Shards (2 page)

A potted hibiscus broke my
fall, bruising my hip in the bargain. My hand worked on its own,
trained by countless dreams of this moment in the weeks before.
With the gauze pressed tight over the wound, I tilted my head to
watch the gunman go down.

He seemed to drop
simultaneously as two booms rocked the foyer. Good boy, George.
Plumes of blood sprayed from the gunman's shoulder and chest. The
phantom pains in my chest, overshadowed by the very real pain from
the hole in my side, subsided as the would-be robber crashed to the
floor.

I didn't need to take a closer
look to know the man was dead. George's second shot had exploded
his heart, just as it should have.

Everyone was huddled in clumps
on the floor, still too afraid to rise. Most kept their eyes to the
floor, with only furtive glances spared for me or the fallen
gunman.

"George," I stammered, although
it took two tries to get the name out right. The metallic tang of
blood was already on my tongue. Not a good sign.

George was still frozen in his
stand-off pose, the Smith and Wesson smoking from doing its duty.
At the sound of his name, he holstered his gun and rushed to my
side.

"You alright, Miss?" His words
were as stammered as mine.

"No, George, I've been shot."
This came out clear enough.

He pulled up my blouse to
inspect the wound, careful to remove my hand, and the gauze pad,
while doing so. The blood surged when the pad was taken away. He
pressed his hand over mine as we reapplied the gauze to my side.
Blood swallowed both sets of fingers and pooled along the floor. It
soon encircled his shiny black shoe, just as it should.

"Sorry about the mess," I said,
then choked back a cough.

"Where'd you get all these
scars, Miss?" George was transfixed on the naked skin beneath my
bra.

"Shootings, stabbings, that
one's a cattle prod," I traced an ugly scar along my ribs with a
limp finger. "I'm drawn to these things. A moth to a flame."

"What?" George's brow creased
in concentration.

"I'm a sucker for punishment.
Empathy and prescience. It's a sacrifice thing. Don't sweat it, you
wouldn't get it anyway." I coughed again, much harder than before.
The heat from the wound was subsiding. A chill was steadily
creeping into my limbs.

"Don't worry, Miss---"

"Verity."

"Verity, then. Don't worry,
we'll get an ambulance here pronto."

"I called one a few minutes
ago."

George was puzzled but said
nothing.

I closed my eyes, waiting for
the wail of the ambulance to fill the silence. Responses were slow
this time of year. I concentrated on the ebbing blood and George's
fingers entwined with mine.

The warmth was reassuring as
new phantom pains emerged to nag at my neck and left arm. Knife
wounds, most likely. The tingle went deep enough.

The pain---the real and the
imagined---was also reassuring. More work and more days left ahead.
More sacrifices.

Just as it should be.

* * *

Virgin in the Mist

She appeared in the mist of my
bathroom mirror, her eyes haloed by the light, her face on the cusp
of a scream or a prayer. My faith was strong when I told Father
Morales about her. His faith was stronger when he told the
Vatican.

Now the queues of worshippers,
with their candles and incurable diseases, have taken over my
house. Poor as I was, I now live on the streets---pushed out by
droves of fanatics. All desperate for a glimpse of their vision or
clutching for 'holy relics' like my bathroom tiles. Anything to be
close to her. The pilgrimage line to my bathroom fills the
streets.

They run my hot water all day
for a glimpse of the Virgin's face. And they get it---her eyes ablaze
in the fluorescent light, reflecting their convictions, their need.
Like Father Morales, and the Vatican Cardinals, they wonder at the
expression on her face.

When I still cared and still
had a home, I had asked the first pilgrims what they saw. They had
offered only fervour, vagueness, and prayer.

But I know now. Life in the
gutter has made it clear.

She's laughing.

At me.

* * *

Revision is Murder

I'd written many short stories,
trying to break into the writing scene, but it was with this
particular manuscript that I had a special affinity. It was my
first, my masterpiece---the great unpublished novel.

Wedged between a dozen coffees
and 3am, I struggled to focus. My eyes blurred as I banged away at
the keyboard. Words and whole sentences formed almost unbidden,
pouring from me with abandon---the product of trained hands running
on automatic. The blurring intensified, forcing me to squint at the
letters floating in pixelated clusters across the screen.As I
typed, a whirl of colours filled my peripheral vision. Too tired to
care, I continued typing. Chapter seventeen was drawing to a close,
and the protagonist was headed for a cliff-hanger. The colours
swirled and danced in my field of vision but never swam close
enough to cloud my view of the screen.

Rounding off a page, my eyes
committed their betrayal, whirling the spectrum of light and haze
into a tunnel. Only the words on the screen existed, everything
else was swallowed by the luminous fog. Within moments, even the
white document background dropped away, disappearing into the
depths of the screen and the abyss beyond. The words and letters
were left hanging like baby spiders clinging to the smoky monitor
glass.

I tapped away, flooding the
glass with more black characters. I typed like a madman, the
sentences forming from fragments only half-conceived in my fogged
mind. Even as I continued to create, the individual letters were
sucked from the glass, hurtling into the blurry abyss that had
engulfed the rest of the computer screen. One at a time at first,
and then in clumps. As the letters were drawn away, so too was my
focus. In my weariness, I succumbed to that same black hole. It
sucked my consciousness into a place beyond thought or reason,
turning everything dark.

I snapped my eyes open again,
pulling myself upright in my chair. The screen was there, as were
my typing fingers, still performing admirably under their own
steam. But filling the screen was a collage of the manuscript and a
world beyond.

Blinking couldn't dispel the
illusion, nor the fogging rainbows still swimming in the halo
obscuring the study.

In the world within my screen,
animated letters floated in a luminous void. An abstract realm of
subtle consciousness, where angles and points, letters and numbers,
coexisted in embryonic forms of life. Metallic clouds of gas
undulated, gently propelling the fleshy letters through the dense
atmosphere. In the distance, noises penetrated the void, akin to
the rise and fall of a whale's song.

Through my twenty-one-inch
window into this abstract plane, waves of empathy radiated into my
core. Contentment, an innate peace with the universe, saturated my
being.

I watched through blurry eyes
as more of the letters I created, bunched into words, sprang into
being on my screen. Simultaneously, fleshy simulacrums appeared
amid the coppery-gold cloud. With my skewed perspective and tiny
viewing frame, I had no idea whether these newborns were twelve
pixels in size or mile-wide monoliths.

I typed and typed, lost to the
joy of creating these passive life-forms. It was rapturous---my
fingers hammered out line after line of prose, outlining the peril
of the protagonist, while the souls of the letters appeared in the
reality beyond, breaking apart from their parent word and floating
unfettered, soaking in the glow and radiating contentment.

As my rational mind intruded,
my hand drifted to the delete key to correct a misspelled word of
my character's plight. Three letters were all I corrected, but the
outcry from beyond nearly shattered my eardrums. The dirge, so much
like a distressed whale, was heartbreaking. The newly birthed
letters, the ones I deleted, faded from a rosy-flesh colour to a
sullen grey. An instant later, they disintegrated to ash, their
carcasses diffusing into a steely cloud.

I froze.

Beyond the line of words on my
manuscript, the rise and fall of the alien whale-song haunted the
void every few seconds. My gut was hollow as realisation dawned on
me. This was the sound of dying letters.

Despite the constant radiating
contentment, I tore my eyes from the screen and wiped a hand across
my brow. The sweat collected there was ice cold. Although the blur
persisted, a legacy of the late hour, I could read my watch well
enough to know 4am was approaching.

The euphoric feeling had faded,
replaced by emptiness. When I refocussed my concentration on the
screen, the bizarre realm of living letters had vanished. Instead,
only the last page of my manuscript filled the screen. Most of it
was riddled with typos.

I squinted hard at the screen,
hoping for the dazzle of colours to return or the hint of a cloud
to show through. Instead, nothing.

I composed myself with deep
breaths and tried pushing the vision from my thoughts,
concentrating instead on finishing the chapter before going to
bed.

I started in on the typos, but
with every correction---every deletion---the haunting call of the
letters echoed through my mind. I couldn't do it.

Afraid to even turn off the
computer, I sought refuge from the madness in sleep. While I slept,
the screen purred and flickered in the darkness. Even in slumber,
the metallic clouds, the bloated shapes of letters and numbers, and
a haunting scream, played through the landscape of my dreams.

The next morning, I returned to
the manuscript, still bleary-eyed, but again, couldn't bring myself
to correct the mistakes. I soon turned to thinking of all the
corrections I'd made in the novel, and then in the dozens of short
stories I'd written. I paled when I remembered trashing the
original versions of chapters three and four. Nearly nine thousand
words. Murdered.

After much soul searching and
guilt, I backed up every story of mine onto disks and locked them
away in my study draw.

Since that night, I've never
written another story. Not another word. Knowing the consequences,
it's just too painful to make a mistake. My computer sits dormant,
with my entire writing career dormant within.

I've now turned my hand to
art---abstract art. With the indecipherable smattering of paint on
canvas, I'll never be in danger of erasing my work ever again. The
thought gives me comfort as I'm painting, imagining myself floating
through a steel-brass cloud, feeling at one with the universe.

Never again will I have to
endure the mournful call of letters lamenting the loss of their
kind.

* * *

Stealing Fire

He glared into the campfire as
though it were his bitter enemy. Tension lines---muscles taut and
charged with adrenalin---were highlighted in the amber glow.
Flickering shadows transformed his eyes into pits. Though hidden,
they burned with an intensity greater than the coals.

The fire played along the
twigs, delighting in its rampage as the wood charred beneath. The
kindling popped and crackled, accompanied by the dirge of a
cricket. The insect was lost in the trees beyond his campsite,
beyond his battered Triumph Thunderbird.

Fire was capricious---an idiot
child with a flair for destruction. Its dance sickened him to the
core.

Memories stirred. The fire
became a portal to his torment. He scowled, repeatedly clenching
his gloved fists as the nightmare played through his mind.

The flailing arm was always
first. Amy's. The tiny arm reached through the steel bars that
entombed her inside the bedroom. Heat and irony assaulted him in
waves as he fought to free his little girl. The bars he'd intended
for her protection became her death sentence.

He wrenched at the bars with
all his strength as Amy's pleas, then screams, tore the heart from
his chest. His desperation wasn't enough. The bars never yielded,
nor the flames. The fire was ever hungry.

Black, billowing smoke stung
his eyes and raked his throat but couldn't drive him away. Despite
the pain, the heat, and the stench, he held that tiny hand until
the world faded to black.

His memories soon shifted to
Sonya.

She survived that night, burnt
beyond recognition and crippled by more than physical injuries. 'I
should have done more', she had mumbled through ruined lips. Even
after the bandages came off, Sonya tormented herself with the
chant.

Those were the last words he
had ever heard from his wife and they haunted him to this day. The
fire had stolen her too. Without Amy, or a face, her spirit
surrendered.

He saw it in her eyes that last
day. That dancing flame. Where her light should have been.
Dissatisfied that Sonya was spared the withering brutality of its
embrace, the flame drove her to the hospital roof, and to her
death.

In turn, it drove him to the
road. To the life of a wanderer. An avenger.

He glared at the campfire,
willing his demons to quieten. Clenching his fist again, to the
sound of scrunching leather, he moved in closer to the flames. The
heat surged in anticipation. Twigs popped like snapping bones. His
face grew hot but he ignored the sensation. The heat barely
registered. Not after this long.

His focus honed to a tiny black
sphere, a pinpoint aimed directly at the heart of the fire. Flames
licked the air, eager for a taste of the flesh suggested by his
singed hairs. The fire flickered, darting to and fro in the hunt
for combustibles to devour.

He rolled back the sleeve of
his jacket, revealing a maze of burn scars along his forearm. It
was time.