Secondhand Script

           My mother told me I have old eyes. That my eyes were not meant for the time in which I live. They are from a time of skies and wars. She promises I am blessed, for old eyes bring wisdom from a lifetime before The Descent but having old eyes is a curse, I think.

What is the point, having eyes, if I cannot see anything?

The days before a great nuclear war were when sunshine came from the sky. Mother says our people fled underground, hoping to escape the radiation- something the explosions make that changes and kills people. Somehow, the minerals had protected them, but I have a feeling it doesn’t take an explosion to change or kill a person like time does. No one after The Descent has seen the sky in their lives. In dozens of generations, really. I could not see what my family and community always could. My eyes are not made for these caverns. Apparently all others, with time, have had eyes which work well with their environment; sensitive enough to see much with only the fluorescence of our home. I’ve never seen it but our vegetation and our walls are said to give off their own light. The only “darkness” they know is when they close their eyes. I see darkness all the time.

           Since I can remember, I have felt my way around the tunnels. My hands sliding along rough crags of calcite, I could not even see the shapes I felt. I could hear, well enough, the sound of my siblings’ jubilee and so I had followed. My brothers and sisters, they can see. At least, they once did. I don’t know if they can swim, anymore, but I do know that I envied their swimming, too. They laughed, splashing in the pool. Father would not approve, I think, as it seems to be the pool where we fish. I knew directions, if I got up from my bed and kept my wits about me. I knew whether or not I took a sharp turn or if I had wandered off of the property.

           My family resides in a series of smaller caverns. Though cramped thanks to the clusters of plants and water sources, these necessities only help in keeping us secure in our isolation from Town. Especially since our main entrance was narrow enough that only one full-grown person could slide through at a time. Not one of much girth ever came to visit.

           Any time mother was with child, she could not leave home for weeks on end.

           When I felt the temperature gradually drop as I neared my family, I curled my lips away from my teeth, so they could see my smile. They once told me my smile is warm, which is good for them, they told me. I heard one of my sister’s voices among them. She had spotted me and was telling the rest I had been approaching.

           Suddenly, there was a shove at my back. My feet no longer had ground beneath them. All that was known of me from the world was gone. My siblings were still laughing when a great thunder clapped in my ears. There was no sharp gravel nor smooth stone to feel. The world went from drafty to only… cold. There was no wind with which a draft could glide on. I was without air. Why wasn’t there air?

           Somehow, I was moving. Besides wildly jerking in my confusion, something was grabbing my body without hold, sucking it in one direction, without my consent. I couldn’t breathe but I could move. I fought against the force. I kicked against it clawed away from it, though surrounded by cold, and no air, until I found rock.

Though my chest screamed for breath, my hands only knew what rock was and held fast to it. I pulled myself through a tunnel. A tiny tunnel. I had to squeeze through. I could feel what little was left of my air leaving me, skittering down my torso and between my legs, fleeing towards the opposing force that was pulling me, too. That power which was taking my very air.

Then something happened to my world. My world changed, yet again, and rapidly. Disoriented, my perceptions on everything went even further out of my control.  

I felt the force shift. A new direction, the one I was taking, tugged me without my will, yet again. Immediately following the force having grabbed me without hands, I felt… warmth. Steadily, I felt not warm but hot. A violent heat. Something I had never felt before.

With eyes tight shut, I saw. I know that I saw, but I have no idea how I know what I could see, what I was to later know as the color orange.

Everything was orange, for a moment.

I then opened my eyes and orange was not alone. There was purple. Blue, yellow, and green swirled around me, too. My head thumped in my skull as my heart continued to pump in my burning chest, struggling for air that still was not there. Sharp, jagged pinpricks like needles dug into my eyes, but I saw. I saw myself, then, when I turned my head. I saw many parts of me. I saw my breath flutter away in circles, tiny circles, out of my reach, away from me, again. Up, then, instead of down, as I had felt them leave, before.

Also unlike before, I followed my air.

Without being able to move anything, nothing but my pained eyes, I drifted upwards, chasing my spheres of air. I saw my world tilt, though my direction continued its ascent. I saw my feet. My toes. My shins and knees. I saw my hands, the useful tools, and I saw, after once again righting my direction, my fragile, spherical air. And I fell away from my air, then. My air left without me when my lungs had no more to give.

My sight left me, too, for the last time.

If you can hear me, could you tell me?

Would I hear you if you were to shout?

I’ve tried to scream, but nothing comes of it. I’ve been screaming for so long, already.

I don’t know if you can hear me. I can’t hear my own thoughts. I can’t see anything, anymore, either. There is nothing here to touch. I’m suspended, here, as naught but a thought, myself.

Me: Tease it.

Ayla: *looks at hair suspiciously*

Ayla: ...

Funny thing about stars is that they burn so bright you forget that they aren't made of light. A star gives light because it can. A star throws its affect into the universe and can spread through multitudes of environments in an instant.

For a while, a fox thought it had a star like a child thinks the moon follows you home.

Its feet below it, and the star above, the fox followed the stare wherever the ball was going. They became friends. Then companions. Then the star left. Slowly, it seemed to the fox, as it flew further and further away.

The lightyears which passed apparently caused the fox's whispers to take longer to reach the star. With a star who has seen more than it had, certainly the time went by quicker for the star, since there was more time and experience to compare the moments than the fox. Despite this, the sly fox felt like such a fool for thinking the star wouldn't leave or that it wouldn't lie.

After all, a star is made completely of gas. Burning gas. It burned gas to on its way somewhere else; the fox was only a stop. The fox burned gas to meet it, once, but the star was it's only destination.

After it stopped staring at the star because the star was too far away, the vixen noticed it had wandered into a desert. Deserted, it was, left behind. Deserted, it had, for her family didn't know where she went. Darkness surrounded and she remembered when winter had numbed her to everything before she had wanted to embrace death.

This was not like that time.

The star had shown a fox that it had gas to burn. The star was flagrant but the fox was and is its own small flame. Gentler; a flicker. It affects less. However, its smile and laughter is still contagious. her hair curls in the tendrils of her fire.

She did shed a tear, though. Not because the star had left it. Not because the star was gone. Not even because the world was darker. It shed a tear to let itself feel. It was in a desert, but a time of night and freezing. A long time would pass before the sun would shine, again. The sand stung its face with each breeze, and the fox didn't want to be frozen numb ever again. So when that tear fell, it hit the granules beneath its front feet.

It looked down to find that it wasn't sand she was standing in. Actually, it had been laying down for a while. Riding atop a shark in a sea. Her one tear became an ocean around her, or so she had thought. But really, the desert was probably a beach. Oh, what a relief to have something else carry her than her own four feet.

The waves tossed them and turned. The shark didn't mind too much. It never had gotten much sleep. The shark is a calm companion, always moving, and it knew the fox should go back to the shore.

But with the shore, again, was the desert.

The fox forever considered the shark a friend.

It still didn't know how to get home, to its forests and thickets. To comfort. To shelter. But it ran.

The sun was up. The heat and pressure slammed down. The fox needed water but had nowhere to find it and just did what it knew and simply ran.

And it ran.

Until its feet became swollen and callused atop burning sand.

Until its lungs would burn and it had to collapse.

When it came to, there was a scent of promise. An oasis in the desert was where the fox had passed out, safe and sound. The fox's muzzle had fallen in a trickle of water, quenching its parched lips as it slept. A tickle on its whiskers. Something teasing and light. Something small and sweet. The fox opened tired eyes once it felt a cool breeze.

With each breath out it gave carbon dioxide to a flower. Pretty and delicate, the blossom returned oxygen in turn for the gift of breath the fox gave. They passed their time just breathing, for a while. The fox recovering, the flower observing.

Exchanging air.

Not burning gas.

The fox recovered fully but found it could only like the one flower, though the oasis held a botanic buffet. The single beauty captured the fox's eyes, breath, and soul, as well. The fox figured it could be anywhere in the world and it didn't matter; for it had to keep living right next to the flower.

With it.

Symbiotically. 

Though the fox had thought it found a flower... the flower had found the fox.

For the flame was almost out.

But the light could be seen from a distance.

One day she told them they would find their own names, and when they did, they would gain a uniqueness and grow away from each other so that they may explore on their own.

Of course, a cub asked, “What is your name?”

And she answered, “Mother.”

"Oh," said the cub. "Well, can I be named Mother?"

"Maybe some day," Mother said. "But let yourself learn, first, of the world we live in. Let yourself find what makes you smile though you are sad and what makes you think, even though you are hungry, and what makes you continue forward, though you are thirsty."

"Do we only get to have one name?" another cub asked.

"You could keep one name all your life," said Mother, "or you could change it, as I have."

A third panther cub questioned, “What was your name, before ‘Mother’?”

"I had two names, before ‘Mother’," she told her cubs.

"Why?" the first cub asked.

"Because when I was born I named myself ‘flower’ for I liked how it smelled. Then I learned my favorite flower, one which attracts colorful frogs and grows on rocks; it was called Bromeliad, so I named myself Bromeliad.”

"But Mother," the fourth cub inquired, "If it was only a flower, how did it choose its own name?”

And Mother answered, “A wandering panther once told me the name, in passing, and said their father had been named Bromeliad, so I did not question why the flower named itself. It wasn’t my place. But if someone else had found beauty in the same flower I had and named themselves Bromeliad  for it, I found reasoning it should be my name, as well.”

Another cub asked, “So why did you choose the name ‘Mother’?”

The panther lay down so that her large head met her cub’s levelly. “Although I was sad because someone I loved died and left me. And I was hungry, but I had to think or I, too, would die. And where I was, at the time, there was no water, but I continued onward. Because more than anything I’d ever loved was the thought that I would, someday, be your Mother.”

If I were to rewrite the story, today, it would not have been a storm but a man; a body collector, maybe, for anatomists or a preacher for the sake of dramatic effect.

But the story went that the dragon, in his loneliness of post made by God, would leave the boy to inspect the garden. God had forbidden all descendants of Adam and Eve, but when Adam got freaky with his daughter, all humans were banned simply because there were enough, to begin with. Eden had not been the only place God had created life, in the story. He had made too many animals; those which flew and those which tunneled through earth and swam in depths of the ocean.

In the story, I had His Angels as dragons. It never says anywhere in the Bible that dragons can't be angels. Honestly, when I imagined God, he was a centaur so... anyways. Yeah. The boy would ask the dragon where it went and the dragon would honestly answer. The boy would ask of other dragons and the one who guarded Eden's gate would answer honestly that there were more dragons than people; protectors which floated above a person's head, guard dragons -like he was- for the fountain of youth down in the ocean but a geyser or the entrance to Hell like Michael was, and messenger dragons which were no more than wisps of dreams sent from God to inform God's creations of immanent dangers.

Yeah, I was a weird kid. No plot or anything.

Hope I fixed that, with writing erotica.

But my favorite parts of stories are not the sword fights, because what matters is who wins; my favorite parts are not the matching of wits against each other because we all have different minds, one not 'smarter' just exposed to more than another; my favorite parts are not the love scenes where people have sex because that doesn't mean they're in love, it just means they are attracted to one another's bodies.

If you read what I write, you'll know by now that my favorite parts are the descriptions and backgrounds. The stories within the stories, where one has and gains context. It's why I fell in love with The Scarlet Letter while my classmates couldn't stand the opening paragraph and it was torture to them from there; and yet those words ravished me faster than the most charismatic debutante ever to be fantasized ever could. When my friends complained they had to read and reread sentences, I was thrilled to read and reread chapters, sometimes two or three, because I was finding new links to a person's character interlaced in the lines.

I wish Hawthorne had made a spin-off for the rosebush alone.

Anyways, my point is that context, to me, is and has been the highlight of anything and the highlights aren't too far behind.

I like things a certain way and I don't really know why.

Once, I was told that I am an optimist and I was asked why I was so happy all of the time.

Immediately, the answer my mind produced was "Because I like tragedies."

That thought didn't make much sense, so my mouth answered the person, "I don't know," but after a while, I thought about my initial response.

"Why are you so happy all the time?"

"Because I like tragedies."

A star found beauty in all things, everywhere it looked. Though high above and in the constellations, it was not for fault of superiority. So shining and daunting was she, that she caught those below by surprise when she informed them she found them. A grain of sand here, a firefly there, a song or an ocean. It was not unoften that the star stared at something on Earth, straining her eyes to focus. However, that made the subject of her scrutiny blush.

One day her sights befell upon an old leather chair sitting out on a yard, in front of a house. She saw how worn it was and wondered at its age. She found she liked how the chair's leather was green and its buttons brass, though the colors did clash with most surroundings.

It belongs in a library, the star thought. Or a scholarly study.

Through the chilled night, the chair felt a bit warmer when it sensed the star looking down on it. Its leather warmed all over and its brass buttons heated to the point of searing hot. Perhaps, the chair suspected, it does not like me. For why else would a star look upon a chair? The chair found it liked the star, though the star was high above it, and found it to be quite convenient that the star's favor was warming its stuffing as well as its leather. The cold night didn't feel cold, to the now-musty seat.

Content to simply notice the star, the chair was surprised, as most things the star spoke to were, when the star questioned "What is a leather chair as robust and squat was doing sitting outside, at night? Where do you belong?"

The chair thought, If I answer the star, will it hear me? and decided it couldn't care less, as long as the star would spend a bit more time hovering lightyears above. "I was made in a slavic country, by hands of a scientist who thought the craft a hobby. I don't really belong anywhere. I am sold to a man who lives a little distance away."

"But you are American, now, correct?"

"Yes," the chair said, having mulled the question over, itself, while idly sitting. "I like it in this climate," it continued, "There are less harmful things around me and so there is a smaller chance of getting torn."

"You prefer your new owner, then?"

The chair's leather tightened, again taken offguard. "Not really," the chair admitted to the star. "But my owners here could really do no better. They are in need of friends, likeminded, and the new owner is supposed to be quite similar. I am a gift, of sorts, for relationships, ahead."

The star felt a strange sensation, then. One of purpose. She spoke clearly to the chair: "You don't need him, you know. You could be your own chair."

At this the chair laughed, for it had heard the same words from a bright lamp. It's stand was simple cedar, but curved smooth and slim. It's cloth shade softened the bright light of its bulb, but without an owner, what had the lamp become?  Without a socket, its light didn't shine, and so its shade wasn't needed, either. It was sent to the attic, to gather dust for years, and when it came back down, its bulb had shot, its shade had holes, and its stem had rotted. The same lamp had then been sent to a dump, to erode amongst scrap metal and rats. No fault of its own; but on its own, it couldn't contend against the elements.

It wasn't made to stand alone, like the lamps of metal which light the street.

So the chair simply said, "I wouldn't know how to. All I know is from the books placed on me casually. Besides, like this, I am comfortable."

The star asked, "But are you happy?"

So the chair answered, "Why should I be? If I am not sad, that is the best a chair could ask for." The leather chair's back stiffened against the night air and it asked, "Why is a starcurious about a chair, in the first place?"

Laughing, the star corrected the chair, "I am no star. I am a plane. I carry people like you carry people. But when you carry yours to places in books, I carry them to places around the world."

The chair had read about planes, before. Planes which crashed and planes which rescued and planes which traveled far and either did or did not return. "I hold people," the chair said, "But the books take them to where they want to go."

"Tell me tomorrow, please," asked the star, "more about this. For I like talking to you, but I must go. I'll be back tomorrow, though, I promise."

That was when the chair noticed the star had been moving, not just the earth, and already the star was far away and very quiet.

So the chair was quiet.

And the next day, when the star passed over the street, the chair was not there, any longer.

I sleep as though I'm already dead, when I'm alone. I don't move a muscle. I barely breathe, and I do so nearly silent.

I cling to those in bed with me for dear life. I seek and find and hold and press myself forcing myself into them and around them.

The woman wanted the tank to store clean water. Why a buzzard wanted a gasoline tank, I have no idea. 

But the woman was in the mountains of Honduras, when I saw her. She had long dark hair and moles darkened her already sun-weathered complexion. In Guaimaca, though there were plenty of streams in the forests, they were heavily polluted by toxins streaming out of the gutters in the nearby government-restricted factory.

The people commonly had diabetes because Coca-Cola was easier to come by than rain water.

I was there as part of a group of missionaries. This group consisted of General Doctors, Surgeons, Anesthetists, nurses, pastors... and med students.

I assisted in hiatal hernia surgery as well as a laproscopic gall bladder removal. I had to break scrub both times because of my hot nature betraying me as well as the too-sweet smell of cauterized flesh being directly under my nose.

What I had been good at was socializing with locals. People I could practice my extremely limited Spanish with and they could practice their English. I was commended as I played soccer with ten-year-old boys who were five times better than I was, yet I was forbidden to look boys younger than myself in the eye, for my own safety.

And though all of these things made me feel like an adult, because I experienced them quickly and learned when to hold my tongue...

what made me realize I was only a child, a spoiled, spoiled child...

was when I stared at a beautiful little girl's face

which was covered in gnats

which swam in the whites of her eyes

and she didn't blink them away.

Because that is what full weight of the world does, to you.

I had nothing, compared to that little girl, when it came to experience.

I hadn't known starvation or dehydration

only to smile.

They told us not to hug the children because we would get lice.

But that little girl wanted nothing but a hug, from me.

Me, who had a backpack of toys. Me, who had fresh clothes, untorn.  Me, who had a hose and a tank filled with boiled-down sterile water from a hospital and beans to cook for food.

And all she wanted was a hug.

And I couldn't say no to the girl who held the weight of the world on her shoulders when all she wanted for grinning and bearing it was a hug.

What lice?

So I have a cat named Rabbit.

Rabbit is the blonde in the middle, his scrawny girlfriend is on the right, and the far left is one of their kittens.

He’s an outdoor cat, I’ve had him since he was a kitten, and we never fixed him BECAUSE he is an outdoor cat. He was the runt of his mom’s litter, so I sort of adopted him.

He has a type, calico, like his mother, and he has two girlfriends. Probably a dozen kittens he’s sired. I dislike his girlfriend, but not because of any particular reason; just because I’m a mother-in-law, so I exercise the right to spite.

Thing is, throughout the year, he’s wandered off to the woods; only coming around on weekends (as if he knows what weekends are). 

Until this month. This entire week, he’s just been sitting on the front porch.

It was actually a very safe feeling. Now, if even an insignificant stranger watches me, I find myself inclined to scoot away or fidget from self duress; back then, though, I felt cared for and I felt special because I had His attention at all times.

My parents would both work.

My brothers went to school or out exploring our woods, and sometimes I would be left alone in our house for hours at a time.

No social contact, a large home with space and stairs and unlocked doors.

They left me there because they knew I wouldn't leave. They left me there because they knew no one would come to our house in broad daylight to try to take me. They left me there because they didn't know what else to do with me, in the day.

They were right.

I was small and I remember a lot of things. I recall short, green carpet under my legs, and how it wasn't itchy until I stood up and there were lines from having stayed in one position for too long. I remember blue jeanshorts being coveralls with corduroy buttons and a Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too white t-shirt embroidered with the comrades on the front. I remember being old enough to speak, but my family disapproved of my "r"s sounding like "w"s.

This is what started my practice, actually, staring at dustmotes.

We had a simple window, in this green-carpeted room I spent hours sitting in and on. It had heavy green and burgundy-bespeckled drapes. My parents didn't have time to dust anywhere. My mother wasn't the cleaning type, and my father would just supervise one or both of my brothers as they did simple chores, for him.

Before I could be "supervised", I was free to amble about. And though I could work a television reasonably for a child with poor mobile skills, I would much rather talk to dust motes.

Because unlike television, I could manipulate dust in sunshine.

And unlike television, the dust was as quiet as I was.

I understand you don't necessarily stare at dust motes, but you really should, some time. It's like when a flock of birds move together along air currents. However, instead of ten or twenty birds, it was thousands of migratory specs, shimmering or not, in a beautiful display of yellows, whites, or grey.

And to tell you the truth, I spoke to the dust motes.

I, for whatever reason or another, was convinced that God had a language and that language was dust motes. It made sense to me, I suppose, because I thought God's eye was the sun and moon and when you were listening carefully for God to speak to you, the only thing happening is a bunch of swirling somethings you couldn't touch but they could touch you.

More importantly, I liked thinking I could speak to God in God's language.

I could breathe in the Word of God, you see, and I could breathe it out just as well.

So it helped my confidence, when speaking to God, alone, through dustmotes lit sunshine through sunbeams brightly illuminating a glass window overlooking a willow tree, whose whooper wills made the light fragmentate before settling on my green-carpeted square, which I sat in for hours.

And just talked in a continuous prayer for so many things.

Thanks to Him, for my stuffed animals or my tv shows or stopping my family from yelling or stopping my brothers from hitting me or telling my father to have patience with me. I prayed for the sick and I prayed that I wouldn't get sick and that no one I knew would get sick.

For one entire day, I prayed to start pronouncing "awe" like "are" and I finally started getting it, actually. 

When my family came home, though, I couldn't do it, anymore. It was very dark, outside.

And I couldn't see the moon.