“I don’t understand, what’s
happening?” I whispered.
“Does
it hurt?”
“No”
“Are
you sure?”
“Yes
I’m sure!” I raised my voice, “it feels like a hand should feel.” It was my
right hand, the one I plunged into the darkness while Owen was trying to save
me. I couldn’t tell him that, what would he think? He took my wrist in his big
hands and massaged it lightly. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. The
kneading felt nice, but it wasn’t doing anything for my arm.
“I
don’t think that’s helping” I wrenched my hand away from him and held it up
against my chest.
“I
need to go outside.” Out in the sunlight I took three deep breathes and closed
my eyes. Images of volcanoes and magma swam before me and I snapped them open
shaking my head. I could feel Owen watching me, but I didn’t care. There was
something inside me that wasn’t my own. Now that I focused on it, now that I
had a foreign image of black veins in my body, I could feel the rest. A small
voice in the back of my mind said something inaudibly. It was like my
subconscious was trying to speak to me but the harder I focussed on it the
softer it seemed to get. I shook my head more violently.
“Your starting to scare me” his voice came from behind me, “I think maybe we should go back to the meeting place and see what the others have to say.” I spun around. What the others have to say? I didn’t even know what to say and it was my fucking hand. I think he sensed the panic in my eyes, or saw it in my body, either way as I turned to run he lunged forward.
Dodging
around him I jumped for the edge of the container and hauled myself up. Without
missing a beat I scaled the stacked blue one and descended on the jagged metal
footholds of the red. I was running before I could hear the thud of Owens feet
landing on the ground. He must have jumped both containers.
“Wait!”
he yelled out after me, but I was blind. Metal walls rushed past me as I pushed
forward. I could feel the wind blowing back my tangled hair. Seeing a gap I
squeezed through and stumbled over some debris before coming out on the other
side. I could see the water. It was all I could do not to fall forward as I
rushed head long towards it.
It must have been five metres below me, but it
felt like a sweet caress when I hit the surface. Coldness swept over my head
and engulfed all my senses. I dove deeper keeping my eyes open. The salt water
didn’t even sting. As I surfaced I looked back at the shipping yard. Owen was
standing on the edge of the water. I half expected to see him dive in after me,
but he just stood there and watched. A pang of regret nestled itself inside my
heart as I turned away and began to swim. The other side of the narrow port was
just empty land, fenced off from the shipping yard. By the time Owen got the
others and tried to intercept me I would be long gone. That’s if he ran to get
anyone. He was probably still standing there, just watching me swim away.
Reaching the
shore was easy enough I had always been a fairly strong swimmer. When I was
four years old my mum took me to some exotic beach in France, or Belgium, one
of the two. She was tanning on the shore while I played in the water. I could
remember the huge floaters strapped to my arms and the sounds they made every
time I splashed around. While she wasn’t watching I decided to swim out further
into the bay. From the shore I could see that the whole swimming area was
fenced off and I was convinced that if I just reached that I would be at the
end of the world.
My mum found me surrounded by bewildered
Frenchman watching as I launched myself off the fence, paddled around and climbed
right back up. It turned out that there was a whole lot more ocean beyond that
fence, but it made for the best diving board. All the Frenchman were amazed
that I wasn’t afraid of the deep blue. Sometimes being fearless is effortless,
especially when you’re a kid.
As I
struggled to climb up onto the concreted edge of the shoreline I wished that I
felt as carefree as I did on that fence. In truth though my whole body was on edge
and my heart felt like it was skipping beats. I stood on my tip-toes and
shielded my eyes from the sun with my left hand. The shipping containers looked
no larger than cardboard boxes and Owen’s figure was gone. Sighing I turned
around and slowly began to walk back to my building. I was all the way on the
other side of the port and it would take me at least half an hour. As I walked
the sun warmed my back and I could feel the wetness in my clothes slowly
evaporating. I tried to concentrate on that and on the road in front of me, but
my eyes kept darting back to my right hand. Eventually I stopped and lifted it
up to the sunlight for closer examination. I must have stared at it for too
long because my head began to spin and a feint whisper started up in my ears.
Everything
was becoming too much for me. There were too many conflicting emotions running
through my head, and no logical thought path explained why my veins were darker
than they should be. I replayed Owen’s account of the black hole over and over in
my head. I saw bones turn to dust. Maybe
my hand was petrifying? Isn’t that what happened? I knew that hands turned
black from frostbite, and that charred skin was black, but I had never heard of
black veins.
I was walking
on the main road by now and I couldn’t help but stare at the numerous car
wrecks that littered the road. One was a pile up of a truck and three cars that
had all somehow ended up being crushed by the truck’s cargo. As I came closer I
could smell the feint odour of decay. Now that I thought about it, this whole
side of the port smelled off. That’s when I saw the first body. It was half
spilled out of one of the cars, the hands were stretched forward as if they
were trying to grasp onto something, but there was only bare bitumen. Maggots
and flies crawled over its back, but the sight of them didn’t make me retch. I
stared at the body impassively and like a receding shadow the whisper in the
back of my mind caught up with me; it’s
nourishing the creatures. Soon it will all be returned to where it came from. That’s
right. That was exactly right.
The more
bodies I came across the more conviction I felt. Who had these people been but
polluters and users? Their bodies now would be used in so many different ways,
all for the greater good. I stopped in my tracks. Was I one of these people?
No. I used to be. I kept walking forward. I had been just like everybody else.
Using aerosol sprays, oil, gas, electricity, leaving my carbon footprint, but
now there were none of those things. I wasn’t exactly surviving off the green
earth, but I wasn’t contributing to its destruction. Soon when all my supplies
and batteries would run out I would turn to the earth and subconsciously I knew
that it would provide for me.
As I rounded
the corner I saw Costco looming up in front of me. An intense hatred formed in
the base of my stomach. All of these man-made structures housing man-made
products that needed to be implemented in man-made hovels suddenly made me feel
sick. I continued on towards my building but all sense of comfort and safety
that it had once inspired in me turned to ash in my mouth. The prospect of
sitting inside those four walls eating out of tin cans and squinting at pages
of novels under the beam of an LED light made me stop in my tracks again. I stood
there for a long time. Part of me wanted to crawl into bed, onto my $900 posturepedic
mattress and my Egyptian cotton sheets, but another part of me wanted to go and
find a soft patch of grass under a leafy tree and just fall asleep under the
stars.
I took a few
more steps forward and stopped. The indecision in my mind was spreading to my
body. I was physically incapable of moving. I looked around nervously and
cracked my knuckles. What the fuck was going on? Out of the corner of my eye I
saw a flicker of shadow. I was standing in front of the Ice House where a
million years ago I had glided over a sleek rink to the sound of Coco Jumbo. On
my left the ashes of the Fun Park swayed back and forth, stuck in a current of
air. Only a few metres ahead of me though were the ruins of Harbour Town. Black
tendrils licked at the sky as I found my legs moving.
They
propelled me forward, under the fallen down wreckage of a restaurant and
through a collapsed metal frame. I found myself climbing over chunks of concrete
and tumbled down pillars until I stood atop the jagged remains of an escalator.
The thick cloud of darkness swirled below me and above me until all I could see
were the delicate wisps of ebony. I raised my right hand and stretched it out
before me. The roiling mass was still too far away to touch, but I could see
how the black veins on the back of my hand began to move. As I looked closer
though I saw that I was wrong, my veins weren’t moving, but dividing and splitting
until a fine web of lines covered the back of my hand. I turned it over and
watched as the darkness spread up my forearm. Taking a step forward I kept my
hand outstretched and my eyes glued to the black pulsing lines. It was reacting
to the presence of the black hole, but instead of wasting away it seemed as if
my body was being added to.
I wanted to
see what would happen if I let myself be taken in by it, would it consume me?
It was a primal urge. I felt it in the bottom of my heart, all I had to do was
step off…
“EVELYN!”
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