by H. R. Romero
The Girl
Who’s
Made of Leaves
Dedication:
To Rose,
You are always loved.
The beauty of a Rose, its pure innocence, the glee it brings when it’s greatness is gifted.
The heart of the beholder filled with wonder, the senses are taken, and one by one are lifted.
The eyes compare this single and individual flower, to other types, different kinds, and breeds.
By far it exceeds its expectations, its presence causes delight, by comparison, other flowers are weeds.
The nostrils take in this pleasing aroma, the smell of perfection oozes even from its very name.
The inhaled pollen gently nests inside the smeller; the Rose and the lover become indistinguishably the same.
But alas, perfection, beauty, love, all only mask what is hidden below, a secret that must remain.
The reality of the Rose shows a sorrowful being, saddened by its curse, the potential to cause great pain.
The happiness and the joy, the eternal unquestioning love, the Rose can turn all this to scorn.
The beautiful creation, the sad and scared soul, only too aware of the truth; Every Rose has a Thorn.
Daniel P Martin
THE GIRL
WHO’S MADE
OF
LEAVES
Written by H.R. Romero
COMING TO AUDIBLE.COM
Late 2018
Copyright © 2018 by H.R. Romero
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
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 any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgments:
To my wonderfully talented, patient, and brutally honest Beta Readers,
Misty, Meggie, Angelique, Crystal, Lauren, Rachel, Dawn, Amy, Susanna, and Sally.
YouTube.com publishers, authors, producers, friends,
Self-Publishing with Dale, Thank you, Dale. You know the meaning of building a brand and not forgetting those who support you.
Kelli Publish, Thank you, Kelli with an “i”. You are a truly a woman who knows her craft. Thanks for sharing.
Jenna Moreci, Thanks to the only Pegasus-riding, cyborg I know.
Thank you. You are appreciated. Enjoy.
Your friend,
H.R. Romero
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter One
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for Native Americans.”
-Stephen Hawking
Rum and tobacco caress her skin, leaving behind a thin film of notes, hinting of chocolate and earth. The girl wants to tumble deeper into a restful state of sleep. She has a driving need to dig her toes into the blankets, desiring a feeling of comfort and safety, but here, there are no blankets in which to burrow.
The harsh clank of metal instruments, falling upon a bare metal tray, scrapes at her nerves, making the ends stand at attention. The sharp clamor of the noise pours ice water over her and tells her to wake up, right now.
The aroma of cheap drugstore aftershave soothes and reminds her of better times, but of times she cannot remember. Recollection is a phantom, floating through the room, evading her when she reaches out for it, eluding capture.
Sliding downward again into the sweet molestation of darkness, soft and shadowy tendrils of empty promises coax her into giving in to it. She tries to nestle down into the bed, escaping into the narrow fringes of sleep again. There she can hide within the sanctuary it will provide.
A smart, repetitive slap from the back of a hand, one to each cheek, angers her. She’s awake and annoyed.
"Do you remember anything, R – Zero – Five – E?" says a man, whose lovely face she glimpses only briefly before it fades out again, taking the light with it.
The child hears the question; it’s distant. It’s a ghostly nagging whisper, filtered through a confusion of echoes, bouncing around on the inside of her head, pounding on her tympanic membranes with little tack-hammers, and so, not knowing the question is being directed to her, she ignores it. Who am I? Why am I here?
"Do you remember…” repeats the man, pausing to glance at his watch. He winds it, and then turns to study a nearby chart before continuing his question. “…how you came to be here… at Camp Able?"
The question is more defined this time, taking shape and meaning. Why won’t this man let her just fade into the beckoning abyss. It tugs at her, pinching at her playfully; giggling, grinning, and coercing her to give into blessed unconsciousness.
Only a girl of nine, she lays here, like a fatted lamb, on an abused and stained hospital gurney. The sheets are stretched tightly across it, and tucked in with hospital corners. Its striped pattern is faded along with the dying breaths of the building which houses them. Both are in much in need of a good cleaning.
She struggles to open the lids of her eyes. They flutter like clipped-winged butterflies, confronting their own mortality as they falter. Heavy, unwieldy, curtains of skin, unwilling to comply with her urgent need to let the light in. They are sticky from the insides. She’s been drugged, and the drugs are working.
Like other subjects, who came before, it’s taken three times the recommended, safe, dose to induce a satisfactory level of sedation. If one was to ask the voice speaking to her, it might confirm that it’s typical of her kind…. the mutation… or whatever ‘it’ is. It causes the host’s body to be resistant to the meager collection of pharmaceuticals available on Camp Able’s medical wing.
Who am I? She doesn’t know, so why ask her anyway? When finally, she manages to open her eyes, the world is spinning wildly around her; a carnival ride guaranteed to make her puke. And puke she does.
The girl’s bombarded with external stimulation and visual noise that clatters, and clangs, and turns everything upside down. The world makes no sense to her, whatsoever. Where did she come from? Why is she here? She has not a clue.
She’s an under-baked embryo, emerging from the nurture and protection of a cadaver’s womb. Emerging… no. Instead, grasped by her ankles and yanked out, breech. She’s thrust against her will into a cold calamity of a dying world.
Her throbbing head pulses excruciatingly, at the temples, feeling more cumbersome than it should. The drugs can partially be blamed, along with severe dehydration.
Something’s encircling her head like a soft crown, threatening to cut into the skin. A thin, mesh fabric conceals an injury that she ca
n’t remember receiving. She suffered a blow – to the head – somehow.
Any attempt to raise her skull from the mattress only causes it to loll suddenly, to one side or the other, with a lack of grace that only an alcoholic could so vividly display after a long night at a bar.
A line of concentrated saliva drools from the corner of her mouth intermingled with specks of vomitus.
Waves of nausea grind into her gut, like a punch from the world’s strongest man: he’s a brutish man with a handlebar mustache, and a bald head. He wears a red-striped, one piece. He twists her intestines into great looping knots, the likes of which even the most experienced sailors would be envious.
This room is cold, and also moon-burned white. The lighting from above, from the two oversized and obnoxious surgical lights, is intense. Having no care what the mortals of this world think about them. They are what they are, with no pretense or wishes to be anything else but lights. They laugh at oddities, maladies, and the occasional death from their perches above. They cast a surreal illumination; a false, dead sort of light, having a quality about it that reminds one of a nightmare, and this nightmare is as real as any could be.
There’s a large mirrored glass hanging from one of the walls. Time and humidity have crept in along its edges, slowly finger-nailing the reflective material away from the bubbling back of it and leaving the edges to blacken as the reflective nature of it is leached away to the passing of the years.
A calendar hangs next to the mirror, partially torn, with the year, 1942, at the top. The days have all been crossed out, so the actual date is a mystery. The calendar could be years off for all she knows.
An advertisement for, Lady Guinevere Cigarettes, fills the page, just above the days of the week. It’s a low-rate illustration, drawn by an, underpaid, amateur artist who was most likely overworked enough to commit suicide in lonely alleyway.
The ad displays a knight in shining armor, and a lady; perhaps the Lady Guinevere herself, graces the stage, thereof. The two embrace one another, passionately, arms and legs entangled in feigned passion.
They slobber on one another like wanton animals. Perhaps they both secretly yearn, not for each other but, for another drag. The copy claims that Lady Guinevere Cigarettes are made from only supreme tobacco… a cigarette so smooth you will never love another.
Becoming slowly aware, a presence creeps across the borders of her mixed-up reality. Yes, there’s a man in the room, he’s standing beside her. He’s the source of the smell of rum and tobacco. He’s been the one talking to her all along.
His long white coat is splotched with body fluids. The collar is fraying along its edge. The irregular patterns make brown puddles which are outlined with darker brown-red borders. Maybe an assassin used the white coat as a canvas, on which he finger-painted a terrible confession.
She struggles to think clearly. The brain-fog is clearing. She asks a question of her own, her voice sounds distant and strange to her, it’s muffled in her ears. “What… is it… I’m supposed to remem...?” Her voice drags to a halt. She can only complete the question in her head. Her tongue is swollen and feels like a piece of dry leather in her mouth, sticking to the inside of her gummy cheeks.
Her eyes are sensitive to the sterile white beam shining rudely into her face, insulting her, invading private little spaces she hasn’t even explored yet. All the mushy jelly stuff at the hot, screaming core of her eyeballs wants to burst out, with each painful throb of her brain.
Rivulets of tears squeeze out and careen down onto her small, sallow cheeks. She finds her voice again and slurs, sounding increasingly more impaired than before, “Did you… did you bring me here?” Her head wobbles and nausea crescendos. She’s uncertain if this man is responsible, for her being in this place, in this room, awaiting an unknown fate.
He ignores her question. “No, perhaps you don’t remember. They tell me that was quite a blow you took. A big fall indeed. Amnesia would be my diagnosis. Only a temporary condition I hope. I’m anticipating that it’s temporary anyway. I’m optimistic that you may be able to shed some light, on a way… on any way at all… to correct the state of things as they are now. He lifts a Cherrywood pipe from an empty emesis basin and puffs on it a few times before setting it back down.
“You know,” says another voice, “I wish you wouldn’t smoke that thing in here. These anesthetic gasses are just waiting for a reason to ignite and blow us all to Hell.”
“Me thinks thou dost protest too much, Dr. Jackson,” says the Man-In-The-White-Coat. “It’s helps me relax. Now if you can just get on with it.”
“Okay, suit yourself. I’ll be ready in just a minute.”
Dancing on the ridge of the dream world, she jolts awake, sucking in lungsful of air. Panic crawls up her legs leaving them numb as it ascends. The drugs are losing their influence over her.
What is the word the Man-In-The-White-Coat said? Amnesia? It’s a funny-sounding word. Again, her eyes part, barely enough to see him smiling at her through the slits of her long, wet eyelashes. She’d hopes if she closes them, she’ll find herself far removed from the world she’s found herself in, and instead, she’d be plunked down into a land of fantasy with tall flowing grasses and running horses. But no, she can only see him, the Man-In-The-White-Coat.
He seems like someone who’s trying to hide his guilt as it threatens to real itself by climbing to surface and show on his face. Just like an ordinary garden spider; the Argiope Aurantia, for instance, as it invites an unsuspecting housefly to dine. All the while the cunning spider knows its motives and, ultimately, the outcome for the housefly.
He leans, unpleasantly, over her. He observes and assesses her, scientifically. Poking and prodding. Tapping and thumping and pinching her with some type of surgical instrument, in places that feels wrong for him to see, much less tap or thump or probe. He sighs, scratching the nape of his grimy neck.
Has boredom set in so quickly for him? His rubber surgical gloves grab and pull her hair as he slides his hands across the top of her head looking for notable abnormalities. Something to chart. A milestone reached, a question ticked off with a check mark. He must find her unremarkable and dull she thinks… she hopes.
Maybe if she doesn’t seem exciting to him, he’ll let her go back to where ever she can’t remember coming from. The pulling of her hair diverts her from focusing on the pain of her slashed-open forehead, where the bandage is secured too tightly.
He moves a steady hand towards her. Assaulting her… again. It feels no less intrusive this time than it did before. Her attempt to raise her hands are hindered by something. Her efforts to defend herself from the suddenness of his well-practiced gesture, his very presence, and his uninvited invasion into her life… such as it is, are thwarted.
The rails of the bed shake stiffly, uninterested in her circumstance, they clack against the metal bed frame. The girl fights harder against the hold the tethers have on her. She finds that she’s tied securely. Her struggles are rendered useless. Her ankles and wrists are attached to the gurney. She’s a bug caught in the liquid resin of a conifer, in time she’ll become encased in a prison of inescapable amber.
The rails rattle louder as she resists the uncomfortably tight bonds that dig into her flesh. If they were any tighter, they would act as a tourniquet cutting off the flow of blood. As it is, the blood circulating through her vascular system is significantly reduced, causing her arms and legs to tingle with the lack of oxygen going to the tissue. The sensation of pins and needles make her wiggle her toes, and flex her fingers, to fill them with freshly oxygenated blood. Flexors and extensors work in a jerky fashion to ease the irritating sensation. She’s going nowhere.
Her body is, for the most part, incapacitated due to the noxious potion the Man-In-The-White-Coat injected into her. The dull pulse of hopelessness taking root, and the despair is biting into her, evermore driving home the reality of the situation at hand.
Her brain is fighting the drugs. She’s rousing, but
only slightly. Waking in this room, with these two men, is nearly overwhelming to her. Confusion and disorientation at its finest. She’s Alice, rag-dolling headfirst down the rabbit hole. A horrific cocoon of fear spins around her, encases her, smothering her, slowly. It presses her into the repressive, stuffy, sarcophagus of her own being. The last place she can possibly escape. Inside herself.
She pushes, and she struggles until the claustrophobia of the moment flees, but like the incoming of high tide to drown her indefensible and immature shell, it takes baby-steps and creeps back again. Invisible hands of anxiety choke her, meaning to snuff out the miserably dull spark of sanity and hope which remains within her.
Smells of many odd and curious things; noxious medicines, and sanitizers sting the eyes and the nose. Wafts of chemicals rub raw the inside of her nose, sucking the moisture from the membranes, drying them, cracking them.
There is someone positioned near the top of the gurney, next to her head. He’s the one who protested because the Man-In-The-White-Coat wants to smoke ‘that thing” around the anesthesia gasses and ‘blow us all to Hell’. She can only see him, briefly, when on occasion, he leans over her.
He has dark hair; it is thinning, and a scruffy brown beard sprinkled with grey hairs weaving out wildly like hands grasping for long-forgotten youth.
He’s doing things she can’t glimpse. She can, however, hear sharp clinks of glass, upon glass, upon metal. Painfully unintriguing, everyday sounds, which, unless one found themselves strapped to a table in a strange room, with two strange men, wouldn’t typically fill one with anxiety or dread.
“Okay, now I’m ready,” says the protesting man, arranging the Schimmelbusch mask, placing it over her nose. He piles several sheets of loosely woven, 4x4 inch, cotton gauzes, one upon the other in a neat, fluffy, stack upon the delicate wire frame and fine strainer wire. He positions his liver-spotted hands, holding them inches above her face. The man’s holding a tiny glass vial of drop ether, he’s preparing to induce anesthesia. The girl cranes her stiff neck to see, but she still can’t see enough to draw a conclusion as to what her fate will be.