Regrettably, I was human at one point in my life. My time was ill-spent as I meandered through life like a hitchhiker looking for some sort of meaning. Like the universe and existence, itself, I had boyish tendencies towards spontaneity. I remember that I almost liked the thought of my rebellion. Somehow, my subconscious told me that I was immortal, but my soul felt always on the brink of being halfway dead. It is hard to put into words what I felt exactly, but even though I can’t string words together, I think maybe this is a feeling shared by all people at one point or another as part of the trial of living just the run time error of human life. Of course, being young, I was not immortal nor was I dead (I live for the dramatics). Even now, I feel as though I am not quite living even though a textbook may or may not, depending on the textbook, define me as doing so.
To return to the subject of my ingratitude of time, in a brief reflection on my youth, I don’t have many remaining memories. I remember my wife and my sister, my parents, and my children. I remember myself but as a different person than I am right now. However, as my parents told me, I was an angel of a child – before I became an easily detestable boy, of course. They said that I had twinklettes in the blacks of my eyes and an apodictic characteristic of kindness. They told me that I was an unimpeachable force of confidence and learning until the tragedy of growth.
I remember the first time I felt a feeling I felt, feel, and will feel again, was when I was sitting at my desk. I don’t remember what color the desk was, but knowing myself, it was probably a dull gray or white. The desk was scratched up by pen mistakes and bumps that made the surface quite uneven and rough. The walls were shaded blue with spikes of golden sunshine painting them almost green. They all had posters and paintings and paraphernalia and memorandums of life. The air was soft and cozy just like the blankets on my bed and the carpet on my floor which to me resembled water. The shapes of the bed sheets were like waves that lazily oscillated without a sliver of breath to the wind as the brown drapes cascaded like a bronze waterfall. The floorboards were stained like rich chocolate and the closet door was white which mismatched my bed frame and dresser which were wood. The lights were off because the sunlight’s emergence through my windows was enough to illuminate my work. I also had letters spelling out my name on the wall in a neat serif font. I was in the workings on my history reading. I didn’t like having to read as much as I did, but everything that I learned, which is much different than reading, fascinated me. My scribbles of cursive traced across lines in my notebook methodically even though for the most part it was illegible.
The neighbors’ boys threw a brick through my window. I don’t remember the entire event, but only remembered the high pitch crash through my window. My room became a prison where my own body seemed to be the iron bars that kept me from bolting. The stronger one named Daniel, who was a tier-five Brawn, was the one who threw it. Someone told me later, but I didn’t need someone else’s eyes to know. He threw it about twenty feet away from the side of the house and launched it at his fullest force through my window. The brick was not the politely sized red ones; it was a brick for fire pits, weighing almost sixty-five pounds. The brick got caught on the curtain, bending the steel rod, but still managed to hit me in the back. If it wasn’t for the curtain, I would have certainly been irreversibly dead. Instead, I felt a sharp pain shoot through my spine and my legs. It was the most pain I’d felt at that point in life. I wasn’t able to move my legs which was one of the most concerning sensations. My brain was telling me that my toes were there, but every muscle of my physical body screamed otherwise. I wanted to cry and to shriek in initial pain, but my pride kept it down my throat. I felt my contorted body on the ground but if I screamed, the boys would laugh, and I only had one spine and so much patience. Even with only a few months of hindsight, I knew that it probably didn’t matter whether or not I screamed.
I pulled my body with my arms, gripping my bookshelf and the door frame. I was slow but my arms were strong, and I managed to pull the door shut to cancel as much noise as possible. I felt myself begin to cry and I wailed out for help, my voice cracking as if I was thirteen despite being four years older. I remember the snot blockading my sinuses because of my tear-inducing pain. I don’t remember what my parents said exactly, but they rushed up the stairs and saw me lying on the ground. The next thing I remembered was my sister arriving after a few frantic phone calls. She was never home, but she came out of one of the second-floor rooms that had a balcony, right down the hallway from where I was. She emerged from a white door fully adorned in her heroic attire. She didn’t even gasp at the sight of the contortion of my feelingless body. She held my hand which was clammy and cold from fear. She smiled down at me with her thin pink lips. She had a dimple and a beauty mark on her cheek that she was always a bit ashamed of, and her face was flat, but her cheeks were nice and fluffy.
“Breathe,” she said in a calm manner. I remember that she tilted her chin downwards so that I was only able to see her forehead. I did try to breathe, but it was hard because I probably had a few broken ribs. Nathalie whispered an incantation, prompting a violet color to pump into her irises. I saw that she had a hand on my back where it was broken, but I wasn’t able to feel it there. She put me to sleep so I wasn’t there to account for the healing magic, but when I woke up, I was in bed, able to move my toes. Everything was painless except for my head which throbbed enough to stir discomfort. I leaned over the side of the bed to see that the dent in my floor was patched with sand and my window was fixed. The plastic window screen still hung from the frame in a twisted mess, but that was on the outside and not in immediate danger. I figured the repairs were conducted by my mom who was a talented Tera-former. She must not have seen the curtain rod because it still hung at a bent angle, but it was better not to fuss. Nathalie stayed home that day. It had been the first time she had done that since she graduated college, I only wished that she stayed for less unpleasant circumstances. I heard her footsteps on the floors which was another unusual feat because she usually preferred to float in the air (she never liked her shortness). I closed my eyes again to signal a sleepy, injured boy in peril because I was in no mood to be lectured by her. She shook me awake anyway, grabbing my shoulder while also accidentally shoving my head into the bedframe. I acted groggy as if I had been hibernating through winter and was woken up in January.
“What? I’m sleeping,” I said, burying my face back into my pillow. Nathalie rolled her eyes. She must not have heard clanks of my head hitting the bed frame because she continued to shake me and also continued to accidentally hit my head against the bed frame. In doing this, she also accidentally knocked my things off my nightstand with her obnoxious cape and oversized shoulder pads.
“Who did that to you?” she asked. She didn’t present her words as a question. “I’m planning on making them disappear. You tell me a name and I’ll kill ‘em.” I didn’t wake up at that moment, but I began to lay off the acting as if I hadn’t already been awake. I knew that she was somewhat joking because she was also under the impression that youth made one impervious to all violent obstacles. I also knew that despite Nathalie’s jocular demeanor, if I asked her seriously to kill, she lacked the rational thought to do anything but seriously kill.
“Daniel who lives down the street,” I said half-jokingly to make sure that she only half-killed him but did so thoroughly. Nathalie scrunched her nose and smiled, nodding.
“Consider him history, Dave,” she said, hopping out of the room, the long ribbons of her hair swinging like a jump rope. Her cape bobbed about, and her twisted ponytail swayed at an uneven tempo. I sighed, sinking back into my bed and I fell asleep for real.
Nathalie told me when I woke that Daniel was moving out of state. I chose not to say anything because I was conflicted between relief and a feeling of terror that I felt guilty for, but my triumphant feelings of relief absolved everything else pretty quickly. My parents were standing in the kitchen when Nathalie announced it proudly. I saw my mom’s countenance sink slightly. Her dark circles became apparent, but she smiled and clapped her hands together in joy. The one thing that I had over my family was my perceptiveness. It wasn’t any sort of gift, but it served me good in my attempts to have some empathy. I saw her breathe in heavily when Nathalie wasn’t looking. I smiled at Nathalie too and I thanked her but she wasn’t looking then either. I truly adored her then even when she ignored me and I truly adore her now when I can only remember the times when she loved me.
She drove me to school the next day. She took me in the convertible which was a shiny lavender with silver accents. I wished that she hadn’t because it usually caused me more trouble than it’s worth at school, but she enjoyed the wind and the fame. As a compromise, she let me hand my arms out of the windows and play the music I liked. When we got to the school drop-offline, people were crowded around the car with their phones out as I anticipated. People with outstretched arms holding paper and pens for signatures lined the sidewalks. Nathalie smiled elegantly with poise, absorbing all of the flash photography like a flower facing her leaves to the sun. I remember people followed me to the door asking for autographs and for gossip to sell to the magazines. A part of me always wanted to say something completely absurd to be sent to publishers just to laugh at the angel falling from the sky, set ablaze. No, I’m not a psychopath, I’ve met enough real psychopaths in my life to know.
I met Maria in the hallway. She was somewhat in the corner listening to music on her phone. Her earbuds were in a tangle hanging from her ear. She was always too lazy to undo them. I always untangled them when they were just laying around, but they never seemed to sit still. Even though I did my best to squeeze past my peers all praising Nathalie, they closed tightly around me, forcing me to use the wall to guide myself out of the crowd as if I were a blind man in a rainforest full of brick walls and busy street intersections.
“I had a dream about this exact thing happening,” Maria said, pulling an earbud out of her ear and handing them to me to cue the untangling. She didn’t pause the music and had it playing loud enough for me to hear what was coming out of them. It was an old love song that I had never heard of but didn’t dislike.
“You didn’t,” I said, rolling my eyes. Maria smiled with her imperfect smile with her creased eyelids and dimples. Her glasses sort of slid down her nose.
“Yeah, I didn’t but it would’ve been funny if I had,” she replied, shrugging. Her curly hair bounced lightly as she walked down the hall. She had to take two steps for every one of mine, so she practically ran next to me. I eventually slowed down for her, but that came years later. I told her about the brick, and I remember her waterfall of slurs and curses that she spat in my neighbor’s name, some of which were completely uncalled for, but made me laugh, nonetheless. She always looked at me so kindly and so sweetly. I was a very dumb guy, so I never really noticed it then, but that look never went away. With her kind eyes and her politically incorrect voice, she confided in me her nightmares and her apparitions that night. At that time, the ripe age of seventeen, she rarely got coherent messages from the future. They were usually weak sightings like what the meal of the day was or how many people were going to be in the bathroom at a certain time. Sometimes her dreams never came true, that they were only dreams. She was closer to me in power than to an average person but that was a fact that I never brought up because I didn’t have a death wish. However, Maria Romero was much smarter than to be in denial. That woman knew everything that there was to know about the world, and she didn’t have to dream it, she just knew. About half of her dreams were true and half of them weren’t, but she always told me what they were so that, she put it, she never forgot.
“I had another apparition last night,” she said blankly. I listened routinely and attentively “It was about your sister,” she continued.
“Not you too,” I rolled my eyes and scrunched my nose. Maria gave me a recognition of the joke but the fun in her dissipated quickly as she resumed.
“She’s going to-” Maria said, hesitating. I looked her in the eyes, to signal that she was okay. “She’s going to kill someone.” She made a face that clearly stated that the idea scared her but even she doubted the validity of her dream. She swallowed and I saw the light rise and fall of her Adam's apple. I didn’t believe her because it was easier than to offer myself to the fifty-fifty possibility that it was true, but I gave her the semblance that I entertained her vision, still.
“Did you see who?” I asked. Maria recollected for a moment, shifting her body.
“Yeah, it was an Oracle which is really weird,” she replied, slowing her speech as if to think while speaking. She caught onto my confusion and continued, “Oracles aren’t inherently dangerous, so the League doesn’t ever have to deal with them, it’s usually just police. Your sister didn’t tell you any of this?” I still didn’t catch on partly because I was dismissive and partly because I idolized my sister no matter how much I hated her too, so I nodded at Maria.
“Ai, you have to get out more, then. Stop being so privileged for a Nomagi” she smiled. I made a playful face at the word. Of course, it was different coming from her, but that word was plastered all over my life. Besides the jokes, Maria was right as always.
“Okay, Lomagi,” I retorted with a joking grin. She gasped melodramatically. A teacher gave us a look at the poor language, but it would have been more socially discriminatory for him to have yelled at us for the slurs that we made our own. Every morning went somewhat the same. Maria and I would sit in the hallway waiting for classes to start before she would leave. We would wander through classes making no enemies and only making good acquaintances, with the exception of Benny.
Benny was a figure of a person. He didn’t really do much but somehow everyone remembered him. He was kind and he was a bit of a third to Maria and I but he was an underclassman. He was an Aquatic-Class person and was sufficient enough to lack any disgrace. He was extremely middle of the pack in everything that he did but had a certain quality that I still cannot describe that made him particularly memorable. It wasn’t intelligence, or looks, or speech, or kindness, or athleticism, or popularity. He was just Benny Fontaine, and it was hard not to love the guy. When I first met him, he told me his government name was Benjamin, but he hated it. It was in the seventh grade, and I proposed to Ben, but he hated it and asked for Jamin. I had told him that it sounded ethnic and similar to Jae-min and Jaymin and could have been misconstrued as racism. I remember our dumb brains thinking of the implications of having a potentially culturally appropriating nickname, so he went with Benny even though it sounded almost too feminine to the sixth-grade boy. He stuck with it for as long as I can remember, claiming that he grew into it, supposedly being good with ladies.
I drove Benny to and from school almost every day because he lived only a few houses down from me. Benny strapped himself in my small sedan tossing his backpack into the back seat letting it crash off of the car door and onto the floor. I truly trusted him with all my secrets, even the ones I held close to my chest, so naturally, I also confided in him my fears about Maria’s apparition. I started the car and pulled out of the parking spot as Benny thought of a way to answer. He wasn’t a very smart character, but he was always very keen on providing the most thoughtful answers that he was able to muster.
“Well,” he began, smacking his laps as I drove the car down the long-curved road, picking up every pothole on the way. “I think that you should talk to Nathalie to gauge whether or not you think that she’s suddenly more homicidal. If she is, then you can tip someone off and if she isn’t, then it’s the fifty percent of the dreams that Maria has that aren’t real.” he concluded. I fidgeted with my fingers on the wheel and played with the buttons, turning the heat up and down as trees and sidewalks and curbs fled past the window, and wind laced through the windows and brushed the tip of my head.
“I don’t think I can do that,” I told him. Benny kind of looked sideways. Since my own eyes were on the road, I wasn’t able to tell if it was averting my watch or to ponder an argument or to think of an alternate solution.
“I don’t know, this is kind of a weird situation. Maybe you can talk her out of anything before it happens.” he told me, returning to the conversation.
“You know that’s not how it works,” I said thinking of what Maria had told me years before. It happens or it doesn’t. Benny shrugged to signal that his thinking quota had been fulfilled already so we resorted to talking about sports. I ran track and he did water polo along with the other Aquatic-Class athletes. He was on the junior varsity team which was pretty good for someone who was a middle-tier. I always envied his carefree nature that he had despite being wildly passionate about everything he did. He loved the sport and I know that he loved me and Maria, but he was always able to let things go so easily. Sometimes I wished he got angrier than he usually did when the occasion arose, but I got the idea that there was nothing in the world that would be able to make him hate anything in the world.
I patted him on the back and reminded him to get his backpack from the back seat when I pulled into his driveway. His house was quaint with light tan painted paneled walls and a brown shingled roof with a dark wood door. It was a square home with a few windows on the front. The fence was always a little bit open, and the big maple tree always seemed to keep its leaves, even in the winter when they were all dried out. Benny waved at me, and I watched him open the garage door and disappear. I pulled out the driveways I was almost more familiar with than my own at this point and drove down the street slowly back to my own house.
I was going slow enough to see all the imperfects and little stones on the road. There was a small splatter of something dark like water, turning the pavement a more saturated color. It was cloudy so it was always hard to tell what it was exactly, but a trail of these splotches followed the exact same path as I. I took notice but didn’t really care all too much because there wasn’t really anything to care about. The path followed all the way up to the driveway where I parked the car. It followed to my feet when I got out of the car. It continued when I walked on the short stone paved walkway to the door. It didn’t cease when I got to the stout concrete patio (if it could be called a patio). There, the ground was lighter, so I was able to see the splotch. I crouched down and saw that it wasn’t water, but it was something red. I didn’t touch it because I was afraid of it, so I turned my body to the door to open it but the splotches followed my eyes on the door handle which was already turned and slightly open.
It followed me on the rug in front of the door to the floor in front of the rug to the stairs and to the light heather gray runner. I felt a little faint and I might’ve known that it would’ve been wiser to run and to wait for someone less human that I, but I was not wise back then, so I followed the trail like a child. I turned the corner of the stairs, holding onto the square banister to find the palm of my hand wet. I didn’t want to look, so I didn’t look. The lights were all for the most part off in the hallway but a few yards from the top stair was one light that was on. The trail smeared and my eyes followed to find my sister at the end of it. My breath stopped and for a moment I didn’t even see Nathalie, I only saw blood. My wisdom must’ve kicked in in the form of immature cowardice because I only remember running.
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