The Motions, An Echelon of Beauty Part 7
I woke up, my entire body itching. The sun still beat down unopposed but I sensed below my reasonable conscious that something was missing. My bare arms stung from the tiny rocks that lay mixed within the sandy-grass that I had fallin into. Sitting up, I brushed bits of dirt and dead grass from my skin, revealing a web of imprints and wrinkles that threatened to be permanent though I knew they wouldn’t be. The sense that something was off became more and more apparent until I realized that everything around me had a taken a subtle greenish tint. This pervading hue alteration was reflected in the rays of light almost so much that I could visually see the compilacted wave-particle mystery that lit the world around me. Like a dog sensing a hurricane, however, I began to feel like there was more than just this dim shade of green that had sent the world into an abnormal spin. A spin of empty streets and voided buildings and a silence that could only exist in the center of some metaphysical torment, where the universe twists and the air screams with such ferocity that all sound waves are sucked outward like an inverse black hole. I tried to think of how I had come to be at such a place and recalled passing out from what could only be described as one hundred percent sensory overload. I wondered if I had slept through some sort of catastrophe that had only claimed the life of the conscious. I felt pressure in my throat and began to get dizzy again. But as the green sunk in and my eyes became desensitized, beginning to respond less to the color, slowly bringing the comfortable, familiar colors back to my retina, my panic began to subside. Looking around once more, I noticed a young blond-haired woman leaning against the wall of a bank across the street. She was passively smoking a cigarette and resting her eyes on the ground in front of her feet. I cautiously stood up, noticing that the ground seemed to feel a little sturdier than it had before, or maybe it had just become more resistant (to me?). Out of habit, I check for any oncoming traffic (not even a glimpse) before crossing the street.
“Excuse me,” I called. As I spoke, the green tint flickered out of everything, not consciously seeing the effect but biologically reacting to it, suddenly losing the habituation so that when the green tint returned I once again perceived it. The woman I approach now held some sort of green martian quality. Just the subtle change in the color of her skin was enough to change every aspect of her facial expression and the aura I tried desperately to percieve, to prepare myself for. My voice startled the woman and she dropped her cigarette, looking around frantically to see where it had come from. She must have been blind because her eyes passed over me several times with no sign of recognition. It did strike me as odd, however, that a blind person would bother looking around like that. Then, to add to the peculiarity of this event, she didn’t bother to call out. Instead, she shrugged her shoulders and replaced the cigarette with a new one. A small piece of paper tumbled across the street in some light wind that I somehow failed to percieve and my mouth dropped as I saw with absolute certainty the woman watch that piece of paper flutter beside her for a moment, both objects disinterested in each other but still responsive. I stood not three inches from her face and asked,
“Hey, are you okay?” She made no indication of hearing me or even sensing my presence, continuing to watch that floating trash. Even though it was nothing, trash, discarded waste, something that she obviously didn’t care about, wasn’t even storing the imprint of its existance in her hippocampus, not emotionally impacting her or anyone else in any way, that piece of paper seemed like the only thing on Earth that would allow me to interact with that woman. It seemed that if I snatched it, tearing it to smaller pieces, she might finally respond, if only because there were too many pieces to watch at once. But, there was something in that uniqueness, that irreplacable existance that terrified me. Instead of grasping for the shred of notebook paper that I wouldn’t have been able to capture anyway, I attempted to nudge the woman. My chest inflated instantly as my hand, with no physical interference at all, passed clean through her shoulder, causing my center of gravity to miss its intended propped position, falling forward, carrying my body with it until my cheek scraped against the white cement. The sharp pain went unnoticed as the fear and confusion trumped anything else my body felt like explaining to my mind. On impulse only, since all signals sent up the spinal cord were just being relayed back in some Newtonian action-reaction consequence of the spine, I bounced the wall away with my palms and fell backwards instead of forwards. As I fell into a sitting position before the blind, deaf, non-physical woman, my palms slapping the sidewalk painfully, she continued to watch the dancing trash. I screamed as the breeze blossomed into a strong gust and her blond hair parted, revealing the loneliness written in her deep blue eyes. The gust receded and I continued screaming through her. But, her eyes dimmed with the wind. I stood up, hands clenching, panting, horrified with the realization that I might finally be haunted by someone other than myself.
A black, fully-haired spider, curious from all the noise, crawled towards me, emerging from inside the woman’s foot. I shivered and stomped on the spider in some effort to force this event from history by annihilating one of the antagonists. I lifted my foot and silently watched the flawless spider continue walking without a hesitation. As it passed into my other foot, I began to wonder whether the woman was the ghost, or if it was I, or if it was this simple, unintelligible spider that was there to haunt. When the spider reached the edge of the sidewalk, it passed through growing blades of grass like an optical illusion and I laughed uncontrollably.
I heard the bank’s front door click open behind me and I turned to find some solace. A blond-haired, clean-shaven man wearing the same gray sweatshirt and sweatpants as the smoking ghost emerged and began to descend the marble steps. A part of me that had already accepted my complete dissociation from reality knew that any yelling or commotion was useless to get attention from this man but I tried anyway. But, as my sensible though now very very silent part of myself already knew, I was invisible to this banker. I continued yelling from the bottom of the steps and gave up when the man finally passed through my body. In protest, I spun to grab his shoulder and lost my balance for a second time, my hand falling through air (but not air because air is molecular and there were no molecules just empty space but empty space that can only be comprehended, accepted, by calling it air), and I fell into a decorative bush next to the steps. I landed on my back and began to laugh at the various sections of the bush branching from within my torso. I looked at my hands and noticed that blades of grass stuck through them without piercing my skin. My head was in a daze from hitting solid ground and all I could do was try to piece together who had killed me. The world surrounding me faded and I was alone, relatively speaking.
