Etchings and Scribbles

"First I woke up, you see, then I had breakfast, checked through my mail..." "I don't need the little details, just run me through your day so far," Al said, his arms crossed, his foot bouncing noiselessly on the rubber floor mats. The man scoffed, wiping an errant bit of tear left on his cheek, "Well excuse me, but I thought that's what I was doing!" He sniffled a bit, sitting himself up and straightening his tie. "Since when were you so impatient?" Al sighed, shaking his head, his leg had stopped, "I.. look, this train's just been going forever and I'm anxious to leave, but I also want to hear the end of your story." The man nodded slowly, swallowed a few times and cleared his throat, "Alright.. Well, I did my normal morning routine," his eyes were searching, his brow furrowed, "and... I left the apartment... Got to the boarding platform..." A hand rose up to rub his temple, why was this so ...

The train coasted along, silently passing by the fields, the trees. Occasionally some wildlife would pop up in the distance, see the mass of metal moving, and turn tail back to its burrow. That’s how the man felt all too often. Life had a way of inserting itself when least wanted, forcing itself into your cozy nook and up-heaving everything in its path. The man was reminiscing on how he had just settled into some kind of normality before life came along. The ripples of its passing left his daughter, Nicole, with a tumor. Something uterine, if he was remembering correctly. He remembered thinking she was too young to be dealing with all of this, too young to be having surgery, too young to be left infertile the rest of her life. Truthfully he hadn’t wanted to come. He felt like he hadn’t been there for most of her life, and as such wasn’t entitled to be there for her difficult moments. Deep down, he knew that it would have been easier to stay at home, sit and wonder, but never have...

The man opened his eyes, startled. The train tracks clicked and clacked below him, the carriage rocking back and forth gently over ancient warps in the wrought iron they rode above. It was no wonder he dozed off. He glanced absently at his watch and distantly registered the time, or rather, his lack thereof. “Can’t believe I’m gonna be late.. This always happens, I have something important to do and life finds a way to mess it up. Maybe traffic will be merciful and I’ll get there on the dot…” he mumbled to himself. He heard a rustling and glanced up to see a stranger sitting across from him quickly raise his newspaper back in front of his face, but not quick enough. He saw the raised eyebrow, the attempt to return to normalcy after gawping at him, the awkward clearing of his throat to try and seem innocuous. He shook his head, he’d never much liked people, they had a habit of disappointing. All of them except his sweetheart, Laura. She had a smile like a patch of sunflowers and w...

He felt himself slipping more and more from his life. He wandered his apartment, muttering to himself about the creature, the places he’d seen, the deep pangs of regret and unending pits of depression. Nostalgia was the worst of it, he decided. It masked memories that weren’t enjoyable as something that to be celebrated, cherished, nurtured to enjoy later, he hated the feeling. Nothing was sacred anymore, now even his dreams hunted and pecked at his consciousness. He wasn’t sure why, or how he managed, but for three days he stayed awake. Partly from sheer will to avoid the torment his nightly life had brought him, partly because his body simply wouldn’t allow it. He had been asleep so much lately, his body was pent up, needed to burn off some excess; unfortunately the most active thing he did was eat. He sat in front of his TV, the same channel had been on repeat since 2 AM, and he stared past it. The infomercial wasn’t important, nothing was important, nothing mattered, not even t...

He landed in the middle of a town this time. It was a broken place, like everywhere else it seemed. At one time it might have been a bustling little village, now it looked like a quarry that had some homeless vagrants as residents. As he rose, he took note of the clean walkway he stood on, no weeds or dirt marred its surface. Neither did any other being appear to near him, it was a ghost town, and currently he was the ghost. The air was stale here, unsurprising really given the ruination he was surrounded by. It felt almost like the wind had given up, refused to exist in such conditions. He wished he could do the same. He began trekking up and down the walkways of this place, peering into broken houses, occasionally shouting to listen for a reply, trying desperately to find any source of life beyond himself, and failing. He let out a sigh, wiping sweat from his brow and cursing the early autumn heat. He had come upon what would have been the town center where small, broken benches ...

The room was spinning again. How many times had he come down this black hole? The number didn’t matter so much as the content he would discover this trip. The blankets slipped effortlessly as his bed slowly gave way beneath him, the room spun in his vision but he did not. As always, the blue-gray darkness of his bedroom was replaced by the impenetrable, suffocating black of this hole. He felt himself falling, but felt no wind beside him, only the deafening silence, and his own breath rasping in his chest. Down, down he fell, and as always, he never felt the impact of the ground. He always opened his eyes to find himself back in this strange realm of some other’s making, for surely it couldn’t be his own. He sat himself up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and trying to make sense of his surroundings; in the distance a crumbling castle sat atop a mournful hill, the dead, crooked trees stared back at him. The air was cold and smelled of damp earth, a far cry from the cozy blankets back ...

He lived a quiet life. A normal life, some might say. His days were spent scuttling about at his job, running errands and the like. Accomplishing the things that society and that reptilian part of the brain demanded be done. He had felt the gamut of emotions to their extremities and found himself most content directly in the center of that hurricane. Indeed, he felt normal most days, but every now and then he felt something different, foreign; the Visitor, he called it. The Visitor was not one in the physical sense, instead it was a mental state, as far as he could figure. It was almost an indescribable emotion, one that didn't fit neatly into any of the other boxes, or even in some segmented form. The Visitor would arrive, and his brain would make room for it's presence. It always felt like he shut down to some degree when his Visitor was there, like only a very basic subset of his total capacities would function. Perhaps it was some unconscious effort to not be rude while h...