No title to speak of

This is story number 17 from my short story collection Touch the Falling Stars, I wrote it a bit over a month ago and have edited it a little since, but any feedback would be welcome. Thanks! :)

    She has wild brown eyes that are way too bright and fly-away blonde hair that’s always exactly the wrong length, but frankly her eyes are much more interesting because in addition to being too wild and too bright they’re also too wide, especially right at this very perilous moment when it all hangs on one thread, and that one thread she misplaced inside herself a long time ago and has started to give up on the it’ll-turn-up-eventually attitude and is instead beginning to endorse the someone-must-have-stolen-it version of events or non-events, it’s very often hard to tell the difference, specifically when it comes to her and her very specific or not-so-specific self.
    There are rainbows tattooed on her wrists and they’ve been there as far back as she can remember, even though perhaps she doesn’t remember that well, or perhaps she remembers much more than anyone else ever could.  They used to shine a bright healthy pretty light, but that was a long long time ago and now not only do they not shine, they’re covered by the heavy metal chains binding her arms together in front of her and leading to the indistinct people in white jackets who have come to take her far far away, and even she knows that in some ways they can never and will never succeed, but in other ways they will accomplish their misguided goals all too well and she’s scared.
    No, not scared, terrified.  If she hadn’t been dreading this moment for years already she would be petrified.
    Bright red blood is running down her dirty clothes onto the too-clean pavement, soaking the chains and making her look, if possible, even more demented than she already is.  Bright red blood is pouring out of her body but she doesn’t even know exactly where it’s coming from, only that it’s there and that she’s in pain and that even the two people holding the chains are starting to be stained by the scarlet liquid.
The sidewalk that she’s standing on leads up to a wooden house that’s much more than it seems in many many ways both good and bad, though that could be debated, like everything else, and even she has to admit that the house is rather peculiar; for one thing, it doesn’t have a number or a driveway, and the address changes every now and again for no particular reason.  On the street behind her is a white car emblazoned with a red cross, the same red cross that the people holding her claim to work for.  There are five or six or four of these people, she can’t be too sure, in fact she can’t even be too sure that they’re really there in the first place (or maybe the penultimate place), but hey maybe it’s the other way around and she’s the one who isn’t really there, who can tell? Certainly not her.  But yes the people holding her are trying to drag her into the ambulance and she’s of two mind -- or maybe more? -- about whether she really wants to go in there since she’s not entirely convinced that she wants to return to the house either so she’s just staying put no matter how much they attempt to tug her away and whisk her off to someplace that they say will make her better which isn’t hard to believe, I mean, it’s not like it could make her much worse.  But she’s having serious doubts about going somewhere that she’s never been before and facing the Great Unknown not only inside her soul which she’s used to but also outside her soul which she’s deadly afraid of even though she’s deadly afraid of pretty much everything and nothing, so who cares? It’s all the same, even though to her it’s all completely different.
    In the front of the house there is a door, which isn’t unusual since she sees doors everywhere and they’re closed and open and concealed and right in front her nose to the point of trapping it between their frames and the walls and then her nose is all red and bruised and bent out of shape but on the other hand (maybe it was her hand that got trapped in the door and not her nose?) when was it ever in shape? But in front of the house there is a door, and in front of that door there is a girl and she has intense coffee-colored eyes made of flames and wavy chestnut hair that shines a darker but more enchanting light than her rainbows ever did and she reminds the bleeding girl of the moon only in feminine form and everything about her seems elegant and beautiful, from her arms to her breasts to her legs to her hands to her eyes to her hair to her sweet encouraging smile.  And the bleeding girl starts reaching out for her but then she remembers that she knows better; she remembers how flawed and twisted the beautiful girl is on the inside, she remembers that it was she who put a spell on her and forgot to remove it and that it was she who led her to the wrong city and left her stranded and that it was she who showed her how to bleed.
    She struggles against the bonds and the people behind her.
    “Let me go to her!” She yells.  “I need her!”
    Their hold tightens, and then she changes her mind, or rather, her mind changes her.
    “Help me!” She screeches, pulling this time towards the ambulance.  “Get me away from her!”
    The girl at the door smiles still more widely, and suddenly she transforms and becomes a woman with clear blue too-bright too-wide eyes and short blonde hair and exactly the same lips as the rainbow girl.  The woman isn’t smiling, she is crying seemingly endless tears and her slightly wrinkled face is red and blotchy and she is staring beseechingly at the rainbow girl and the rainbow girl turns away and starts running running running away from this woman whom she loves whom she despises who loves her who breaks her over and over again.
    Her vision clears as the razor-sharp panic takes a less urgent more immediate form and she sees that she hasn’t moved, she’s still on that same strip of too-clean pavement and she doesn’t understand why she still hasn’t gotten to the ambulance since the people obviously wanted her to and now so does she, so what went wrong? And then she looks down and notices for what might be the first time but it might not that she is also chained to the sidewalk in front of this house and the people don’t seem to have found a way to detach her.
    She turns around, guilty suddenly for leaving the woman there on her own, the woman that she hurt so badly the woman who needs her help the woman who did so much for her.  She resolves to swallow her anger and try to make it up to her but as soon as she reaches out towards her the woman shoots her a stony look and her shape changes again.
    This time she is a girl with chubby legs and a small waist and rough calloused hands and thin ankles and the chained girl is sure that she’s seen her many many times before but her mind is drawing to a blank about who on Earth (or off of Earth) this newest girl is and she stands completely still, the blood continuing to drip down onto the pavement, as she tries to work it out.  She cannot read the girl’s expression, and this confuses her even more, because she’s usually very good at reading people, and this girl has that air around her, that air that open people usually have.  This girl is an open book, but she’s written in a language that no one can understand without having been taught by the girl herself.  Curious and increasingly unsettled, not that she was ever settled in the first place, the chained girl takes a tentative but determined step towards her and looks into her eyes --
    -- and realizes that the girl is her because she has her same too-bright too-wild wide brown eyes and the same fly-away blonde hair that’s always exactly the wrong length and the same everything everything EVERY-F*****G-THING except for the blood, she isn’t covered in the thick red liquid.  And the girl keeps on staring at her and it’s driving her even more crazy than she already is and she SCREAMS as loudly as she possibly can or maybe even louder because she
Can’t
STAND
It!
But though her scream goes on and on it must eventually end and she asks the people to please do all that they possibly and impossibly can to take her away from here now right now but they’re strangely silent and she looks around to discover that they’re no longer there, and neither is the ambulance.  In fact, it’s as though they had never been,  and as she glances instinctively at her wrists to make sure that the rainbows are still there, she wonders who was holding the chains.

Author's Note

Everything and anything.

Reviews

[Jasmarine]

Holy crap...my mind has actually been blown away. A very clever narrative you have going, it's almost as if a child is dwelling on the small things, but there' also a level of maturity to this. There are emotions here, emotions so deep it's best described as a breakdown, whether mental or emotional. Both work for this piece. The hardest thing about this, is there are actually people who have to suffer through this, not knowing reality from imaginary. But then again, what is real and what isn't? Neoplatonism (sp?) comes to mind at the moment and everything else learned in Art History, not to mention how influenced art is by Biblical stories..were....are? Whatever, besides the point.. a great read I realllllllyyyyyyyy liked this, keep up the good work :)

Wow. That was pretty amazing. I felt like I was really there, watching it happen.

[Lolita]

...wow. I'm surprised this doesn't have more reviews. It's amazing in my opinion. Jeez, your imagery is great. It's kind of discombobulated and nuts but it's really, really good. Keep it up.