What To See If You’re Invisible

My eyes open wide, but the world seems oddly empty. The people who’d been sitting before me, the magician and his ridiculous mustache and rental tux were all gone. Vanished completely. I scrub my eyes with my hands and strain to hear the oohing and ahhing of the crowd that I’d been waiting for. There is nothing, though. Heart pounding, I take one shaky step out of the starry upright coffin I’d volunteered to step in to, happy and eager, and squint at the empty room. I see nothing but empty tables and chairs, darkness. I walk on, nervous now, and I notice the dust sparkling in the air. It is comforting.

“Hello?” I cry. There isn’t a response. I focus on placing on foot in front of the other, on getting out of this dark and suffocating room. Outside, the cool night air flows into my lungs as I breathe deep with satisfaction. Lightning flies through the air above my head, zipping so fast it makes my head hurt. There are mumbled words trailing behind the lightning, the tail of a comet. I sigh at the sound of the voices.

“…if he comes over tomorrow, I’ll have to do laundry as soon as I get home today…”

“…the living room would look okay in green, but with that light I think blue would be better…”

“I cannot believe I said that, I looked like such an idiot.”

“Where is she going?”

“I wonder if he’s ever going to write that poem or if I can take the idea…” I can feel my heart slowing slightly. I continue walking. The world, though dim with the night, is painfully colorful. There is a shade of sort of purple I’ve never seen before, oranges and blues and greens too bright for me to absorb. I look around in awe, feeling like a tourist on their first trip to Time’s Square. The lightning zooms all around me, lowering as it assimilates to my presence. They ruffle my hair and make my skin rise in goose bumps, a feeling of floating dizzily in my stomach as they fly by. It is a pleasant sensation and for a moment I think I could stand being invisible.

“…I would do anything for an ice cream, right now”

I laugh a little. This one was especially ticklish and I want to follow it, to stay with it all night, but it evaporates before my eyes as I trail behind it. The next thing I know, even as I’m laughing, my eyes are exploding with tears. I fall to my knees as one of the bolts flows through me, as if I wasn’t there at all. I suddenly feel violently queasy all over. My stomach, my lungs, my pancreas, my elbows, my eyelashes, my toenails, my kidneys …

“…that fucking bastard. I never want to speak to him again…he should…”

And before I can truly register that I am in pain, it is gone. I lie panting on the sidewalk, the lightning’s tickling sensation no longer pleasant as they fly slightly above me. On the cement by my nose, a hundred thousand tiny things crawl. I don’t know what they are. They’re squirming onto my hands, my face. They’re slimy and crusty and scuttling and there are so many of them. They could easily carry my body off with them, the way an ant can carry a leaf. Their amorphous forms squish in underneath my fingernails, into the scrape on my leg, in through my nose and mouth and eyes, invading my body rather than carrying it off. I shriek, leaping to my feet and trying frantically to brush them off me, even as I’m almost hit by another bolt or two. I realize as I rub my arms raw trying to remove the things that they’ve been on me the whole time and that even when I brush off some of them, there are always more beneath the first layer. I can feel them now, squirming on my skin and under my skin, impossible to move. I take a deep breath, shut my eyes tight and try to ignore it. I instead turn my attention to the bolts flying by, concentrate hard on the human voices that float along behind as if by clinging to those voices with enough strength I can force them to become reality. The calm and quiet world I had first entered is completely gone, swallowed whole by chaos I can’t escape.

“…I totally forgot about the homework. Maybe she won’t collect it…”

“…he’ll be home…Tuesday. I think. God, I miss him…”

I stand motionless in the sea of lightning bolts, every atom of my being feeling separate, fluid, nauseous. My cells are boiling; my medusa hair is under someone else’s control as my mind begins to float away. I’m dying. I can feel a tug on my appendix, a vicious, solid pull which I stumble toward against my own volition.

I walk, zombie-like, in the direction of the pull, back into the theatre. There are fewer bolts here, most of them moving slowly and muttering,

“What is he doing?”

“How long does it take to finish this cheap trick?”

“Where the fuck did this hack learn magic?”

“What time is it?”

I walk absently through the lightning, across the room, over empty tables and chairs and back to the little booth, where I close myself in, grip myself in a desperate embrace, trying to hold my molecules together until the glue dries. When I open my eyes again, there are cheers. The curtain is pulled aside by someone who is not me and when I look out, the room is full, packed with cheering three dimensional people, made of flesh and blood and bone. I step out of the box, again, bewildered, and follow the magician’s lead in a low bow. Trembling, I walk back to my seat. My kneecaps are made of glass, my muscles grape jelly and my heart pounding faster than it has since my mother first heard it via ultrasound. I collapse into my chair, panting, and turn to my friend sitting there; all of his cells cooperating to create one large organism. I wheeze,

“Please, let’s leave.”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I'm really not sure how I feel about this one and so I'd greatly appreciate some concrit. thanks!