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Days 19 and 20
Jul. 13th, 2008 10:42 pmDays 19 and 20: Floating.
Sidney snuck back past the decrepit fencing into the vacant lot. In the half-light of the fading day, the shapes of his collection loomed like the skeletons of clockwork dinosaurs. He rushed by them with only a few exception- a strange apparatus there received a loving pat, another a cursory examination that yielded a few specks of dust. For the most part they went ignored, like shoes he had long ago outgrown.
An observer would note that he clutched something to his chest as he ran, that he was flushed and out of breath long after he had stopped running, and that his grin stretched out wide past the point appropriate for polite company. A careful observer would perhaps have noted the convulsions of his fingers and belly where his burden touched his body, as if it caused spasms. A very careful observer who looked in exactly the right place would have seen the blue glass eye around Sidney’s gleam far more brightly than the ambient light should allow. But Sidney was unobserved in the place he had constructed for himself, and no one could have seen from his actions whether those convulsions were a sign of delight or revulsion.
He slipped into the last inner circle of his carefully artless maze, which directed both the casual and the determined walker on paths tangential to the heart of the field. Only Sidney even noticed where the debris formed a pointedly solid barrier around the center, and of course only Sidney new where to press, push, shove and wriggle his way around them.
Sidney reached his goal and carefully lowered his burden to the table in the center of the labyrinth. His hands rested heavily for the space of a heartbeat on this, the altar to his mind’s inner workings realized, and he took a breath slowly. In. Out. In. Out.
He’d come so far and there was so much work to be done still.
***
Anyone could build an airplane or a hang glider in his spare time. Sidney had set his sights a little higher.
***
Sidney’s first breakthrough was, oddly enough, the night that he was attacked by a werewolf.
His various attempts to recount the story after the fact remained confused well past the point that terror and youth would excuse his inability to remember. Werewolves have however an inherent terror and confusion attached to them, and Sidney had so few chances to recite his tale to a believing audience that it hardly mattered.
The facts, as recounted by his mother to the priestess to whom she took Sidney to clean him of the taint of evil, were as follows: Sidney at age nine wandered out into a wooded section of a neighboring park on a night of a full moon. His mother was not a woman convinced of the truth of the things her grandmother had whispered to her in the dark of the night many years before, and it had been many years since she had tied holly above her door to keep out evil. She stocked her cupboards with Advil and cough syrup, not potions, and her garden grew only vegetables, not herbs. When Sidney protested against the need to wear the blue glass eye his great grandmother had passed along to all her descendants, Sidney’s mother did not insist.
Nevertheless when Sidney ran screaming from the woods with blood on his T-shirt, she recognized the creature that chased her son to the edge of the woods. She grabbed her son in a rush that belied her cold terror and carried him screaming into the house. She hid him in a closet and returned to the door of her porch. There she waited, clutching her grandmother’s silver carving knife in her good left hand and a flaming brand made hastily from gin and turpentine in her right.
The beast came. They fought. It was a hungry monster in search its rightful prey. She was a mother. She won, but it cost her an eye and her home. She fled that night before the firemen came to pull from the ashes her house the only corpse that they would find that evening: a mostly human figure with shattered teeth. When the blackened fragments of the canines were reconstructed, they measured half the coroner’s index finger. He quietly ruled the death an accident, and put a fresh bow of holly over the door of his own home that evening.
Sidney knew very little of the battle, but recalled the next night with great clarity: he had spent it strapped to a bed while a mixture of wolfsbane and rosemary was rubbed into the open bite wounds on his arms, over and over until the dawn brought him back to himself.
Sidney learned several things very quickly after that: always wear your glass eye and see that that you keep it clean and brightly shining, so that it can see evil far away. Keep holly fresh and green in your home, especially over the doors and windows. Never use your real name when a false one will do. There are monsters in the world and they will get you if you are not careful.
***
Sidney did think that merely flying was enough. Winds would eventually fade down. Planes would run out of fuel. Essentially, to keep absolutely sure of not touching the ground, one had to find something that would perpetually and eternally remain off the ground of its own accord.
One had to defy gravity, really.
Sidney snuck back past the decrepit fencing into the vacant lot. In the half-light of the fading day, the shapes of his collection loomed like the skeletons of clockwork dinosaurs. He rushed by them with only a few exception- a strange apparatus there received a loving pat, another a cursory examination that yielded a few specks of dust. For the most part they went ignored, like shoes he had long ago outgrown.
An observer would note that he clutched something to his chest as he ran, that he was flushed and out of breath long after he had stopped running, and that his grin stretched out wide past the point appropriate for polite company. A careful observer would perhaps have noted the convulsions of his fingers and belly where his burden touched his body, as if it caused spasms. A very careful observer who looked in exactly the right place would have seen the blue glass eye around Sidney’s gleam far more brightly than the ambient light should allow. But Sidney was unobserved in the place he had constructed for himself, and no one could have seen from his actions whether those convulsions were a sign of delight or revulsion.
He slipped into the last inner circle of his carefully artless maze, which directed both the casual and the determined walker on paths tangential to the heart of the field. Only Sidney even noticed where the debris formed a pointedly solid barrier around the center, and of course only Sidney new where to press, push, shove and wriggle his way around them.
Sidney reached his goal and carefully lowered his burden to the table in the center of the labyrinth. His hands rested heavily for the space of a heartbeat on this, the altar to his mind’s inner workings realized, and he took a breath slowly. In. Out. In. Out.
He’d come so far and there was so much work to be done still.
***
Anyone could build an airplane or a hang glider in his spare time. Sidney had set his sights a little higher.
***
Sidney’s first breakthrough was, oddly enough, the night that he was attacked by a werewolf.
His various attempts to recount the story after the fact remained confused well past the point that terror and youth would excuse his inability to remember. Werewolves have however an inherent terror and confusion attached to them, and Sidney had so few chances to recite his tale to a believing audience that it hardly mattered.
The facts, as recounted by his mother to the priestess to whom she took Sidney to clean him of the taint of evil, were as follows: Sidney at age nine wandered out into a wooded section of a neighboring park on a night of a full moon. His mother was not a woman convinced of the truth of the things her grandmother had whispered to her in the dark of the night many years before, and it had been many years since she had tied holly above her door to keep out evil. She stocked her cupboards with Advil and cough syrup, not potions, and her garden grew only vegetables, not herbs. When Sidney protested against the need to wear the blue glass eye his great grandmother had passed along to all her descendants, Sidney’s mother did not insist.
Nevertheless when Sidney ran screaming from the woods with blood on his T-shirt, she recognized the creature that chased her son to the edge of the woods. She grabbed her son in a rush that belied her cold terror and carried him screaming into the house. She hid him in a closet and returned to the door of her porch. There she waited, clutching her grandmother’s silver carving knife in her good left hand and a flaming brand made hastily from gin and turpentine in her right.
The beast came. They fought. It was a hungry monster in search its rightful prey. She was a mother. She won, but it cost her an eye and her home. She fled that night before the firemen came to pull from the ashes her house the only corpse that they would find that evening: a mostly human figure with shattered teeth. When the blackened fragments of the canines were reconstructed, they measured half the coroner’s index finger. He quietly ruled the death an accident, and put a fresh bow of holly over the door of his own home that evening.
Sidney knew very little of the battle, but recalled the next night with great clarity: he had spent it strapped to a bed while a mixture of wolfsbane and rosemary was rubbed into the open bite wounds on his arms, over and over until the dawn brought him back to himself.
Sidney learned several things very quickly after that: always wear your glass eye and see that that you keep it clean and brightly shining, so that it can see evil far away. Keep holly fresh and green in your home, especially over the doors and windows. Never use your real name when a false one will do. There are monsters in the world and they will get you if you are not careful.
***
Sidney did think that merely flying was enough. Winds would eventually fade down. Planes would run out of fuel. Essentially, to keep absolutely sure of not touching the ground, one had to find something that would perpetually and eternally remain off the ground of its own accord.
One had to defy gravity, really.
