The Cold Place III

"THEY TORE MY ARMS OFF", the freshly pruned oak tree howled.

"Get off, it hurts!" the individual blades of grass wailed as the Morgensens terrier leaped this way and that, it's comical little mouth soundlessly snapping, drowned out by the cacophany that now filled Kyle's ears.

Inconsolable grief disguised as song drew his gaze into the branches of the relentlessly moaning oak. There in it's branches, danced a mother bluebird, shouting her fury and her loss to the winds and the leaves and the insensate rocks down below, where her fledgling's broken body lay, out of the nest too soon, and now, never to return.

Kyle pinched himself. Hard.

Nothing.

When the cold place called, there was no him, only this...

An ear to hear pain that is blithely ignored,
an eye to see rage in the eyes of a stone,
a mind that can grasp the fury of clouds,
an awareness of the seething red storm that is omnipresent,
ever beating against the gates of reason with hands worn raw and bloody.

The Cold Place II

The hairs on both his forearms suddenly rippled like so much grain being kicked about beneath an angry thunderhead.

Cold.

"No. No, not yet. Not yet dammit!"

Kyle picked up the pace, not quite a run, no longer a brisk walk. He was beginning to panic.

The ambient sound all around him started to smudge around the edges, as if some gigantic pastel-dusted thumb was taking the individual sounds, one by one...

(the roar of a jet overhead became a gnat's buzz)

and pressing them to the ground,

(a terrier in the Morgensens front yard became all motion, no noise)

breaking their membranes

(the buzz of passing cars faded into inconsequential motion)

forcing their liquid, glistening essence

(his respiration was heard, but as through thick cotton)

to overrun their natural boundaries

(the soft feet-on-wet-sand crunching of blood beating against the stretched flesh of his tympanii - marched over the hill and was gone)

and become indiscernable.

Silent.

Cold.

His sense of self was draining out of him, like water racing out of a hot tub on a cold day.

Cold.

The cold place I

Humming a tuneless little ditty, Kyle rolled his eyes at the scenery passing by.
His blond, straight, thin bangs occasionally took flight as he marched with a purpose down the sidewalk toward his home.

Another school-day, gone.

Another afternoon begun.

This one will be much like the one that preceeded it, and the one that will follow.
Homework books are squeezed onto the top of a pile in his backpack which works every day to change the curvature of his young spine.
They'll be ignored.
Unless, of course, someone asks "Did you do your homework?".
That should be around 10 o'clock tonight, so we're golden.

Kyle doesn't hang around after school.
He doesn't fit terribly well with any of the "in" crowds.
He's not a jock, not a head, not an artist, not a freak, not a.....
Kyle bites his lip to pull back from the cold place.
His lower lip bleeds a little, warm and salty.

The cold place.

Cold and dark and cavernously solitary. There, a single step could take a thousand years. Or a thousand steps, up a Mayan Temple could pass in an instant.

Kyle never could find words to describe what it was that happened when he would go there.
Go. That's a joke. More like being dragged backward by sharp, merciless steel hooks embedded in his sternum. There was no volition involved, when he would suddenly be "elsewhere".
And, the more he would try to make people understand that he was alright, that he had just "checked out" for a bit, the more they would look at him as if he had grown a tentacle right out of the middle of his oily pre-pubescent forehead. A thick, clammy, sticky, glistening, festering, wriggling, whip-cracking tentacle.