The Shattering

Being fourteen is like being a God. You're untouchable. You're invulnerable to everything and anything around you. But what happens when darkness stalks upon that happiness? When you lose everything?

The Shattering

            To be fourteen is to be immortal. There is an unseen power that comes with it, granting the mind raw immunity to everything around it. There is no fear of getting older. No fear of losing oneself to the dreaded disparity of loneliness. There is only invulnerability. But that invulnerability sits atop an unfinished foundation of uncertainty, blinding the eyes with the arrogance of adolescence so that they cannot see just how frail the mind really is. And it is not until there, out on the edge of the abyss where madness and desecration collide, that I know not how easily broken the mind can become.

            Friday, no later than 7:33 in the morning, the rays of the still-rising sun splicing through the cracked blinds over my bed, the radio alarm clock plays a catchy tune. I lay on my back, and I gaze up at the ceiling, my mind struggling to reenact the fading images of the night’s meaningless dream. Was it meaningless, though? Dreams are funny like that. Why do we even dream at all? Who really knows, I think to myself as I slowly pull myself from my back to a stooped sit on the edge of the bed.

            It is a small bed, and the room shadowing over it is even smaller, or so it seems, and there is something, somewhere, that seems out of place with it all�"those dull, grey walls that stare at me day in and day out with their blank faces, and the shag carpeting that lines the flooring beneath my feet. I can’t quite place it, but it all just seems wrong.

            I force myself to believe otherwise, however, as I run my fingers through the tangled strands of my hair. I then turn off my alarm clock as the radio hosts begin to talk about the weather and city traffic and whatever other junk they deem important.

            I managed to hear the high of today first, however. Sixty-three degrees, with overcast, which is fine. I don’t mind the rain, really, as I find it relaxing. Hypnotic, even, that steady pitter-patter of the droplets on the roof of this old trailer. It is really quite entrancing.

            My clothes for the school day ahead of me consists of an ACDC jacket over a tee shirt that simply states that ‘Creativity is for the strong-willed!’. I steal a glance through the gaps in the blinds and spot my mother’s rose bush as I am getting ready to go.

            It never crosses my mind that its browned petals and shriveled ligaments could have been an omen to the slight feeling of unease that sat deep in my heart. It never occurred that the dying nature of that once beautiful, colorful plant resembled anything more than the absent-mindedness of my dear old mother.

            I thought she had only forgotten to cater to it when she did her gardening last weekend. It was a typical thing, the way I knew her mind worked. Whether it was forgetting to water certain plants and flowers in her mostly healthy garden, or whether it was opening the refrigerator to grab a can of Mountain Dew only to forget halfway through opening its door what, exactly, she had been opening it for in the first place. Yeah. Absent-mindedness was a commonality with mom.

            I didn’t mind, though. None of us did, to be honest. That was just the way she was so it was all okay. But that feeling was still there, that feeling of wrongness, and the longer I kept my eyes on the wrinkled petals of what were once glorious rose buds, the more wrong it felt.

            Something was off, there just had to be! But I could not figure out what. I would be late for school if I sat here and thought it over all day long, so I grabbed my bag, and I slung it over my right shoulder as I paced out of my room. My mother was in the hallway. Well, partially so, where the living room met with the hallway, and she stood with her head against the wall. She has one hand to her lower stomach, and the other on the wall for support.

            “Mom?” I call to her as I make my way around her, but she only looks up, and she tries to smile.

            Her smile is not even right today, though, one corner rising only partially while the other remains flat, untended to by emotions or emphasis of any kind. I know that smile. It is the smile of a broken spirit. Not really broken, I guess, but not entirely whole, either.

            Dropping my pack, that strangeness in the depths of my heart wavering slightly, I put an arm over her shoulders. “You alright, mom?” I ask, taking her to the living room couch.

            “Yeah,” she responds as I sit next to her, seemingly out of breath, “it’s just cramps.” There is a grimace beneath her words, and a pain that I cannot figure out, not exactly, and then she looks back up at me. “Don’t ever become a woman, because if you do, then these cramps will f*****g kill you,” and I cannot help but laugh at this.

            So my mother is alright after all. It is just her womanly cramps. Maybe this feeling of unease is nothing as well, and with that thought I harness my pack once more and I begin my journey to the bus stop at the end of the trailer park. It is a pleasant enough walk, one without much excitement, and the bus manages to actually arrive early this morning. It is an odd thing, but like my mother’s dying rose bush I ignore the strangeness of it as I board the bus’s narrow confines.

            Kids younger than me scream and make funny faces and throw paper airplanes that were probably crafted from the last night’s History or Math homework, and there are a few older kids on the bus as well. Not much. Freshmen in high school, by the looks of them, and they are all sitting at the end of the bus talking about tonight’s big football game. It is supposed to be a good one, but I wouldn’t know. I am not much into sports, truth be known, so I could care less either way.

            What I do find interesting is that our bus driver manages to take a wrong turn, which results in the entirety of the students on it being fifteen minutes late to the school. Terrific, right? This strangeness I don’t blow off because three oddities in one morning seems far too real to be mere coincidence. And what about my mother? Seeing her hurt and grimace like that this morning? Something was off, and maybe it was high time I believed it. The feeling in the core of my heart was still there, only it was burning slightly. And scratching, tearing away at me from the inside. But what was it?

            The feeling caused me to vomit twice, the second time only increasing its rage to where it pounded relentlessly within me. With each new beat I fell into a deeper trance, becoming a victim to the intoxication of believing everything I had witnessed this morning had actually been omens of some kind after all. I believed now that some mysterious darkness had sifted over some part of my life, and that someone that I loved had died. That had to be it.

            Dizziness followed the vomiting, and with it came headaches from Hell. They were the ones that thrummed away monstrously beneath the mesh of my temples. My concentration had faltered entirely as the demonic beast locked away within that raging paranoia I’d acquired had possessed every arc and branch of my nervous system.

            That paranoia had evolved into a maddening fear, and I had become crippled by the dread that charged my beating heart. I have become bound by the black tendrils of my pulsing anxiety. There was something wrong, and not knowing what that something was had become the feed that quenched the beast’s ravenous lust.

            I threw up once more on the walk home from the bus stop after school, and I nearly fainted. My heart was an erratic drum of discontent as I walked up the porch steps, and my mind was a flaming bomb awaiting to be ignited as I reached for the knob on the door. Sweat covered my forearms like a layer of clothing all on its own, and the pores of my forehead seemed to squeeze it out of me by brute force alone, each drop a harsh reminder of the screams my mouth had failed to release.

            The knob was cold, as was the hulking shadow of dread that lingered inches off my back, its hot breath steaming the sweat on the nape of my neck, and it felt heavy. A weight reminiscent of the anguish fueling my heart’s epileptic dance, and it turned with an unease I could not fathom. Once the door was opened, my hand instantly became plastered to it.

            Fear crippled me once more, and the muscles in my legs had become infected by the exotic toxins of anticipation. Having done so all day, unable to deter the flame of burning curiosity about what had felt so goddamn wrong all day, I, now, could not grasp the reality of finally being able to stare the truth in its ugly face.

            I released the handle of the door, and it swung inward on rusted hinges that cried out to me, telling me not to enter, and alerting me of the truth I had so longed to exploit. The hands of the darkness of the living room beyond it had lunged outward and they had grabbed the door from my own hand, pulling it inward as if it were an invitation. And the dread hanging over me had pushed me inside after it.

            There, on the couch, was my mom. She had her head bent over the floor, and she was crying. I can hear the sobs that cascade over her thinned lips, each one slipping out into the lingering air like ghostly echoes, the kind that should be there and not be there at the same time. My dad sits next to her, his head on her shoulder, with one of his hands on the middle of her back. He looks up and over at me, but not for very long. He takes a deep breath, and through broken whispers of his own, he says to me: “We just got back from the hospital.”

            My heart becomes the only sound between us now, and my eyes start burning as they struggle to hold back tears of their own. My father’s tears fall silently, steadily, to the floor.

            “You mother has cancer,” he finishes after a pause that was much longer than it should have been. His tone is heavy, and it is vacant, emotionless; as if every possible emotion there is has already been expunged from his system. And then it happens.

            My pack falls to the floor, my knees banging louder as I throw my hands up to cover my face. My tears flow between the cracks in my fingers, my sobs shattering the lingering silence at once. My heart seems to stop, its form splintering first in half, and then shattering into millions of jagged shards that are launched wildly about, and I scream as each one of them carves deeply. They cut me apart from the inside out. My mother cries harder, and my dad screams in synchronized tune with me. Everything becomes nothing; nothing becomes everything.

            The shattering.

            My life is a jumbled pile of steaming ashes that were once real emotions, and those ashes are still burning. My faith has been stricken from me without warning, and hope has become surrender; love has become desecration. I became lost then, but I have found myself now. My mother is with me; she is my hope, my love. She is my faith, and the pieces have slowly started to come together in the way that they used to be.

Author's Note

A very intense story about how I felt during the darkest day of my life. It took place a long time ago, and the emotion in the writing is real. I dug it up to give this particular story the feeling it has. Also written for an essay in college. It was nominated and published in the school paper. And now you all get to read it. :)

Reviews

[Brandon R. Chinn]

This story feels so raw, so emotional. The sense of dread and unease builds to a terrifying degree, to where I felt absolutely sad when I arrived at the end of it. A life being shattered by something that affects so many people, yet there's nothing to prevent it. This story places you in the mind of the protagonist well, as he tries to come to terms with this terrible, building feeling, finally culminating in a sad, broken ending. Well written.