This page is for anyone that has work that they want to get credit for. Thus showing pride in your work. Just place it with your elftown name and a hr line after it. i will give you a rank on The monarchy of the pen. Thankyou [nightgoth]
[
leaving fo good]-Currently the king of the pen
My Death
I lie there, the scissors, my saviour, by my side. Crimson Life pouring from my veins, the cut i willed myself to make. I feel the darkness of death slipping over me. My heart pounds against my chest, furiously trying to get more blood to my body, not realising that its pouring darkly all over my bedroom floor. A shaft of light. Someone has opened my door. My heartbeat slows. My little sister walks in and screams in horror at seeing what her brother has done. She runs to my parents who storm quickly to wear my near lifeless body lies. They stare, not knowing what to do. My father shakes. My mother stares wide eyed, barely breathing, barely thinking. I give a limp smile and turn my head so they cant see the tear running from my left eye to my ear. I didn't want them to see my death... I just wanted them to know that I died, that I died in some form of peace.
My mother leaves the room and I hear her frantically grasp for the phone, then calmly talking to the other end, asking so gently for an ambulance while my sister screams in a kind of twisted horror down the hall. My eyesight starts to go. The silhouette of my father fades into the dark. But my hearing stays clear. I hear a thump in the hall. My mother falling to the floor sobbing, i guessed. I dont know how long i lie here. Time is nothing to me now... All that i know is I'm gone soon.I'm just waiting for it to happen. I know I'm dead.
The ambulance arrives and the medics run into my room. "How rude..." I think. I'm here, in my space and no one has even considered my privacy. I hear them talk above me, asking me o stay with them, to open my eyes, but I can't really make out the words. I don't respond. "I hope they don't think im rude..." I think morbidly. I know they're trying to help me, but I don't want help. I don't want charity. I want to die. "I'm nearly there," i think. I can't hear them anymore I can only hear my head, and I can only hear my heart. Weaker, weaker, weaker...
Stop.
Only Human a short story by [
little flag]
I remember walking those streets with no sense of purpose. With no anger, no fear, no pleasure, no love. I was dead inside. It wasn’t precisely apathy. It couldn’t have been. I didn’t have enough passion not to care. I watched the graying, darkening world not with my eyes, but through them, from behind them, as though I was not one with my body, and what little me was left of me was held captive somewhere in the dark of my mind, or my heart, or perhaps, if such a thing exists, my soul. Perhaps it was my soul that was doing the watching. The me that is me, and not what I think, or thought, or others have seen.
I found the bum down an alleyway, one of hundreds of alleys, all alike in their atmosphere and purpose and the fuzziness at the edges of things there, between the boundaries. Where certainties falter and doubt is second nature. At least for those, like me, who do not belong there.
Don’t I?
He might once have been handsome. His clothes might once have been colorful, well-fitting, of good quality; fashionable, even. But as I watched him, from my place by the trashcans at the ill-let opening of the alley, face mercifully cast in shadow by the inconsistent, flickering glow of the streetlamp somewhere behind me, his face was obscured by scraggly stubble, and his skin was wrinkled, drooping, drawn inexorably downwards—not as though with the same gravity that anchors us all to rocky earth, but through some sheer weight carried inside, behind the eyes, where no one but he could see. He sat on a dirty, frayed, blue-embroider
ed blanket that, for all its poverty, was cleaner and in better shape than his holey, bug infested coat. And he was thin—so thin…
He sat wrapped in a shroud of fallen glory, pitiful and wretched, and for all he might once have been—he might once have been me.
Perhaps that is why I crossed the invisible barriers of stranger-ship and class and affluence, the barriers between him and what I used to be, might still have been, found myself walking towards this old, half-solid shade, and by way of introduction dug into my pocket and produced a half-eaten muffin.
He watched me, and the muffin in my outstretched hand, for a long while. Once I might have been impatient. Once I might have tried to speak. Once I might have felt the gloating “pity” that is the condescension of someone thinking, “I’m luckier than that sad excuse for a human being, I’ll give him a penny to appease my twisted, soiled conscience,” but instead—I stood there.
“Keep it.”
His voice was gruff, as though with disuse, and slow, slow and sad, imbued with old wounds and deep pain, strong enough to break a heart—either of the speaker, or the listener; maybe both. But it was also beautiful, and, faintly, a reminder of Before, glowing softly for a pained, tense moment in this After. (That could almost be called Hereafter. But not quite.)
I had not spoken for a week, and I did not do so now. But I did sit, stowing the muffin away in its pocket, and, unable to see the stars, we stared into the darkness, ignoring with the obliviousness of the hopeless the stuttering illumination of that distant streetlamp. The tears I had never cried did not fall again, and I wondered if he was as me as I thought, or if I had finally crossed the thin line that, in either all realness or only by my imagination, had haunted my thoughts this past week.
But then he spoke again.
Somehow, it was neither surprising nor inappropriate.
“Young lady, you might know me. You might used to. You might now. You might once again.”
There was nothing I could have, or wanted to, say to this.
“I used to be a hero, you know.” The words were still slow, but now infused with what was not bitterness, but the echo of what comes after. His words were the image of the stains on his soul, and they danced before my eyes like so many mocking, sincere portraits, of colors and words. He was tense with the almost relaxed tension of one on the edge, forever. The edge of what? The Everything. And for those who have been there, there is no other explanation.
“I was Superman. I was Batman. I was Spiderman. I was Flash. I was Zeus. I was Mars. I was Odin. I was Ra. All the within the world, I stood among the people, and I was their better, I was their hero, I could meet my own gaze in the mirror, and now look at me.”
I did not need to. The blackness consumed my vision. His words struck something deep within me, and the tension grew.
Far away, a siren screamed, but his words were low, insistent, and they went on.
“I fell. I just disappeared. I had no last great hurrah, no final battle, no glory, no death, no goodbye. I vanished. And nobody noticed. Nobody cared. Not even me. For a long time, I didn’t even notice. I was lost in the darkness, and the darkness was all.”
My heart was pounding.
“I used to be a hero. I used to be more.”
The silence was choking.
Softly; “I used to be More.”
More, the echoes of the shadows insisted. More, more, ore, e…
“Was it a lie, because it isn’t now? Because it isn’t anymore? Or is this the lie? The shadows came in the dawn and obscured the rising of the sun, so we thought the sun never rose. Does that mean this is still the night? No one ever noticed. No one ever noticed, no one. Does that make it untrue?” His voice was intense, but tired. He had been here before, traveling around in circles, turning, turning, getting nowhere, but going nonetheless. “When no one understands but you, does that make you wrong?”
I could see clouds roiling overhead, churning, dark and black and thick, but the only emotion they had was what I ascribed to them. Having none, I could give none.
Is that not correct?
He was not done. He had said little, but an infinite moment was there, was passing, and no time at all had gone by me, and I still did not understand.
“I cannot explain what the truth is, because it’s true. It just Is. How do you describe art to the blind, music to the deaf? They raped my soul and left me to die and nobody cared that I was right. They didn’t think I was right. I don’t know what they thought I was…
“I used to be a hero, you know. I gave them to myself because they worshiped me. I had a following. I was their role model. They cheered me on. I gave myself to them even though I knew they were treacherous…”
I almost spoke, but it was not yet time, and he anticipated the question anyway.
“I knew them in a way I did not know myself, because they were the me in the mirror.”
Time both stopped and rushed forward, catching its breath on those words, already reeling when the next blow came.
“I was what they thought, but not quite. I don’t know how to say the difference, how to define it, how to explain. It just Is. I was what they thought. But at the same time… I’m only human.”
Eternity passed in a single second, and a second of eternity was all it took.
“They were not ready for a human hero.”
I did not recognize my own voice.
His laugh was hollow, but brighter than his tone. “Mind your tenses.”
“They mix up mediocrity with what you are.”
I knew he was nodding, but my eyes were still searching the darkness, and my face was still turned away.
“I do not have the words either. I do not know if I have passed beyond the edge, or if I am lost, unable to find it. How can I come back if I have not left, and how can I know the way when there is no one to show me?”
“What do you think I am? What do you think I am for?”
The churning clouds broke apart, and a thin, piercing shaft of moonlight fell upon us, and then I was facing him. My metaphor was grinning, teeth bared, a wild force of motion in the night. His eyes were dark and deep and locked into mine, and I felt suddenly filled, filling, aware of every particle in my body, from the extremities down to the darkness behind the eyes, where that soul was pushing forward, to be one with the eyes again…
My doppelganger and I stared at each other for a long moment, there in the moonlight, this fallen man, human hero, and I—whatever I was—knew there was still no answer, and if there was one at all, it would not have to be a good one. And the bitterness came, yet was, for the most part, held at bay, unable to penetrate this bond of vision, like a cord between two shadows, binding the self into other-self and one opposite to another, as a shadow might gaze at its reflection and wonder what is real…
But for the moment, real and unreal, we—I?—had all eternity… perpetual and finite as it was…
My me in the mirror was not done with me yet.
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