#500wordsaday

There was so much to be said, and yet the silence filled the entire room. After what seemed like hours to them both, finally he spoke:

“So” said Douglas.

“So” she replied in a steady, deep voice; startling him even further.

Where to go from here? Douglas could not account for the confusion he was feeling. Every next question he could ask flooded his mind until he landed on:

“Where did you find a thrown that small?”

“I don’t know what you mean” she sneered back at him.

Douglas was drowning in his own racing mind. How could this be happening? It seemed only a few hours ago the world was a simple place, abiding by the rules it had always abided by, and being filled with the things it had always been filled with. Now he didn’t know what to expect.

She sat straight up, proud but with an air of discomfort. She was keeping a composure that Douglas could not reconcile given the situation they were in. He had never seen her hold herself with such steady regality.

“It this what you do every day?”

“More or less.”

“Why did you never tell me?”

“You never asked.”

“I didn’t think I had to…”

Douglas let his last sentence drift between the two of them. The feeling of betrayal in his voice becoming a string pulling at both their hearts.

Her bottom lip began to quiver, and in that moment he knew she was the same dog she had always been. His dog. They had gone through so much together. He had gotten her when she was just a puppy! Was walking in on her sitting on a tiny thrown going to change that? Was the fact that she could talk the whole time going to alter the fact that they had been best friends in silence for years?

“Bones”

“Yes, Douglas?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was then that Bones finally let her neck relax, the weight of her fury head hanging low with exhaustion. She had been keeping up this charade for years; waiting for Douglas to leave so she could pull out her tiny thrown from behind the ficus. Digging up and re-burying her tiny crown whenever she heard his car enter the driveway. She knew from a young age that he wouldn’t understand, couldn’t understand! And yet, she still played with fire everyday as she watched him leave. Betraying her best friend, over and over again.

“Douglas, I never meant to hurt you. I knew you wouldn’t understand this part of my life”

She felt his gaze upon her and knew their friendship would never be the same. She never should have let him see her on her tiny thrown, she never should have let him know she had a voice with which to answer back all of these years.

She bowed-wow-wowed her head, whispering to him low: “please, say something.”

Douglas’s eyes filled with tears, he looked at his once best friend, now a complete stranger, and said:

Rage, anger, that feeling of pure emotion that makes your entire body shake in a way you’ve never experienced before. Oh how that emotion makes you feel...alive.

Until it doesnt.

You feel it more often than you like to admit. That anger is always simmering just below the surface. The smallest things seem to set it off. You wield your rage like a sword though you have no training in controlling your strikes. Yet, after it's all over, and the feeling dissipates, you just feel...empty.

There’s a void left once the crimson wears off. Your body feels heavy and your soul heavier. Rage demands so much from you and leaves you with nothing. You start realizing maybe it isn’t worth it. Perhaps all that anger is what is slowly killing you.

You’ve felt it for awhile. It's a nagging feeling that you just can’t put your hand on. You snap at someone and feel that high for a shorter and shorter amount of time. Then you feel almost nothing. You just feel heavy.

So you start working on hiding that anger. Every time you feel it welling up more, you take those waves and shove them into a jar. That jar is locked up in the recesses of your soul where you willingly chose to ignore it. 

At first, it's easy. It's so simple to bite your tongue and shove the anger into jars. Those jars get locked away. It was so easy.

Until it wasn’t. 

People started noticing that without your crimson rage, you just weren’t you. You were quiet. You withdrew from people, a little bit at first and then suddenly, you realized people were avoiding you. It hurt. You questioned them.

“You just aren’t yourself. Like, it's nice that you aren’t snapping at everyone, but you just aren’t you.” 

“You just seemed really depressed lately.”

Depressed. Was that the word for the emptiness you felt after you let loose? Or was it something else? You were still as active as you could be. Sure, you felt empty but it wasn’t like the other symptoms you felt online. So you changed again. You replaced that rage with happiness as much as you could. For awhile, you felt lighter and people were coming around again. 

Then, one night, you found yourself out at a restaurant, sitting at the bar just trying to enjoy a drink or five. Someone you haven't seen since you started suppressing your rage sees you there. They come and sit and you talk. It's a nice conversation.

Until it isn’t. 

They point out how fake you are. How this happiness is obviously just a facade. They tell you that you haven’t actually changed. They go on and on. You feel it building. You feel it welling. You see the crimson on the edge of your vision. This time, you don’t stop it. 

You rage in a beautiful way. You strike out at them with words sharper than any sword. You tear them down piece by piece. You watch them shrink away because your voice hasn’t raised. In fact, your tone is even and cool. There is no yelling. There is no scene made. The bartender even asks if you’d like another in the middle of it all. You reply yes with a smile and he just nods. No one is the wiser minus the one who pushed you to this. 

Then, it's all over. They apologize and look down at the beer you ordered for them when the bartender came by earlier. You can almost feel how uncomfortable they are but they aren’t sure how to leave. 

From the corner of your eye, you swear you see a man grinning from ear to ear with a familiar crimson glint in his eyes. You don’t question it. You are too busy reveling in how you feel, how light everything seems and for the first time in a long time, you think maybe you’ve gotten control over that rage. You finally know how to wield it and strike precisely. 

Looking back on it now, I can see no tell-tale sign that would have given a clue as to what was in store. I washed my face like any other evening, brushed my teeth, turned out the lights, and crawled into bed all without even an inkling that something horrible was afoot.

Had there been signs? Of course! It had been brewing in me for months now; bubbling up at times of high stress. That particular day had been filled with misspeaking during meetings and arriving late to phone calls. There had been no free time, and I had only gotten through the morning by sneaking 2 donuts from the break room.

By mid-afternoon, A sharp pain had begun concentrating just above my right eye. After what seemed like hours, I gave up on my various pain killers taking affect, and decided to leave work early.

I closed my eyes to sleep at around 8pm- neglecting to finish the laundry I had previously starting, and cancelling a long standing dinner plan with friends. After going over all of the regrettable conversations that had come to pass during the day, I drifted off with the pain still searing in my skull.

When I opened my eyes, it was the next morning. It only took me a matter of seconds to recognize that the pain in my head was still there. Dreading taking off another day of work, I walked into the bathroom to begin my morning routine; that’s when I saw it.

A small, extra head had exploded itself out of my skull just over my right eye. It was staring me right in the face with palpable disdain.

“What..the fuck...are you looking at” it sneered at me, tiny eyes rolling into the back of its tiny head.

“Who are you?!” I cried in disbelief, feeling around the seams of its neck only to find that she was in fact growing straight out of my own scalp.

“Of course you would ask that” she mumbled under her breath “You honestly don’t know? Are you that much of an idiot?!”

After a few moments of stunned silence, she finally accepted that I had no explanation for what I was seeing. Drawing in an unimpressed breathe, she finally uttered the words that would haunt me for the rest of my life:

“I’m your own self loathing, you piece of shit! You let me grow too big for too long. Did you honestly think I was just going to live my life inside your big, sad head? There was no way I could spend another second in there with all of your pathetic thoughts bothering me constantly! Now I’m out here, where I can finally get a good view of how much of a failure you are.”

My voice was caught in my throat, I had let my own self doubt get so out of control that I was going to have to live with it out there for the world to see for the rest of my life.

Speechless, and feeling a little self conscious, I finished my morning routine. I washed both of our faces and got us both ready for the day. The whole time, my self doubt heckled me about what a mess I was going to be now that I had let her come to fruition.

There wasn’t much to say for how the evening turned out beyond the word “disaster.” Or at least, that’s the most Queen Fox would say about it.

“The whole evening was a complete and utter disaster!” she would sneer through her clenched snout whenever one of her triage of fancy woodland governesses would ask for details.

The whole forest was buzzing with gossip about the event- none of which was to be believed. From the mole boroughs to the beaver dams to the robin nests, there wasn’t a single creature in the forest who wasn’t spreading one rumor or another.

“I heard the duchess of bear cave knocked over the cake!” whispered the old withered chipmunk from her ornate wheelchair.

“I heard Lord Stag walked in on one of the foxlings with the royal butler!” Baker Warthog piped in, his hands covered in flour.

“I heard Queen Fox herself fell down the grand stairway!” giggled a tiny mouse, no bigger than a walnut.

No matter what the ruckus was, one thing was for certain: Queen Fox could not be bothered to discuss the event! No matter how hard her foxlings would beg, or how much King Fox pressed her, she simply would say nothing more. Only that “it was an utter disaster!”

And so the forest continued its gossip. One story piled on top of another, growing taller and taller and taller with every detail. By the end of the day, the tale was almost ten stories high!

It appeared that the party had begun as normally as any good party should: there was dancing and eating and not a dry goblet in the hall. King Fox was just as excited as anyone to see the royal cooks roll out the royal sundae bar. “Huzzah!” he cried.

Running towards the ornate sweet setup, he tripped on the elaborately long gown of Miss Crane and tumbled to the floor, pulling down the bird with him!

Miss Crane’s neck, falling in the air to keep her balance, wrapped snakelike around the shoulders of the Goat Prince, forcing his lips against her beak.

Mistaking the embrace for a romantic gesture, the Goat Princess wailed out in horror, startling the entire deer orchestra into a stampede!

Wails filled the hall as guests ducked for cover. By the time the stampede had cleared, not a single party goer was left unscathed.

Distraught, disheveled, and without any ice cream, the evening ended embarrassingly early (something that was entirely unheard of for a Queen Fox ball!)

Or at least, that’s what the rumors had said. The story of the evenings disaster made it all the way through the forest and finally, to Queen Fox herself.

She listened, making sure to nod politely as her fancy woodland governesses pleaded with her to verify what they had heard.