she pulled herself up and hobbled over. Whether it was sight, or the stench, coming from the decaying fox babies, her breath caught in her throat and she stumbled back. As she fell to the ground, her eyes roamed everything around her. The dead trees, the baby foxes, the dead stubble on the field… and realization beat her in the face, in the stomach, and wrenched her heart.

It is real.

Tears began to fall as she hugged her knees and rocked back and forth. It was real. The pain was real. The ugliness was real. In fact, right now it was the realest thing she had ever experienced. Everything was injured and dying. At some point, she would be as dead as the baby foxes over there, with the flies swarming around her and the worms feeding off her lifeless corpse.

As the days passed, she returned to the forest often. She watched the babies decay and waste away. She watched herself bleed. Whenever she saw the blood trickle down, she smiled to herself with a morbid satisfaction. “I’m not dead yet.” The more time she spent there, the more solace she found. It was a constant, it was something you could count on happening. There was solace, and yet there was hopelessness. Was this all she had to look forward to? Decaying somewhere on the ground, with mindless organisms feeding off her dead body? Was this all there was? She didn’t want to believe that, but she realized that having seen what she had, she could not go back to how she had once been, nor believe what she had once believed. There was pain in the world, and death. There was evil. And it was more common than the good. Good would never be able to win. It would never be able to triumph. How could it triumph over all this?

Once again, she began to cry. She could accept reality now. She understood it. But she wished she could escape sometimes. Just once in a while, escape. Create a world where good did prevail. Where it triumphed.

She suddenly heard a noise behind her. She whirled around to face a boy, or was he a man? It was hard to tell. He was tall, with a strong build, but his face held childish features. His hair was a strange mixture of black and brown, short and tossled. He had a shovel in his hand. He was looking straight at her. His eyes pierced hers with a strength and searching force that frightened her.

“What… are you doing here?” she managed to ask, standing up and brushing the dirt and dead leaves off herself. His eyes motioned to the animals.

“I am going to bury them. Something you should have done a long time ago.”

“Why? Why bury them? What difference would it make?”

“You recognize evil. You accept it. But you want an escape. Do you not?”

“There is no escape.”

He handed her the shovel. “Yes there is.”

With a sceptic gaze, she tentatively accepted the shovel, and began to dig the shallow grave. When she felt it was big enough, she turned to look at him. He merely shook his head. With a sigh, she used the shovel to nudge the carcasses into the hole. Seeing them in the little hole suddenly made it worse. She shuddered and hastily dragged the dirt and leaves over them, and then dropped the shovel in disgust.

“How is this supposed to be an escape?!”

“If you had wasted even one second on thought, you would know. You would understand that burying the dead is a way of escape. You will always have the image engraved upon your inner eye. Why further torture the outward eye? Understand reality, and accept it. But do not feed off its malicious torture. You must find escape in small things, or you will go mad with hopelessness. Your body may accept reality, but your soul will die without hope. And if you have no escape from reality, hope will surely die. You must keep hope alive, even when it seems futile, for that is your escape.”

“How do you expect me to keep hope alive? This escape is no great comfort.”

“You have to believe.”

“Believe in what? In the impossible? How can you expect me to believe in anything but diabolical darkness without acting an utter naive fool?”

“You have to believe in some things, whether they are true or not, because they are worth believing in. You need to hold on to them, and make them your escape. You need to believe they are real.”

“How do you convince yourself that something fake, is real?”

“Do you believe I am real?”

“Of course you are real. Why shouldn’t you be?”

“What makes you believe I am real? What if I am nothing more than the rambling creation of your mind; a figment of your imagination? That is the point of escape. Blur the boundaries! Force your escape to life. Make whatever you believe to truth in your mind, Riley.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Maybe because your mind told me.”

“That is preposterous. I did not invent you. You came here, out of nowhere, and interrupted me. I did not ask you to come. You disturbed me. You are being a nuisance. You are real. … aren’t you?”

He smiled. “Do you now see what power the mind can have? How swiftly it can doubt, if it only allows an idea to grab hold. You have a powerful mind, Riley. You can create worlds and destroy minds. If you would only unleash it. You would find it wields a power beyond your imagination, making yours limitless. It can create your escape. It can shield you. It can help you cope with reality, by creating a reality of your own.”

“How… do I start?”

“You already have. Follow me.”

Reviews

[Jamie Lee]

This part of your writing style reminds me of my own. When you describe things, instead of using one word you use two and separate them with a comma.

Ex: "Everything was confusing, bemuddling."

Just thought I'd point that out. I wasn't sure if that was a bad habit to keep, but if you're doing it then I guess it must not be too bad :)

I feel like this story is a metaphor to the creative mind and that there is a message here--whether it's intended or not--that we as artists can create alternate worlds within our mind and use our medium to illuminate those worlds. I'm having a hard time distinguishing between what is real and what isn't, but I think that's the point here.