by J Bennett
FALLING
Girl with Broken Wings, Book One
J Bennett
Copyright © 2012 by J Bennett, All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9840048-0-5
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content
Prologue
I may be a monster. I’m not exactly sure yet. A strange thing to think, but I wonder if you can have something evil inside of you without being evil yourself. Perhaps you can think about doing something terrible—maybe even want it so bad the pen in your trembling hand keeps bleeding ink through the page—but if you don’t actually commit the act, then you’re not really guilty. At least this is what I have to believe. Especially now, right now, because the hunger has me. All of me.
The hunger is a lot of things. Sometimes it is everything. Other times I imagine it as a throbbing, living monster inside me, and if this were true, I’d take the closest dull letter opener and see about getting that fucker out. My brothers think of it as a virus, and I get to play the part of plague victim; except that instead of black, pus-filled boils, I present other vestiges of the disease. Gifts, my father called them, but then again, he doesn’t consider it a virus at all. I will kill him someday. I have to believe this too.
Mostly, the hunger is a song with a secret melody only I can hear. The music clings to each breath of wind and the calm in between. It hums along the spongy corridors of my brain, each note jumping from one stalled synapse to the next. At night, when the sun cannot feed me its thin soup, the song grows loud as thunder captured in my bones. Destruction concealed beneath the beauty. Such craven release. I’m not thinking clearly at all.
The night holds fast, and the song lulls me with sweet siren notes. Gabe is asleep in the other bed. I know the rhythms of his energy so well, that soft aqua color like postcard oceans that is his alone. It hums in gentle cadence with his dreams.
Tarren is awake in the next room. His energy is all jumpy and exhausted, muddled blue with too much brown mixed in. The nightmares often keep him up. There are others in the motel with different auras. Some spiking as they make love, others a weak beat in sleep. The song is calling to me, and even my terror is muting in its wake. I could almost forget my own name.
Maya. My name is Maya, and his name was Ryan. On the worst nights—the ones where I don’t know if I can make it to dawn—I think of Ryan and the way he would always only half smile. I close my eyes and picture just the way his mouth quirked up to the right as if he were afraid to unleash the full tide of his happiness. Ryan had a glorious smile, like the sun hitting something just right and bringing out colors you hadn’t even known were there. I would spend nights awake conjuring intricate plans to break open his lips. When he did smile, it filled me with hot bubbles and vanilla scents.
Tarren thinks that I am gone. An angel. I am changed—shattered and glued back together crooked—but I cannot be all gone, because I still smell vanilla when I think of Ryan.
Ryan. Ryan. Ryan. Please. Oh, Ryan. Don’t let me kill my brother. At least not the one I like.
Gabe shifts in his sleep. His energy flickers, and I start. For a moment I am lost in the hunger. I don’t know how I’ve come to be standing over his bed; why I can think of nothing but the energy, so bright, leaping off his healthy body. Gabe doesn’t understand about the hunger. Tarren knows better, but even he does not recognize the precariousness of my grip. The grip I’ve just lost. He should have killed me.
And right now I wish he had. Hot hands. Skin peeling back. Monster hands reaching out. The song plays. I am gone.
Part 1
Chapter 1
A few weeks and a very different life ago.
Ryan. Chapped lips. Warm breath. Bringer of little chills all up and down me, mostly when he isn’t trying.
The heat hasn’t broken yet, and the leaves wilt beneath the sun’s inerrant gaze. I lug my shoulder bag down the university’s cobbled pathway toward the student union building.
I am proud of the purple bangs combed in a slant across my face. It’s no matter that the color didn’t manifest quite right. It’s the principle of the thing. This is me rebelling, all badass with black eyeliner scrawled along each lid. And I only stabbed myself in the eye once this morning. A vast improvement.
This is me coming alive. Finally. It didn’t start with Ryan, but I tell him it did. It was coming to school, discovering entire classrooms of people ready to defend Twain or Melville to the death. Willing to jump in front of buses for Orwell and Vonnegut. Tears flowing for Nabokov and Tolstoy. It was finding friends with strange passions and loud laughs. Learning to appreciate my freshman roommate who slept till noon and showed me how to masturbate.
And then, of course, Ryan with his ice tea-colored skin and beautiful black eyes half hidden beneath his lids. He isn’t my first boyfriend, just the first one who matters. Somehow my constant metaphors and little dramatics only spark amused forbearance. Our apartment together is terrifying, because it doesn’t scare me at all. And Avalon. The realization that it’s okay to dream.
As soon as Ryan gets out of class, we’ll grab lunch before I fry my brains with intermediate Latin and Shakespeare II. He’ll probably raise his eyebrows like he always does, and the look will say you could always minor in business, you know, just in case. And I will battle his practicality with my brave, starving artist smile that boldly cries whatever it takes, because I don’t actually know what it takes, and I still have two more years to squelch this inconvenient little fact.
I sweat. Summer in Connecticut seems determined to go out muggy and hot. Then I become aware of an unknown figure leaning against a tree. His pale blue eyes follow my progress down the path. I wouldn’t have noticed him except that he’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans on this brutally hot day.
He is a striking man, tall and pale with thick, dark hair cut short. His face is all cheekbones and smooth planes. He could have been a track star or some arrogant frat boy. But he isn’t any of these. Not with those cold eyes couched in such a quiet, intense face. His mouth grows tighter when our eyes meet, and he is most definitely staring at me, until he isn’t. When I look again he is walking away, his body moving in fluid strides as he turns down another path and disappears. His face is familiar, but I can’t place it. Surely I would have noticed him if he were in one of my classes. There are always fewer male students, and then, of course, that scar would distinguish him anywhere.
* * *
Ryan and I sit down for lunch. I eat something with no realization of how important this particular meal is or how much I will struggle in the near future to relive every chew, every burst of flavor simmering on my tongue.
I can’t remember what Ryan is wearing, so I give him his favorite gray t-shirt with the faded black spade in the middle and some washed out jeans. His hair is carefully disarrayed in black spikes. I am cultivating these sparks of rebellion inside him, trying to singe away all the good manners, adult seriousness and intense study habits his typically-Asian parents have spent a lifetime layering around his soul. The current excavation for a sense of humor is slow but promising.
Ryan remembers the man with the scar.
“He was outside last night when we went to the improv show,” Ryan says. “I remember, because I thought he would be a good enforcer for Avalon.”
“I didn’t know we needed enforcers,” I repl
y.
“Of course we will. Everyone will want to come. They’ll try to sneak in every which way, but we have standards.”
“High standards,” I chime in.
“Really high standards,” Ryan continues, “so, we’ll need enforcers who can patrol all around the island. The man, he looked, I don’t know.” Ryan pauses to think. It is very important for him to find just the right word. This can lead to long stretches of silence where I enjoy how his eyes seem to be looking backwards into his own mind and how he unconsciously curls in his bottom lip.
“Dangerous,” he says, nodding with satisfaction.
We eat. We are full. We are happy. I feel entitled to a good life, though I have done nothing to earn it.
* * *
That night I work on a short story for my creative writing class. It’s about a little girl who lives in an orphanage and discovers a magic crayon. Her drawings come to life on the page, so she creates herself a perfect family. A brother, a sister, a mother and a father who all welcome and love her. She gives her family castles and jewels and grand adventures—everything she can never have for herself. The little girl draws and draws and draws, but as soon as the last little nub of wax crumbles into her palm, her family and all her creations lose their life and revert to flat drawings upon the page.
The story sucks. The sentences are too bloated with adjectives, because I can’t push the action ahead. It’s the girl. She’s dull. Too sweet and sad. I need to paint her heart a darker hue.
I close the lid of my laptop. There are two things I do for inspiration. The first is to touch my books.
If the walls of my apartment suddenly dissolved, the books would keep everything securely fastened in place. They crawl up and down the walls like a wild, square-leafed plant pushing its shoots through rows of shelves, under tables, across my desk and, for the most special, standing upright on my dresser embraced between Shakespeare bust bookends.
I walk over and touch their spines, and as I read their titles, the stories come alive in quick whispers. Ryan looks up from his textbook, sees that my laptop is closed and knows that he now has permission to speak. He uses his newly freed voice to announce that he is hungry. We know a Mexican place run by real Mexicans just outside of campus. It serves plates full of greasy meat wrapped in warm tortillas for a couple dollars.
“Come on Pixie Girl,” Ryan says closing his big, boring and utterly practical textbook.
Before we leave, I visit Avalon. This is the second thing I do for inspiration. Ryan is unsure of his drawing skills, but he is brilliant. His hand brought the island to life. At the center lies a huge park, and wide rings of industry, modest homes and learning institutions ripple outward. Electric trains hum on their tracks, and sun dappled trees shade the paths that lead along the open corridors of the city.
I walk on the paths of Avalon breathing in the ocean-scented air. Other citizens jog by or ride past me on bicycles. They are doctors, teachers, janitors and construction workers. Smart and average. Funny and dull. All are warm, honest and hardworking.
It’s all very foolish. Ryan and I are in complete agreement on this point. Avalon is the product of a reckless idealism that can only blossom in our naïve university seclusion. This is why we have agreed to search the atlas for a suitable island only as a hypothetical query meant to challenge our geographical aptitudes.
“It’ll be here when you get back,” Ryan says behind me. I grab my purse and turn in time to catch the last vestige of a half smile leaving his lips. I will find my orphan girl. I will make her real. But first, food. I’m starving.
We walk through campus, and the sounds of life flow around us: bass beats from the dorm windows, a scream far away that pitches into giggles and cheers, our own steps treading the pavement. A club meeting ends and students issue from the building in front of us. A figure brushes my shoulder. He murmurs an apology, and I only catch a glimpse of wavy hair tamed with a ball cap.
I sneak my hand in the back pocket of Ryan’s jeans and delight in how he turns shy at it. He stutters something about the stars, and I look up. They are all over the sky, and I ponder if such glitter could really be only balls of gas. Perhaps they catch the secrets of our hearts and hold them for us until we are brave enough to give them voice.
Ryan laughs at this thought when I say it out loud.
“You are a strange one, Pixie Girl.”
“We can’t both be boring,” I tease back and bite his nose. His lips find mine. It is a quick, off-centered peck because my hand is still caught in his pocket as he turns toward me. Ryan pulls back. His eyes are wet, shining onyx hiding behind his long bangs. I’ve won a full smile from him, fading quick, stirring those chills inside me.
Then we both become aware of a figure blocking the path in front of us.
The man keeps outside the pool of light beneath the streetlamp. At first I think he might be a college professor or a lost parent, but no. He is staring too intently, and his legs are planted wide across the cobblestones as if he means to be exactly where he is.
In the fading glow of twilight, I observe that his is a delicate face, bearing a small nose, thin lips, a high forehead and a hairline just beginning to recede along a widow’s peak. Blue eyes move up my body and pause at my face. His wispy eyebrows are blonde like his hair, and they reach for each other as he comes to a conclusion. A pale fuzz of light blurs the lines of his fingers.
He takes a step towards us, and this is when I recognize the danger. It’s the glowing hands — of course it is — but also the eyes and how quickly he moves. That single step seems to have propelled him across the divide between us.
Ryan must understand this too, because I feel his hand leave the small of my back as he moves in front of me. I say “uh, let’s…” and Ryan says “is there…”, and neither of us finishes our sentence.
The man puts his hand, palm forward, against Ryan’s chest. I can only see the left side of Ryan’s face. His eye grows round, the pupil shrinking to a pinprick in the brightening glow of the stranger’s hand. His mouth drops open, and what comes out is a choked, “ugh, ugh, ugh.” He twitches violently, my darling.
The stranger steps back, and Ryan collapses to the ground. Some part of him cracks hard against the pavement. I scream.
Chapter 2
I keep screaming. It might be Ryan’s name or something coherent like “What are you doing to him?” but I don’t think so.
There are not words for this, only a strange tearing that is also emptiness, because my mind is trying to escape my body lest I comprehend what has just happened. My boyfriend, he who kisses my shoulders and took me down the quiet pathways of Avalon, is suddenly still, his eyes glass and half-lidded, a dark stain growing across his crotch.
The stranger is looking at me. He is not so tall, but I can tell that he is a powerful person. A person who is not kicked around, who wins fights before they even start. His voice is quiet and calm, each word crisp like water drops hitting my cheeks.
“We are leaving now.” He opens his arms, and I don’t understand.
I am crouched over Ryan, gripping his shirt. I am also watching the stranger’s glowing hands, wondering if it hurts. Something is coming off him. I feel the vibrations of it hook around me and tug me upright. I cannot see what it is, but I can feel it, an invisible string that pulls me toward the stranger. I start to slide across the cobblestones.
“No.” I clutch Ryan’s shirt, and his body drags with me. “No, no, no.”
The invisible force pries my fingers loose one by one.
“No, no, no,” I moan.
Ryan drops back, and I spin into the stranger’s arms. I don’t understand how this has happened, but I know it is the stranger’s doing, his invisible string. His hook.
The stranger embraces me. I feel his breath cut across my ear, and my stomach wrenches. I vomit across his shirt and down my own. A low gurgled moan comes out of my throat.
“Unbecoming behavior for a daughter of mine.” He wraps his a
rms around my waist. We lift up into the sky.
Running steps. Someone is below us. It is the boy with the baseball cap and curly hair. He pauses at Ryan’s body, looks around. Then up. By the time he swings the gun around for a shot, the stranger and I are already rocketing away through the night. The stars are streaks, and the boy is a shrinking dot beneath the lamp light. I hear his voice echoing in the distance.
“Shit!”
Chapter 3
We fly. The air is cool, and the stranger’s arms are strong. My mind flees into a dark recess. I close my eyes and feel the tears flicking off my chin into the dark.
My senses short circuit so that everything is bleary except for random bits that stand out like vivid darts of pain: dark row of storage units coming nearer as we descend, minor jolt of landing, sound of the stranger’s shoes crunching beneath the gravel, sweep of headlights strafing the rows of closed metal doors. My mind clutches to the light, hoping that it is a police car, but there are no sirens, and the headlights jump away.
A short while later I am lying on a concrete floor inside one of the storage units. I pull my legs into my chest. My lumpy purse is under my hip, its strap still twisted around my arm. The metal door shuts with a bang like a gunshot or like panic or like gruesome finality. The man lurks somewhere in the dark, and a question hiccups in my mind – is he a man at all or something else entirely? A light flickers on, and I tuck my head to my chest to protect my eyes. His voice comes from above.
“Inelegant accommodations I know, but I couldn’t rely on your composure.”
A wail crawls up my throat. “Did you kill him? Did you kill him?” My breath is gone. “Did you…” I huff, “did you…” my voice cracks and my heart cracks and my mind cracks too. I stare at the stranger’s shoes between my tears. They are expensive-looking loafers, the kind with tassels on top that I would have mocked in the vast distant past when I didn’t know that monsters wore tasseled loafers. The shoes walk away. This is when I should try an escape, when I should scream for help or otherwise try to save myself. I wrap my arms around my body and weep.