August 13
The precipitate running off the shiny red exterior of the coke can.
The tapping of 17 feet: an out sync rhythm
Without saying a word we knew each other, we knew the smell of our sweat. Our fear.
We knew who cracked, who ran out of time, who time ran out of, who ran out.
We knew our competition, but now we were one, there was no point in hating.
It started with Twenty Two, we knew that, too. Two left before the test started, two ran out in the middle. One supposedly died, or so rumor has it.
There was a girl, I remember her clearly, blond hair, pretty, too. I would guess twelve, but that's just an estimate. Ran out an hour into the test, put down her pencil, said that this was bullshit. Left. Gone.
The other one was another girl, an Asian. Left three hours, sixteen, I'd think. Screamed something about spiders, said that there were spiders all over her. Stabbed herself with her pencil. Was escorted out.
I tip my Fedora down, my sneaker still tapping to the beat of my heart. The girl next to me pushes her glasses up against her face, too hard, they weren't falling down.
The boy across the room taps on his knee.
The tension is dying, people are wondering what the point is. But something holds us in this room like a magnet, a sense of purpose. A subconscious knowing. We got this far with our wits and cheats, with our study guides and answer keys.
We got this far.
Laughter now, coming from a boy, seventeen with white hair and a very beautiful face. It sounds like angels playing on their harps, but it's out of tune, wound too tight.
We feel the footsteps before we hear them, they enter before we realize that they're there.
"Cookies?"
"Goddamn it! This is bullshit! Just hand back the fucking tests. Just hand them back. We know you've got them. We know. Just give us our goddamn grades. FUCKING DISMISS US ALL. Kill us, for Fuck's sake. Just let us know." The boy with black hair speaks. Everyone pays attention, no one notices.
And another one bites the dust.
This is the place that produces geniuses. That is if we don't end up in the asylum across the road.
But we're all willing to take the risk, we don't have a choice.
Everyone stares at the platter of cookies.
The girl pushes up her glasses. The boy taps his knee.
"So it's us now, ain't it?" A boy's voice asks a rhetorical question. His voice is low and thick.
"Mmmmm." My answer is ambiguous, it doesn't matter.
"I'm Tommy."
"Angel, Angel Gregory. Gregory because it's normal and Angel because Snow White was too gay." The boy with white hair speaks, still in his soft velvet voice.
"Alize." A French girl doesn't look up from writing math problems on the table.
"Anthony Easton." That would be me.
"Mimi. Mimi Belladonna Krylov-Wolff" A girl with big brown hair and blue streaks murmured in an accent that I couldn't place. She had cut her finger open and was currently drawing a picture of a wolf on the wall with her blood.
"Edgar Von Miri." A man with a monocle spoke in an exaggerated english accent.
No one else gets to introduce themselves, the boy with black hair gets up and leaves without explanation.
No one moves. Ten seconds later the men in suits enter, they hand us back our tests.
No one makes a sound.
September 11
School. Finally. I meet up with the other new students, we can recognize each other by the smell of our fear.
Angel Gregory. Me. Mimi Belladonna Krylov-Wolff. Alize Beachump. Zachary McCallister.
January 9
It gets sickening after a while.
You go insane when you can see your whole world, everything you are and ever will be, from your bedroom window. Looking outside I can see all 23.4 acres of the campus of the school, we're trapped here. We're too smart for the outside and too sane for the asylum.
This is all we'll ever know until we know no more, until we're old and grown with tweed coats and suspenders, unless, of course, we die before then.
Gregory is gone, no one calls him that anymore.
He no longer allows it.
Angel, now. Born from the heavens, one day he'll fly away.
He failed to acknowledge the existence of his parents, he's convinced that he's born from the heavens, he's convinced that he can fly.
He spends his days staring out the windows now, he wont even see Alize.
He's trapped her, too.
He goes to therapy thrice a week, now.
He's going to jump, we all know it, no one cares, no one moves a finger to stop him.
I'm surprised he's lasted this far, not everyone has.
I fear for Alize, she's so beautiful.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Aimée Story? Better Name? Someone?
Picture Yourself On A Boat On A River, With Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies
A little girl, who couldn't have been any more than five, sat on the floor of a nursery, listening to her parent's screams. The nursery was overstuffed with brightly painted children's toys. She sat very still, her albino skin blending with the white walls of the room. All of the teddy bears, blankets, and mobiles that populated the nursery hadn't been moved since her parents bought them. They all stayed in their respective corners, sitting against their walls. Staring at her. The toys her parents thought they could buy her love with. She wouldn't touch them.
"Baisez toi," her mother shrieked, a couple rooms over, "allez à l'enfer!"
"Comme vous souhaitez!" her father spat back.
A door slammed shut. That was the last she ever heard of her father. Now, thirteen years later, he was just a faceless figure who populated her dreams, and always her nightmares. Her father was no more than an idea, a collection of scattered facts, some that were true and some that weren't. He was married to her mother, or was he? She called him Monsieur Batton, not dad. Did she ever know his real name?
Suddenly the scene changed to something very different. She was riding on the back of a motorcycle. No, she was riding in front. She knew this because she couldn't see who was riding with her. She so desperately wanted to look back to see who sitting behind her, because she knew it was her father, but she was too afraid to take her eyes off of the road. Yet, she was no longer on a road, she was in the water now, the lake in front of her house. The ducks were quaking the French anthem. Or were they? The lake fell away, she was approaching a waterfall.
"Aimée! Aimée!" Someone was screaming her name, was it her father? A hand reached out. She grabbed on to it.
"COMME VOUS SOUHAITEZ!" The hand let go. She was falling. Falling through the sky. Falling through the ocean. The ground was getting nearer and nearer, or maybe it was getting farther away. She was doomed. She was going to die.
Aimée woke up from her resting place in the alleyway. She hadn't remembered falling asleep. Her aviator sunglasses had slipped from her face and now rested down amongst the needles that were scattered around the ground. The rays of sun that had wormed their way into the alley, burning into her papery skin. White hands felt around through the needles until they found their way to her sunglasses. She got up and moved around to a darker alleyway, away from the sun's beams.
She contemplated her dream. It was not uncommon for her to dream about her father. Sometimes he was fully formed, as he was on the motorcycle, but sometimes he was just snippets. A hand that reached, a voice that said her name, a shirt that he wore on her birthday. Only parts of a whole. Parts of a memory. She had this fantasy that one day they find each other. That she would just recognize him. But what would she do next? Would they run into each other's arms and reunite happily, as father and daughter should, or would she just scream at him, as she probably would. Thinking about it too much confused her, and her mind soon drifted off, thinking of dancing gumdrops and man-eating mushrooms.
Aimée closed her eyes, lost in her own thoughts and dreams. She reached into her pocket and removed a small vial of golden liquid. She brought the vial to her lips and took a small sip. The effect was instantaneous. Suddenly the colors were no longer just in her head, they danced around the walls. Forming words, some legible and some not. Squares of pink and red spun and crawled around the alleyway. The alley and the sky came together came together, as if being sucked down the drain of a bathtub. What was right and wrong seemed to vanish down the drain, too, and the dirty needles that dotted the ground started moving, almost like they were dancing. Suddenly everything froze. An image came out of the wall. It was a person. Or maybe it was a shirt. Maybe it was just a red square. More of them appeared. She was certain that they were all people, all the same person. All of them were wearing the same shirt, it was red with a plaid tie. Where did she remember this shirt from? Their bodies were volatile and blurry, their arms and legs growing and shrinking. Their hands reached out to her then vanished before she could grab onto them. Everything was going slower.
"Aimée," the illusions screamed, "Aimée. Quoi Aimée? Quoi?" She stared at them as they came, more and more of them. They surrounded her screaming "Quoi Aimée?" Suddenly she couldn't take it anymore, "ALLEZ À L'ENFER!" She screamed at the shadows. That seemed to break the spell, everything came back to normal speed. The figures were gone. Geometric patterns zoomed past her face, distorted squares, triangles, even hexagons. They were there then gone. Kaleidoscopic colors and patterns surrounded her until her eyes hurt. She sat down, and felt the dirty needles from the ground poke her. The colors started fading, how long had she been here? It only seemed like a couple minutes. The shadows began receding and sunlight began appearing through the cracks between the buildings. She continued to walk through the maze of alleyways, the colors fading more and more until they were hardly there. Only light shapes appearing then disappearing. The needles that scattered the ground became denser and denser. She was obviously getting closer to the dealers; most people didn't go far after they bought. Broken syringes were strewed across the ground. There were brown spots, almost like dew, that formed random pattenrs on the ground.
Graffiti began appearing on the walls, in beautiful shapes and colors. Some were names and some were just random messages. The dark brick walls of the buildings that formed the alley contrasted with the bright graffiti. One message said, "Fuck you Las Vegas" in tones of bright scarlet and golden orange. Each letter being formed from only straight lines, and having sharp angles that pointed this way and that. She reached the circular area that was called the core. It was wear everyone went after buying. Dealers, themselves, usually stayed outside of this area for their own reasons. But every now and again they appeared. Hiding in the shadows with their hats tipped forward and their overly large sunglasses hiding their face.
Aimée picked up a needle from the ground that still had a bit of the brownish liquid in it and slowly inserted the dirty syringe into her arm. She let out a relieved sigh. It always felt so good, even if there was only a little left. Injections were never a big part of Aimée's life, but they were always very enjoyable. The way it intensified everything. How it made everything so much more beautiful. The euphoria mixed with the knowledge that doing it was potentially dangerous. The intense happiness coursed through her blood and ran through her bones, becoming one with her body. Becoming her soul. She pressed her back up against the alleyway wall, needing support so she wouldn't fall over from pure ecstasy. She stared at the needles, finding some unknown, unseen, enjoyment in just looking at them. The cylindrical body of the syringe distorted the shape of the alleyway. Bronze spots dotted the tube, each in its own way. Each having it's own design.
Aimée felt connected here, this is where everyone went to inject themselves. She knew that every abandoned needle had its own story, no matter how insignificant it seemed. One was used by an artist with creative block, one was used by a girl, depressed after being Date-raped, one was used by a cheating husband. Everything was sharper and clearer, yet she was also lethargic. As the euphoria calmed down all that was left was a haziness, a drowsiness. She wanted to fall asleep for the rest of her life.
Aimée woke up sweating and shaking. Her head felt like it was being split open. She threw up a mixture of water and left over drugs. All of the joys and colors from last night seemed like a distant memory. The phantasmagorical patterns, the dreams, and the realities became one. She had met her father, he was riding on a square. There was something about ducks fucking Nevada. Her thought process was broken up with another wave of nausea. She felt drained of everything. Aimée rolled over, needles poked at her stomach, nothing made much sense.
Here Comes the Sun
Aimée walked into the open sunlight, her half closed eyes hidden behind dark aviators. Her mind and body still numb after yesterday's high. She was in a daze. The sun made her skin glow in an inhuman way, her silky white hair blowing in the slight breeze, almost reflecting the light. As she emerged from the dark labyrinth she'd spent so long in, people stopped and stared. She was Persephone, coming out of the depths of Tarturus after seven months. Cars skidded to a stop and swerved past her as she strode through the middle of the street, not hearing the people's shouts. Gumdrops danced with sugarplums in her head. Hera never knew what she got herself into. Persephone shouldn't have eaten those seeds. Icarus was flying too close to the sun.
Suddenly everything came into vicious clarity, the sun was no longer a dull pain on her skin; it was burning her like paper. She couldn't open her eyes for fear of being blind. Aimée gasped, trying to catch her breath. She was melting like wax-wings. Everything faded out, the car horns became birds chirping, the buildings trees, the people ants, crawling in a straight march. Only the harsh rays of the sun remained the same, beating down on her back as Aimée watched her brother, a faceless boy with brown hair and a black shirt, crouching over the ants with a magnifying glass.
"Arête!" She cried, watching him burn them as they persistently crawled forward.
"Quoi?" He sneered. His sister's pain only increasing his joy. Tears began pouring from Aimée's eyes. She couldn't stop them. She felt helpless to save the ants as they got burned, one after another. She felt lost and useless.
"Sorts." Her brother was annoyed with her tears. When she wouldn't move he got up and screamed it again. She still wouldn't leave. Her sobs only increased in volume. He hit her. The knife. The rage. Aimée screamed, not realizing she had collapsed in the middle of the street. People were surrounding her, arguing about calling a ambulance, the police. When they saw her get up, one of them, a boy with blond hair said "You could've hurt yourself." She glared at him venomously; did he think she was, a baby?
"Yes. I know." She spat at him, getting up and brushing off her dress. The boy was taken aback by her response and turned away. Aimée glared at the crowd, daring any of them to stare at her. They began dispersing back into their cars; all of them had a story to tell now, the crazy girl with the white hair.
As she walked on, Aimée thought about her brother. Where was he now? Was he still in France? She sat down in the shadow of a building, next to a girl, who couldn't have been more than eighteen, asking for money to buy food she couldn't afford.
Aimée usually didn't think about her brother, memories of him were in a suitcase, under a rug, hidden in the back of her mind. But every once in a while she pulled it out, just to glimpse at it. But she always ended up stuffing back under the rug and locking the door. Just in case it got too out of control. And one suitcase often led to another, and she was worried that if she dared open one, they would all open. Her thoughts where broken by someone tapping her on the shoulder.
"Need money?" A male voice asked, "Possibly a date at a diner?"
"No. But she does." Aimée pointed at the girl next to her holding up a sign, which clearly stated, 'Homeless, I need money for food.' The man made a disgusted noise at the suggestion and left. Aimée's rage was instantaneous. How dare he walk away?
"What are you doing?" She hissed at him. He turned around, looking surprised.
"It's my money..." He started, but stooped in mid sentence, staring at Aimée, who had just pulled a knife on him. It was no real weapon, but a kitchen knife, rusty and dented from age. It might've just been his imagination, but there was brownness around the edges.
"W-what are you d-doing?" He stuttered, too panicked to run. "T-take the m-m-m-money." She looked an Angel of Death. Her pale face had an almost heavenly glow about it, her white dress blowing in the wind.
"I don't want your money," she said in an eerily quiet calm voice, like she was talking to a child, "I want you to stop burning the ants."
The suitcase had just been pulled out from a rug and now lay open in a white room. Freidrich Batton shifted through the old pictures of his sister as he sat in her old nursery. He never really knew what to think of her, he tried to keep her memory hidden. But today was different. Today was her birthday. Today was the day she left. Where was she? She had always wanted to go to America, but had she? Suddenly his hand grabbed something cylindrical and smooth. His stomach lurched as he pulled out the magnifying glass. Memories that he never wanted to remember flooded back into his head, memories he had tried to lock up. He never remembered putting the magnifying glass in the suitcase, anyway. He tried to stuff it back under the photos, but it was too late. The idea of her being a loving sister he had tried to create was gone.
She had wanted to kill him; she had pulled a knife on him. He tried to convince himself, like he had for the last ten years, that it was just a game. That if even he hadn't grabbed the knife from her hand, that she wouldn't have hurt him. But that never worked. He remembered the pure hatred in her eyes and voice as she came towards him. "Ne pas brûler les fourmis," she had growled. Everything was so vivid it hurt his head. Tears escaped his eyes. "Aimée", he whispered, "je suis desolée."
The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes
(Part 1)
Aimée's eyes snapped open, her vision blurry. She blinked until everything came into focus. She was staring up at a white ceiling. Too bright for her liking. Was she in her nursery? She sprang up from the bed she had, apparently, been sleeping on. A shiny metal plate was screwed on to one of the walls. There was a sign on top of a black door, the only way out. The sign read "Mental Ward: Room 208."
"Good morning. Or evening. Or night. It's hard to tell which because there are no windows. But, assuming that you just woke up, I'd say it's morning. Then again, I woke up quite a while ago." The voice rambled on, seemingly in deep thought, "I could always read the clock. It says 12. But you see, it doesn't say if it's morning or night. Good night." It took Aimée a few seconds to realize that the voice was talking to her. Then a few more to realize that the voice was coming from a girls sitting across the room, her crimson red hair blinding against the blank white of the walls. She couldn't have been more then fifteen.
"You seem surprised that I'm not looking at you. Many, many people are self-centered like that. They think that they should get my undivided attention. But I'm a busy person! Anyway, I'm talking to you. Shouldn't that be enough? Yes, it should. So I'm talking to you, but there are so many more interesting things to look at." Aimée only blinked a few times, still trying to remember how she got here.
"You came in mumbling something about ants. Hah! I guess that's why they locked you up. They locked me up because I burned down a forest. Hahaha." The girl started laughing, still facing the door, unmoving. "You probably want to know all my personal information, right? Like my name and why I came here. But I'm not going to tell you. My name is Kaleidoscope. Well, that's not my real name. But, heh, I don't know my real name." Aimée was about to point out that the girl, Kaleidoscope, had just contradicted herself, but decided it would be pointless.
"I-I'm Aimée... I was talking about ants? What was I saying?" The girl finally turned around to face Aimée, who let out a little gasp. Kaleidoscope had bright red eyes... or maybe they were green... or yellow... or purple. They seemed to change.
"You were talking in French. You were talking about not burning them. Then when you got here you just let out a little gasp and collapsed on the bed, my bed. And you missed breakfast, or maybe it was dinner-" Aimée let out a little groan and stopped listening. She sat down on the bed again, suddenly tired.
Everything came back to her in a flash. The beggar girl, the knife, the ants. Despite the fact that her mind was racing, sleep soon overtook her, and she had incoherent dreams about giant ants, drowning in blood, white rooms, and emus.
Aimée was having a particularly vivid dream about a flying emu when she was awoken by someone shaking her violently.
"Ant girl. Hey. Wake up. It's breakfast," a gruff voice said.
"Je m'apple Aimée." Aimée didn't feel like this man deserved to understand what she was saying.
"Yeah. Great. I don't speak Spanish." The voice was obviously annoyed. Maybe you should be locked in a mental hospital, Aimée thought to herself, smiling. Kaleidoscope was sitting in the corner, staring at the clock.
"They've been delivering breakfast to me after I tried to kill someone with oatmeal." Aimée was unsure if Kaleidoscope was talking to the clock, or her.
Aimée got up and followed the man out of the room. She went through a plain white hallway with rows of black doors on either side, down a white staircase, and through another white hallway, until they reached a two white doors that Aimée supposed led to the cafeteria, though you would've never known by the smell, or lack thereof.
Aimée walked through the white doors and was met with another white room, though this one was much larger. The silverware was white and plastic, the plates were white and plastic, the cups were white and plastic, even the food looked white and plastic. Aimée regarded the oatmeal that was being served warily, unsure if it was actually edible. After much internal conflict she finally decided that she was too hungry not to eat.
"Can I please have some of the oatmeal?" She asked. The woman behind the counter was surprised that the person who was ordering could actually string a coherent sentence together, most people here couldn't. But she served the oatmeal without questions, as she had learned to do after many years of unsatisfactory and illogical answers. Aimée stood with her tray staring at all the tables set up in neat rows. The room was filled with chatter, but Aimée seriously doubted anyone was talking to anyone but themselves, as the people seemed to avoid each other.
Someone was sitting at the edge of a table, singing some unsung ode to some unknown lover. His angelical face covered by unkempt golden hair. He wasn’t singing in English, or any real language, Aimée suspected, but his tone was that of someone who had loved and lost. A girl was sitting next to him. Her hair was short and bright blue, the edges ragged and uneven, as if she’d cut it herself. She was debating animatedly with non-existent devils and angels who resided on her shoulders. Her voice alternating from worried whispers to outraged screams.
A man fiddled around with a plastic knife, somehow bending it into circles then unbending it, without breaking the plastic, only to start over again a few minutes later in a never-ending cycle that only had meaning in his eyes.
“Meaning, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.” The man held up the fork, which he had delicately bent into the shape of a key. “Keep on to it. You’ll need it at one point. Soon, or later.“ He returned to bending the knife back and fourth.
Aimée stared at the plastic key she now held in her hand. The word Snippletweak was engraved on one of the teeth. While her sanity told her to throw it away, that it was useless, something else, something deeper, told her to keep it. Her thought process was broken by a shrieking bell and a voice that announced that everyone would be promptly escorted to their rooms. All of the patients filed out of the room like a heard of sheep, all of them wearing white clothes, going through white halls into their white rooms.
Just Tune In, Turn Off, Drop Out, Drop In, Switch Off, Switch On, and Explode
“Good day, Aimée, isn’t it? Aimée Batton. I’m Patricia” Aimée was sitting in a chair in a room that was painted a friendly sunshine color. There were wooden shelves on the walls that were sparsely populated by books, most of them about psychology. There was a diagram of the human brain on the wall directly above Aimée.
“Oui, c’est vrai.”
“Please speak English here.” The woman who she was talking to, Patricia, had cropped brown hair and a cloying, condescending voice.
“Yes.”
“Good. So, do you know why you were—“ she paused, seeming to search for the correct word, “—institutionalized?”
“No.”
“It says here, Aimée, that you tried to kill someone with a knife while repeating the Phrase ‘Don’t Burn The Ants, do you have any recollection of any of that?’”
“No.”
“Well, Aimée, do you know why you did that? Does that phrase, Don’t Burn The Ants, mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure, Aimée?”
“Stop saying my name.”
“It would help if you answered my questions.”
“I am, the answer is no.”
“I can’t believe that, Aimée.”
“Oh, well, you should figure that out with yourself.”
“Stop being snippy, Aimée.” Patricia’s voice rose a note and adopted a rather angry tone.
“I don’t know why I’m here to begin with, Patricia. So I’m sorry if you aren’t getting the answer’s you want... Patricia. Alright, Patricia?”
“Aimée, I’m going to rise above this, alright?” Patricia’s voice returned to her usual condescending tone.
“You have fun with that, Patricia.”
“Alright, Aimée. So, it says here that you have a brother, named Freidrich Batton. Is that correct Aimée?”
“No.”
“Well it says it right here.”
“Okay, then why’d you ask?”
“Okay, Aimée, are your parent’s dead?”
“One would assume.”
“Any other relatives?”
“It depends, are you Jewish?”
“I don’t see how that has any relevance.”
“Then you don’t see much. Next question.”
“We are going to phone your brother, okay?”
“Knock yourself out. Literally.”
A little girl, who couldn't have been any more than five, sat on the floor of a nursery, listening to her parent's screams. The nursery was overstuffed with brightly painted children's toys. She sat very still, her albino skin blending with the white walls of the room. All of the teddy bears, blankets, and mobiles that populated the nursery hadn't been moved since her parents bought them. They all stayed in their respective corners, sitting against their walls. Staring at her. The toys her parents thought they could buy her love with. She wouldn't touch them.
"Baisez toi," her mother shrieked, a couple rooms over, "allez à l'enfer!"
"Comme vous souhaitez!" her father spat back.
A door slammed shut. That was the last she ever heard of her father. Now, thirteen years later, he was just a faceless figure who populated her dreams, and always her nightmares. Her father was no more than an idea, a collection of scattered facts, some that were true and some that weren't. He was married to her mother, or was he? She called him Monsieur Batton, not dad. Did she ever know his real name?
Suddenly the scene changed to something very different. She was riding on the back of a motorcycle. No, she was riding in front. She knew this because she couldn't see who was riding with her. She so desperately wanted to look back to see who sitting behind her, because she knew it was her father, but she was too afraid to take her eyes off of the road. Yet, she was no longer on a road, she was in the water now, the lake in front of her house. The ducks were quaking the French anthem. Or were they? The lake fell away, she was approaching a waterfall.
"Aimée! Aimée!" Someone was screaming her name, was it her father? A hand reached out. She grabbed on to it.
"COMME VOUS SOUHAITEZ!" The hand let go. She was falling. Falling through the sky. Falling through the ocean. The ground was getting nearer and nearer, or maybe it was getting farther away. She was doomed. She was going to die.
Aimée woke up from her resting place in the alleyway. She hadn't remembered falling asleep. Her aviator sunglasses had slipped from her face and now rested down amongst the needles that were scattered around the ground. The rays of sun that had wormed their way into the alley, burning into her papery skin. White hands felt around through the needles until they found their way to her sunglasses. She got up and moved around to a darker alleyway, away from the sun's beams.
She contemplated her dream. It was not uncommon for her to dream about her father. Sometimes he was fully formed, as he was on the motorcycle, but sometimes he was just snippets. A hand that reached, a voice that said her name, a shirt that he wore on her birthday. Only parts of a whole. Parts of a memory. She had this fantasy that one day they find each other. That she would just recognize him. But what would she do next? Would they run into each other's arms and reunite happily, as father and daughter should, or would she just scream at him, as she probably would. Thinking about it too much confused her, and her mind soon drifted off, thinking of dancing gumdrops and man-eating mushrooms.
Aimée closed her eyes, lost in her own thoughts and dreams. She reached into her pocket and removed a small vial of golden liquid. She brought the vial to her lips and took a small sip. The effect was instantaneous. Suddenly the colors were no longer just in her head, they danced around the walls. Forming words, some legible and some not. Squares of pink and red spun and crawled around the alleyway. The alley and the sky came together came together, as if being sucked down the drain of a bathtub. What was right and wrong seemed to vanish down the drain, too, and the dirty needles that dotted the ground started moving, almost like they were dancing. Suddenly everything froze. An image came out of the wall. It was a person. Or maybe it was a shirt. Maybe it was just a red square. More of them appeared. She was certain that they were all people, all the same person. All of them were wearing the same shirt, it was red with a plaid tie. Where did she remember this shirt from? Their bodies were volatile and blurry, their arms and legs growing and shrinking. Their hands reached out to her then vanished before she could grab onto them. Everything was going slower.
"Aimée," the illusions screamed, "Aimée. Quoi Aimée? Quoi?" She stared at them as they came, more and more of them. They surrounded her screaming "Quoi Aimée?" Suddenly she couldn't take it anymore, "ALLEZ À L'ENFER!" She screamed at the shadows. That seemed to break the spell, everything came back to normal speed. The figures were gone. Geometric patterns zoomed past her face, distorted squares, triangles, even hexagons. They were there then gone. Kaleidoscopic colors and patterns surrounded her until her eyes hurt. She sat down, and felt the dirty needles from the ground poke her. The colors started fading, how long had she been here? It only seemed like a couple minutes. The shadows began receding and sunlight began appearing through the cracks between the buildings. She continued to walk through the maze of alleyways, the colors fading more and more until they were hardly there. Only light shapes appearing then disappearing. The needles that scattered the ground became denser and denser. She was obviously getting closer to the dealers; most people didn't go far after they bought. Broken syringes were strewed across the ground. There were brown spots, almost like dew, that formed random pattenrs on the ground.
Graffiti began appearing on the walls, in beautiful shapes and colors. Some were names and some were just random messages. The dark brick walls of the buildings that formed the alley contrasted with the bright graffiti. One message said, "Fuck you Las Vegas" in tones of bright scarlet and golden orange. Each letter being formed from only straight lines, and having sharp angles that pointed this way and that. She reached the circular area that was called the core. It was wear everyone went after buying. Dealers, themselves, usually stayed outside of this area for their own reasons. But every now and again they appeared. Hiding in the shadows with their hats tipped forward and their overly large sunglasses hiding their face.
Aimée picked up a needle from the ground that still had a bit of the brownish liquid in it and slowly inserted the dirty syringe into her arm. She let out a relieved sigh. It always felt so good, even if there was only a little left. Injections were never a big part of Aimée's life, but they were always very enjoyable. The way it intensified everything. How it made everything so much more beautiful. The euphoria mixed with the knowledge that doing it was potentially dangerous. The intense happiness coursed through her blood and ran through her bones, becoming one with her body. Becoming her soul. She pressed her back up against the alleyway wall, needing support so she wouldn't fall over from pure ecstasy. She stared at the needles, finding some unknown, unseen, enjoyment in just looking at them. The cylindrical body of the syringe distorted the shape of the alleyway. Bronze spots dotted the tube, each in its own way. Each having it's own design.
Aimée felt connected here, this is where everyone went to inject themselves. She knew that every abandoned needle had its own story, no matter how insignificant it seemed. One was used by an artist with creative block, one was used by a girl, depressed after being Date-raped, one was used by a cheating husband. Everything was sharper and clearer, yet she was also lethargic. As the euphoria calmed down all that was left was a haziness, a drowsiness. She wanted to fall asleep for the rest of her life.
Aimée woke up sweating and shaking. Her head felt like it was being split open. She threw up a mixture of water and left over drugs. All of the joys and colors from last night seemed like a distant memory. The phantasmagorical patterns, the dreams, and the realities became one. She had met her father, he was riding on a square. There was something about ducks fucking Nevada. Her thought process was broken up with another wave of nausea. She felt drained of everything. Aimée rolled over, needles poked at her stomach, nothing made much sense.
Here Comes the Sun
Aimée walked into the open sunlight, her half closed eyes hidden behind dark aviators. Her mind and body still numb after yesterday's high. She was in a daze. The sun made her skin glow in an inhuman way, her silky white hair blowing in the slight breeze, almost reflecting the light. As she emerged from the dark labyrinth she'd spent so long in, people stopped and stared. She was Persephone, coming out of the depths of Tarturus after seven months. Cars skidded to a stop and swerved past her as she strode through the middle of the street, not hearing the people's shouts. Gumdrops danced with sugarplums in her head. Hera never knew what she got herself into. Persephone shouldn't have eaten those seeds. Icarus was flying too close to the sun.
Suddenly everything came into vicious clarity, the sun was no longer a dull pain on her skin; it was burning her like paper. She couldn't open her eyes for fear of being blind. Aimée gasped, trying to catch her breath. She was melting like wax-wings. Everything faded out, the car horns became birds chirping, the buildings trees, the people ants, crawling in a straight march. Only the harsh rays of the sun remained the same, beating down on her back as Aimée watched her brother, a faceless boy with brown hair and a black shirt, crouching over the ants with a magnifying glass.
"Arête!" She cried, watching him burn them as they persistently crawled forward.
"Quoi?" He sneered. His sister's pain only increasing his joy. Tears began pouring from Aimée's eyes. She couldn't stop them. She felt helpless to save the ants as they got burned, one after another. She felt lost and useless.
"Sorts." Her brother was annoyed with her tears. When she wouldn't move he got up and screamed it again. She still wouldn't leave. Her sobs only increased in volume. He hit her. The knife. The rage. Aimée screamed, not realizing she had collapsed in the middle of the street. People were surrounding her, arguing about calling a ambulance, the police. When they saw her get up, one of them, a boy with blond hair said "You could've hurt yourself." She glared at him venomously; did he think she was, a baby?
"Yes. I know." She spat at him, getting up and brushing off her dress. The boy was taken aback by her response and turned away. Aimée glared at the crowd, daring any of them to stare at her. They began dispersing back into their cars; all of them had a story to tell now, the crazy girl with the white hair.
As she walked on, Aimée thought about her brother. Where was he now? Was he still in France? She sat down in the shadow of a building, next to a girl, who couldn't have been more than eighteen, asking for money to buy food she couldn't afford.
Aimée usually didn't think about her brother, memories of him were in a suitcase, under a rug, hidden in the back of her mind. But every once in a while she pulled it out, just to glimpse at it. But she always ended up stuffing back under the rug and locking the door. Just in case it got too out of control. And one suitcase often led to another, and she was worried that if she dared open one, they would all open. Her thoughts where broken by someone tapping her on the shoulder.
"Need money?" A male voice asked, "Possibly a date at a diner?"
"No. But she does." Aimée pointed at the girl next to her holding up a sign, which clearly stated, 'Homeless, I need money for food.' The man made a disgusted noise at the suggestion and left. Aimée's rage was instantaneous. How dare he walk away?
"What are you doing?" She hissed at him. He turned around, looking surprised.
"It's my money..." He started, but stooped in mid sentence, staring at Aimée, who had just pulled a knife on him. It was no real weapon, but a kitchen knife, rusty and dented from age. It might've just been his imagination, but there was brownness around the edges.
"W-what are you d-doing?" He stuttered, too panicked to run. "T-take the m-m-m-money." She looked an Angel of Death. Her pale face had an almost heavenly glow about it, her white dress blowing in the wind.
"I don't want your money," she said in an eerily quiet calm voice, like she was talking to a child, "I want you to stop burning the ants."
The suitcase had just been pulled out from a rug and now lay open in a white room. Freidrich Batton shifted through the old pictures of his sister as he sat in her old nursery. He never really knew what to think of her, he tried to keep her memory hidden. But today was different. Today was her birthday. Today was the day she left. Where was she? She had always wanted to go to America, but had she? Suddenly his hand grabbed something cylindrical and smooth. His stomach lurched as he pulled out the magnifying glass. Memories that he never wanted to remember flooded back into his head, memories he had tried to lock up. He never remembered putting the magnifying glass in the suitcase, anyway. He tried to stuff it back under the photos, but it was too late. The idea of her being a loving sister he had tried to create was gone.
She had wanted to kill him; she had pulled a knife on him. He tried to convince himself, like he had for the last ten years, that it was just a game. That if even he hadn't grabbed the knife from her hand, that she wouldn't have hurt him. But that never worked. He remembered the pure hatred in her eyes and voice as she came towards him. "Ne pas brûler les fourmis," she had growled. Everything was so vivid it hurt his head. Tears escaped his eyes. "Aimée", he whispered, "je suis desolée."
The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes
(Part 1)
Aimée's eyes snapped open, her vision blurry. She blinked until everything came into focus. She was staring up at a white ceiling. Too bright for her liking. Was she in her nursery? She sprang up from the bed she had, apparently, been sleeping on. A shiny metal plate was screwed on to one of the walls. There was a sign on top of a black door, the only way out. The sign read "Mental Ward: Room 208."
"Good morning. Or evening. Or night. It's hard to tell which because there are no windows. But, assuming that you just woke up, I'd say it's morning. Then again, I woke up quite a while ago." The voice rambled on, seemingly in deep thought, "I could always read the clock. It says 12. But you see, it doesn't say if it's morning or night. Good night." It took Aimée a few seconds to realize that the voice was talking to her. Then a few more to realize that the voice was coming from a girls sitting across the room, her crimson red hair blinding against the blank white of the walls. She couldn't have been more then fifteen.
"You seem surprised that I'm not looking at you. Many, many people are self-centered like that. They think that they should get my undivided attention. But I'm a busy person! Anyway, I'm talking to you. Shouldn't that be enough? Yes, it should. So I'm talking to you, but there are so many more interesting things to look at." Aimée only blinked a few times, still trying to remember how she got here.
"You came in mumbling something about ants. Hah! I guess that's why they locked you up. They locked me up because I burned down a forest. Hahaha." The girl started laughing, still facing the door, unmoving. "You probably want to know all my personal information, right? Like my name and why I came here. But I'm not going to tell you. My name is Kaleidoscope. Well, that's not my real name. But, heh, I don't know my real name." Aimée was about to point out that the girl, Kaleidoscope, had just contradicted herself, but decided it would be pointless.
"I-I'm Aimée... I was talking about ants? What was I saying?" The girl finally turned around to face Aimée, who let out a little gasp. Kaleidoscope had bright red eyes... or maybe they were green... or yellow... or purple. They seemed to change.
"You were talking in French. You were talking about not burning them. Then when you got here you just let out a little gasp and collapsed on the bed, my bed. And you missed breakfast, or maybe it was dinner-" Aimée let out a little groan and stopped listening. She sat down on the bed again, suddenly tired.
Everything came back to her in a flash. The beggar girl, the knife, the ants. Despite the fact that her mind was racing, sleep soon overtook her, and she had incoherent dreams about giant ants, drowning in blood, white rooms, and emus.
Aimée was having a particularly vivid dream about a flying emu when she was awoken by someone shaking her violently.
"Ant girl. Hey. Wake up. It's breakfast," a gruff voice said.
"Je m'apple Aimée." Aimée didn't feel like this man deserved to understand what she was saying.
"Yeah. Great. I don't speak Spanish." The voice was obviously annoyed. Maybe you should be locked in a mental hospital, Aimée thought to herself, smiling. Kaleidoscope was sitting in the corner, staring at the clock.
"They've been delivering breakfast to me after I tried to kill someone with oatmeal." Aimée was unsure if Kaleidoscope was talking to the clock, or her.
Aimée got up and followed the man out of the room. She went through a plain white hallway with rows of black doors on either side, down a white staircase, and through another white hallway, until they reached a two white doors that Aimée supposed led to the cafeteria, though you would've never known by the smell, or lack thereof.
Aimée walked through the white doors and was met with another white room, though this one was much larger. The silverware was white and plastic, the plates were white and plastic, the cups were white and plastic, even the food looked white and plastic. Aimée regarded the oatmeal that was being served warily, unsure if it was actually edible. After much internal conflict she finally decided that she was too hungry not to eat.
"Can I please have some of the oatmeal?" She asked. The woman behind the counter was surprised that the person who was ordering could actually string a coherent sentence together, most people here couldn't. But she served the oatmeal without questions, as she had learned to do after many years of unsatisfactory and illogical answers. Aimée stood with her tray staring at all the tables set up in neat rows. The room was filled with chatter, but Aimée seriously doubted anyone was talking to anyone but themselves, as the people seemed to avoid each other.
Someone was sitting at the edge of a table, singing some unsung ode to some unknown lover. His angelical face covered by unkempt golden hair. He wasn’t singing in English, or any real language, Aimée suspected, but his tone was that of someone who had loved and lost. A girl was sitting next to him. Her hair was short and bright blue, the edges ragged and uneven, as if she’d cut it herself. She was debating animatedly with non-existent devils and angels who resided on her shoulders. Her voice alternating from worried whispers to outraged screams.
A man fiddled around with a plastic knife, somehow bending it into circles then unbending it, without breaking the plastic, only to start over again a few minutes later in a never-ending cycle that only had meaning in his eyes.
“Meaning, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.” The man held up the fork, which he had delicately bent into the shape of a key. “Keep on to it. You’ll need it at one point. Soon, or later.“ He returned to bending the knife back and fourth.
Aimée stared at the plastic key she now held in her hand. The word Snippletweak was engraved on one of the teeth. While her sanity told her to throw it away, that it was useless, something else, something deeper, told her to keep it. Her thought process was broken by a shrieking bell and a voice that announced that everyone would be promptly escorted to their rooms. All of the patients filed out of the room like a heard of sheep, all of them wearing white clothes, going through white halls into their white rooms.
Just Tune In, Turn Off, Drop Out, Drop In, Switch Off, Switch On, and Explode
“Good day, Aimée, isn’t it? Aimée Batton. I’m Patricia” Aimée was sitting in a chair in a room that was painted a friendly sunshine color. There were wooden shelves on the walls that were sparsely populated by books, most of them about psychology. There was a diagram of the human brain on the wall directly above Aimée.
“Oui, c’est vrai.”
“Please speak English here.” The woman who she was talking to, Patricia, had cropped brown hair and a cloying, condescending voice.
“Yes.”
“Good. So, do you know why you were—“ she paused, seeming to search for the correct word, “—institutionalized?”
“No.”
“It says here, Aimée, that you tried to kill someone with a knife while repeating the Phrase ‘Don’t Burn The Ants, do you have any recollection of any of that?’”
“No.”
“Well, Aimée, do you know why you did that? Does that phrase, Don’t Burn The Ants, mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure, Aimée?”
“Stop saying my name.”
“It would help if you answered my questions.”
“I am, the answer is no.”
“I can’t believe that, Aimée.”
“Oh, well, you should figure that out with yourself.”
“Stop being snippy, Aimée.” Patricia’s voice rose a note and adopted a rather angry tone.
“I don’t know why I’m here to begin with, Patricia. So I’m sorry if you aren’t getting the answer’s you want... Patricia. Alright, Patricia?”
“Aimée, I’m going to rise above this, alright?” Patricia’s voice returned to her usual condescending tone.
“You have fun with that, Patricia.”
“Alright, Aimée. So, it says here that you have a brother, named Freidrich Batton. Is that correct Aimée?”
“No.”
“Well it says it right here.”
“Okay, then why’d you ask?”
“Okay, Aimée, are your parent’s dead?”
“One would assume.”
“Any other relatives?”
“It depends, are you Jewish?”
“I don’t see how that has any relevance.”
“Then you don’t see much. Next question.”
“We are going to phone your brother, okay?”
“Knock yourself out. Literally.”
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