Post by Anthony Crute on Nov 20, 2006 19:51:12 GMT -5
Exile
Insane, Mad, Crazy and Mental all of them in the common vernacular mean the same things and each one of them is so overused, one of them is probably the most overused word in the English language but I don’t know which. ‘My friend is mental, you should have seen this jump…My friend is Crazy yadda yadda yadda’. The one problem with these euphemisms is I am all of them, I’m mad, crazy, mental and insane (both meanings) or at least they think I am. I thought I was at one point, at some level I still do but when you’ve lived a life like mine its expected.
My family have always lived a fairly normal life, all except me, I’ve been a black spot on their record. There hasn’t been an interesting individual for seven generations at least and then I come along, a complete fruit loop.
I spent many of my formative years laughing at people who aren’t there or talking to my imaginary friends all of which FYI were named Michael and looked just like me. I used to describe them as ghosts as I got older, people I didn’t recognise moving around town and my house shimmering in and out as they went. They blurred as they walked and then one day they vanished.
I’d realised normal people don’t see ghosts, they don’t see people that aren’t there and so I blocked them out. I ignored them day in day out for years, eventually I stopped seeing them, I saw no more strangers walking the roads shimmering in and out and I saw no more of myself to talk and play with, they were just gone.
When I was around 15 they came back but not like before, this time they were more solid and these were people I knew. My father would walk across the room and behind him trailed an echo or a spectre of him, all of them just slightly different from the one before. I could see them with everyone, where people moved these blurred lines of spectres followed.
I tried to ignore them but they were there, the wouldn’t go away and they were more solid then before. Occasionally someone would continue to move and a spectre would stand still and when they did it was almost as if they were a real person solid before my eyes as if I could reach out and touch them but I never did.
I wanted to ignore them again, I wanted them to fade from my sight again and to never bother my normal (but very dull) life. I was happy skating with my friends at the park, I was happy listening to Green Day and worrying if this girl would say yes if I asked her out. They had different ideas, they became more and more solid to the point I couldn’t tell them from reality, they’d speak to me and I’d answer or I’d ignore someone who was really talking.
People began to notice I was acting strange, my family worried and my ‘friends’ began to avoid me or have somewhere else to go when I called. It all came to a head one day when I lunged at my father with a knife screaming.
I swear to god I saw him, he was standing in his favourite shirt. He was bathed in blood and holding a gun while at his feet lay my mothers body the pool of blood soaking into the carpet. He was screaming at her that their freak of a son was her fault, it was all her fault that their son was an abomination.
I ran from the room and into the kitchen, I screamed at the top of my lungs as I went. I slammed the kitchen door behind me and pressed my back against it until I heard him coming. “Michael!” he screamed, I now know its just because he’d heard my scream and was worried but I didn’t know that then. I dove across the kitchen and picked up the knife that rested on the chopping board and ducked down behind the counter.
The kitchen door opened slowly “Michael?” my father questioned as he walked in tentatively. I waited a few seconds as my heart beat loudly in my chest, I was sure he could hear it but he made no indication. I waited until he was on line with the edge of the counter, another inch or another couple of degrees and he would see me and I would be done for.
I lunged upwards and towards him with the blade held tightly in my hand, I slashed the top of his arm before he managed to get his arm up sending mine splaying sideways. He dropped back obviously surprised as he tried to assess what had just happened to him, he looked terrified and then his eyes fixated on the knife in my hand as I raised it again.
Dad was a big man, always has been, I however gained my mother’s slightness. I was always scrawny and looked gaunt. His fist flew out and caught my jaw, his left hand came up and caught the other side of my face. I was out for the count.
I wake up in the back of a police car, cuffed. I know what’s happened I’d been hallucinating, the killer dad wasn’t real…but you try telling that to the cops. Into a cell where I sat for a few hours until a psych consult came to see me with my dad. I could here Mom sobbing outside and I couldn’t hold the tears in, I hugged my dad and he hugged me without question. If he’d tried to stab me I don’t know if I could have been so forgiving, he told me to tell Dr Singer the truth and he was only there to help me.
I cried and I talked and I spilled my guts and told them everything I could remember. I told them about all the spectres I’d seen from my teacher who looked like the Hulk to my cousins baby who had her flesh dripping from her like some kind of zombie.
They put me here ‘Bedlam for the criminally insane’. It’s really called Quiet Hills Hospital but I know what it is really. The truth is it isn’t as bad as I make out, its comfortable, we watch TV and have group therapy. There’s no electroshock therapy or scenes from A Clockwork Orange, life isn’t so bad.
I’m not insane and that’s my only problem with this place, pills after pills and therapy session after therapy session and I still see them. I see spectres following the ‘wardens’, ‘inmates’ and Doctors around. I see spectres of staff as patients and patients as Doctors and most other things you can imagine in a mental institute.
Most days I just sit and watch, if I let my eyes blur I can pick a spectre and view them as clear as day as they interact with other spectres. I of course have to follow them around when they leave a room which doesn’t make the doctors think I’m any saner but if I didn’t I’d go crazy. Irony your name is Michael.
I sometimes sit and blur my eyes out of the window, I look at giant castles made of stone or citadels of metal hovering in the air as winged men and women swoop and dive. I sometimes watch the dinosaurs as they hunt through the valleys for humans to eat or I simply watch people going about their daily lives in the village that is sometimes outside of my window.
My parents visit me once a week and my eyes blur, I see brothers and sisters I never had. I see people I don’t recognise (usually accompanied by another stranger sitting in a gown next to me. One red letter day I saw my Mom in a robe she was screaming at my dad telling him how I can vanish at will, its obvious why she’s here.
We talk small talk of what’s going on in the outside world and how I’ll be home soon. Its all lies! I’m twenty one years old and I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
The echoes began to die one day, I was sitting talking to my parents and watched them slowly fade away. My mother, father, mother, both, me, my fictional brothers and sisters. Every visit there were less and less echoes, everyone else still retained their own but my parents lessened more and more until I could barely see them.
I was worried about them but there was little I could do as I sat in my ‘cell’ and contemplated my own insanity. I saw my mother flicker, I sat on my bed, the mattress was as lumpy and solid as the day I walked in. My mother (whom I assume was the same one from the meeting room that day) sat in a chair opposite the bed. She was crying and begging with someone, an unseen spectre passed between us casting a shadow over her face and then the shot was fired.
My mother slumped back in the chair, I don’t know why and I don’t know how but I ignored my experience and something happened. I can’t usually touch or feel spectres and I know this so why bother but I’d just seen my mother murdered.
I launched my self from the bed and across the room in one leap. My hands found her shoulders as she slumped sideways. Her limp body rested against mine and her head lolled onto my shoulder. “Mom!” I cried as I shook her but she was gone.
I turned as I heard the gun cocked again. He stood pointing the weapon at me, he wore a red mask like some sort of superhero and a black body suit, on his hip was a holster in which his gun had been stored. I suddenly noticed he had no echo, there were no spectres when he moved and the same was true for my mother, they were for the first time in years solid to me.
There was a loud bang as the gun recoiled. I felt the searing pain in my upper arm as the bullet entered and then exited. The pain shot through my body making my recoil as my mother dropped to the floor. The killer levelled his gun again and just as he was about to fire my eyes blurred.
I found myself lying on the floor of my cell, the blood poured from my wound and down my body onto the floor. The pain was unbearable but I was more concerned with what had just happened and what I’d just done. Maybe it was a sign I truly was crazy and my mind was getting worse but I couldn’t shake the feeling it was something else.
Mutants freaks of nature who want to wipe out humanity. They’re human born but due to some genetic fluke they’re born with powers beyond imagination….could I be a freak like them? 198 left in the world and I gotta be one….though I suppose I’d be 199.
I suddenly realised the pain in my arm had ceased, I glanced down to see the bullet wound was gone as if it had healed. I ran my hand over the space on the arm but there was nothing there but smooth skin. I stretched my healed arm out before my face and examined it, it looked normal as if it had never been injured. That’s when I saw it, a small scar I’d never seen before, a small scar I’d never had before but it wasn’t where the bullet had hit me it was further down near the wrist. The pieces began to fall into place.
It sounded crazy but I could think of no other explanation and as soon as it crossed my mind I knew it was true, I knew it as if I’d been told it or discovered it over and over again…maybe I realised, I had. I was a mutant, I’m not great at science but I’d seen that Sliders show before. I somehow had the ability to traverse the multiverse. The spectres and the echoes suddenly made sense, I was seeing the shadows of alternate realities. I’d managed to span the void when my mother was in danger and I’d appeared in that world. There, in another world I couldn’t see the ghosts or spectres it was as if my power was linked to my own world. When I’d been shot and injured I’d acted instinctively and ‘exchanged’ my arm with that of another version, a version who had scarred his wrist at some point….he would be pissed when he woke up to find a bullet wound in his arm.
My mind suddenly snapped back to a problem in my mind, my parents fading echoes, he was the reason why? Who was he? What was he doing? Why? The questions pounded through my mind but I didn’t know any answers, was it the same guy moving through the realities or was it an echo in each reality. I came to realise it didn’t matter all that was important was my family was in danger and I now knew I had the power to stop whoever it was from killing them.
I sat on my bed and wondered how I could help them, could I use my powers? How? I stared at my door and an idea came to mind, I continued to stare at the door and let my eyes blur. The door did nothing…or at least I thought it did nothing at first. I watched it and noticed a slight change in shade or a paint chip away in another place, I was doing it but not in any useful way. The door flipped and flopped between colours as the cycle speeded up, the door suddenly stopped changing as it vanished and my eyes went clear. I’d not even known there wasn’t a door there until my vision cleared, it was as if some sixth sense had made me stop on the right spot.
The walls were covered in rotting wallpaper and the paint was peeling. The floor was covered in dirt and dust and the mattress I found myself sitting on was wet and rotten to the touch. I climbed from my bed and the second my feet touched the floor I wished I was wearing my slippers.
I walked across the room taking in the smell of dirt and grime. My fingers touched the doorframe as I passed the threshold. The hall I found myself in was the same as the one outside my room on my world but just like the one I’d been in it was rotting away. Upturned chairs and tables lay all the way down the corridor and there were some splashes of blood up the wall which made me question what had happened here.
I made my way quickly through the corridor and down the flight of stairs from the third to the ground floor. As I walked into the hall I could here a faint hissing. I followed the noise unknowing of what to expect. I walked through the final door and into the foyer which you come through when you arrive and then don’t see again until you leave. Two teenagers dressed in denim jackets and hoodies were spray painting their names and the year on the wall.
The shorter of the two turned to look at me and dropped his can, he grabbed his friends shoulder and pointed. The two looked over at me and began to sprint for the door. They were gone before I could speak, I smiled as I realised what the situation was from their point. You’re in an old abandoned mental hospital and a emaciated, whiter than white man with sunken eyes and black hair dressed in the garb of a mental patient appears, you don’t know if it’s a ghost or a psycho…you don’t hang around.
I follow them out into the elegant ground outside but they’re gone…and the grounds are no longer elegant. The trees and bushes are overgrown and the grass is a couple of feet high. The ornate fountain has crumbled sending rusty stream of water into its base. The sky above me is dark and black as a weak sun tries to power through what seems like smog. Pollution? Weather? I don’t know what happened to the world but it seems like a pallid and depressing…more depressing version than our own.
The steel wire fence which runs around the grounds seemed as sturdy as ever as I shook it, I realise there has to be a gap somewhere for those kids to get in but in such a large grounds who knows where it could have been. My eyes begin to blur.
I walk through nothing as the fence disappears before my eyes, I turn and the hospital is gone too. The sun beat down on me heavily, the ground around me seems to be healthy, the green fields and deep forest ahead of me made me think of the garden of Eden but I didn’t have time to think about it, my family was in danger and the longer I waited the more danger there was.
This is the point I realised the dangers of my powers, pain ripped through my body and I hunched over crumbling to the floor. Jumping from reality to reality was taking a toll on me, I don’t know what was happening but it hurt. The problem was that this world seemed to be wilderness and I needed some civilization, I had to blur out again.
I knew where I was heading this time and because of this it was almost easily, my eyes blurred for a second before a town was visible just down the small road I was standing on. I began to walk my body still wracked with pain.
I walked for about an hour till I got to town, the pain was still wrenching through my body which was why it had taken so long to get here. I needed to lie down and needed to sleep, needed food, needed rest.
There was a motel at the end of town, I scouted around and couldn’t see anyone but I was still careful as I forced one of the windows open and climbed into a room. I would have blurred till there was no door and just walked in before blurring back but I wasn’t sure on what the extra strain would do to my body.
I ate some complimentary fruit, the banana was nice, the orange was not and the small blue fruit I didn’t recognize was delicious and filling. It wasn’t long before I passed out into sleep.
The morning came to quickly as light streamed through the window and awoke me, my body was devoid of pain as I moved so I sat up and put my bare feet on the carpeted floor. They were pitted with muck and dirt which meant they left two prints on the cream carpet, I grabbed some more of the fruit and quickly jumped in the shower.
This was the first individual shower I’d had in years and whilst it was the greatest feeling I’d had in those years it was also completely terrifying. I was alone and everything and anything that happened along the way from now on was all on my shoulders. I couldn’t even call my parents and warn them(once I got back to my own world) because they’d just throw me back in the asylum and wouldn’t believe what I said.
I dried myself and threw my clothes back on, as I tied the robe I knew I needed to get more clothes if I was going to get home anytime soon. I hopped out of the window which I’d forced open the night before.
I walked further into town sticking to the edge which is surrounded by woods. The ground hurt my feet but if I was seen by anyone I’d be back in the hospital before I had time to think. I stopped and crouched low when I reached a garden, there were clothes hanging on the line. I walked around the perimeter of the garden and scoped out if there was anyone around before I jumped over the wall. I grabbed some jeans and a T-shirt (I think it was a girls T-shirt…luckily if so she was a big girl which meant I was wearing a tent). A pair of sneakers caked in mud sat at the back door, they were a little too small for me but they fit well enough to do their job.
I walked around the front of the house and onto the street, I pause in the bushes a second to make sure there’s no one around before moving forward. I dash across the street and press myself up against the side of a car. I move my hand up to the door handle and pull on it, with luck the door slowly clicks open. I feel a little bad, when I first saw this place through the window I thought it looked like a nice place to live, somewhere you didn’t have to lock your doors at night…I’m ruining it.
I reach my hand under the front compartment and rip out the wires, ah misspent use I thought to myself as I fired up the engine. When you’ve always considered yourself a freak like I have you’ll do anything to fit in, you pick up some bad habits and skills along the way.
I could have probably used my powers in some way to avoid grand theft auto but I didn’t know what else I had to do that day and the thought of the pain coming back made me wary of their overuse.
Insane, Mad, Crazy and Mental all of them in the common vernacular mean the same things and each one of them is so overused, one of them is probably the most overused word in the English language but I don’t know which. ‘My friend is mental, you should have seen this jump…My friend is Crazy yadda yadda yadda’. The one problem with these euphemisms is I am all of them, I’m mad, crazy, mental and insane (both meanings) or at least they think I am. I thought I was at one point, at some level I still do but when you’ve lived a life like mine its expected.
My family have always lived a fairly normal life, all except me, I’ve been a black spot on their record. There hasn’t been an interesting individual for seven generations at least and then I come along, a complete fruit loop.
I spent many of my formative years laughing at people who aren’t there or talking to my imaginary friends all of which FYI were named Michael and looked just like me. I used to describe them as ghosts as I got older, people I didn’t recognise moving around town and my house shimmering in and out as they went. They blurred as they walked and then one day they vanished.
I’d realised normal people don’t see ghosts, they don’t see people that aren’t there and so I blocked them out. I ignored them day in day out for years, eventually I stopped seeing them, I saw no more strangers walking the roads shimmering in and out and I saw no more of myself to talk and play with, they were just gone.
When I was around 15 they came back but not like before, this time they were more solid and these were people I knew. My father would walk across the room and behind him trailed an echo or a spectre of him, all of them just slightly different from the one before. I could see them with everyone, where people moved these blurred lines of spectres followed.
I tried to ignore them but they were there, the wouldn’t go away and they were more solid then before. Occasionally someone would continue to move and a spectre would stand still and when they did it was almost as if they were a real person solid before my eyes as if I could reach out and touch them but I never did.
I wanted to ignore them again, I wanted them to fade from my sight again and to never bother my normal (but very dull) life. I was happy skating with my friends at the park, I was happy listening to Green Day and worrying if this girl would say yes if I asked her out. They had different ideas, they became more and more solid to the point I couldn’t tell them from reality, they’d speak to me and I’d answer or I’d ignore someone who was really talking.
People began to notice I was acting strange, my family worried and my ‘friends’ began to avoid me or have somewhere else to go when I called. It all came to a head one day when I lunged at my father with a knife screaming.
I swear to god I saw him, he was standing in his favourite shirt. He was bathed in blood and holding a gun while at his feet lay my mothers body the pool of blood soaking into the carpet. He was screaming at her that their freak of a son was her fault, it was all her fault that their son was an abomination.
I ran from the room and into the kitchen, I screamed at the top of my lungs as I went. I slammed the kitchen door behind me and pressed my back against it until I heard him coming. “Michael!” he screamed, I now know its just because he’d heard my scream and was worried but I didn’t know that then. I dove across the kitchen and picked up the knife that rested on the chopping board and ducked down behind the counter.
The kitchen door opened slowly “Michael?” my father questioned as he walked in tentatively. I waited a few seconds as my heart beat loudly in my chest, I was sure he could hear it but he made no indication. I waited until he was on line with the edge of the counter, another inch or another couple of degrees and he would see me and I would be done for.
I lunged upwards and towards him with the blade held tightly in my hand, I slashed the top of his arm before he managed to get his arm up sending mine splaying sideways. He dropped back obviously surprised as he tried to assess what had just happened to him, he looked terrified and then his eyes fixated on the knife in my hand as I raised it again.
Dad was a big man, always has been, I however gained my mother’s slightness. I was always scrawny and looked gaunt. His fist flew out and caught my jaw, his left hand came up and caught the other side of my face. I was out for the count.
I wake up in the back of a police car, cuffed. I know what’s happened I’d been hallucinating, the killer dad wasn’t real…but you try telling that to the cops. Into a cell where I sat for a few hours until a psych consult came to see me with my dad. I could here Mom sobbing outside and I couldn’t hold the tears in, I hugged my dad and he hugged me without question. If he’d tried to stab me I don’t know if I could have been so forgiving, he told me to tell Dr Singer the truth and he was only there to help me.
I cried and I talked and I spilled my guts and told them everything I could remember. I told them about all the spectres I’d seen from my teacher who looked like the Hulk to my cousins baby who had her flesh dripping from her like some kind of zombie.
They put me here ‘Bedlam for the criminally insane’. It’s really called Quiet Hills Hospital but I know what it is really. The truth is it isn’t as bad as I make out, its comfortable, we watch TV and have group therapy. There’s no electroshock therapy or scenes from A Clockwork Orange, life isn’t so bad.
I’m not insane and that’s my only problem with this place, pills after pills and therapy session after therapy session and I still see them. I see spectres following the ‘wardens’, ‘inmates’ and Doctors around. I see spectres of staff as patients and patients as Doctors and most other things you can imagine in a mental institute.
Most days I just sit and watch, if I let my eyes blur I can pick a spectre and view them as clear as day as they interact with other spectres. I of course have to follow them around when they leave a room which doesn’t make the doctors think I’m any saner but if I didn’t I’d go crazy. Irony your name is Michael.
I sometimes sit and blur my eyes out of the window, I look at giant castles made of stone or citadels of metal hovering in the air as winged men and women swoop and dive. I sometimes watch the dinosaurs as they hunt through the valleys for humans to eat or I simply watch people going about their daily lives in the village that is sometimes outside of my window.
My parents visit me once a week and my eyes blur, I see brothers and sisters I never had. I see people I don’t recognise (usually accompanied by another stranger sitting in a gown next to me. One red letter day I saw my Mom in a robe she was screaming at my dad telling him how I can vanish at will, its obvious why she’s here.
We talk small talk of what’s going on in the outside world and how I’ll be home soon. Its all lies! I’m twenty one years old and I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
The echoes began to die one day, I was sitting talking to my parents and watched them slowly fade away. My mother, father, mother, both, me, my fictional brothers and sisters. Every visit there were less and less echoes, everyone else still retained their own but my parents lessened more and more until I could barely see them.
I was worried about them but there was little I could do as I sat in my ‘cell’ and contemplated my own insanity. I saw my mother flicker, I sat on my bed, the mattress was as lumpy and solid as the day I walked in. My mother (whom I assume was the same one from the meeting room that day) sat in a chair opposite the bed. She was crying and begging with someone, an unseen spectre passed between us casting a shadow over her face and then the shot was fired.
My mother slumped back in the chair, I don’t know why and I don’t know how but I ignored my experience and something happened. I can’t usually touch or feel spectres and I know this so why bother but I’d just seen my mother murdered.
I launched my self from the bed and across the room in one leap. My hands found her shoulders as she slumped sideways. Her limp body rested against mine and her head lolled onto my shoulder. “Mom!” I cried as I shook her but she was gone.
I turned as I heard the gun cocked again. He stood pointing the weapon at me, he wore a red mask like some sort of superhero and a black body suit, on his hip was a holster in which his gun had been stored. I suddenly noticed he had no echo, there were no spectres when he moved and the same was true for my mother, they were for the first time in years solid to me.
There was a loud bang as the gun recoiled. I felt the searing pain in my upper arm as the bullet entered and then exited. The pain shot through my body making my recoil as my mother dropped to the floor. The killer levelled his gun again and just as he was about to fire my eyes blurred.
I found myself lying on the floor of my cell, the blood poured from my wound and down my body onto the floor. The pain was unbearable but I was more concerned with what had just happened and what I’d just done. Maybe it was a sign I truly was crazy and my mind was getting worse but I couldn’t shake the feeling it was something else.
Mutants freaks of nature who want to wipe out humanity. They’re human born but due to some genetic fluke they’re born with powers beyond imagination….could I be a freak like them? 198 left in the world and I gotta be one….though I suppose I’d be 199.
I suddenly realised the pain in my arm had ceased, I glanced down to see the bullet wound was gone as if it had healed. I ran my hand over the space on the arm but there was nothing there but smooth skin. I stretched my healed arm out before my face and examined it, it looked normal as if it had never been injured. That’s when I saw it, a small scar I’d never seen before, a small scar I’d never had before but it wasn’t where the bullet had hit me it was further down near the wrist. The pieces began to fall into place.
It sounded crazy but I could think of no other explanation and as soon as it crossed my mind I knew it was true, I knew it as if I’d been told it or discovered it over and over again…maybe I realised, I had. I was a mutant, I’m not great at science but I’d seen that Sliders show before. I somehow had the ability to traverse the multiverse. The spectres and the echoes suddenly made sense, I was seeing the shadows of alternate realities. I’d managed to span the void when my mother was in danger and I’d appeared in that world. There, in another world I couldn’t see the ghosts or spectres it was as if my power was linked to my own world. When I’d been shot and injured I’d acted instinctively and ‘exchanged’ my arm with that of another version, a version who had scarred his wrist at some point….he would be pissed when he woke up to find a bullet wound in his arm.
My mind suddenly snapped back to a problem in my mind, my parents fading echoes, he was the reason why? Who was he? What was he doing? Why? The questions pounded through my mind but I didn’t know any answers, was it the same guy moving through the realities or was it an echo in each reality. I came to realise it didn’t matter all that was important was my family was in danger and I now knew I had the power to stop whoever it was from killing them.
I sat on my bed and wondered how I could help them, could I use my powers? How? I stared at my door and an idea came to mind, I continued to stare at the door and let my eyes blur. The door did nothing…or at least I thought it did nothing at first. I watched it and noticed a slight change in shade or a paint chip away in another place, I was doing it but not in any useful way. The door flipped and flopped between colours as the cycle speeded up, the door suddenly stopped changing as it vanished and my eyes went clear. I’d not even known there wasn’t a door there until my vision cleared, it was as if some sixth sense had made me stop on the right spot.
The walls were covered in rotting wallpaper and the paint was peeling. The floor was covered in dirt and dust and the mattress I found myself sitting on was wet and rotten to the touch. I climbed from my bed and the second my feet touched the floor I wished I was wearing my slippers.
I walked across the room taking in the smell of dirt and grime. My fingers touched the doorframe as I passed the threshold. The hall I found myself in was the same as the one outside my room on my world but just like the one I’d been in it was rotting away. Upturned chairs and tables lay all the way down the corridor and there were some splashes of blood up the wall which made me question what had happened here.
I made my way quickly through the corridor and down the flight of stairs from the third to the ground floor. As I walked into the hall I could here a faint hissing. I followed the noise unknowing of what to expect. I walked through the final door and into the foyer which you come through when you arrive and then don’t see again until you leave. Two teenagers dressed in denim jackets and hoodies were spray painting their names and the year on the wall.
The shorter of the two turned to look at me and dropped his can, he grabbed his friends shoulder and pointed. The two looked over at me and began to sprint for the door. They were gone before I could speak, I smiled as I realised what the situation was from their point. You’re in an old abandoned mental hospital and a emaciated, whiter than white man with sunken eyes and black hair dressed in the garb of a mental patient appears, you don’t know if it’s a ghost or a psycho…you don’t hang around.
I follow them out into the elegant ground outside but they’re gone…and the grounds are no longer elegant. The trees and bushes are overgrown and the grass is a couple of feet high. The ornate fountain has crumbled sending rusty stream of water into its base. The sky above me is dark and black as a weak sun tries to power through what seems like smog. Pollution? Weather? I don’t know what happened to the world but it seems like a pallid and depressing…more depressing version than our own.
The steel wire fence which runs around the grounds seemed as sturdy as ever as I shook it, I realise there has to be a gap somewhere for those kids to get in but in such a large grounds who knows where it could have been. My eyes begin to blur.
I walk through nothing as the fence disappears before my eyes, I turn and the hospital is gone too. The sun beat down on me heavily, the ground around me seems to be healthy, the green fields and deep forest ahead of me made me think of the garden of Eden but I didn’t have time to think about it, my family was in danger and the longer I waited the more danger there was.
This is the point I realised the dangers of my powers, pain ripped through my body and I hunched over crumbling to the floor. Jumping from reality to reality was taking a toll on me, I don’t know what was happening but it hurt. The problem was that this world seemed to be wilderness and I needed some civilization, I had to blur out again.
I knew where I was heading this time and because of this it was almost easily, my eyes blurred for a second before a town was visible just down the small road I was standing on. I began to walk my body still wracked with pain.
I walked for about an hour till I got to town, the pain was still wrenching through my body which was why it had taken so long to get here. I needed to lie down and needed to sleep, needed food, needed rest.
There was a motel at the end of town, I scouted around and couldn’t see anyone but I was still careful as I forced one of the windows open and climbed into a room. I would have blurred till there was no door and just walked in before blurring back but I wasn’t sure on what the extra strain would do to my body.
I ate some complimentary fruit, the banana was nice, the orange was not and the small blue fruit I didn’t recognize was delicious and filling. It wasn’t long before I passed out into sleep.
The morning came to quickly as light streamed through the window and awoke me, my body was devoid of pain as I moved so I sat up and put my bare feet on the carpeted floor. They were pitted with muck and dirt which meant they left two prints on the cream carpet, I grabbed some more of the fruit and quickly jumped in the shower.
This was the first individual shower I’d had in years and whilst it was the greatest feeling I’d had in those years it was also completely terrifying. I was alone and everything and anything that happened along the way from now on was all on my shoulders. I couldn’t even call my parents and warn them(once I got back to my own world) because they’d just throw me back in the asylum and wouldn’t believe what I said.
I dried myself and threw my clothes back on, as I tied the robe I knew I needed to get more clothes if I was going to get home anytime soon. I hopped out of the window which I’d forced open the night before.
I walked further into town sticking to the edge which is surrounded by woods. The ground hurt my feet but if I was seen by anyone I’d be back in the hospital before I had time to think. I stopped and crouched low when I reached a garden, there were clothes hanging on the line. I walked around the perimeter of the garden and scoped out if there was anyone around before I jumped over the wall. I grabbed some jeans and a T-shirt (I think it was a girls T-shirt…luckily if so she was a big girl which meant I was wearing a tent). A pair of sneakers caked in mud sat at the back door, they were a little too small for me but they fit well enough to do their job.
I walked around the front of the house and onto the street, I pause in the bushes a second to make sure there’s no one around before moving forward. I dash across the street and press myself up against the side of a car. I move my hand up to the door handle and pull on it, with luck the door slowly clicks open. I feel a little bad, when I first saw this place through the window I thought it looked like a nice place to live, somewhere you didn’t have to lock your doors at night…I’m ruining it.
I reach my hand under the front compartment and rip out the wires, ah misspent use I thought to myself as I fired up the engine. When you’ve always considered yourself a freak like I have you’ll do anything to fit in, you pick up some bad habits and skills along the way.
I could have probably used my powers in some way to avoid grand theft auto but I didn’t know what else I had to do that day and the thought of the pain coming back made me wary of their overuse.