Fiction Friday: The Girl With the Gift

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[My apologies for the lack of Fiction Friday lately. But I'm back! A special thanks to my friend Melody for telling me about her crazy dream that served as the initial inspiration for this piece. Enjoy!]

Keeping secrets was all I knew. As natural as breathing. Such was the price to pay when born extraordinary in an ordinary world. Before my grandmother passed away, she made me promise to guard my secret, no matter the cost. But even as I promise passed from my lips, a certainty swelled within me. I knew that one day, I would break it.

The world was ending. It was obvious. But apparently, only to me. Trying to show my friends what I saw was met with confused looks and nervous snickers, followed by a mass exodus from my life. Consequence number one of people finding out the truth according to granny. 

Be prepared to live a life of solitude and harsh judgement.

Despite what I saw, the world continued to thrum along all around me. Clueless commuters and tourists meandered through the park on, what they believed to be, a beautiful day. A red-faced man knocked into me without apology, too caught up with yelling into his cell phone. I wondered if he would still be such an ass if he knew that this was the beginning of the end. Would whatever had him steaming mad be worth it?

Gazing up at the sky, my breath hitched at the sight of how much the tear had grown. It was like a frustrated artist took a giant knife and jammed it into the canvas of our world, starting deep in the heavens and dragging it toward earth. The slit between our world and whatever lay beyond glowed in the purest white.

My lungs filled with electrified air. My chest heaved. But I stopped myself short of screaming: Look! Run! Save yourselves!

I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t some tin foil hat wearing doomsday conspiracy theorist. I was just a girl with a gift. A girl whose main worry a week ago was whether or not Billy Ortiz was going to ask me to prom. And now, it was hard to believe that I’d ever cared about something as inconsequential as a dance. There would be no prom. Hell, soon enough, there might not be a Billy.

Or a me.  

I felt a tingling at the nape of my neck and I knew the time was near. It always started this way. Soft, almost comforting.

The brilliant slash had reached earth and disappeared along the horizon. I watched in horror as a blackish gray dot mutated into a long, skinny tendril. It unfurled from within the glow and entered into our world. Smaller tendrils sprung from its tip. As the terrifying appendage reached toward the ground, I heard the first screams.

The tingling in me grew and morphed into a pounding pulse that wracked my entire body. My abilities weren’t limited to just seeing what others couldn’t. I was gifted with a wide array of gifts. Each one important, according to granny, in fulfilling my ultimate purpose: to save the world.

Fiction Friday: [A Few Years]

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Barton Marshall’s tooth slipped from its gummy pocket and hit the porcelain sink with an unceremonious clunk. Every sign he’d ignored before now took center stage in his mind. Releasing a long, sour sigh, he knew no matter how hard he tried, there was no denying that he’d been duped.

“You’re an old man,” he said to the reflection in the bathroom mirror. His eyes, nestled atop bulging dark folds, stared back and, through the fading steam, offered a wordless agreement. Lightning bolts of pain chimed in from his lower back with a “Here. Here”. His creaky joints extended the only audible notes of solidarity.

He shuffled his way out of the bathroom and into the sterile room he woke up in. Lifting his feet seemed like an inefficient use of the little energy he had left and his well-worn slippers scuffed across the tiled floor. Reaching the bed, he plopped down, allowing gravity to do most of the work.

Barton’s friends and family had begged him not to do it. But to him, they were overreacting. Back in the twenty-first century it wasn’t uncommon for people to donate blood for some extra cash. He’d even read about people going as far as donating their sperm. Their eggs. So what was a few years?

A few years.

When he woke up, he had a bad feeling, but chalked it up to post-surgery haze. And even though making it to the bathroom had been a chore, he swatted away the thought that they had taken more years than he had agreed to. Hours ago, he would have had the strength to fight. To allow his rage to run the show. But hours ago he was a twenty one year old with his whole life in front of him.

Staring at the spots on the back of his wrinkled, fleshy hand, he figured he must be somewhere north of eighty. The thought added eighty pounds of tired on top of his already exhausted, fragile frame. His head hit the pillow and his body softened atop the stiff mattress.

As his mind drifted and sleep wove its way through every part of his rapidly aged body, Barton hoped when he woke, he’d discover this had all been a nightmare. Or at the very least, that he had enough money to buy some of his years back.

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Fiction Friday: [Owusu]

in

It wasn’t a body as much as pieces. Four to be exact. Two arms and two legs. And they weren’t the first sets of limbs to be found. Discovery of the first had sent the media into a frenzy. With the second, serial killer was splashed across every headline and flung from every news anchors lips. After the third, they gave the killer a name…The Butcher. This new find might just send the city into a full blown panic.

The call came in a little after 2 am. They called in Detective Anita Owusu, who wasn’t on duty. She was not a happy camper, drumming her perfectly manicured nails impatiently against the steering wheel the entire ride. The street lights would occasionally glint off the purply-gray polish on her squared shaped nails, drawing her attention.

“What’s the deal?” she asked Suarez who approached her as she arrived. “This isn’t our case. Why are we here?”

Her partner rubbed the back of his neck and couldn’t quite meet her eyes. Her stomach fluttered, nervousness wasn’t an emotion she’d ever seen him wear.

“Owusu.”

Following Marino’s voice, she looked over to find him standing next to Jackson in the tall grass. They glowed, spotlighted by the work lights that formed a harsh line against the blackness surrounding them. Suarez grabbed her arm when she took a step toward them. She waited for him to speak, but instead he pushed up her sleeve, revealing the tattoo on her left wrist.

“What’s going on, Suarez?”

Instead of an answer, he studied her face for a moment before dropping her arm and heading toward the scene. An uneasy feeling trailed behind her as she followed him. Marino and Jackson stood awkwardly as they drew closer.

“Sorry for bringing you down,” Jackson said. “It’s just…”

He exchanged an uncomfortable look with Marino. Then, they both looked to Suarez.

“Just show her,” Suarez said.

She hated being treated like the odd man out and after all her years on the force she didn’t deserve it. The three of them not only knew something, they worried it would upset her. The idea that it was because she was a woman made her angry.

“You got me outta bed for this, so let’s see it,” she said with an edge.

Marino and Jackson parted, allowing her a clear view of the limbs that lay in a square on the grass. The legs parallel to each other and the arms, the same. Slender and delicate, they were undoubtedly female. Just like all the others. Suarez passed her a pair of gloves and Owusu knelt down next to the morbid display as she slid her hands into them. The first thing she noticed was how clean the cuts were. The media’s moniker was even more accurate than they knew.

Starting with the leg on her left, she scanned them each carefully before settling on the left arm at her feet. She was used to tamping down any outward indications of panic, but it was gathering and swelling to a level that she couldn’t control. She tried to swallow, but her throat had gone dry. The sound of her jackhammering heart pounded in her ears.

“Owusu?” Suarez sounded tinny and distant.

She jumped up and ripped the glove off of her left hand and pushed up her sleeve. Holding her arm out in front of her, the butchered limb lay below, out of focus. She studied the black Enso circle that surrounded the open heart made of barbed wire at her wrist. She had designed it herself, an overly stylized reminder of her past. Of how protecting her heart needed to be a priority. Even more telling, the tiny “m&d” that filled the small gap where the circle didn’t quite meet. An homage to the first to break her heart. Her mom and dad.

She looked down at the ground and back to her wrist several times. The tattoo on the bodiless limb was an exact match. There was no doubt. She lowered her arm in an effort to hide the shaking, but she wasn’t able to stop the tears. She watched as they splashed down, striking the victims hand. A scream formed in her throat as they rolled down toward the perfectly manicured, square shaped, purply-gray nails.