Hello to all of you fellow blog-readers, having so much time and so little to do on a Saturday night. Or a Thursday night in the middle of December, as the case may be. Time is always so fluid on the Internet, where you can read the news as it breaks, or wade forever in the shallows of 2003, as the mood strikes you and where the Archive button takes you. As I've mentioned in my description above, I plan to post fiction here - my own original fiction, probably largely unedited, because at this point in my life, it seems like the greatest problem I have with writing is the act of coaxing the stories out of my head and onto the paper - er - computer screen, and anything that helps with this process is bound to pay off sooner or later. I don't promise that these stories are good, but only that they're mine, and that sometimes to tell your own stories is the best you can hope for.
So, without further ado, a section of a much longer work I like to call Quintessence:
The sound of the bells blotted out everything else. They were tinny, and yet not incredibly so – like carousel bells. If Tessa had but known it, they were carillon bells – but she had no idea of the name, only that they sounded like memory, and like childhood. The music was coming from a large van, like an ice cream truck that had eaten a pipe organ – it had a hundred different bells inside, just visible through a sheet of glass. The little boy sat at the keyboard and played inexpertly. He had short dark hair, and was no more than four years old. His playing was better than you'd think, for that. It filled up the edges of the world in Tessa's head, til there was no room for anything else, not the bright park, or the swans swimming nearby, just the sound of the carillon. Then he LOOKED at her.
His eyes were dark brown, but it wasn't their color that had such an impression. It was the look that he gave her – a shared secret between them. He was asking her something with those eyes, “you know it was like this,” they said. Tessa racked her brain, trying to understand what they meant. Then the bottom dropped out, as it always did, and instead of the carillon and the park, and the people, moving in and out on the fringes of the picture, she was alone with the boy. He was still giving her that searching, questioning gaze, but she looked down...
And wished she hadn't. The bottom had dropped out of the world. There was nothing below but eternity, and it stretched on and on. Tessa had never known the meaning of the word 'void' until this moment. If you fell, you would never hit the bottom. They were standing somehow, and not falling, but she knew it wouldn't last. Maybe if she reached the boy? She could? What? Save him? Save herself? She knew she had to reach him, in any case, and reached out, but the space in between them, though less awesome, was no less un-spannable.
She woke up with a sharp intake of breath, staring at the ceiling. That wasn't the first time she'd had that particular dream, by a longshot. Probably, she had it about once every six months, and had as long as she could remember. Tessa was a reader, and lately she'd been dipping into the occasional psychology book. Dream analysis was a popular subject in those books, and she wondered, what could it all mean? Probably nothing, but you never know, do you? And it was just weird that she would continue to have the same dream, over and over again, year after year. Then there was the void. It seemed so real. It was one of those dreams that has so much substance that it's the waking that seems like an illusion. Reality was there, in the dream. She thought if she ever met the little boy, someday, that she'd know him instantly. He hadn't changed at all over the years, and he was so vivid, she half expected to meet him. Maybe it was a precognitive dream. She wasn't sure how much of that kind of stuff she believed - about the paranormal, and ESP. But she wouldn't like to rule it out, and hadn't yet stopped hoping that it would happen to her someday, something really exciting, and a boy straight out of a precognitive dream would fill the bill admirably. He seemed so real. Why shouldn't he BE real? And every day she had that dream, she gave each face she passed a second glance, half expecting that one of them would be him.
She thought about this now, getting up out of bed and looking out the window at the quiet street below. It was a typical suburban neighborhood, the kind that was built before the unwritten law was passed that said all the houses had to match each other, planted in rows like large, ugly mushrooms, with rooms called things like 'the great room', and an overabundance of ceiling space. This was a street of the last century, where most of the houses were probably around fifty years old. They were kept in good condition - no peeling siding, or toy-strewn yards. Tessa's own house was a forest shade of green with brown trim, a little old-fashioned, but it seemed like home to her. She'd lived there all her life, alone with her father, who composed symphonies for electronic synthesizers and instruments. Gavin Quint had achieved some measure of local fame, having once had a piece played at the Bicentennial of the state capitol building, and they lived fairly comfortably off of the proceeds from his compositions, and the lessons he taught on the side. Tessa had never known her mother, who had died in childbirth, having Tessa, a thing that was rare in the 21st century, but unfortunately still not inconceivable. Tessa hadn't minded growing up with just her father. She had fun with him, and in some ways she enjoyed being the only woman of the house, with fewer rules than many of her friends had. She and her father confided in each other – they were friends, against all conventional child-raising advice. And it had worked for them. Tessa got good grades, was well-adjusted – she had fewer friends than a lot of kids her age, mostly because she preferred her own company. But right now, she wasn't thinking about all that. She was thinking about her dream.
The largest part of her, though, knew the dream for what it was - a dream. And not very likely to have any bearing upon her real life. She sighed as she realized this fact, and brushed away a small bird feather that was stuck to outside of the windowsill. It drifted to the ground below – about twelve feet down from her second story window, unobserved by Tessa, who had turned and was now making her way across the bedroom, but seen by another, a bystander slouching against a tree three houses down the lane. It was only a little before 7. Tessa might as well start getting ready for school. The young man in the black leather aviator jacket watched her window for a while, smoking and blowing rings that drifted in neat little Cheerio o's up toward the treetops. When she didn't return, he stubbed out his cigarette and began to walk down the street, in between the trees lining the sidewalk. If anyone had been observing him, they would have noticed his disappearance about ten steps onward. But the street was silent at this hour, and Sparrow went entirely unobserved.
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