Falling

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

Cover design by
ParadigmGD.com

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.

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 reply.

“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.