We’d talk for what seemed like eons that passed in a second, and I’d discover all the little things, keep them close to my chest like treasures. His eyes would betray promises of what I’d always longed for and feared at the same time, the sweet warmth of him when I’d kiss the corner of his lips a craving I couldn’t deny.
I was in my dressing room, high off the adrenaline, when I zoned out. One moment I was yanking off my sweaty T-shirt and the next, gravel scrunched beneath my soles and the world was spinning madly around.
“Faster!” His smile was wide, reflected in his eyes, hands locked in mine as we spun around on the rooftop. The sky stretched above us, infinite and unobstructed by the smog and city lights.
We came to a stop eventually and collapsed on the ground with heaving breaths, our hands still interlocked.
“I… I like it when you smile like that,” Tobiah said, cheeks flushed.
“Like what?” I turned on my side, ran my fingertip down his nose.
“Your eyes crinkle at the edges. It’s… I like it when you’re happy.”
“You make me happy.” I hadn’t realised how true it was until it was out in the open. It shook me to the core. That I was happier in my delusions than I was awake. Where does it end? Am I going insane? I wasn’t dreaming now, if I ever had been. I was spiralling out of control. Dreams came and vanished, they didn’t stick around to cross the threshold into reality, did they?
I let go and leapt to my feet, palms sweaty, shivers running down my spine.
“Where are you going? What’s wrong? Do you feel sick? Should we go find a nur—”
“This isn’t real.”
Everything would be so much easier if he didn’t look so hurt. “Why do you keep saying that?” He stood up, the distance between us feeling like miles.
“Because none of this makes any sense. There is barely anyone else around and, and… I’m not sick! I don’t have… I’m not dying.” I’m not falling in love with a figment.
“Jar—”
I warded him off, stepped away, gravitating towards the ledge. “I’m a popstar and I’ve just finished playing a gig. I’m not really here.”
“Listen to yourself.” His hands closed into fists and he was shaking, but his voice was steady. Steadier than I’d ever heard it. “What sounds more plausible to you? That you’re a teenage popstar or the fact you might not… please, stop walking away from me.”
His eyes were wide and dark as my heel hit the edge of the building. It was a long way down.
“Stop, stop! D-don’t move.”
If I jump, I’ll wake up. Isn’t that what happens? But what if… what if. I didn’t know what was real anymore. I looked up, saw him crying soundlessly, skin so pale he was almost translucent. Why couldn’t I let go? All it would take was one step backwards and all this could be over.
“Don’t leave me here alone,” he pleaded, teeth sinking into his bottom lip to keep it from quivering. “I l-lov—”
“Don’t. No, you can’t. You… don’t you see nothing hurts? I… shouldn’t it hurt? If we’re both sick? Night sweats and headaches and—”
“I’m hurting right now.” He inhaled a shaky breath, gaze dropping to the ground, seemingly curling in on himself.
Right then was when I’d made my choice, knowing I was being weak and selfish. That it would end badly in the end. But the moment I’d reached out to take his outstretched hand, something had yanked me backwards as if I was a marionette with its strings cut off.
“Jared! He’s awake.” That smell. I knew it. Knew what it meant. It felt like cold dead hands wrapped around my throat.
There was a jumble of words.
“Found you collapsed in the dressing room, called the ambulance. Your mum’s on her way. You hit your head pretty hard. They need to do some tests…”
Everything fell apart soon after and the worlds collided when the doctor sat in front of me, my mother squeezing my hand too hard.
A tumour had been pressing on your brain. Caught it too late. May have experienced mood swings, hallucinations.
Maybe if I hadn’t kept it to myself. Maybe they would have caught it sooner, given me a better chance. MaybeMaybeMaybe. I caught the gazes of the people around me. They were all staring at me as if I was vanishing right in front of their eyes, cell by cell, until I was see-through.
Inside I’d always been like a house of cards, ready to collapse with a whisper. And Tobiah was no longer there to prop me up, that unyielding pillar of quiet strength in the midst of a raging sea I could count to lean on. Not after they put me on so many meds there was barely any room left in my bathroom cabinet. I’d slipped. It was just a matter of time before I hit the bottom.
Days bled into one continuous string of poking and prodding and too many convoluted terms I didn’t understand. I spent my time trapped between light green walls, people who had never really known me crying as if I was already dead.
It came too soon, the last desperate attempt to fix something beyond repair. The surgery.
The sickness was weighing me down and I let my head loll to the side, knowing I’d find no relief. Not from the cancer soaking into my brain cells one by one like spilled ink, not from my clammy hands gripping the sheets. It seemed to last forever but not nearly long enough as they wheeled me down the corridor. I wanted to have it over with, yet I was terrified these walls would be the last thing I’d ever see. I didn’t want to die.
The medicine was starting to kick in, shackling my limbs to the gurney, my eyelids growing heavy. If my mouth didn’t feel as if it was filled with sand, I’d have asked are we there yet? like an obnoxious five-year-old on a road trip. Only this seemed too much like a one-way street.
And maybe it was the crippling fear choking back all the words I wanted to say that made me see something that probably wasn’t even there, fought through the meds soaking into my brain. Maybe it was the tumour in my head taking pity on me, because as we turned the corner I spotted him right away.
It’s not real.
Don’t care. Can’t.
His hair was just as curly as I remembered, tucked beneath a dark blue beanie. My fingers twitched with the memory of teasing the soft strands at the back of his neck. He was huddled against the wall with his eyes trained on the ground, but the second they wheeled me past, his eyes met mine. I opened my mouth to say you look too pale, let me sneak you out to get ice cream and dance on the rooftop, but I never voiced it out loud. This Tobiah didn’t look as though he knew every dirty corner of my heart and the taste of my fingertips, and I thought then that he had to be real. Real, but not mine.
He only smiled, faintly, his eyes two dark strangers. Good luck to you, whoever you are.
It was fruitless to think of the way it could have been, and yet… All I could think about as he disappeared from view was that what if. What if it had all really happened, somewhere in a world that didn’t play by our rules and he just didn’t remember. And it was too late now.
I was running out of time and I wanted to scream and turn it all back and just do something. Meet him here in the real world instead of my dizzying dreams at least for a few days, fall in love and discover every piece of him as if it was new. I needed to know if he’d still hide his smile in my shoulder and play with the hem of my T-shirt when words got caught in his throat. I’d empty my entire bank account to have just five more minutes.
I remembered that day months ago, before I’d first seen him, back when falling from the top of the music food chain seemed worse than death. I could laugh now, hysterically so, because I no longer felt invincible. This was the dead end of a cliff and I’d been pushed off. It was a different kind of falling, one without a bottom to hit. There was nothing but an empty black void without him in it. There was nobody there to catch me.
There was nothing but muff
led voices and rustling of scrubs and stillness as the swinging doors shut behind me. It was too quiet and too loud at the same time. I could hear my heart beat through the monitor next to me as the anaesthesia flooded my bloodstream. The waves of it were dragging me under, his face burned into my retinas, echoing long after my eyes fell shut for the last time, the only coherent thought in my head please don’t let me fall.
Dark River – by Thomas Brown
I
A man is running beside a river. He moves quickly, his eyes fixed ahead. His brow is damp with sweat. It is late afternoon; he can tell from the sharpness of the light through the trees, and the way it catches the water. The river shines, like a child’s eyes, or the sun on an insect’s wings.
His bare feet sink into the muddy banks. Wet grass slides between his toes, as it used to when he was a child and played by the river. He begins to cry, though he does not stop running.
He had a name once. He had friends, family; people who mattered, tied to him by blood or the closeness of their flesh. He remembers a flat, on a street, in a city filled with people just like himself. Now he has none of these things. They still exist, somewhere. They have not changed. But he has. Tears well in his eyes and he paws at them with his fingers. Snail-trails of wetness slide down his cheeks. He wonders if they wept for him, if they still weep, if they miss him at all. It doesn’t matter, it isn’t important. But he wonders.
The river is familiar to him. He has been this way many times before, and witnessed the blasted oak, its roots splayed like splintered bone, the willows, their long, limp branches overhanging the next bend, the encroaching beach by that same bend, where the bank gives way to mud and stones and slime, incandescent in the evening light. He remembers one autumn evening, much like this one, when he was little more than a child. The first time he came to the river alone.
It was late when the cubs emerged from their den. He had been playing by the water on the opposite bank and was about to leave when he saw them. They moved as shifting shadows in the dusk. He studied them in the failing light. Their legs were short, their heads seeming too large for their bodies, so that at any moment they might topple to their flanks amidst the grass and the mud, or worse, slip into the currents of the river and vanish from the world forever. He thought he knew how they felt.
This close to the centre of town, where the river met the mill, he could hear the evening traffic quite clearly. The cubs could hear it, too. Their long ears swivelled and twitched: a car horn, a curse, the savage screech of brakes. They were not alien sounds but the foxes were wary nonetheless. Theirs was a world of loam and soil and winding roots. They had yet to venture far from their den, and certainly not into town proper. He knew all this not because he had seen them before, or had any knowledge of foxes or cubs, but because of their mother, sitting attentive, a little way off by the bank.
Growing more confident with each step, they gambolled towards the vixen. She sat, statuesque, as her babies moved closer, and in the dappled dusk he thought of his own mother. Where was she, to save him from the water, to protect him from the wilds, the willows, the world?
Reaching their mother, the fox cubs fell upon the tattered prize at her feet. He thought it was a rabbit, or a hare, as though it mattered what they ate, what lay dead in the grass before them.
The mewling animals plucked at the flesh with their teeth, stretching sinew and skin and nipping at purple innards. He saw the glassy black eyes of their prey, matted grey fur, shiny organs spilling from its insides as they tore it apart. He thought the cubs beautiful. He also thought about light and colour and how the insides of the rabbit matched the various shades of dusk; indigo innards spanning the skyline.
He runs faster until the muddy beach, draped with willows and water, slides slowly into view. The children call it Cattle Corner. The cows would stumble here to drink and cool. He called it by the same name when he was a child. He grew up near here, by the fields and the trees and the thin, dark river that winds between them. He lived and breathed by the dark water.
Dark and beautiful! He runs faster, following the splashes of light, the ripples and currents as they course alongside him. He cannot remember how long he has been running for. He thinks he has always run by the river’s side, from the first moment he was born, slick and screaming, into this world. Before, even. He was grown of water and blood and the ebbing of his mother’s heart, as all people are, though few others give it conscious thought.
He swallows and, for a moment, the tears stop. The wind dries them against his face. Men and women are born, and they are taught to walk, to talk, to stand upright, as people should. They surround themselves with buildings; foundations and aspirations, brick and stone and solid earth beneath their feet and around them. They shelter themselves from the rain, the dark, the wet, anything to distance them from the ancient rush of their beginnings, their wet, wild natures.
Few think of it consciously but all dream of it. It is a human thing, to dream of water; of the rushing currents and the patterns made when they meet pebbles or small plants emerging from the surface and are forced around them. These men and women dream of the river and they listen to its pulse and they feel the silky coldness as they slide their hand into its depths, and in their sleep they smile.
He dreams often of the foxes, too. At first he thinks they did not see him, when he watched them that day by the river. Then he realises that they knew he was there and were allowing him to see. He knows it is different for everyone, the way into this world, but for him it was through those cubs and their ravaged prey in the grass. He thinks of the cubs’ long ears, their spindly legs, their short, soft snouts, and sometimes he dreams they are not foxes but something else in the guise of a fox. He dreams of a baby, river-born: her little limbs lovely, her head large like those of the cubs. He thinks her no less beautiful than the foxes, and their fierce mother beside them. His tears begin again, renewed.
II
He runs past Cattle Corner, towards the treeline and Ellington Woods. Cattle Corner is not his destination. It is just another place. They are all just places, along the way. Stepping stones across the water.
Though he sees the embankment properly for only a moment, it is long enough. A moment is all he needs to remember the willows, which used to terrify him as a child, the lively current as it sweeps around the bend, the churned banks, the weeds and the polished stones, arranged carefully in the mud. He glances at the stones only once, knowing already that they spell a name. Alice, written in rocks. The name haunts him. It means so much and yet it is just a name, an assemblage of small stones. He feels comforted, encouraged, euphoric even, at the sight of them after all these years. Though he continues to cry, he smiles too, then laughs. The sound bubbles from his lips.
As he runs towards the trees, he thinks of the things he has left behind. A lifetime of memories, experiences, people he professed to love. They are better off without him as he is better off without them. He might have loved them once, these people, these places, but no more. He remembers expensive flats – money mattered so much! – and the sound of the city, like static, buzzing at the back of his mind. It was exhausting, but he knew no better then, except that he missed the fox cubs and the willows and the river that ran beneath them.
The city was hard. And cold. And bright! He used to fear the darkness, for the same reason he feared the willows, he supposed; reminders of something else, something more than he knew, intangible and unknown. But it was not until the city that he realised how beautiful the darkness was, and how much he missed it, in that place of constant light.
In the evening the birds made silhouettes against the skyline. They perched on the rooftops of the adjoining flats, stationary, save for the occasional twitch, like rows of inverted bunting in the breeze. They stood stark and black against the deepening dusk behind them. Minutes became hours, the sky assuming the glow of heated iron unti
l, with the speed of that same cooling metal, it turned a night-time blue.
Every night, he watched the birds from his bedroom window. He watched the sky too and, when dusk failed, the city that rose in its place, flickering into being like an emergency light. The dark was not allowed, not for one moment. There were always lights: the sun and then the city below it. The dark could not be allowed because with it came a frightening, permissible glee, which rippled through people even as it rippled through the city, like the shivering flanks of a cow. It was another way in, he realised. Like the cubs, the dark hinted at something else, which could not be expressed in words but settled into his blood and beneath his skin; an itch he could never scratch.
So there was always light, making silhouettes of the birds, and he watched the silhouettes, growing both restless and in love.
One afternoon he found a sparrow, on the pavement by the offices where he worked. He had just finished for the day. The bird was a small, damaged thing in his hands, its legs almost invisible, like the splinters of wood he used to get as a child, from the table in their kitchen. Though the bird was tiny, it gave off a burning heat against his fingers. He cradled the hatchling to his chest, cupped it close, and walked carefully home with it, as though it was more than a bird. Surrounded by strangers and screams and the stupor of society each day, he felt an attachment to the tiny life in his hands.
The city rose around him. The streets smelled of smoke and sweat and often grease, when he walked past fast food restaurants. It was a cold day, but he still felt damp beneath his arms.
By the time he reached his apartment, the bird was dead. He buried it in a plant pot, on his balcony. There were no other places to bury it, and at least this way, he reasoned, it was eleven floors closer to Heaven. When he told his wife, she exhumed it anyway. She dropped it in a bin bag and carried it down to the skip, on the ground floor. He loved his wife very much, but in that moment he questioned her, hated her, even. Were they so different, bird and man? Was she so far above the bird that it did not deserve a burial? Who was she to decide?
Fall - A Collection of Short Stories (Almond Press Short Story Contest) Page 13