alright, here's a fic i wrote for my creative writing class. not much to say about it, except it's not gay, but you know he IS because i wrote him. :laughs: all my main characters are. . .except for one dad who wasn't. anyway. originally wrote this in third person and felt it was a bit flat, so switched it to first instead.

just let me know what you think, k? i haven't heard opinions from my class yet, so it'll be interesting to gauge the reactions from you guys against theirs.

monday, 15 september, 2008.

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“Charlie, turn that damn thing off!”

The yelling from downstairs roused me more than the blaring of the alarm two feet away from my head, and I shifted beneath my lumpy ‘Go Army’ blanket, reaching over to push the plastic switch to its opposite position. The resulting silence was nearly as jarring, and I minutely shuddered before expelling sleep from my lungs.

After tumbling from bed and into the khaki pants and navy polo of my school uniform, I zombie’d my way downstairs to see what Mom had for me to eat.

“I swear, child, you’re the deafest kid I know,” she grumbled, putting the last touch of maple syrup to my oatmeal before handing the bowl over for me to carry to the small kitchen table placed in the corner.

“M’sorry.”

I wasn’t, and she knew it, but let it slide, choosing instead to watch me take my time in eating before she finally ushered me out the door to meet the bus. The stupid, yellow bus. They’d be tons more awesome if they were green.

-- -- --

“Oi, Charlie, wanna four-square?!”

A red textured ball bounced from Scotty’s hands to the asphalt, the bong of impact almost metallic in nature and adding to the cacophony of children’s voices at play. Scotty’s in another class, but we play together sometimes.

“Nu-uh, not today,” I feel really crappy.Scotty shrugged and ran off, probably to find someone else, but I didn’t really notice, preoccupied with a queasy sort of roil in my midsection--that feeling you get after you realize that four hotdogs at once really isn’t so great an idea after all.

I wandered over to the swings instead, managing to snag one when a girl got called away by a friend, her yellow top making my eyes flinch away, stomach worse than ever. I swung a bit, not going too high, and while it didn’t make me feel worse, it didn’t much help either. Maybe it was the maple syrup in my oatmeal--the thought alone made my stomach clench, my mouth slammed with rushing saline, salty sweet.

Leaning forward, my feet scraped at the grooved dirt below the swing as I obsessed over the fear that I’d hurl all down my front unless my body was completely still. And during that split moment between moving forward and placing the soles of my sneakers more solidly upon the ground, a gaping, flaring rift opened up in the sky, the silent impact of which threw me backward and off the swing.

My left leg jerked hard, arresting my movement as it remained tangled in the chain and seat, and my weight smacked up through my spine and out my chest, crushing the breath from my lungs and throat.

I. . .can‘t. . .breathe.

Gasping in shallow, whooping pulls of air, I finally wrenched myself upright, staring with dumb eyes at the sight of everyone continuing on as they had before a giant hole in the sky knocked me on my butt. As if they couldn’t see the zipper-like tear hovering low in the sky, an opaque sickly-yellow blotch.

My body was frozen, but my eyes whipped back and forth, desperately searching for somebody else looking at the sky, anybody, but nobody noticed. Nobody saw it.

I buried my face in my hands and hunched over my throbbing left leg, the squirming, glassy pain keeping me certain that I was not dreaming. There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home! Close your eyes, find the star, make a wish and. . .poof! It’s gone. Taking one last, deep breath, I lifted my face from my hands, and opened my eyes.

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A dry piece of toast sat untouched on a napkin before me when Mom entered the kitchen at about half-past six. I didn’t look at her, hiding behind my ever-darkening sunglasses so I wouldn’t have to see the deceptively gentle yellow glow of her, her shine being put off. It made me sick, even more so than the yellow shone from anything else.

“Please tell me you’re eating more than that toast, Charles.”

Her voice was tired. Tired of saying the same thing every day, tired of the silence that had fallen after I first tried to make her understand that there was a hole in the sky that she couldn’t see. That nobody could see.

She’s tired of me.

Obeying the letter if not the spirit of the law, I silently placed a corner of the toast in my mouth and bit down, chewing as I should before swallowing and repeating the process three more times.

It’s hard to eat when the yellow is smacking me in the face every chance it can, shining from my mother. From the grass and trees, the Doberman down the block. . .eighty percent of the kids in school. I still don’t know the difference between the ’yellow’ kids and those who aren’t, why some people absorb the light and others remain immune.

I still don’t know why I can see it. I don’t want to, but if it’s there, I’d rather see it than. . .not. Three years, I’ve been ’seeing’ it, seeing the gash that follows me, no matter where I go. I ran away from home once when I was twelve-something, I ran like hell out of the city and found that only made it worse.

There’s a whole lot of sky in the country.

Leaving the toast half-eaten on the table, I left the house and began the silent walk to school. I haven’t ridden the bus since I was eleven, shuddering internally every time I see one of those goddamn yellow eyesores.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’d be more nonchalant about this portal to Hell in the sky if it were red. Black, even, with monsters gibbering like mad beasts in the shadows, in that space of blankness behind your eyelids when you blink. Anything but this bastardly yellow. Corrupting everything it touches, and it does touch all.

There were no books in the black backpack hanging off my spine, but the weight of it tugged my shoulders stiff and sore. Five-nine and lanky as hell, I know for a fact I don’t weigh much over a buck-fifteen.

I feel brittle. In more ways than one.

A low tuneless hum kept me company all the way to school.

“So, in Case Study 3.2, what did we read about?”

“Uh. . .that guy who like, fell off his roof and hit his head, and he like. . .became different?”

I held a pencil loose in my hand, doodling amorphous shapes in the margins of class handouts. My sunglasses slid down the bridge of my nose, and I used the misshapen eraser end to push them back into place. The window was to my immediate left, but I avoided its presence with the hard-built ability to think of it as merely a further portion of brick wall, and not a window at all.

Even still, I saw the way light came in and splashed down across my desk, the warm golden sweep of honest sun, and I watched the play of shadows along my fingers until I noticed that my tone seemed off. Frowning, I pushed my glasses up and felt myself go rigid, seeing a definite tallow glow about my skin.

It grew, deepened, and spread.

Tainted, I was tainted.

Class conversation dropped as people became aware of the fact that I was letting off a high-pitched whine, my thoughts thumping the gray matter of my brain into one hysterical internal screech, the likes of which could only be translated by an inaudible noise in my throat.

Tainted! Tainted tainted tainted!A palm clapped down on my shoulder and I involuntarily shrieked, startling the kid who’d touched me, his eyes wide with the bittersharp fear of me, watching as I scrambled out of my seat and fell amidst the cold forest of metallic desk legs--my foot was tangled in my own backpack straps. I jittered, scrabbling for purchase as I crawled and slumped along the aisle, people jumping from their seats to flee before my wake.

Tainted skin flew near my face, and I flinched, only to belatedly realize that it was mine, and that’s when I recognized the hysterical shrieking to be mine also, one word flung out over and over.

Yellow.

Raving mad, they say, and they came to take me away.

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Yellow, yellow, light, and it’s on me, in me, around and everywhere and nowhere. I’m stained and degraded, sweating yellow tears beneath the constraints, thrashing at the building hum of Hell’s glee.

Got me, got me, they’ve gotten to me.

The sweetest morsel, feel and hear the ‘rip--champ--smack’ of routine feeding, the darkness lit from a sickly yellow mist. I’ve breathed it in, and now it’s got me, wholly, completely.

Tears. A tear. In the sky, a rending tear.

No one sees, no one cares. They think me mad, feeding wires against my scalp and pulses through my battered gray matter, and it doesn’t help. Doesn’t make things better. I see--can see the light and glow, I burn the brightest of them all, expending my energy in a violent nightlight.

A ghoul, I’ve become a ghoul.

I laugh into the silence to drown out the cajoling tongues, the whispers, the sweetest dark of all music choking me in the brightest of rooms.

I laugh, and they pop medication down, one by one, until I’ve swallowed a chemical cornucopia. Never ending! Never, ever ending.

The yellow goes on forever, the gash pulsing, growing bigger, stronger, wider. It taunts me, a disgusting likeness to the gummy vagina I saw once in a dirty magazine--a very dirty, very wrong magazine. The tear has gained its own life, its own pulse, and its horrors become more visible with each passing day.

I refuse to go outside. They cannot make me!

There is no longer any visible boundary between the rip in the sky and everything else. It has violated and penetrated the last bit of blue, and the putrid yellow of it has tainted every last. . .thing. No longer any sanctuary, no longer some small scrap of peace. Not for me.

“Charles, come away from that window.”

I snickered, tepid glass barely felt beneath my fingertips, my hands barred away from its surface by thick metal rods. For my “own safety,” of course.

My hands were slick and gummy. Metallic.

“Charles? Come now, let’s exorcise our positive energy, shall we? Hm? . . .But you have to come away from the window now.”

“I’m better now. I don’t see it anymore.”

Trite words, my voice keen and even, over-bright like a sharp copper penny and the cutting spring green of new buds.

“Uh-huh, that’s good. Great! But, Charles, come away from. . .my god! . . .We need medical to East Wing Lounge, stat!”

My laughter was sing-song, reminiscent of the naïve innocence of childhood, as I turned sightless eye sockets back to the world beyond the window.

I don’t see the yellow, not anymore.

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a/n: el fin