The Terminus Point

In the distance April could make out the terminus point, where converging lines ceased into a single point and naught but darkness and worse than darkness foretold of a great dropping off as of a cliff into the abyss.  She would have described it as a solid wall of nothing into which their car would crash and then accordion back on itself, had she been able to speak.  She couldn’t and that was for the best.  They wouldn’t feel the crash, anyway; wouldn’t feel the front bumper shove the whole of the engine block back into their laps.  They would think they were still driving, and wonder at the scenery as they had for all the miles of their lives.  Ignorance was bliss and her family was in a constant state of euphoria.

Everyone was in a constant state of euphoria.  Only she was aware of the sleeping giant and the beginning and end of dreams.  She tried not to let it bother her, to be as blind and deaf and dumb as the others.  She tried so hard, when she was only a child, that she had succeeded in losing all capacity for speech though sight and sound remained constant.  Even as a toddler, she was thrilled to have even that much power over the course of her life. 

There, right there, the terminus point, converging lines culminating in a single point, not in the distance but right there.  Her mother was humming along with the radio, her older brother hunched over his GameBoy beside her, her father driving along as if the sign ahead did not say End of the World…Here there be monsters.

The fireplace had been stacked and lit and carefully tended.  Her parents sat on the rug before it, father’s arm draped over mother’s shoulder.  She was reading a book, a romance April had scanned through for the sexy parts and replaced on her mother’s shelf with a sense of disappointment.  Father held the poker in his free hand, waiting for the fire to need maintenance, doing his part to preserve stability and continuity.  It made April sad.  Her brother was already in bed and fast asleep.  She should have been, too.  Those were the rules and she usually obeyed them for simplicity’s sake, but sleep never came easy and dreaming carried with it a kind of guilt she could not understand.  So she crept down the stairs and sat looking at her parents from between the posts on the railing.  Innocent she thought of them.  Her mother looked up from her book, her father faced her and they kissed lightly.  They were too perfect to be real.  This also made April sad. 

The fire flickering in the fireplace, the shadows cast upon the walls and the soft sound of breathing in the room.  April remembered their faces as they hit the terminus point in the road—earlier today, last week—their smiles as reality smashed against them and the end of all things turned their car to rubble and separated their heads from their bodies and swept them off on a speeding current of blood to the cliff and the abyss, and the swirling sinking of a plug somewhere being pulled.  She screamed without a voice, her face twisted.  Her mother, bodiless, turned to comfort her, not understanding what had gotten her so upset.  It was always the same. 

The fire flickered and began to grow.  April closed her eyes and tried to will herself to sleep—as much as she feared sleep—so as to miss the way the scene would die.  The fire grew and she could feel its heat reaching up over the mantle and melting the framed family photographs and bric-a-brac her mother kept there.  She felt it pour over the walls and light the curtains and race across the carpet and over the ceiling.  April opened one eye, incapable of not doing so, and watched her parents kiss as the fire climbed up their shirts and danced over their skin.  They melted together, the flesh of their lips first dripping then hardening together until she could not make out where her father ended and her mother began.  Her slippers caught fire from the carpet along the stairs.  She closed her eyes, feeling the fire lick her body clean.

Bright afternoon sun shone down over the green grass and wind whipped April’s hair back from her face as she swung.  Her father was behind her, giving her a great big push whenever she would pendulum back his way, and the neighborhood grew and receded, grew and receded in her sight.  Looking down at the healed scabs on her bare knees she noticed her legs were longer, her hips more broad, and her chest was all swollen n*****s.  She guessed she must be about twelve.  There were memories of being eleven, of being ten, but they were generic and universal like information stored away after watching too many after-school specials. Bits of gray sprouted at her father’s temples.   She looked up and saw beyond the billowing white clouds in the vast blue sky the outline of outer darkness, from which the sleeping creature sent thought into manifestation.  It looked like a great embryo in the sky, the shape of a womb.  No one else could see it, but it was there, just as the edge of the neighborhood was only a gray-black blur of emptiness.  If she decided to take a walk around the corner, the scenery would fill in just moments before she’d view it, right at the very periphery of her vision, until of course the terminus point came looming into view.  She was afraid to leave the back yard.  She felt tired; dogged.  After a few more swings she jumped down, landing neatly on her feet, and turned back to look at her father.  He waved.  She threw her hands over her face and ran inside.

Before she could stop herself she was sprawled out over her bed and deeply asleep.  She hated to sleep.  Dreams came too easily.  The world filled in the way images come to the surface on film when dipped in chemicals.  Her world, the world of a young woman surrounded by the love of her family and the realities of neighbors and friends.  The grass grew green and lush in the backyard under a sunny sky and the boy from the next block—Rodrigo Menezes of the blue eyes and raven hair—awaited her on the sidewalk with his skateboard in his hands.  She walked calmly, unhurried, to meet him. Her breasts swelled against her damp, sweaty T-shirt, ruining the illusion of calm non-chalance only a bit, her long curvaceous legs revealed by her short, form fitting shorts drew most of his attention.  He was going to invite her to the junior prom—pointing out by way of being real that the whole thing would be pretty lame anyway, but everyone was going and it was something to do—and she would shrug and say, “Whatever”, and go buy that dress she’d had her eye on for three weeks.  April breathed deeply, letting her breasts rise and fall against the damp T-shirt for affect.  Something else had grabbed Rodrigo’s attention.  He lifted his bronze gorgeous face to the perfect sky and seemed troubled by what he saw there.  She looked, but could make out no more than the billowy white clouds of spring and the brilliant blue that comes of the memory of winter and the welcome of summer’s approach.  Rodrigo muttered to himself, his dark hair glistening with sweat and apprehension.  He could see the outline of the face of the child in the sky, dreaming eyes peaceful in sleep, the terminus point rising at the horizon where something like storm clouds built into towers of gray-black.  He felt tears in the corners of his eyes and fought them.  What was the point, anyway?  The scene would end before fairly begun and he would be somewhere else, doing something else.  He longed for something real, for someone to share it with.  The dark clouds plundered the sky and ate away the houses at the end of the block.  April leaned over her fence, staring at him, he could feel how much she wanted him and he wanted her right back, but it would be no more substantial than jerking off to two-dimensional images in a Penthouse Magazine. The darkness sucked up the house next to them and the ones across the street and grass all around.  Cars rose up in the air, circled, then were lost in the storm.  April gazed at him, utterly unaware.  Neighbors leaning over lawnmowers or flipping a burger on the grill were snatched up without ceremony, there one minute and gone the next.  Rodrigo closed his eyes, waited for it to take him too. 

He was sitting at the kitchen table in front of a bowl of Cornflakes. His mother chattered away on the phone in Spanish.   His head felt squeezed dry and his eyes hurt, he knew he’d had too much to drink at a party the night before.  He was tired, exhausted.  His mother wandered off with the cordless phone, Rodrigo went upstairs and crawled back into bed.

April rested her head in his lap and reached for the cigarettes in her purse on the passenger seat.  He lowered the window so the smoke wouldn’t build up.  Stretched out over the back seat of his dad’s old ford they smoked and listened to the city-sounds happening out there somewhere beyond the parking lot of the apartments.  Her mom and dad would be fast asleep in the corner apartment, second floor, with sugar-plum fairies re-filling their whiskey glasses and the stench of their drinking filling the night air like rat poison.  His mom was probably sitting on her couch imagining what punishment would be enough for her wayward son, out all night, again, and with that piece of white trash, when he should be resting up for finals and getting his head straight for the future.  Did the boy want to be like his father?  Did he want to be a loser all his life?  Rodrigo pushed it aside, ran his fingers through April’s hair.  She’d never make it past high school, if she managed even to finish the year.  What would become of her when he went off to college?  He loved her.  It was the most real thing he had ever felt.  Stars shone vaguely above them through a veil of city lights and smog and distance.  He felt childish, but he made a wish anyway. 

Outlined in the faint stars he could see the person he was not so long ago, wrapped neatly in sleep with the black cosmos as blankets.  The terminus point blinked on and off—a night-sensor light mounted to the near corner of the apartments.  Each illumination showed less of the surrounding trees and sky, each spot of darkness ate away a little more of the world.  It was all right.  He wrapped his arms around April and drew deeply on his cigarette.

The alarm clock screamed.  Rodrigo opened one bleary eye and slapped the noisy machine to the carpet.  He became increasingly aware of the empty space beside him on the bed as the days drew on.  She’d been gone a year.  He missed her.

He closed his eyes and let sleep take him again.  It was the only place anything made any sense.  He stretched his legs full out to the end of the bed and relaxed.  The Sleeping Giant—that’s what he felt like; full grown but stuffed into the little bed he and his wife…ex-wife had purchased with their meager funds right out high school. His feet hung over the edge.   The dream had been such a nice one and he didn’t want to leave it.  He hoped he could fall right back into step, right where he had left off, but it was never that way.  Reality is what you make it and he dreamed his was something other, something better.  He slept.

 

 

Reviews

[flaneur]

There are many good works in your portfolio; this is my absolute favorite. At the end of a day spent reading other people's stories on this site, this is the story that will linger in my thoughts.

[yinseriv]

I cannot believe this little gem has sat unreviewed. Luthien this is a complex story which you managed to make easy to follow. The imagery was very real and at times almost perfect! The transition of the story at the terminus was well crafted and seamless. I hope you have plans for this.