Birds and A Pen

Chapter 6

Everyone fluttered around Dave like so many birds at a feeder, chirping away wildly while Trent looked on. The derelict sat in the middle of the little flock, telling stories and laughing when they asked for more. Trent sat on a crate well away from the crazy birds. He'd lived through a bad experience with some geese as a child and birds were not to be trusted.

He couldn't argue with his three flying friends about Dave, though. There was a kind of magnetism about the bum that couldn't be explained away. Either that, or the acid he had taken was already beginning to take over. Lex had spent twenty minutes warning him away from taking any of what was held in the little eye drop bottle, but if he didn't want Trent to take any he shouldn't have brought it.

At the thought of Lex, he wondered why his friend and Erin were still absent. The two of them had to close up at Charlie's, cleaning the greasy mess of the diner and putting everything away. Trent smiled for the fifth or sixth time in twenty minutes that they had to put up with the fat diner man's crap. Suckers.

He couldn't come up with a reason why it would have ever been necessary for him to work for a slave driver like Charlie. In his apartment there was no one around to tell him what to do, and no one to bust his balls about anything and everything that went wrong...Well, there was Erin. She wouldn't stop yelling at him if the zombie apocalypse came rushing through the door. He giggled to himself at the thought of Erin telling off a bunch of hungry zombies.

The birds sitting around Dave twisted their heads to look at him.

Trent stared back, wide-eyed in a way only a deer in the headlights can be. Penny opened her mouth, and Trent chirped at her before she could utter a word. Dave quirked an eyebrow at him, but looked back at California and began talking once more.

Trent shook his head at the scene, and then shook it harder. The tracers on his gray walls brought home how everything seemed to be moving a little funny. As if gravity was dropping its guard for a split second every time someone breathed, so they appeared to be trying to float.

That was his signal. The acid was heating up, and it was never a good idea to be around too many people while tripping. There was no telling what he would say or do, and Trent never enjoyed hearing embarrassing stories about himself the morning after.

His bedroom door closed behind him, leaving those in the living room to wonder what was wrong with him. The bedroom was a mess, nothing strange about that. What was strange was the sight of his clothes slinking their way across the floor, and his bed was trying to eat itself. Trent stared at it all, and figured he could deal with it.

Then things got weird.

*****

Trent clawed his way back to consciousness slowly. Something about the dream he was having didn't want to let him go, but he was already awake and the dream faded as if escaping his mind. He groaned, opened his eyes, and stared in to Erin's sleeping face just a hair away from his own.

He bit back another groan. It wouldn't do to wake the sleeping girlfriend. Unfortunately, his arm was caught beneath her pillow, and he had to wiggle it free with movements that wouldn't disturb a mouse. It was a painstaking process, but finally he had everything but his hand free, and with one quick pull he yanked it out.

And promptly fell on to the icy concrete floor. The thought that the floor was more comfortable than his bed crossed his mind as he splayed out. It was cold enough to freeze a polar bear, but it was flat. Waking up was never a nice experience. Waking up next to Erin was even worse.

He slowly peeked his head over the edge of the bed and looked at her. She was still sleeping peacefully in spite of his thudding on the concrete. Then he remembered that he had shut himself in his room the night before, and he had no idea how much time had passed.

Trent smiled when he sat up. Just a few feet away from the bed was the circular mirror he always used to roll his joints, so he quietly pulled it toward him and put it to work. Life was a bit more pleasant when he didn't have to deal with sobriety, or sobriety tinged with the aftereffects of LSD.

His eyes slid shut with the first hit, and he couldn't bring himself to open them again until half the joint was gone. His body was infused with the residual comfort of sleep, and the weed would keep that sensation from fading. Weary eyes peered around the room, hunting for something to do. Something simple.

There was an old notebook slouched behind the crate his clock used for a pedestal. Trent laboriously reached around the crate and picked it up, and a pencil slid out of the wire binding.

“Providential,” he mouthed at the pencil. Writing was something he had always loved to do; the feeling that came over him when putting pencil to paper made all seem right with the world, no matter his problems of the moment. He swung the pencil back and forth between his fingers as he flipped from page to page in search of a clean sheet.

His mind stopped fighting him the instant the pencil hit the paper. Memories of better times didn't jump out to tear apart his fragile fog of tranquility. Trent didn't consider the words that appeared behind the rounded point of the pencil. He just fell into the rhythm of free-writing. Tension flowed out of him in a torrent, draining away as if it had never been. In just a few short minutes he was as relaxed as it was possible to be.

Then he heard the yawn that signaled the end of his short reprieve from the present. The pencil froze an inch above the page.

He sat and listened to the quiet sounds Erin made while waking up. It was easily five minutes before she opened her eyes and realized Trent wasn't shared the lumpy bed with her. He hadn't moved the pencil through the entire, yawning process.

“Whatcha doin'?” Erin mumbled sleepily after seeing the back of his head sticking up over the edge of the bed.

“Writin'.” Trent felt a flash of anger; she couldn't allow him to do anything without her approval.

She hurriedly sat up and scooted behind him to drop a leg off the edge of the bed on either side of his body. Effectively trapping him.

“Really?! Lemme see.” Without even having read it himself, Erin pulled the notebook from his hand.

Trent leaned back against her and waited for her to finish her reading. There was no way to know what kind of strangeness he had put down on paper. Free writing wasn't really meant to be read in the way she was reading it. It was just a fun little way to put whatever he was thinking on paper, without the contents ever touching his conscience.

His eyes glanced at the leg he leaned against, and saw that she had cut herself shaving. His hand rose of its own will and traced a circle around the half-healed nick just below her knee. In contrast to a moment before, Trent felt strangely gentle toward his bossy girlfriend. She didn't react to the feather light touch on her leg.

The page wasn't more than half full, so it didn't take long for her to grunt in disgust and drop the notebook from above his head to land in his lap. Trent coughed in surprise and looked up. Erin's mouth was pinched in a thin white line. She didn't approve of whatever he had written, apparently.

Trent looked away from his girlfriend's gaze and skimmed through the fifteen or so lines. He chuckled wryly after a moment, and received a light swat on the back of his head for it. The two paragraphs he had written were an exceptionally bitter monologue questioning his continued search for oblivion and its connection to the hatred he had for everything in his life. No wonder Erin didn't appreciate it. She was a rather large fixture in his life, and would consider his free writing an attack against her personally. The prose was fairly good, though; that was something at least.

“Why can't you write the way you used to? Those stories were happy, and even when they were sad, there was a reason. Your notebooks used to be filled with philosophy, and questions you were interested in answering. Now...Everything's all depressed and...Horrible.” Her tone was scathing.

“That's what comes out after a night spent on acid.” He shrugged. The page wasn't something Erin should have had an opportunity to lay her eyes on, so why should he apologize for it? Perhaps the shock of it would keep her from reading things Trent didn't expressly hand her, although he doubted the lesson would be learned that easily.

“Don't blame it on the acid. You did the acid last night, what about the past two years worth of s**t?”

“What else can I blame it on, Erin? What do you want me to say? I wrote that this morning, after a night spent on acid. I dunno about the rest of what I've written, but I'm sure there's something I could blame it on.” He leaned his head back and blandly stared at her.

She glared back, “Don't blame it on s**t, Trent. What the hell's wrong that you spend every day miserable? What made you stop writin' things that people actually wanted to read?”

“I dunno what to tell you.” He rolled himself around and up onto the bed, angry at the grilling. An argument couldn't be won when he was sitting between her legs. His voice came out harsher than he intended, but the thought of writing something nice and sweet disgusted him. “Would you like me to write a love story? Or perhaps a cute little children's book? Somethin' nice and fluffy, with nothing of real life in it? Look around you! Is s**t like that really what comes to mind when you look at me? Is that what I know?” Trent bit his words off. Her big brown eyes were wide and staring. He never challenged her on anything, much less something she had made her wishes clear on. Yet, here he was, fighting her and doing a good job of it.

Her voice was much smaller than it normally was when chastising him, “Your old stories used to be happy...I mean, when was the last time you looked through some of these notebooks? Read some of your old stuff? None of it sounded like that.” She gestured toward the notebook in his lap, and frowned at his complete lack of reaction. “What changed?” Erin seemed to be pleading with him. He liked it.

Trent smiled, amused at her lack of realization of how far he had fallen. He twisted the thumbscrews a little harder, “Say the word, and I'll get right on making some candy-coated story that people can sigh over.” She looked hurt, all because he was treating her the way she treated him day in and day out. “Forgive me if I don't feel like writing something I don't have a clue about. I haven't thought of something pleasant to write about in years.” The pale blue eyes that had locked on to her face just moments before were looking far away by the end of his declaration, watching memories of a better time.

Erin wondered what had happened the night before to make him seem so different. Where had her boyfriend gone, and who was the horrifically bitter person seated beside her? She didn't speak aloud, but the questions wouldn't dissipate from the vaults of her mind.

In truth, she didn't know how to react when he talked like that. She didn't know anything about his past, and had been content to keep it that way. The look on his face was too alien from his usual countenance for Erin to guess how he would react to anything she said. She was too careful to lose complete control of the situation while he was out of his mind, but she didn't know what to do when her usual manipulative outbursts couldn't cow him.

Trent's mind fought inch by inch back to the present, completely ignorant of Erin's dilemma. He stood hurriedly at the sight of Erin staring at him, but paused and wondered why he had done so. It wasn't as if he could run from himself, and that was where the problem was. Erin craned her neck up at him in puzzlement, trying to make sense of her boyfriend's actions.

She spoke slowly, as if saving the bulk of her energy to run. “Look, honey. I just want you to get back to writing. You seem happier with a pencil in your hand.” She cautiously placed a hand on his cheek, and his eyes met hers without any recognition of her attempt at a tender moment. “I just want you to be happy.” She waited patiently for him to respond, but no response was forthcoming.

She emitted a long sigh and removed her hand from his face when he didn't move or speak. Erin knew when she wasn't going to get anywhere.

“Well, I gotta go to work. I'll be gone for the next few days, too. My parents want me to come for a visit. They'll try to keep me there as long as they can.” She shook her head at her family's misguided attempts to make her come home. “They'll probably try to tell me I'm not doin' well out here on my own. Then they'll whine about how they want me to go back to school. I wish they'd figure out I'm doin' just fine.”

Erin assumed he couldn't miss the obvious opening, but Trent just stared at the wall behind her. His mind drifted through the past again, thinking of when he had really believed that he could be some kind of writer. Or at least believed he could make something of himself. His dream of becoming a writer was dead, as were any other dreams he may have had. His girlfriend's voice didn't intrude upon his thoughts in the least.

Erin continued staring at him, growing more frustrated by the second. Unfortunately, he wasn't paying any attention to her.

Trent hit a place in his memories he didn't dare to go, a dark place with high walls, a moat, and nightmarish monsters guarding its gates. He fled in terror; even the present was better than that. He wondered why Erin was growling at him, and gave her a lazy noncommittal, “Yeah.”

She huffed and stood to leave. He tried to think of something that would fix whatever the problem was, but he couldn't bring himself to care enough to figure it out. It seemed she was always angry about something, and maybe she had over-used the tactic, because it wasn't having its usual effect.

“I'll see ya in a few days.” Erin's clipped words floated back as she shut the door behind her. He couldn't summon up an ounce of regret that she was leaving while upset with him. Normally he would have chased after her and tried to make up for whatever it was he had done. He wasn't sure if it was the acid that had taken away his concern, or something else, but he had no desire to chase her.

Reviews

[Xavier Lee]

I don't even want to review this because I just want to get to the next chapter as soon as I can so I can know what's going to happen.
Most simply: Great work.