zombiegraycat

i haven't written poetry for years, but we had an assignment to write a poem with the theme of "family" for one of my english classes recently. i asked if i could do prose poetry as a way of kind of avoiding verse poetry, and the teacher said yes, so this thing was what i came up with. i'm only posting it because the teacher actually liked it, thus it's probably not total crap. i don't really care for it though since it's not my best work, i just wanted to use some characters i made up awhile ago but haven't written anything about yet. (the reason i made them up was actually because of this class and being sick of reading about cliched types of family dysfunction so i wanted to create a family situation that's not only dysfunctional but also truly atypical. things like adultery, abuse, etc are all far too overdone in fiction to really have any significant impact. if the reader is bored while reading what's supposed to be a tragedy, you're doing it wrong)

anyway, this is it. 


The inn lies at the end of Weir Street, down by the canal. Some of its windows are lit, the guests snug in their rooms. The corner window on the top floor – that one’s light always flickers, flashing like a firefly. They live up there, the innkeepers, three of them in the upper rooms even though their family is five. The flickering corner window on their floor, that one is the young daughter’s room.

On the shelf above her bed – two photographs and a candle, the only light she allows once the sky has gone dark. The girl in one photo, that is the older daughter. Somewhere in Europe now, she won’t tell them what city, with the girl she loves but her parents hate. Only this photo shows someone misses her. But the other, the boy, only in high school and born between the two girls, his face is in all the rooms on the fourth floor. His body, in the hospital, tubes forcing him to live when he has already died. They won’t let go. The young girl who keeps the pictures, she will let him go.

On the floor under her bed – things belonging to a girl of her age, school folders and posters of bands, mismatched socks and stuffed toys from a childhood not too long ago. The mess is an ordered one, a chaos designed to protect the rest of what is under her bed, at the very back where the headboard meets the wall. They are animals, mice mostly, but some toads and a bird too. The mice she leaves in their traps after slitting their throats neatly with the blade of her scissors, even if they have already died by the time she finds them. The others, she puts inside small plastic bags after catching them herself and doing the same thing.

If she can do this, take the life from a breathing being without a quiver of hesitation, then she knows she can turn off a mere machine. Give reprieve to one whose real breath has long since gone. She prays each night to whoever might be listening – “Keep my sister safe and free, guide my fingers to the plug, let my parents keep believing I’m dealing with all of this so well.”

inspired by a painting called "the melancholy and mystery of a street."


Where They All Go

She'd lost her job that morning. 

"It's nothing personal, you're a diligent employee," her boss had told her when she entered the back room of the cafe. "But business is slow this summer. Slower than I've ever seen it. I'd afraid I can't keep you on staff anymore, so... I'm very sorry. I hope things work out somewhere else."

As she walked out past the empty tables, their umbrellas flapping in the breeze, she looked up and down Main Street. It wasn't just the cafe, she knew - the entire town seemed to be coming to a halt, as it had for the past year. The bakery at the corner had closed last week, and several other small shops had gone out of business. Poverty consumed the families of most of the men who had once made a living fishing down at the harbor. 

Places change, she thought, turning to the right and up the slope of Main Street. No one in this little town really has a chance at this point. They should get out while they still can afford it, because it won't get better anytime soon.

That, and there were the disappearances, too.

There had been only a few, and they were all people whom no one really knew, people like herself with no family, and now, no job. But still... they had been there one day, and then the next, just gone, and all of their possessions left behind. One had been from her own apartment building. His neighbors on the floor below hers reported he was missing only once they realized they hadn't seen him in who knew how long. There had also been two small children, who had vanished shortly after their mother died of an illness. As far as she'd heard, the police chief had no leads on any of the cases.

While it unsettled her, she had more pressing concerns at the moment.

In her mind she struggled with her options. She could search for another job, either online or by going door-to-door on Main Street, but what if she didn't find one? She believed this was the most likely outcome, which left her with two more choices - staying put and facing the real possibility of homelessness and hunger, or leaving and going elsewhere. Her car was old but sturdy, her month's rent was already paid, and she probably had enough money remaining to settle in a small place somewhere far away from this dying community.

She would check her savings account when she got home, she decided. And if it looked promising enough, she'd withdraw everything and leave the next day.

Her apartment building lay on the other side of the small hill that she was about to crest. Lost in thought, she didn't see the lamppost until it was almost in front of her. For a moment she was puzzled, and then her confusion turned into downright shock as she reached it and looked to the right. There was a narrow cobble-stoned street branching off of Main Street that had never been there before in all the years she had lived in this town.

She grasped the lamppost at the end of the sidewalk to make sure it was real. Another rose several feet ahead where the sidewalk resumed again. Together they stood like sentinels on each side of the beginning of the street. There was no sign nearby marked with the street's name; it only wound off into some unknown place away from the shops of Main Street, the walls of its buildings obscured in shadow even though the sun had nearly reached its highest point in the sky.

What she was seeing couldn't exist, and yet it did. After what might have been a minute, she walked forward and passed between the lampposts. Almost immediately she felt colder somehow, and the light seemed to dim faintly. 

"What in God's name is this place?" she asked of the dark walls and empty windows that stretched out before her to where the street curved to the left.

The only way to find out was to continue on, she decided, curious. Her surroundings became progressively danker as she continued. When she looked up, she couldn't see the sun anymore. Instead of shining high above her like it had been when she'd entered the street, it now appeared to be setting just behind the buildings ahead, although she knew that couldn't be possible. Dust and dirt of ages past seemed to hang in the air. She became acutely aware of the echoes from her footsteps. Under her shoes, the cracked cobble-stones showed evidence of constant wear even though there was not a soul to be seen. 

She had been looking at the windows of the buildings that flanked her in a row on each side, trying to catch a glimpse of a human face. She assumed that the buildings were, or had once been, people's houses. They varied in size, some having as many as five floors and a few being only the ground floor, but the windows in all of them were small. Many were broken or had no glass left at all, and for those that did, the glass was too dirty for the woman to see inside. 

She reached the curve in the street. Looking to her left, she saw the same scene of abandoned buildings and felt the same heavy air weigh in her chest as she continued on. But soon after, she became aware of a faint sound in the emptiness. Up ahead to the left there was a small dilapidated porch at the front of one of the houses, and on it someone sat in a rocking chair. As the person rocked back and forth, the chair creaked softly. 

She approached cautiously, grateful to have found another human being, and saw that it was an old lady. Long gray hair with white streaks fell over the shawl that draped her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, and she turned her face as the younger woman reached the front of the porch. 

"Excuse me...?" the woman began. "I... well, I think I'm lost. Where am I exactly?"

The old lady's features became puzzled. "You're not lost, dear."

"Yes, I am. I've never seen this part of town. I was on Main Street, and then I saw this street and could have sworn it's never been there before."

"Oh, it's always been there," the old lady said kindly. 

"Then why didn't I - "

"See it? Is seeing everything?" She opened her eyes then, and the woman saw that she was blind.

"Oh... I..." She didn't know what to say.

"It's always been there. You just haven't always been here," said the old lady by way of explanation.

It made nothing clearer for the woman, who was still confused and beginning to feel exasperated. The old lady must have sensed this, for she continued, "You can't come here unless you're already lost. Would I be right to say that you believe you have little left in your life? And the Main Street you speak of, that town... does it offer you any hope?"

"No," the woman said quietly. "It's dying. I lost my job today. I don't really know what I'm going to do anymore now."

"Exactly." The old lady smiled, pleased to have created understanding. 

There was a silence, heavy as the air that weighed in the woman's lungs. She looked around her, and she saw for a moment the future of her own familiar town with its houses and storefronts reflected in the decrepitude of the ones lining the strange street. The old lady was right.

"This is where we come, we who have no place anymore in the world. And you are most welcomed here," the old lady told the woman. 

Despite her kindliness, the woman felt a sense of panic beginning to rise within her. This town, with its gloom and shadows, was nothing but a surreal nightmare. A twisted illusion. Yet the ground under her feet was hard and and the person in front of her was flesh and blood. "But... what am I supposed to do? How do I get back?"

"Back? You're here. There is no back - oh, listen!" The old lady broke off suddenly and turned her sightless eyes to where the street continued onwards, in a steepening curve up a slope. The woman turned as well. As she strained her ears, she made out thin voices coming from somewhere ahead.

The old lady looked back to the woman excitedly. "Your children are calling you," she said.

"My children? I don't have any children." Somehow a feeling of foreboding came over the woman. The high-pitched, chattery voices meant nothing good to her.

"Nonsense, of course you do," chided the old lady. "And they're waiting for you. Go on now. They'll be very happy to see you."

"But I-"

"Oh, and one thing more..." The woman stepped closer to hear what the old lady had to say.

"There is no need to be afraid. Nothing can hurt you here. This-" she gestured towards her eyes "-happened long ago, in the place you came from. But this place is safe." She smiled again, and the woman decided to try and trust her, the first person she had met in this strange town. Her uneasiness remained, however, for it was not injury that she feared, but something else entirely.

With nothing left to say, she thanked the old lady and began walking in the sun's fading light towards the upward curve in the street ahead of her.

She saw them as soon as she rounded the bend. They stood farther up the slope, in front of one of the small, precariously built houses that lined the ascending street.  The boy looked no more than eight, and the girl no more than six. Their clothes, streaked with dirt and grime, hung loosely from their bodies. The woman approached them slowly, deliberately, and when their faces became clear so did the reason for her misgivings. 

"You... you're from town! The real town. I've seen you before. You're the children who disappeared!"

They looked at her, having fallen silent as soon as they'd caught sight of her coming towards them. 

"How did you end up here?" she asked, still looking at them in alarm.

The boy answered, shrugging. "We just did. Our mommy died."

Then the girl said, "Liar. That's mommy." With a small finger she pointed at the woman.

"That's our new mommy. The other mommy died, back in the other home." He covered the girl's ears and whispered to the woman, "She never remembers anything."

"Shut up, I heard that!" yelled the girl, pulling away.

The woman stepped closer to them before she lost her chance for control. She felt panic rising within her again, fear of these two perfectly normal children who were in a place where no one should be and thought she'd come to replace someone who had died. 

"Look," she stammered. "Do you know if there's a way out of here? Don't you want to go back?"

"You heard the lady, there is no back," said the boy.

She had no idea how he could have known what the old lady said when he'd been all the way up the hill. But she persisted with her questions and asked, "So you're going to stay here?"

They both looked at her, confused.

"Of course. There's nowhere else," the boy said.

"We live here," said the girl. 

"But where? Everything here is in ruins." She gestured to the decrepit buildings around them. "And who takes care of you?"

"That's why you're here!" the girl answered excitedly. "And we live in a house, of course."

The woman was getting nowhere closer to understanding, and she felt herself quickly losing patience. But before she could say anything else, the boy offered to show her where they lived.

"Come see it," he said. "It's not much but we've done okay. It'll be better now that you're here." He smiled up at her.

Her stomach lurched. "I'm not staying."

"Then where will you go?"

"Back. Out. How about you come with me instead and I'll show you the way to the real town where we're all from?" She hoped to persuade the children, but they looked dubious.

The girl offered a compromise. "What if you come see where we live, and then we'll go see where you live?" 

The boy still seemed doubtful, but he nodded to his sister and both of them turned around before the woman could respond.

"Come on, then," they said, beginning the walk up the hill again. She hurried after them.

Their house stood a short distance away, at the very top of the hill. On the other side, the road sloped downward again, eventually disappearing into the darkness between buildings. There was no porch like there had been at the old lady's home; instead, a couple of dusty cement stairs led unceremoniously from the side of the street up to a gray door whose paint was peeling. The boy pushed the door open, and the girl and the woman followed him inside. 

The woman had already been acutely aware of the decrepitude in this other town, but she was still unprepared for the amount of rubble and filth that awaited her once she closed the door. Chunks of plaster had fallen from above and lay in the middle of the entry room in white dust. The woman quickly felt the floorboards creaking worryingly under her feet, and she bit her lip, glancing around. A couple of dark holes gaped open in the walls, and the ceiling looked to be in danger of collapsing. It sank downward, as though being pulled by the ancient chandelier that hung inexplicably from the center. Other than that, there were no decorations or furniture in the room at all.

"You mean to tell me you live in all this dirt and junk?" the woman asked, appalled. "The ceiling could fall on you at any minute!" 

"The back rooms aren't as bad," explained the boy.

She doubted that, but followed him and the girl anyway across the cold, dusty room to a doorway.

It led to two smaller rooms, one of which the woman guessed must have been a kitchen by the rusted taps, sink basin, and crumbling counters still clinging onto the walls. The same heavy quiet lingered in the house as it had outside. The woman had found a name for it by now - apprehension.

"See, we sleep here," the girl said, pointing to some dusty blankets and sleeping bags on the floor. "It's nice."

"And the sink works," added the boy. "There's not much food here, though. Mostly rats. But now you're here, so you can help us, right?"

She looked down at the children, saw their big shadowed eyes and thin frames, and a sudden repulsion came over her. They intended for her to stay, to take care of them as though she were their mother. They'd consume her with their need; or maybe hunger would drive them to kill and eat her first. 

"No, I won't be able to help you," she said, being sure to make her voice even. "We shouldn't even be here. I don't think either of you realize that you're in the wrong place. This town isn't real. It's... it's some kind of illusion. Everything's wrong here. Don't you remember the real town, where your mother was?"

"So what? Everything was wrong there too. She died, you know. And Daddy before that." The boy had dropped his gaze as he said this, watching his foot as he kicked at some plaster on the floor.

"And you?" the woman asked the girl, but with little hope. If her older brother didn't care to go back, she wouldn't want to either. The woman doubted if she even had any memories of her previous life left. 

The girl shrugged. "Don't remember Daddy. Don't care about dead Mommy either. We have you now."

A sense of profound loneliness from the children washed over the woman. Whether they realized it or not, they were all by themselves in this world. And so they had attached themselves to her when she showed up against her will, attached themselves like parasites. She knew that no matter what it took, she had to get away, out of whatever this place was. 

But something had caught her eye after the girl fell silent. Through another doorway at the end of the kitchen a broken-down staircase wound its way steeply up to what the woman assumed was a second floor.

"What's that?" she asked, pointing. "Are there more rooms upstairs?"

"Yeah," said the boy. "But..." He looked nervously towards the doorway. "We don't go up there anymore. There's goblins."

The woman thought she'd misheard him. "Goblins?"

The children nodded. The boy explained how they used to sleep upstairs on an old mattress in one of the rooms, but then they started to hear noises at night.

"Sounds in the walls. Something scratching around. We still hear them sometimes, even down here. It's scary."

"I want to go to a different house," the girl said anxiously.

"Scratching sounds in the walls?" asked the woman.

"Like claws," said the boy. "Goblin claws."

The woman just gaped at the fearful children for a moment. As if things couldn't possibly get more absurd, they also believed monsters lurked in the walls of their home.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she muttered. Then she said to the children, "You're hearing animals. They're just rats or mice. They live in old houses sometimes and I'm not at all surprised there's some in this dump. They're not going to hurt you."

The boy was silent, but the girl said quietly, "Mice don't kill people."

As soon as she had spoken, the boy clapped a hand over her mouth. "Shut up," he hissed. "You're going to scare her."

The girl fought her brother off, looking at him determinedly. "But we should warn her! She can't ever go up there or she'll get killed!"

Despite her persistence, the woman noticed the girl looked like she was about to cry. Oddly, but perhaps because of the strange things she had seen so far in this town, the girl's words didn't frighten her much. The children were alone and their imaginations had begun to rule their lives in the absence of structure and care. The old lady had said that nothing could harm her here. Still, her uneasiness remained unabated. 

"If there's anything dangerous about those stairs," she said firmly, "it's that you'd probably fall right through them. That's all."

The girl still looked defiant. "Then go see the wall."

Her brother glared at her and made to stop the woman, but she put her arm out in front of him and continued through the doorway. 

The staircase appeared even more precarious up close, the wooden railing broken in places, but that wasn't what the children seemed concerned about. Her eyes roamed over the wall next to the stairs in the dim light, looking for anything strange.

Then she saw it. The children came up behind her at the same moment.

"See that?" whispered the girl, pointing unnecessarily at a red streak on the wall that the woman realized with a sickening feeling was probably blood. 

At the sight of it, she found she had nothing rational to say in answer to the children. What could have made such a dark stain on the plaster? Looking closer, she saw a splatter of the same color on one of the steps midway up the staircase. 

"My god," she murmured. 

"Oh, now you've done it, pigbrain," said the boy. "You scared her. Now she's going to leave and it's your fault."

The girl turned to the woman, outraged. "He called me pigbrain!"

When the woman didn't respond, she tugged on her shirt sleeve and said, "Did you hear him? He called me - "

"I don't care what he called you!" the woman exploded, throwing the girl off her arm. "I don't care about either of you! I'm not your mother! Stay in this pile of junk you call a house and deal with whatever is going on here by yourselves. I'm going home - my real home!"

The children gaped at her. "But..." The boy seemed dangerously close to tears. "We're going to die if you leave."

"You've been doing just fine for the past couple weeks, haven't you?" the woman snapped, even though she knew that was far from the truth. Nothing here was just fine.

And with that, she turned away violently and left the children without a backward glance. The echoes of the girl crying and the boy saying "I told you!" followed her even once she was out the door.

The street still lay faintly illuminated in the orange light of the setting sun despite how much time she thought had to have passed. Contrastingly dark shadows veiled the buildings ahead of her as she ran down the slope. 

She was panting by the time she reached what she recognized as the old lady's house, because of the slanting porch with the wooden rocking chair. The rocking chair was empty. On an impulse, she headed towards the porch, looking warily up the street for signs of the children following her. But they seemed to have stayed where she'd left them. She knocked heavily on the door, which swung open a crack with a screech of rusty hinges. Peering in, she saw only darkness.

"Hello?" she called, pushing the door open wider. She felt uneasy entering someone else's home, especially one as cold and silent as this. When there was no response, though, she stepped inside nevertheless, letting the glow of the twilight slip in with her. 

The faint light illuminated a narrow entryway that led to what seemed to be the only room on the first floor of the small house. The woman could just barely make out the slightly darker forms of a table and a couple chairs at the back of the room. As her eyes began to adjust, she noticed something different about the shape of one of the chairs. A figure the color of shadow sat there unmoving.

"Hello?" the woman said again. "Ma'am? It's me, from earlier today..."

There was no response as she approached the chair. "Ma'am? Are you alright?"

Her vision was getting better, and she knew something was terribly wrong. Unable to stop herself, she reached out her hand and felt her fingertips meet hard, dry bone at the same time that she saw the skeleton before her.

A scream rose in her throat but could not release itself. With her mouth open, she jumped backwards, almost losing her balance. She turned and rushed out of the room, through the doorway and off the porch and into the twilight-lit street, where she bent over gasping with her hands on her knees. The little house with its sagging roof and peeling paint sat in front of her, protected by taller buildings on either side, neither of them any less dilapidated but each more foreboding than the house would appear to anyone who didn't know what she had seen. The woman wildly wondered for a moment what could be inside them, what could be behind the darkened windows of all the houses on this street that wound its way onwards over the hill to who knew where. 

As her gaze flicked towards the slope she had come down from, she saw two figures appear quickly from around the bend. They hurried towards her, calling out to her. She swore fearfully under her breath, but as she spun around to run in the other direction, the boy yelled, "Wait, wait! You can't go yet! You promised!"

They were in front of her sooner than they should have been considering the distance, but the woman didn't bother wondering about that. She'd realized by now that space and time were different here, very wrong, but there was nothing she could do about it. "What do you want?" she said harshly.

The girl flinched backwards, but the boy continued steadily, "Your home, where you're from. Remember? You said you'd see ours if we could then go to yours."

"I said what?" she replied, exasperated. "I never said anything like that. I don't care one bit about where you go. All that matters is getting out of here. Stay, follow me... I don't give a damn! I'm leaving right now." 

She strode away from the children for the second time, but predictably, they hurried after her. Ignoring them, she walked quickly towards the bend in the street ahead. After she rounded it, she'd be able to see the two lampposts and Main Street from which it branched off, and then she'd go quickly home and decide whether or not to leave town. In addition to her fear of the place, the woman felt a flicker of annoyance at the realization that she had wasted her afternoon there. Had it truly been a whole afternoon? Eternal sunset seemed to paint the sky above this street. How could she know how much time had really passed, or if it had even passed at all?

Quickening her stride, she hurried around the curve and looked ahead eagerly... only to see the street continue onwards between the two rows of long-abandoned houses.

She stopped in shock. She must have made a mistake, gone the wrong way. But there were only two ways to go in this place, forward and backward, and she knew she had retraced her steps correctly. From deep inside, the woman felt the despair that had been steadily mounting begin to consume her.

"What's happening?" she gasped, partly to the children and partly to herself. "Is there no way out of here?"

The children came up beside her, the girl on her right and the boy on her left. 

"We were confused at first," the boy said. "We tried to go back to where we'd been before. But the street just goes on and on in both directions."

The girl smiled excitedly. "Oh, that means you can't leave! You're going to stay with us!"

The woman's head spun. These children, the old lady, the man from her apartment building, all the other people here and there who'd disappeared leaving what little was left of their lives behind... was this where they'd all gone? She looked wildly back and forth between the way ahead of her and the way she'd come from, seeing no lampposts marking the exit out to Main Street that should have been there. She saw only this other street under the silent glow of the evening light, stretching on and on as the boy had said. Maybe it went on forever. 

From far away she felt a cold hand slip into hers. 

"Mommy," said the girl. "Let's go home."

i don't think i ever posted this.

i have no desire to take english 200, the intro course required for english majors. the particular section for the course that i chose happens to be about "the dysfunctional american family" as the theme. the course catalogue didn't list what the themes of all the sections were (in fact i didn't even know they had different themes), so there could be a class with something a lot more interesting. but i don't want to fudge my schedule because i like everything else i have. and i have the feeling i won't really like this course no matter what the theme is, so i'm just going to do it.

but i don't want to read about family life. i don't want to read about the american dream. i don't want to read about boring jobs and farm life and the false dichotomy of crowded modern city/utter wilderness. i don't want to read about incest, alcoholism, drugs, adultery, and hopelessness. i don't want to read about the cliched types of dysfunction that people always write because no one can think of anything not involving sex or violence that could possibly also be a type of dysfunction. 

everything i listed above occur in at least one of the four books we'll be reading (the professor sent us the list and i looked them all up). this is strongly reminding me of sophomore english in high school when we read pretty much the same stuff... death of a salesman, fences, the great gatsby, etc. the only book that i somewhat liked in that class was wuthering heights. maybe because it took place in england and there was something about it that was much more subtle and suspenseful and even creepy. maybe it's that when people try to write about "the american dream", they're taking on this huge thing, this whole state of mind that turned out to be a myth without a basis in reality, and so of course they're going to come out with bleak, boring, "so what happens now?" kinds of characters. and maybe that's really how american culture was in the first half of the 20th century, but i've done it before in high school, in english and a couple other history/theater classes, and i'm done with it.

except not, apparently. 

i've decided i'm double-majoring also, english and anthropology. i've had hardly any bad anthro class experiences, but there's something about english that just makes it kind of die when it's taught. or when a particular person tries to teach it, or when certain examples of literature are used to teach it, or a certain type of writing is expected. it's not at all easy to teach, and i think the students who actually like it are the ones who end up disliking some english classes the most sometimes.

inspired by a section in my geology textbook about meteorites and the environmental conditions on earth that a large one would likely cause.

The Meteor

Everyone's going to die this week. There isn't anything that anyone can do to stop it. The human race learned of its coming destruction almost a month ago, although at the time most people assumed the meteor wouldn't hit. What could be the chances of that?

Even now there are still people in denial. I've seen men and women marching through the city with banners and signs proclaiming that god will save us. In most of the public squares, large television screens alternate between news broadcasts and charismatic preachers who scream to their listeners about the love of god for man, about how he must see that we are good at heart. And there are the children. They know that something is going on because they sense the terror and the sorrow. But they can't understand what it means not only to die, but to be annihilated. They will never know. Their innocence will remain until the very end.

The back of a certain alley between two buildings has sheltered me from the chaos of the last week. Sometimes I've climbed up a fire escape on the wall of one of the buildings and looked out over the streets below. I've seen people driving madly through the intersections, even though there's nowhere on earth where they'll be safe no matter how far they go. Later there was an accident almost in front of the alley. The traffic backed up behind the flaming metal shells of the cars and people were getting out and yelling at each other in fury. Far away I heard sirens, but the police were never able to arrive through the mess. For nearly a day there was fighting in the street.

From up high I've also seen people fall to their knees during the religious broadcasts in the nearby square and pray with tears streaming from their eyes to whatever higher powers they believe in. Maybe some of them don't believe, and they pray anyway.

I've seen death. People have taken each other's lives while trying to loot shops or steal cars. Some have been trampled under the surging feet of mobs. I saw one man run into the square shooting madly at everyone around him. And then there are the ones who have jumped from windows and the tops of buildings, or thrown themselves in front of a speeding car. There's no one taking the bodies out of the streets, not when everything will be so changed within the next few days.

But these are the things that have already happened. Today, the day before the end, there is only silence.

I don't know the time it's supposed to hit. I don't know, as I watch the sun going down in the west, if it will rise again one last time before another, infinitely more blinding, light fills the sky in its place. I do know, though, what it will look like as the meteor hurtles into our atmosphere. They've shown pictures on the public televisions, both scientists' and artists' renditions that foretell the coming reality. 

I also know that we won't die all at once. It's not as simple as a sudden global explosion. There will be countries that have no idea the meteor has struck until some time later, when dust clouds and debris begin to fill their skies from far away, becoming thick enough to block out even sunlight. That is what will happen if it hits land - if it hits water, then there'll be tsunamis and drowned islands and coasts. Many people hope that it will land in the ocean, because then anyone inland on the continents will have a chance at survival, as opposed to after a strike on land and the ensuing firestorms and rising temperatures and darkened skies. But again, it's not that simple. Many people don't seem to understand that no matter where the meteor hits, our world will be left unrecognizable. We'll be aliens in an alien land. 

I tried to explain this a week or two ago to some of the people in the family. They're not my real family, of course, but they may as well be. I don't remember when I fell in with them. My memory's not that good, and even so, most of my life is just a blur of moving from one temporary shelter to another. A subway station for a few nights, then an abandoned building, maybe a small city park if the weather is nice and the police pretend not to notice. I could have met them at any of these places. We're a mixture of men and women who would otherwise be entirely alone, and possibly even dead. But no matter how much everyone in our family looks out for each other in ordinary times, I told them, the new world awaiting us might destroy even that.

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait until the meteor came for that to happen. The chaos of this present world, the one I thought I'd always known, had done it instead. I'm alone in this alley now because the rest of my family is gone. They either scattered over the past few days, confused and separated by the mobs roaming the streets, or got killed by stray bullets or reckless drivers. Keeping out of the way and avoiding trouble like we always have didn't save them this time.

I'm alone as everything left that I know is about to end. In the silence, my mind goes back to those ones I've seen who have let themselves fall from rooftops. I look above me and see the fire escape spiraling up the side of the building I lean against. It would be easy to climb up and follow those others in their downward path. Too easy.

A gust of wind blows down the alley carrying papers and leaves and dust. One of the papers, the biggest one, lands at my feet. Bright red paint proclaims that this is god's punishment for our sin. I pick it up, tear it to shreds, and return it to the wind.

It's not that simple. Nothing can ever be that simple.

And so I'm not going to die before my time, by my own doing. I'm not going to do it because there are things I've been thinking today, on this last, silent evening. I found an uncapped black marker in the alley, probably from one of the marches where people were making signs. When I scribble experimentally on the cement wall next to me, I find it still works. I don't know if anyone will ever read the words I write next, but that's not the point. While the light of the setting sun still lingers in the alley, I put my thoughts on the wall among the graffiti and drawings of the past.

No God is going to save us. Maybe no god exists. Maybe one does but this god caused the metior to strike. We can't ever know. But us and our history isn't meaningless even if in the end we're wiped out. Each persons life through out all of time mattered to them. Even people like me, with no home and no money and no-one to really love. We all did the best we could, and we weren't perfect but we tried. We saved ourselves where we could. The meteor is something where we can't. It's beyond our control because we're not perfect or allknowing. We're not Gods, but we're not Nothing. There maybe other life somewhere in the universe, intelligent or not, but as far as we ever knew, there wasn't. And so life on earth was a miracle, and sentient life was a even greater miracle. With sentiance came good and bad, empathy and crultey, creation and destruction, love and hate, and inumerable experiances - all of them only Human - in between. I've seen alot, I've seen all of this. Do we need to be saved if we can look back on our experiances and find peace in the good and forgive ourselves and eachother for the bad? I think I at least will die happy, wether its tomorow or many years from now in a world I can't yet imagine.

hi, my name is gray cat and i have a procrastination problem. woohoo.

papers. they're what i suddenly can't do now that it's towards the end of the semester. i did them fine up until now. and i wasn't even particularly interested in any of the topics. unlike two of the three that i have yet to start at the moment. one is on "the plague" and how to make ethical choices when faced with metaphorical "plagues." the other is an ethnography based on my experiences observing a group of students. that one especially is going to be fun to write. 

once i can actually start, that is.

the third i'm not at all interested in even though i chose the topic, but it's based on research whereas the others aren't and i hate doing research. unfortunately it's due before either of the others.

why am i majoring in english again? oh yeah, because i can't do anything else. and contrary to my practices at the moment, i like reading and (creative) writing. but whereas i once did so all the time, now it takes effort to make myself read for fun or write something. that's what college does, i guess... you get used to doing what you have to do because you have to do it, and so if there's something that's not required for you to do, you feel like you don't want to. it's terrible.

i don't care so much if i end up taking classes where i have to read books i don't like and write papers on them. i'll put it off as usual, but it won't harm me. i just don't want to find myself reading something i love for a class and then watch it die before my eyes, sliced up by literary (over)analysis. i'm glad i didn't get into the gothic lit class i initially wanted at the beginning of the semester. i went to the first class in case there was an extra space for me, and the professor made various remarks about how all these famous works of literature were *really* about race, class, feminism, queer sexuality... i'm sorry, i thought this was english, not sociology 101, i must be in the wrong class. -facepalm- if there's one thing i can't stand in what little of academia i'm familiar with, it's reading the current issues of today's political climate into the cultural creations of past time periods. anachronism- it's not cool. especially when the subject being misinterpreted is something very close to me like gothic literature. 

another example of misinterpretation i feel compelled to share happened awhile ago in anthropology. the professor was talking about "heart of darkness" from an anthropological rather than literary perspective and expressed bafflement at how some literary critics claimed that it was a metaphor for sex. they used phrases like "the men penetrated the deep regions of the congo..." and said, "oh, this is about male sexual domination and the defiling of virginity." no. it's about colonizers exploring and forcefully settling in an area previously unknown to them and the horrors that they subjected local inhabitants to. "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." if it's a representation of anything, it'd simply be of desire for power and the process of dehumanization that can occur as a result. but mostly it's about history, and that particular history is not something to be trivialized by conjuring up sexual imagery. i'm sure congolese people would really appreciate their country being characterized as a giant vagina. 

clearly i'm not going to use my english degree to be a literary analyst. i'm too... literal. lol. but really, half the time i think people just make things up, either draw on basic commonly-recognized archetypes or approach it from a narrow modern-day perspective and claim that's what the author meant when what the author meant is, more often than not, right on the pages in front of you. it's pointless to me. "making things up" and imagination have their place, and it's in creative types of writing, not analysis. i lean much more to the creative side of ways to use language. 

...despite how i haven't worked on anything of my own since i don't remember. but we're going to ignore that xD

and now i should go back to trying to work. a piece from the conversation just now:

"the more i procrastinate, the more the procrastinating makes me procrastinate." - girlfriend
"...yo dawg." - friend

(hanging out with people isn't the best way to increase productivity, btw)

...for the first time, it's not a story. yeah. the last few weeks have been a creativity!fail in terms of working on anything new. but i only have 5 things in progress at the moment, which i think is the lowest it's been in awhile. i got both Lenora and The Riverwalker done finally and started 2 new stories sometime in july (well, one is a really detailed outline of all the characters and the main plot, so i feel like i've already written it even though i actually haven't and now probably won't >.> ) oh and i've submitted The River-Walker to abyss & apex, an online speculative fiction magazine.

but this isn't really about writing, instead it's gonna be a rambling about things on my mind that would never fit in a facebook post (not that i post on fb much to begin with anyways).

first, i'm back at mount holyoke <3

second, classes- i need to take the religion & science fiction course spring semester/at some point in the next 3 years. has to happen. any class that involves reading Stranger in a Strange Land's gotta be epic. i also want to read We Who Are About To... (about to what?? that's why i have to read it) xD

i've also found out what i'll be reading in my american gothic lit class. The Haunting of Hill House, stuff by Poe, The Yellow Wallpaper, The House of Seven Gables (i think), and a couple others i'm not remembering. i'm disappointed there's no lovecraft, though. everything by him is awesome. other suggestions of my own would include The Moth Diaries, The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs, White is for Witching (which, as it happens, are my three favorite books ever), We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Carmilla, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Shiki (yeah, it's a manga, but still), Black Fairy Tale, certain stories by ray bradbury, and Coraline. the only thing is, some of those aren't american, but i've been thinking about science fiction and gothic books for like the last week.

oh, and why must psych now include doing stuff on some computer program? i'm quite fine with learning from the lecture and a traditional textbook. i don't need "interactive, engaging such and such" on a screen to when it comes to academics. i actually work best when academics and technology are kept very separate. i love the computer and internet, but they're for fun, spending my free time, and my personal hobbies, not for class material. when i read for class i prefer to have something printed out or in a book because reading dense text online makes my eyes hurt. and i have enough trouble with labs as it is, i don't need some electronic program to have to learn how to manage in addition to dealing with the lab that it's supposed to help you with. the best help comes when i ask actual people for support and explanation if i need it. i type papers on the computer and receive my assignments on the college network's class forums, and that's all that's necessary.

i'm probably going to drop this course if it's too technology/lab intensive and pick up another english instead, probably english 200 since that's required for the major. it's a little concerning that i have yet to take an english when that's what i'm planning to major in >.< i haven't taken any anthropology yet either (though i am in the fall) but a minor obviously has less requirements than a major.

next, things i want to do but don't know how or if it's going to work out- i feel like i'm taking too long to figure out what i'm going to do in the future and how i'm going to make it happen. but i also feel like some kids rush into it too early and try to plan absolutely everything, and i probably couldn't be that way even if i tried. i still wish i had a more definite idea of what i want to do, though, beyond just "writing" and "doing research on interesting things." i have a few deep interests that are very important to me, but they aren't really things where it's easy to find a correlating type of employment.

i do know that for at least the last couple of years i've felt inadequate in several ways and frustrated sometimes because i want what the majority of other people my age have. one of those ways is how i have such a vague sense of what i'm going to do in life. i know what i'd *want* to do (creative writing), but it's not practical. i also know the things i don't want to do, but they're obvious and not very helpful. whatever it is, it needs to be something i'm interested in and really enjoy.

i've realized that there are exceptions to my general belief that following the crowd or conforming to the majority isn't the best approach to life. i'm not able to say that i don't have any desire to be like "everyone else." in many ways i don't, but i feel that i can't make a broad statement like that because life is more complicated than that. there are ways in which i believe i fall short of other people, ways in which i want to have certain experiences that by now other people have had. familiarity with independence, having some defined goals, having a variety of types of relationships and connections with other people. when my own friends have begun surpassing me in these areas, i know there's something wrong, because i've always tended to fall in with people who are slow-paced to begin with. my fear is being inferior, being left behind. i've worked hard getting to a place where i'm happy, but other stuff has caught up now. and i can't do anything at the moment besides alternate between watching a crapload of anime to distract myself and making various plans that i hope will work out.

anyways, moving on...

teen/young adult fiction- it sucks. it's not that i didn't know that before. i naturally (and fortunately?) lost most of my interest in the demographic of teen lit sometime in middle school, and that was right around that time that it took the downward turn it's been continuing since. when i was a kid/tween, young adult fiction was Harry Potter. it was A Wrinkle in Time. it was Eragon, Inkheart, the Warriors series... yes, it had occasional crap like Gossip Girls or whatever, but that wasn't particularly new, and it was also outnumbered by good stuff. a few years ago, there were a few vampire books in the teen section, but there were also books about all sorts of other things. i only mention fantasy titles because that's mostly what i read, but when i scanned the shelves looking for fantasy, i didn't see any shelves where most of the books were about the lives of angsty teenagers who become and/or fall in love with vampires or werewolves, and the remaining books were basically the same thing just minus the vampires and werewolves. -facepalm-

i only bring it up now because i was recently browsing the young adult section of the local bookstore so the change in the subject matter of teen lit over the last few years has become a lot more obvious to me now that i've actually looked through the teen section and skimmed some of the books out of curiosity. i was reading one called Abandon, which, as a retelling of the story of persephone, looked promising at the beginning. the summary described a girl who had a near-death experience and saw what's basically the author's imagining of the greek underworld before coming back to life. however, once she's alive and back on earth, the god of the underworld still stalks her and wants her to return to live with him in hell. i thought it was just meh until the second chapter or so. in the beginning the main character complains a lot, is self-absorbed, makes vague melodramatic remarks like "at least that was what i believed... until such and such happened" without explanation, and keeps saying that what happened to her was worse than what happened to persephone, a staggering claim to make, but i was trying to ignore all that and get to the description of her experience in the underworld. then i got to it in the second chapter, and read her interaction with the deity of the underworld in waking life after she comes back and he finds her. it turned out she was attracted to him somehow and this was revealed by lengthy descriptions of his eyes, body, and clothes. yeah. because of course a demon from hades would look like a tall attractive brooding guy in form-fitting attire.

what i mean is, how does that kind of relationship make sense? the only thing i can think of is some variation of stockholm syndrome. i can recognize that it doesn't make sense because i'm older. but if 12 year olds read a lot of books like that of which there are quite a lot on the shelves currently, aside from them just not reading something of any literary value, how does it impact their psychological development? i think some kids (probably more girls than boys) could actually grow up believing to some degree that uncaring, violent, creepy, potentially dangerous, and/or non-human beings are somehow ideal love interests or sexual partners.

there isn't anything admirable, romantic, or appealing about the fantasy of being with someone like that or being like that yourself, let alone if it were a reality. there is nothing glamorous about it, especially when you know where the conceptions of many mythological or supernatural creatures came from. i love all kinds of supernatural works- fantasy, science fiction, gothic fiction, etc- but i like it as it really is. a vampire for example, if such existed, would be someone you'd be suspicious of at first and perhaps try to figure out what was up with them, but after that you'd stay away. and if they got you alone somehow, you'd either attack them or run like hell. you wouldn't stand there admiring how they look and praying for them to kiss you. sexuality in traditional horror and gothic literature, if present, is often heavily veiled and sublimated (which makes sense considering that lot of this literature was written in the victorian era). you have to look for it and interpret it, it's not staring you in the face like in modern teen lit. i guess in one way it's good that the male characters in teen lit are like the one i described above, because can you imagine some naive teenage girl getting it on with a *true* gothic character like dracula or frankenstein instead? and yeah, i'm sure there's fanfic of that somewhere, but nothing like that exists in the actual books Dracula and Frankenstein.

speaking of fanfiction, a lot of young adult books really do read like badly written fanfics by kids who know little about real life, actual human relationships, and often the canon characters themselves too, so naturally their writing reflects that. lack of experience can explain some bad fanfic and mary-sue female characters, but idk why *adults* are writing actual books in that style. is it really something they would have wanted to read when they were 12 or 14?

there's a lot to be done with the supernatural as a genre that does not include romanticizing and thus minimizing the idea of supernatural beings and situations. i believe that we can understand a lot about what it is to be human by reading about humans dealing with the unknown. the unknown is powerful, and it's alluring not when it supposedly takes the form of a "hot half-guy half-wolf" or what have you, but because we're driven to want to know the truth even in some of the most frightening situations. and when we discover and face it, what then? does it save us, or destroy us, or something else entirely? how do we continue once we've been there? these themes are elemental, and that's what horror and sci fi and gothic lit and fairy tales and fantasy all involve.

all that said, i feel compelled to write out a list of examples of books (some for teens and some for adults) that i consider to deserve the label "supernatural fiction." i'll organize it by the types of beings/creatures commonly seen in that genre that now appear in young adult fiction as pop culture icons, sex symbols, and angsty upper-middle-class kids who "no one understands." i suggest these to anyone who isn't interested in the modern rendition of classic supernatural figures. i'll start with some alternatives for the persephone/hades "retelling" book that i was describing earlier.

greek myth- the third book of the His Dark Materials series has an amazing depiction of the afterlife that's somewhat based on greek mythology (but the previous books must be read first for context and also because they're great). also, The Cronus Chronicles was a mythological fantasy series i enjoyed as a kid.

vampires- as i've mentioned earlier, Dracula, Carmilla, and The Moth Diaries. i'm also adding Let Me In and The Society of S.

werewolves- well... that's a hard one seeing that werewolves aren't that interesting or awesome to begin with >.> maybe Benighted. a good book about just straight wolves would be The Sight (i normally don't like books where the characters are animals, but i loved this one as a kid, along with its prequel, Firebringer).

zombies- this is also hard because in general zombie books are actually quite bad, in terms of writing or content or both, but most often content. and coming from someone who's somewhat obsessed with zombies, this means something xD the ones i can think of that are good are The Reapers are the Angels, World War Z, and Home Delivery, a short story by stephen king.

aliens- somehow they're fairly immune to the current trends in teen fiction, fortunately. i recommend The Day of the Triffids, A Wrinkle in Time, Childhood's End, The Space Odyssey series (and the lesser-known Time Odyssey series, though that one doesn't have any extraterrestrials that i remember), Stranger in a Strange Land as i said before, and a lot of other stuff by heinlein... almost anything really. can't go wrong there if you want classic science fiction.

ghosts and spirits- Dial-a-Ghost was a favorite of mine. later in middle school i loved Ghost Drum and Ghost Song, two loosely-related books based on old russian folk tales. also the Sevenwaters Trilogy, based on celtic mythology.

in addition, anything by john bellairs falls under the genre of fantasy/supernatural, though it definitely verges on the creepy side. i obsessively read all those books when i was 10 or so and later thought of them as a version of stephen king for pre-teens.

i also need to add another, broader category:

utopian, dystopian, (post)apocalyptic- okay, this one's long... Lost Horizon, Island, Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm, The Dispossessed, Paradise Lost, The Inferno, The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Anthem, The Secret History of Moscow, Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, The Windsinger, Genesis (a novella, not the book of the Bible), The Road, Far North, The Hunger Games, and Memories of the Future (a collection of short stories).

seriously, there's a ton of good stuff out there, it's just not often found in the teen section these days.

lastly, anime fansubs- i don't care whether an anime i'm watching has "official" subtitles or fansubs, and it shouldn't matter as long as the translation makes sense. i know there's a lot of examples on the internet of awkward and grammatically incorrect fansubs and they're hilarious, however, i haven't encountered very many first-hand while watching something. but with this one show i'm watching currently (When The Cicadas Cry), for some reason in the version i'm watching whoever translated it felt the need to stick in a million translator's notes at the top of the screen instead of just translating things directly. it's hard to read both the subtitle and a translator note in the span of 3 seconds before the screen changes.

for example, there was one where "watanagashi festival" was explained in a translator note that went on over at least 3 screens with 2 lines of text per screen. watanagashi means cotton-floating, and it'd suffice to just use that english term from the beginning. knowing the whole history of the tradition isn't needed to understand what's going on in this situation.

another example, and my favorite so far, is the following: a character mentions another character's "nii-nii," and explains the term by saying "nii-nii is nii-nii." yeah, that clears it up xD and then off to the side are the kanji for "nii-nii," and at the top of the screen is a long translator note explaining how they translate to "elder brother." how come elder brother wasn't just said from the start?

then there's ones that aren't explaining a japanese phrase that's been kept in japanese in the sub, but instead are adding information that's not at all necessary to the viewer. for example, in one scene a character says that someone had been demoned away by the village shrine god. then a translator note appears comparing the kanji for "demoned away" with the kanji for "spirited away." so what? it's not relevant.

also, in this fansub, the translator assumes that people know what certain words mean, so they leave these words untranslated. goodbye is left as "sayonara," cicadas is left as "higurashi," honorifics are often left on, etc. most people probably do know these words, but it looks dumb when it's not in english thoroughly.

nevertheless, i'm not bothering to find another version with better subtitles, because then i'd miss out on all this linguistic fun xD in addition, the show is so awesome that none of it matters anyway. i'm gonna watch the next episode right now.

Actually it's almost 8 months old. All i've had to do since like January was just write the ending, but for some reason i didn't, until now, so it was easy to finish and put up after i made myself.


The River-Walker

Ciarin is lonely, Ciarin is sad.
Ciarin would be a happy girl
If she hadn't been so bad.
She spilt the sacred water
And broke the precious stones.
Now Mother will not love her
Until the earth receives her bones.

Every winter I dream. During the deepest nights of the year I see in my mind a young girl with long, long hair, and she is walking on a river. Branches of willows frame each bank, flowing softly in the wind. She walks on the surface of the water like I walk down the road, leisurely and assured in her step. Her face betrays the confidence in her movements, though. I could drown in the depth of the sorrow that I see in her eyes. But when I wake up, I can never remember what color they were.

------------

When I was a child I told my father about her one night. He was tucking me into bed and said, "Goodnight, sweet dreams," as he gave me a kiss on the forehead. I looked up at him and said, "They would be sweet if the girl wasn't so sad."

"What girl?" he asked me.

And so I described her. Her long black hair that turned the water behind her black as she walked, her gray dress that clung wetly to her pale blue skin, her eyes whose color I couldn't know but that were like windows not into a soul but into an abyss. I told him of the wide river and its green willows and the sun that always shown brightly in blinding contrast to the darkness that walked beneath it. He listened to me closely, taking in each word.

When I finished he sat quietly for a moment, considering my dream, and then said, "It sounds like you've seen a river-walker."

"A river-walker," I repeated. The name fit the strange girl perfectly.

------------

I have therapy every other evening at this time of year. I sit in a chair in front of a large, bright fluorescent lamp with my eyes closed. The warmth envelops my skin and even though my eyes are shut, I see light behind my eyelids. I think I was in my early teens when I was diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder. Light therapy combined with a mild anti-depressant is the best treatment, my psychologist said.

I've never told her about my dreams, about the girl, the river-walker, who haunts them. I've never told anyone except my father. As the years have passed I've gotten older with them, but the girl is always the same.

------------

My father took me down to the river one cold winter day after I'd shared my dream with him. "There is nothing to fear from her," he said. "She only wants someone to see her and care about her."

I stood next to him at the river's icy edge. The outlines of the bare trees on the opposite side of the water against the gray sky cast a stark mood over my child self. I shivered as the wind blew strands of hair across my face.

"Why me?" I asked. "Why did she choose my dreams and not someone else's?"

"I don't truly know why," said my father quietly. "But river-walkers always choose people with kind souls. People who couldn't ever hurt another person."

It was awhile before I spoke again. When I did I asked, "Why is she sad all the time? Why does she turn the water black when she walks?"

------------

Soon, soon I will talk to her, and I will ask her the questions I asked my father all those years ago. He hadn't had an answer. River-walker lore is not widely known. People visited by dreams like mine are few.

Every day in the winter I look out the window of my fifth-floor apartment, see the buildings across the street and hear the traffic below, and I long to return to the countryside where I grew up. But where I am makes no difference to her. She chose me early on and she has never left me. In a way, I take comfort from this. She'll be with me until my last winter.

I need to ask her the questions that haunt me. I have been able to speak to her in each of my dreams for the past few days, and each time she has turned her empty eyes a little more towards my voice. Soon, soon I will fall into their depths and I will know her, my river-walker.

------------

I only found out several years afterwards that the place on the bank of the river where my father had taken me as a child that winter day was the place where my mother drowned. I don't remember her. There had been a bridge, old and rotting, across the water. After it collapsed under her the current carried away both the wooden pieces and the woman who had borne me not too many months earlier. They found her body some miles downstream. She was buried in the churchyard on a morning in January; I visited her gravestone for the first time as a young adolescent. That's all I know.

I used to wonder sometimes if she became a river-walker. Somehow I don't think she has. I can't picture her with soul-reaching sorrow in her gaze. From the photographs I've seen she was a bright, laughing woman with curly hair and big green eyes. Not like the girl in my dreams. Dying in the river does not turn you into someone like that by itself. No one has told me this but I know it to be true nevertheless. There has to be something else, something that happens before death. Your fate is sealed before your breathing ceases.

------------

She is coming. I wait among the willow branches, and as I wait the wind carries a sound to my ears - she is singing. The melody holds both great sorrow and great beauty, like her. As she comes closer I begin to make out the faint words of her song. "Ciarin is lonely, Ciarin is sad..."

Ciarin. The song she sings is about herself. Throughout all the years, I never stopped to wonder if she had a name.

I speak her name aloud now, from the shade of the willows. This time her head turns quickly in my direction, and instead of only me seeing her, we see each other. She has stopped her flowing stride down the river, and for a long time we stay still and silent. Blackness swirls around her bare feet.

When she speaks her voice is quiet but clear. "I am ready," she says, "to tell you my story. You have spoken my name... you care about me."

"I do."

------------

She was only a child, but she knew no love from her family. She whispers this with a small smile and faraway eyes. Her eyes are clear, I see now. The color of water. Ciarin lived a long time ago, in another country where people once dwelt in harmony with the spirits they believed inhabited the trees and the stones and the lakes. In front of me she appears to be no more than ten, but Ciarin is old, old. The story she tells will be known only to me.

"We honored the gods at each full and new moon," she begins. "They watched over us, over the entire land. The ceremonies were beautiful, sacred things. I always knew this. But what I did never matched what I felt. My parents would tell me over and over what to do, what magic words to say, which stone to place where and when to sprinkle precious water from the pool over the ground. I couldn't remember anything, though. I stumbled through the rituals while my brothers and sisters glowed with the beauty of the Goddess's affection. And then one day when I was ten years old, my mother forbade me from any participation in the ceremonies both in the village and in our own home. My mistakes would bring a curse, she said, upon us all.

"So I went to the forest each morning. I took refuge below the trees and by the stream that carried the pure water to the pool. I made my own offerings to the gods and to the Fair Folk, beings from the Otherworld. My favorite one was a little house made of sticks and moss. I sat on a stone all day putting it together and when I was alone, with my mind calm and in my own space, my fingers did not tremble. The house was perfect, and it stood for many cycles of the moon. Although I visited it occasionally, I never did catch a glimpse of the spirit who took such good care of it through the seasons.

"Then everything changed. It was the evening of Samhain, the night when the souls of the dead may return to the realm of the living until the first ray of sunlight appears. I was to stay home while the rest of my family and the villagers went to the fields for the communal rites. And I would have done so, lighting my own candles and saying my own prayers, if my only friend had not died of sickness a month earlier. I'd never gotten to say goodbye. So I waited until my family had left, and then I made my way in darkness towards the flickering firelight in the field. The light called to me; perhaps I would see my friend's face once more, even if in shadow.

"And see her I did. Her faint visage appeared among those of many villagers who had passed on over the years. I couldn't help it; I cried out in my happiness when she saw me and smiled. The people nearby saw me too, though, and they knew I wasn't supposed to be there. They made signs with their hands against evil and fled from me fearfully, closer to the warmth of the bonfires, leaving me in the cold. And I was mad. 'I hate you,' I screamed. 'I hate you all!'

"The High Priestess appeared, her face shrouded with a long veil. I had barely spoken to her before, but she knew of me, of course. 'What is this child doing here?' she said with a gasp, and then from within the crowd that was forming my parents stepped forward. 'I am so sorry, my Lady,' my mother said. The High Priestess commanded her to remove me at once, 'before she brings all the dark forces from the Otherworld into this village.' But I ran, sobbing, before my parents could grab hold of me.

"I took refuge in the forest, as I had many times before. This time, however, I would not return home.

"Days and nights passed. Deep within the protection of shady oaks and pines I made a crude dwelling, like the fairy hut but large enough for myself. A stream flowed nearby that provided me with water and small fish, and there were edible roots if I dug in the right places. I spent my time wandering the forest and searching for the things I needed to survive. But winter was coming, and I was alone, without enough food and without warmth. The fires I made became too weak as the coldness increased. After the first cycle of the moon my clothing rested in tatters, fully exposing my bare skin to the bite of the wind. When the first snow came, I could barely move from my hut. But even then, I never gave a thought to returning to the village, to my parents who hated me, to my brothers and sisters who taunted me and the other children who scorned and feared me. I was dying, but I was just a child. What does a child know about death?

"I knew the winter solstice was coming. Despite my hunger and my chilled bones, I resolved to hold my own ceremony on that special night, to thank the Goddess for watching over me thus far. Later, when the fever came upon me, I struggled to stay awake and keep my mind clear. And then, when I finally realized that I wouldn't be able to live much longer, perhaps not even until the solstice, I was sent a vision. The swiftly flowing stream whose water I had sipped and fed from many times and used to bless my little shelter. I was to go to the stream in my last hours.

"So I went. The distance between my hut and the stream that had once taken me mere minutes now took an agonizing amount of immeasurable time. I crawled on my hands and knees over wet leaves and thin patches of snow on the forest floor. The sun was setting when I crested the small slope above the stream and looked down at last to the water. But there was something different. Above me the sun seemed to be shining even though it was night, and below me flowed not the narrow clear ribbon from my vision, but a wide, dark river that I had never seen before.

"The coldness of the river beckoned to my burning skin. In the haze of my fever I understood that this was the reprieve that the gods were giving me, a death in the embrace of the elements, a return to where I had come from. And so with the last of my strength I stood up and spread my arms out like wings as I walked slowly, shakily, into the river.

"'Goddess forgive me,' I whispered to the breeze against my dirty, tear-streaked face. "But I can't keep going anymore. Take me home. There is nothing for me in this land but the land itself.'

"With those words I closed my eyes and let myself sink beneath the surface. There I floated in the darkness between worlds, consumed by the fire and ice flowing throughout my body, until all sensation, all agony both past and present, began to fade away.

"I know the Mother forgave and loved me, in both life and death. But my mother never did."

------------

The river lies in silence as Ciarin finishes her tale. Its black water flows almost unnoticeably, barely stirring the ends of the willow branches that dip into its surface. The young, pale girl stands in her weightless way on the water with her head bowed. When I reach out to touch her hair, my hand feels nothing.

"Oh, Ciarin..." I say softly. But before I can continue, she speaks again.

"You have been everything to me that I never had, even though I am dead. Friend, sister, mother... when you were old enough to understand, I knew I'd find my peace through you."

I struggle to speak words over the stillness around us. "What happened to you was wrong," I say. "But even though it can't be changed, I've always cared for you, even as a child."

Ciarin lifts her head now, and I see that a tinge of rosiness graces her cheeks. And her eyes... they are no longer clear and colorless, but the lightest shade of icy blue.

------------

That was not the last time I saw her, only the last time I saw her as a pale shadow of herself. Each of the many winters since then, when we've joined each other in my dreams, she has changed almost imperceptibly from the year before. I first thought I was imagining it. It was only recently, when she walked on the river in a dress of white instead of gray, that I knew we would soon be parting. Her hair is a rich brown now, in contrast to my thin colorless strands, and the water behind her stays clear when she walks. Just as I know by these changes that she is almost ready to go on from her place between worlds, I know too that I will soon leave where I am now and join my father and, at last, my mother, if such a reunion exists.

Ciarin and I had not spoken to each other since the time she told me her story more than half my lifetime ago, until my last dream. Before then she was content simply to walk down the river side by side. As the years have gone on, she has visited my dreams less and less. It has been several weeks since the second and final time she spoke to me.

"I'm at peace now," she said, after turning to look at me. "Thank you."

I took in her deep blue eyes and her smile. I could only return the smile falteringly before she began to fade away into whiteness.

When I awoke, there were tears on my wrinkled cheeks. This year's winter is coming to an end, and I won't be here to see the next. As I had always known she would, Ciarin has stayed with me until my last winter, until she could at long last be free. But what happens after death to those of us who aren't fated to river-walking is yet a mystery.

This is as done as it'll ever be... I think it's the longest completed story I have so far.


My Sister Lenora

In my earliest memory, there is crying. I sat on the floor of my room playing with my dolls. The door was open and I could see down the hallway into my sister's room. Her screams echoed piercingly and I tried to block them out by humming, softly at first and then more loudly, until I was rocking back and forth on my heels with my hands clamped over my ears. My dolls lay neglected around me. I saw my mother and father each take one of my sister's arms and try to lift her to her feet, but she kept kicking and punching even as she lay on her back in the doorway.

"No!" I remember her shouting. "No, don't make me, please!"

"Lenora," my mother said, "you will be fine. There's nothing to be scared of." But my sister flew at her like an animal, scratching and biting. My mother's screams then filled the air, and as my father tried to calm them both, I buried my head in my knees. Tears still fell down my cheeks even though I squeezed my eyes shut.

-----------

I'd always known there was something wrong with my sister Lenora. That day was only one of many similar scenes that would follow. We lived in a fairly old farmhouse on the edge of town and Lenora and I each had a bedroom on either end of the second floor hallway. It was the hallway that made me realize as a little girl that my older sister was different.

Lenora was afraid of it. When she walked from the top of the stairs to her room, she would do so trembling and with both hands pressed against the wall. She kept her face to the wall as well, never looking behind or in front of her. Then around her sixth birthday, that was not enough anymore. I remember waking up one morning to find stones about the size of my palm taped along the wall. As I reached up to touch one, Lenora appeared in the entrance of her room, gripping the doorframe. She said with big eyes, "It's okay now, Mattie. You'll be safe if you hold on to these stones when you walk."

My mother and father took all the stones down. "This is ridiculous, Lenora," they said. "You won't just go down the hall normally, here or at school. You won't cross the road. You won't stay on the path anywhere."

It was true; my sister was always straying from where she was supposed to be. Her face became a mask of terror anytime she had to be in a long open space. Roads, paths, and sidewalks were mostly bad, but if they were curvy and not straight then there were times when she was okay. Halls and corridors were the worst, and nothing could make her believe otherwise. She lived in fear in our own home.

She tried to tell me once about her fear. It was before she put up the stones. I must have been no more than three. She crept along the wall as usual as we approached my bedroom, and then she shut the door. She whispered even though we were alone. "You don't see it, do you?" she asked.

I just looked at her.

Lenora made a gesture with her hands, like she was gripping a floppy tube of some kind. "The long, clear thing? Reaching down?"

"What long clear? What reach down?"

"The thing, the..." But even though she was older than me, she still did not have enough words. She quickly rubbed her eyes with her hands, trying not to cry in front of me. Throughout everything, Lenora believed I was in danger too, and she took it upon herself to protect me from her own nightmare.

I scooted closer to her on my bed. "Don't cry," I said as I put my small arms around her. "Don't cry." She hugged me back, whispering "Oh, Mattie," into my hair.

I must have mentioned the long, clear thing at some point in front of my parents, because they started telling her to stop putting ideas into my head. "You're scaring your sister with this nonsense," I heard my father say once during another long battle with Lenora over her fear of the hallway. "Matilda needs you as a role model, someone she can look up to. Be a big girl and show her that monsters aren't real."

She just kept sobbing and pleading with him not to make her walk down the hallway without touching the wall.

I think my parents believed that Lenora simply harbored an irrational fear similar to those of many children her age. Creatures in the closet, the basement, under the bed... why not in the hallway? But then things got worse the summer that I was six years old. Lenora had affixed a string from her doorknob to the stairway bannister, and on every trip to and from her room she gripped it as tight as though her life depended on it. My parents got rid of it every day, sometimes multiple times a day, but Lenora was relentless.

One night I woke up to the sound of something opening my window from the outside and climbing in. I froze, trying not to breathe. But as the moonlight fell across her face, I realized it was only my sister. "Wh- what are you doing?" I said, my voice shaking. She told me that she wanted to know if she could get from her room to mine by going along the porch roof.

"But you could fall," I said, frightened. "You could get really hurt."

Lenora put her hands on my shoulders. "Listen, Mattie. I can't do it anymore, even with the string. It's always there... everywhere in the spaces behind and in front of me... what does it want from me? The hallway's the worst because I can't avoid it. But now I can, if I do this! You can't tell Mom and Dad about this, okay? Promise me you won't."

I trembled under the intensity and the fear in her eyes. I started to shake my head - I could not let my sister put herself in danger - but she saw my hesitance and yelled, "Promise me!" Her shout woke up my mother, who rushed into my room and found Lenora there. When she asked what Lenora was doing, my sister set her mouth and didn't say a word, but I started crying. "She was walking on the porch roof," I choked. "She's going to fall and get hurt."

The rest of the night was a whirl of chaos that I don't clearly remember, except for the moment when Lenora gave me the most petrifying glare possible. Behind it I saw both anger and fright. I had told her secret at the first opportunity, had erased the small hope she had for a way to escape some of the terror she faced every day. I squinted my eyes while she and my parents shouted at each other in confusion, alarm, and helplessness. Like that day in the first memory, my tears still found a way out between my eyelids.

This was about the time they started taking her to see someone, a doctor who would help not her body but her mind. I never had much to do as a child; whereas Lenora went out as much as possible to play happily in the yard or with a friend where nothing haunted her, I preferred to stay inside and read or draw. Being quiet and unobtrusive, I often overheard discussions between my mother and father about Lenora and the appointments they took her to.

"I'm no shrink but I know it's not normal. She's almost nine years old, for God's sake," my father said shortly after Lenora started seeing the doctor. "Does this guy have any idea why she's still afraid of imaginary things?"

"Not yet," said my mother. "He wants to talk with her a couple more times before making a diagnosis." There was a pause, and then she continued, "I'm worried about what this could be doing to Matilda. Lenora at least has friends, for now. Matilda doesn't seem to be close to anyone. I just think about everything she does, the screaming, the dramatics, tying string to the door all the time and climbing in her window from the roof... what does Matilda make of it?"

"Have you asked her? Maybe we should - "

"Yes, I tried. She didn't say much. I don't know if she really understood me. But she was worried about Lenora. She knows something's wrong."

I don't remember my mother asking me about what I thought of Lenora, but she was right - I was worried about my sister, whether I realized it or not at the time.

Lenora began to change as we got older, and not in a promising way. She started to keep more to herself, isolating everyone except me. The friends she'd had before gradually faded out of her daily life. And the less she talked to others, the more she talked to me. I became privy to all her mood swings, all her inner thoughts, questions, and fears that she hardly ever shared with anyone else. Even our parents experienced only a fraction of what I did from Lenora. I remember sitting on the window seat in the family room one day, looking out at the bright sun and clear sky, and wishing I could once again see a matching glow on my sister's face. But Lenora was leaving childhood and I had to watch her go to a place I couldn't follow.

I started to truly realize the severity of everything when she told me about the voice. She got me alone one weekend and said that the thing in the hallway was telling her to go with it.

"Go where?" I asked, for I believed her. Looking back, I see that I always believed my sister whenever she talked about what she saw.

"I don't know." Lenora's hair hung in her face and when I tried to brush it aside, she turned her face away from me. "Somewhere far away. It said, 'Come, reach your arms upwards, and I will bring you back. Come home.'" Then she added quickly, "But see, it can't get me unless I'm willing. I figured that out awhile ago, way before I started hearing it speak. It can't touch me if I keep myself against the wall. It's only when I'm out in the open, when there's nothing to anchor me..." She trailed off.

I stayed silent. Even though I believed her, it didn't mean I understood. What was the long, clear thing that she saw coming towards her? Why was it telling her to come home when she was already there?

Lenora had an appointment with her doctor the week after she told me what the voice had said. That afternoon when my mother brought her back, she went up to her room and shut her door. I knew not to disturb her when she shut the door because it meant she needed to think, as she had told me once when I walked in on her curled up in a ball on her bed.

"What are you doing?" I'd asked.

"Thinking," she had murmured, not lifting her head. "Go away."

So I left her alone when I saw her closed door and instead stood on the stairwell and listened to my parents in the kitchen downstairs. I couldn't make out what they were saying, so I crept farther down and hid behind the corner. From there I could hear their strained, worried voices.

"He said she seems to think that the 'thing' is trying to take her somewhere else, as if she feels this isn't where she really belongs," my mother said.

There was a pause, and then my father said, "Does- does he think she knows somehow?"

"No, he doesn't see how she could know. But he thinks we should tell her. She is eleven, after all. We can't put it off much longer, and we shouldn't."

Another pause. "Alright, then."

I resolved to be there when they told Lenora about whatever it was. I had overheard things by accident when I was younger, but I now made a conscious habit of hiding behind walls and corners to listen. I felt safer that way, knowing what was happening, because my parents did not tell me much about it on their own. Lenora consumed most of their energy, and they had their jobs to stay on top of throughout it all. I on the other hand did not demand a lot of their attention.

However, they chose to keep Lenora home from school the next day while sending me off to the bus stop alone. I knew they were going to tell her something important, and knowing that I wouldn't be there to find out along with her made me restless and irritable throughout school.

"How are you doing, Matilda?" my teacher asked gently at the end of the day. "You didn't seem to be with us today. Are you alright?"

Unlike Lenora, I could not put on a happy face when I wanted to hide the instability of my world from people on the outside. So I told my teacher tearfully that there was a monster after my sister.

I did not know it, but my teacher was well aware of my family's struggles. She tried to comfort me by saying assuredly that there were no such things as monsters. I was not convinced, of course. I had seen Lenora's face when she was terrified. It wasn't possible for her to make up something like that, no matter how good of an actor she could be in other situations. I would have stayed and pressed the point, but if I did so then I would miss the bus and have to walk home, and I wanted to get back as soon as possible.

The house was quiet when I came in the front door. No, more than that - an emptiness seemed to weigh heavily in all the rooms. The lights were all off downstairs and the kitchen was cold. The tap dripped steadily, but to me the sound only heightened the silence.

I soon discovered I was alone in the house. My parents and Lenora were nowhere to be found. Despondent, I sat down on the couch in the family room and turned on the TV.

About half an hour later, I heard a car pull into the driveway. The door then banged open and I heard my sister crying loudly, followed by my father telling her to go to her room until dinner. "And think about what you've done," he called after her as she ran up the stairs. "Don't ever put us through this again!"

I peered around the corner just as my mother came looking for me. "There you are," she said. She leaned against the wall and rubbed her forehead with her hand. "Don't worry, it's okay now. Lenora... well, she got very upset a little while ago and left the house. We had to go after her in the car and didn't find her until just now, down by the lake. I... I'm so sorry you had to see this. We were so worried."

My mother sat me down and put her arm around my shoulders. I leaned into her and listened to her breathing as it gradually slowed.

When I went upstairs that evening, I opened my sister's door even though it was closed. Instead of lying in a ball on her bed, however, she was writing furiously in a notebook.

"What happened, Lenora?" I asked.

She paused and looked up. I expected her to yell at me to get out of her room, but she put the notebook aside and motioned for me to sit next to her.

"It all makes sense now," she said quietly.

"What makes sense?"

"The thing I see in long open spaces. How it's been trying to get me. What it says about coming home."

"But this is home."

Her eyes were dull as she said, "No, it isn't, Matilda. Not for me." My sister had stopped calling me Mattie a while ago. Maybe that was when she first began to leave me.

There was a silence, and then she continued, "Matilda... I'm adopted."

I just looked at her. "What's adopted?"

"Mom and Dad aren't my real parents; they're only yours. Someone else had me and then gave me away."

I think I understood, but I didn't want to. "You have another mom and dad?" I asked, even though I knew the answer. It made sense despite the sinking feeling in my stomach - I looked like my parents, with dark hair and eyes, whereas Lenora had pale skin and light, almost colorless hair and eyes.

Lenora became silent for a moment. She picked up her notebook again and flipped the pages back until she reached the beginning. "I had to think about it," she said at last. "That's why I left. I ran down to the lake where I could be alone. Because I started getting this idea, when Mom was telling me I was adopted. I started thinking about how much it could explain." Her eyes were bright, like she was about to cry, but no tears fell. I found myself captivated by her intensity, and I listened without saying a word as she told me her unbelievable theory.

"Do you know what a portal is? It's a... it's like a door, between two worlds. There are portals in a lot of books. Characters use them to get from one dimension to another in hardly any time." She gestured towards her bookshelves on the other side of the room, which were lined with the fantasy and science fiction that she sometimes pored over while in one of her occasional calm moods.

"Think of it this way," Lenora continued, sensing that I wasn't following. She turned the page in her notebook and showed me a diagram. There was one point labelled A and another labelled B, with a line drawn connecting them. "If you want to get from point A to point B in the quickest amount of time, you'd follow this straight path between them, right?"

I nodded. Then she pointed to another diagram below it, where point A and point B were directly next to each other.

"But what if there was an even faster way?" she asked, excitement rising in her voice. "What if you could... fold the space between A and B, so that getting from A to B would just be like taking a single step forward? That's what portals do. They are places where space and time don't exist. You can go anywhere, by just taking one step."

This was still confusing to me, but I began to understand what she was saying with the help of the diagrams. Then she turned the page again. There was another drawing, of something I recognized but had never seen. "It's the long, clear thing," I said.

"Yes. It's a portal, Matilda."

"But... portals are only in your books," I said, puzzled.

"I had thought so too," said Lenora quietly. She returned to the notebook. When she found her place, she said, "The only thing I don't understand is where this portal goes. But wherever it goes... that's where I came from, before I ended up wherever Mom and Dad adopted me from. That's why the voice calls for me to come home."

She then grabbed my hand. "But I promise I won't go. I'm never going. This is where belong and what I know and I won't leave you! I'd kill myself before I'd leave! So don't worry, okay?" Tears gleamed in her eyes, quivering in the corners, and I could only nod repetitively under the intensity of my sister's gaze.

Things finally reached a breaking point after Lenora found out she was adopted and told me about the portal. Starting that summer, she stayed downstairs almost all the time. She was too big for my father to carry her up the stairs and down the hall to her room like he'd do sometimes when she was younger and refusing to go on her own. Instead, he and my mother would beg and plead with her for what seemed like an endless amount of time nearly every night when it came time for bed. Lenora was in middle school by now, and had started sleeping much less than she did as a child. I think it was this, along with what to them was extremely irrational behavior, that frustrated and scared my parents, rather than the fact that she simply wasn't sleeping in her own bed. That was only one manifestation of a problem that ran much deeper.

Being apart from me during the day since we attended different schools profoundly affected Lenora. She had narrowed her entire world down to just me, her younger sister, drifting away from her friends and isolating herself from our parents and all other adults who tried to help her. And then suddenly I wasn't there at lunch or passing her in the hallways or riding home on the bus with her. She was alone.

At the beginning of the year she was made to see the student counselor at school to discuss how she wasn't fitting in, but while there she just said, "I don't want to talk to you. I only talk to Matilda." I don't think she went again after that first meeting. Every day when the middle school bus dropped her off an hour after I'd gotten home, I ran downstairs to meet her since she no longer went upstairs, and we would go to the basement and talk while sitting on an old stuffed couch. Actually it would be more accurate to say that Lenora did most of the talking and I listened. It was clear that she missed me during the day, and she didn't mind if I said little. To have me next to her, to be safe, was enough.

"I'm not going to school anymore," she announced one day. "I hate it there, and I miss you too much."

"But you have to go," I said, puzzled. My understanding was still that of a child - you followed the rules, and the rules kept you safe. Lenora's increasing deviance unsettled me. I knew she had her reasons, but to me they weren't worth it.

I tried to make her see this, but she only said, "I can't do it anymore. It's there, in the hall at school. I can't get away. It goes wherever I go. If I avoid it here, it finds me there."

"Then it'll find you somewhere else even if you stop going to school," I pointed out.

Lenora huddled into herself and said softly, "I know. But I'd rather deal with it when I'm alone. I can't be alone at school; there are always so many people around. They stare at me every time I'm rushing through the hallway between classes. Some kids laugh at me. I hate it, I hate them all! And sometimes it's so crowded I can't get my hand on the wall! I'm less safe there than here at home."

I told Lenora to just stay at home then. She said she couldn't, because our parents would keep fighting with her and making her go to school every day. I began to see that she was trapped, and it scared me. This was the breaking point I'd somehow known was going to come eventually. People can't live habitually with such stress and fear and still keep a sound mind. I know that there are many who believe my sister's mind was arguably never sound to begin with, but sometime during the winter of her first year in middle school, she broke apart completely.

She decided that the best way to avoid going to school was to initially get on the bus before our parents left to go into town for work, and then, once at the school, to sneak away and go down to the lake. She took to packing a lunch in her backpack and eating on the lakeshore, bundled up in a large coat. Nothing troubled her there, she said. Perhaps the portal was unable to appear over water for some reason. "I look at the surface of the lake," she read to me from her notebook, "and I am overcome with serenity that I don't feel anywhere else."

Her time at the lake couldn't last forever, though. After about a week, both the school and our parents figured out what Lenora was doing. She'd been to hardly any classes, done even less homework despite being one of the brightest students in her grade, and the counselor she'd seen that time wanted to refer her to a local clinic for an evaluation.

I overheard my mother one the phone one afternoon with someone from Lenora's school. She started crying as she said, "Believe me, we're trying to handle this as best we can... yes, I know there are issues, but we're not checking our daughter into any hospital!" I asked Lenora later what my mother meant by "hospital," and Lenora said, "Mental hospital. Loony bin. You know, for crazies."

That was when I realized that people were starting to think my sister was crazy because she saw and felt things that they didn't. Throughout it all I never thought so, though, not even when I found her in the bathroom a couple weeks later, submerged in red water in the tub.

I screamed; it was all I could do. I stood there screaming and screaming until someone, my mother or my father, pushed me aside and flew to the edge of the tub. My limp sister was lifted out of the water and they knelt over her saying, "Come on, Lenora! Breathe!" My mother whipped her head around and yelled, "Call 911, Matilda!"

I ran frantically down the stairs to the phone in the kitchen. Minutes later, sirens were blaring in the driveway and the house was full of uniformed EMTs. They carried Lenora on a stretcher out to an ambulance. It had begun to snow, and she was covered heavily in blankets. Even still, some drops of red fell against the white, searing my eyes. I watched out the screen door as they placed her inside and the ambulance rushed off. My mother had gone with her while my father remained at the house with me. He had picked me up and was balancing me on his hip in the doorway. He hadn't done that in years.

My sister never came back to live with us. I didn't know it then as my father held me while the ambulance drove away, but that was the last time I'd see her at home. She had hurt herself very badly on purpose, my parents explained to me the next day, and so she would be staying from then on in a hospital where she could be taken care of.

"But we can take care of her here, right?" I insisted. For I knew what they didn't - Lenora needed me.

But they shook their heads and tears fell down my mother's face as she whispered, "We can't, not anymore."

It was Lenora's suicide attempt that finally made my parents realize they were not able to look out for her no matter how much they loved and wanted to help her. She needed to be protected from herself and that meant strict supervision and therapy and medications whose names I couldn't pronounce. Despite their earlier insistence to her school that they had everything under control, Lenora was taken away that day to what she had called the loony bin.

A few days later I went looking for her notebook. I thought it might have some answers, and I was right. During the countless hours I'd spent with her in the basement, Lenora had never told me that she truly wanted to die, but there it was, written in her large, messy script - "Not even the lake is an escape anymore, only an illusion. The portal finally found me there yesterday. It came out of the sky like a net trying to scoop me up. When it stopped just above me, I heard that horrible voice calling my name. 'Lenora, Lenora. Come back, it is time.' 'How dare you!' I screamed. 'Leave me alone! The lake is mine. Mine! This world is mine! I'll kill myself before I go anywhere with you.' I ran away from the shore and into the forest, ignoring a couple of people nearby who were staring at me, alarmed. Let them think I'm crazy. Being crazy, killing myself... I'd do anything to have the luxury of either."

And then on the next page, a single sentence - "I will give up this world, I will give up my life, if it means being free."

I felt betrayed. How could my sister not have told me any of this after promising not to leave me? Had she not realized that in giving up her life, she would have also given up me? I could have helped her, stopped her... but I could not change the past.

I was about to bring Lenora's notebook down to my parents, to show them her theory about the portal and tell them they had it all wrong, that Lenora was not insane but was in fact in danger. But I knew they wouldn't believe me, just as they didn't believe her. The book would remain our secret. I was older now and capable of keeping secrets. If I were ever to have another chance at helping her, I could not ruin it by talking and acting in the same way as Lenora. Just as she hadn't been believed, neither would I.

As I was putting the notebook back on Lenora's shelf, a piece of paper fell out from between the last page and the back cover. On it was written a telephone number; nothing more. On an impulse I stuffed it in the pocket of my pants before returning the notebook to the shelf.

Later that night I dialed the number in my bedroom when my parents were absorbed in a discussion downstairs about arrangements with the mental hospital. For once I situated myself as far away from them as possible in the house instead of trying to get closer and listen in. As I pressed the numbers, I wondered who would be on the other end. Whoever it was must have been important to Lenora.

I'm doing this for her, I thought when I heard the phone start ringing.

On the third ring a woman answered. "Brimwell's Adoption Agency," she said in a friendly tone. "How may I help you?"

I couldn't think of a thing to say. I hung up as the woman said, "Hello?"

I had no idea how Lenora had gotten the number, but I realized that she had been trying to find out where she came from, starting with the orphanage. They had to have gotten her from someone, or somewhere. But she must not have made any progress because there was nothing else in her notebook after the sentence about giving up her life. And now she was gone, unable to do anything more.

My parents brought me along with them for the first time to visit Lenora about a month after she'd entered the hospital. It was her twelfth birthday. We sat in a large common room and I did my best to ignore the several other young mental patients around us and how my sister's shadowed face almost mirrored theirs. In my mind I insisted she was nothing like them.

"We brought you some things, sweetheart," said my mother.

Lenora took our gifts slowly.

"Well, go on. Unwrap them. It's your birthday," my parents encouraged her.

But she stayed still and said, "I don't feel like it now." Her voice was cold. I knew she was angry at our parents for sending her here, but what about me? I had always been there for her. Nevertheless she avoided my gaze.

I had a chance to talk to her later, when my parents were discussing things with her psychologist. The nurse allowed us to go into her room. It was painfully white everywhere - the walls, the bed sheets, the curtains. Maybe that was why Lenora had dressed herself in brown corduroys and a long black sweater. As we sat on her bed she pulled me into a hug so tight I almost choked.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I couldn't talk to you out there with everyone around. But it's safe here."

It was like we were back in the basement again. Lenora talked on while I listened without interrupting. She told me about life in the hospital, the other people there who were around her age, her academic instruction in place of school, and her therapy sessions.

"Therapy," she scoffed. "But of course, I'm the classic 'I'm not crazy, I swear!' They've heard it a million times. There's nothing I can do."

"And what about the... portal?" I asked apprehensively.

Her sarcastic demeanor vanished. "In the hallways and in the common room. Wide open spaces, same as at home." And just like that she went silent, whereas only a minute before she had been talking rapidly as if to make up for all the time we had been apart.

"So do you mostly stay in here?"

"I try," she finally answered. "But they always drag me out sooner or later. To 'help' me." Lenora rolled her eyes, trying to feign annoyance, but I knew that beneath that she was still the same scared girl I'd always known.

Then I remembered what I had to ask her. "Lenora, what's Brimwell's Adoption Agency?"

She looked at me a moment and then muttered, "Darn. Can you throw that telephone number out when you get home? They can't know I was looking through their files."

I knew she meant our parents, and I said yes.

"It's where they got me," she continued. "But where was I before that? How did I get from out there," she gestured out the window to the vast sky above, "to here? I called them right before I tried to... before I came here."

"What did they say?" I asked, remembering the blank pages in her notebook that held no record of her findings.

Lenora's gaze fell downwards. "It was snowing, the woman said. In the morning they just found me wrapped in blankets in front of the door. I was left there in the night."

My sister's voice had dropped to a whisper and I could barely hear her. "Oh," I said softly, seeing her beginning to cry.

"I pretended to be Mom when I called Brimwell's so that I'd get the answers. After she told me, the woman said, 'Your daughter is lucky to have such a loving family now.' And I am, Matilda. I see that. Whoever is on the other side of the portal, watching me, wanting me back now... it's too late. They can't have me."

I pushed her hair behind her shoulder and said, "They won't, will they?"

"Not if I can help it."

-----------

That was nearly four years ago, and those are the last words I remember my sister saying. I'm sure we said goodbye shortly after and I promised I would come see her again, but that part isn't in my memory anymore. I am now older than Lenora was on that day. She left before we had even planned our next visit.

A morning about a week after I had been with my parents to see her, the hospital staff found her room empty. Even after a thorough investigation, they could not come up with any rational explanation for her disappearance. All the exits had remained locked and undisturbed during the night. No one had seen her trying to escape. They even reviewed the security tapes of the hallway outside her room - nothing. There was no evidence anywhere that she had left, except the fact that she was gone. That, and the folded pages sitting on her pillow.

I have those pages. They were given to my parents, but my mother let me take them when her psychologist said they were a letter addressed to me. My parents never read the letter, and I don't think they want to. I did though, and I know exactly where she went.

Dear Matilda, it began. I won't be here tomorrow. The first thing you need to know is that I'm choosing to go into the portal of my own will. That means you don't have to worry. I won't be hurt at all, so you don't need to fear for me now that I'm not fearing for myself.

This is a sudden change from what I said when you visited me. You're wondering what I'm talking about and how I know I'll be okay, so I'll tell you.

Last night the portal opened up. It got as big as the whole room and suddenly I could see inside it and out to what lay on the other side, across unknown lengths of time and space. I saw an entire world, an entire civilization, inside what looked like a spaceship as big as the moon. They live in it. They've traveled through the universe for eons on this thing, because they have no permanent home like all of us do on Earth. Maybe they once did, but no one can remember.

They're not like us, Matilda. They have no body or form of their own; they assume the body of whatever living being they choose when they visit a planet. I asked what planets these were and what lived on them, but they didn't tell me. I'm not ready to know more because I am a human. I'll always be a human when you get down to it, because this is where I grew up. They watched me through the portal throughout my entire childhood. And I learned something that just changed everything - they didn't abandon me. They chose me. They chose to let me live as a human here so that they can know about what it's like on Earth. They needed me to experience this world for them. I'm not the only one either - there are some others that are also here somewhere, girls and boys probably as scared as I was, who I hope will soon see what I've seen.

They need to learn not only about us, but from us, Matilda. That's why I and the others were sent here, and why they've returned for me. I was allowed a glimpse inside their ship. They've been warring among each other for years, maybe centuries... long enough that no one can remember the cause. If I don't go and tell them about planet Earth, they'll destroy each other. In a way I'm one of them too, and I can't let that happen.

What precisely am I going to tell them? Well, I'm going to tell them about you, Matilda. I'm going to tell them everything you've done for me. You believed in me and were there for me when everyone else thought I was either lying or crazy. Your presence was always what mattered most to me.

But I tried to kill myself anyway, and I'm going to tell them that too. I lost sight, from the depth of my fear, of how bright your love was. And that was not your fault; it was mine. It was always up to me alone to recognize the good that I had in my life. That's what these people, or beings, or whatever they are, have to know. They need to always show kindness for each other, and they need to open themselves to the kindness that they are shown. It shouldn't have to take a tragedy for anyone to understand this.

What I said is simple, and yet it's hard to live by. Just like we on Earth, they won't never disagree or fight. But as long as they always remember and return to love, they'll be alright in the end.

So I'm going, Matilda. I'll be safe. The ones who spoke to me through the portal and showed me what I saw are the handful who hope for a better future. They care for me just like you do.

One last thing - I am trying to forgive them. By watching me, they only meant the best. They couldn't have predicted how everything would turn out, that I'd struggle in this world like I did. But there's something to be said for how I made it through nevertheless. And again, that's because of you. I never wanted to leave you then, and I don't want to now. But hopefully you see now why I must. Can you forgive me too?

When they are done with me, I am going to ask if I can come back. Like I said, I'll always be a human first. I don't know when I'll return; time works differently there. But I'll do everything I can to come home as quickly as possible.

I love you, Mattie.

- Your sister, Lenora.

Officials who had read the letter before handing it over to us dismissed it as the ramblings of a patient with a history of psychosis. They instead insisted that she "must have escaped somehow" despite the lack of evidence anywhere in the building. As for where she had gone once she escaped, they couldn't say. The search parties sent out all over the area naturally found nothing.

What do you do when a young girl, just emerging from childhood, disappears? When a year had passed by, my family held a funeral. There was no body, only a coffin and a hole in the ground. Some relatives came, and a couple of Lenora's old friends from when we went to the same school. There was also a priest who presided over everything, even though we'd never gone to church. I stood next to my parents in a long black dress. While everyone bowed their heads in an effort to hold back tears, I looked out at the graveyard around me and a strange calm came over me.

At the end of the simple ceremony, Lenora's coffin was lowered into the hole. Now people let themselves weep.

"Don't worry," I whispered so that no one heard. "She'll be back." For my sister had indeed left this world, but not in the way that they believed.

I knelt then before the open earth that held the empty coffin and looked up to the sky. "I know you will."

I don't remember when I last posted on here, but since I wrote something today I figured I'd put it up. Awhile ago I'd realized that out of all my finished stories, works in progress, and vague outlines of ideas, none of them contained any kind of romance or characters who were in such a relationship. So I decided to try that out. Of course, this story has my own particular "touch" to it since I could never write just a straight relationship thing between normal people... >.> Still, as my stuff goes, this one's fairly normal for me, though not awesome writing or anything.


(no title yet)

As she had for most days since the winter of freshman year, Anna met Lucas outside after school. There was a large pine tree by the front entrance and although she couldn't remember how the routine had started, this was where either she or Lucas would wait for the other at the end of the day to walk home. Today Anna had been waiting longer than usual.

She finally spotted him among the last straggling students hurrying to catch their bus. He turned away from them and came over to the tree. She knew, by watching his dragging footsteps, that something was wrong.

"Hey," said Lucas.

"Hey. Ready to go?"

"Yeah."

Anna picked up her backpack from the base of the tree and they began walking.

"So," she said after a minute. "What's going on?"

"What do you mean?" Lucas's features formed an exaggerated mask of confusion.

Anna wasn't fooled. She knew how to read his moods, especially since he was more expressive than most boys. "You're slow and look worried. What happened?"

"Nothing. I'm tired, that's all."

They had reached the edge of the school grounds. After some cars had passed, they crossed the street and kept going towards their neighborhood. Neither spoke for some time.

"Hey, Lucas?" Anna said eventually.

"What?"

"I love you."

She couldn't have explained what prompted her to say that at that moment in time. But she knew after she had said it that it was a test, and she knew this even before the long silence from Lucas confirmed her intuitions.

He had stopped walking. "Anna..."

She waited. The wind blew fall leaves around her feet that scratched along the pavement of the sidewalk and her long black skirt billowed out in front of her.

"I have to tell you- " Lucas began, but then looked at her curiously.

"What?"

"There's a leaf in your hair." He reached forward and pulled it out from her thick curls.

"Thanks. But I don't think that's what you were going to say."

"Yeah." He didn't elaborate.

"Lucas, just talk to me, okay? I'm worried now," said Anna, taking his hand. But he pulled away from her gently and looked to the side.

Anna understood then without needing to be told

"There's someone else," she stated. "Who?"

"Anna, I swear I haven't cheated on you. I would never do that," Lucas said in a rush. "We've been together for almost a year and I respect you too much. It's just... you're my neighbor."

"Yeah, so...?"

"So, I've known you my whole life. You were the little girl I played with as a little boy. You... you're almost like family. And I've tried, I've tried so hard, but I can't love you as anything but my friend and my sister. I did at first, but..." He trailed off and turned his gaze to the ground where they stood on the street corner. But Anna saw the tears dripping down his cheeks.

"I'm sorry, Anna. I'll always care about you. But this can't work."

Anna was quiet for a moment, and then said, "I think it still can."

Lucas shook his head. "I wish it could. I wish like hell I didn't have to do this to you. But I can't change how I feel." He looked up, no longer afraid of crying in front of her.

"Who is it?" asked Anna abruptly.

"What?"

"The girl you actually love. Who is she?"

"Anna..."

She just stared at him, not blinking.

"Shelly," Lucas said eventually. "You know, in English with us..."

"Okay." Anna then turned around and said, "It's getting late. Let's go home."

She started walking. Lucas stood still for a moment, then hurried to catch up with her. "So that's it? You don't think anything about this?"

"No. It'll be okay," she said, trying to smile.

Baffled, Lucas asked, "You're sure? You don't seem to- "

"Don't worry. I'll kill her, and everything will be fine."

Lucas stopped again. "Uh... excuse me? What?"

Anna looked back. "I'll kill her. After that, we could work on things. We'd have a lot of time for you to be able to love me. I can wait."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"It's okay, I can do it," she said assuredly. "I'm not quite sure how yet but I'll figure something out. I won't get caught."

Lucas stared at Anna who had begun walking again, his eyes and mouth all circles.

As she turned onto their street, he rushed up behind her and grabbed her arm. "Are you fucking crazy? Is this some sick way to make me feel sorry for you? I'm already sorry! I don't know what else I can do!"

"You don't have to do anything! I've got it covered! Don't worry so much."

They had reached Anna's driveway. She tried to wrench her arm out of Lucas's grasp. "Let go! What's the problem?"

"You, Anna! You're the problem. Stop saying this crazy shit. Look... just go inside, get some sleep, and I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?" He sighed and let go of her. "I'm really sorry. And I really hope we can still be friends."

"Yeah, we can," Anna agreed. "That's a good start."

"Start? What do you mean?"

But she just said, "Bye, Lucas. See you tomorrow," and walked up her driveway.

Lucas watched as she closed the front door behind her. He shifted his backpack on his shoulder and rubbed his eyes, his mind tumultuous but also strangely blank. Then he went across the street to his own house that faced hers.

The next day, Shelly wasn't in English class with Lucas and Anna. Lucas tried calling her several times that afternoon, but she didn't answer. He tried calling Anna too, who had not been at the pine tree after school like usual, and she didn't answer either. When he went next door to her house in the evening, her mother said she was "out somewhere."

The day after that, there was an article in the local newspaper. Fifteen-year-old high school student, Shelly May Baxter, was found dead in a small pond near her house. Bricks were tied to her feet and her hands were bound. Police are actively searching for the person or persons responsible for her drowning and are asking residents who know anything to contact them immediately...