Anna's Story

 

Introduction

Anna sat, her physical listlessness opposing the turmoil she felt roiling inside her head.  Her mind had finally shattered, fractured into a million mirror-like pieces of glass whirling and twirling in a chaotic sphere somewhere in the depths of her soul.  Wait, what soul?  Soul had long since vanished, run cowering into a corner, frightened by the shining reflections of pain, death, and spiritual torture emanating from her splintered psyche.  The dazzling light of her torment shone through her eyes, so that those around her saw merely the happy, starry-eyed girl she thought she was instead of the damaged and ruined smudge of what was Anna’s spirit struggling to remain above water.  Her hands convulsively groped for the sides of her head, fingers clenching and unclenching as they reached to cover her ears, and she sat, knees balled up in front of her chest fetally, shaking a little and breathing heavily.  Deep, gasping, halting breaths issued from her mouth, her lungs struggling to keep alive a body that no longer realized it existed, or wanted to for that matter.

And then, Anna woke.  No, not woke…   Anna came to, realized where she was, in the midst of friends who loved and cherished her.  She felt whole inside, not like the box holding the spangled and shining perversion of her sense of self floating in some murky and frightening abyss.  She took a few breaths to calm herself, then ever so slowly melted into the conversation around her.  “What’s a moment of deep panic and insanity now and then if no one notices?”  she mused unconcernedly.  She resumed smiling and chatting, willing away the terrifying prospects of her future, concentrating only on her present state and her happiness, and the happiness of those around her.  Would the compulsion come again?   Could she control it this time?  Anna was uncertain, but already questions such as these were drifting away into mist and fog, off into an area of her mind that she did never searched too thoroughly.  It was a realm of horrible truths and revelations, of a distorted and terrible imagination. Anna’s mind also contained a realm from which all happiness and joy was furnished and processed, a wellspring of contentment and unadulterated bliss; it was here that she lived the most.  On occasion, though, the two realms became intertwined, providing her with waking nightmares the likes of which had never been heard of.

The connection of these two domains produced a singular but terrible dominion, a realm of madness and peace, sanity and complete and utter lunacy.  Here there lies a fractured spirit but a mended soul, a bleeding heart but an open mind.  Should she mind?  She can’t even think enough to wonder whether or not she cares that her soul traipses lackadaisically across the chasm between joy and despair. 

 

Part 1

                The people in Anna’s life were all fascinating characters, each with a particular persona and mindset that Anna had not encountered before.  Anna lived, quietly and alone, in a small but comfortable apartment above a coffee shop downtown in a medium-sized city.  The coffee shop was like any other; small, cozy, with warm lighting and one long wooden bookshelf lining an entire wall from which the customers could take and read books whilst sipping their piping hot lattes.  Its sole defining feature was the bookshelf; the bookshelf was the shop’s gimmick, paying homage to the days when the area had been a thriving bohemia, and the owner’s way of trying to recreate the spirit of that creative and wonderful time period.  Anyone who came into the shop could borrow a book from the shelf, anyone at all, so long as they left behind a book to replace it.  People from all over the city would come here to borrow a plethora of different books, running the gamut from Idiot’s Guide to’s to huge volumes of poetry by T.S. Eliot.  Modern writers like Stephen King, Chuck Pahlahniuk, and Michael Crichton, and older literary masters like Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Lewis Carroll shared space on the cramped and musty boards.  The scent of books and brewing coffee followed Anna upstairs into her apartment, and she loved it.

                The owner of the shop was a short and usually irate German woman by the name of Beatrix; of mixed and unknown heritage, Beatrix was the kind of woman you didn’t mess around with.  Short, graying, always with an enormous bun crowning her head, Beatrix loved the city she lived in and hated the direction it seemed to be heading in.  The realization that she was becoming too old to be with the hip and in crowd caused her to be unusually irritable most of the time and gave her a hair trigger temper.  With her customers she was always sweet as sugar, but if her employees or husband so much as sneezed wrong the hurricane of Beatrix’s wrath would bear down upon them full force, a sight which immediately fascinated and terrified those who saw it.  Beatrix had come to America a long time ago with aspirations to be a model in New York, but her acidic tongue had alienated her from the professional modeling world.  That’s what she said, anyway.  Really, it was her height that had held her back, that and her love of the bohemian revolution occurring in the streets of the city at the time.  She let herself get too caught up in the revolutionary fervor and, during one of her runway walks at a fashion show, had flung off the designer gown she was wearing to reveal her painted but naked body, big bold letters denouncing the designer of the very gown that she was wearing.  Needless to say, she was fired from her agency and blacklisted, but a friend of hers decided to hire her on at his coffee shop.  She soon fell in love with the place, and when the old man who owned it retired she took over as its manager and owner.

 

Reviews

[MarilynJay]

Wow - I liked all the vivid descriptions. The concept was interesting, as well - the way no one noticed that she was having such difficulties in her own mind. I liked the 'happy, starry-eyed' girl contrast to her real state in the first paragraph. Good start - and I'm sure you'll have fun with wherever this goes :).