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Member
Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 11
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Sent
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By Curtis Ray Jones
Chapter one
Page one
Everything felt so real here. Mace knew that it was not. This place, this room was just a memory-a comfort chamber. And every time he pressed though the membrane that separated it from the rest of the ship he was letting them cut him in half, push his head down through his neck and chest until his insides were outside.
He remembered being a boy on Earth, fishing with Catawba worms. He would pluck one off a leaf cut it into and push both wriggling dieing halves inside out with a toothpick, then carefully slide his hook inside neat dry interior of one of the halves and cast it into the pond. If there was a more gruesome way to catch a fish, he could not think of it
Every time he pushed through the glimmering, white oval passageway, he was happily being their Catawba worm. Sometimes he hated himself for being so weak, so easily manipulated. However, they knew what he liked, what he loved. And they knew he could not say no. They knew that and everything else about him. They knew he hated them. They knew he was completely dependent on them, and that he was as addicted to them as they obviously were to him.
He knew they did not care. And though their technology made them god like, he knew they were not God. He knew he would never worship them.
Serve them, he must. He did have to live after all. And that was all they required of him, just live and try to keep on living. And that was why he sat rocking in his mind made rocking chair. That was why the morning sun felt as smooth and warm as baby breath on his bare chest, why his dead wife still smiled so sweetly at him when she looked up at from her flowerbed. They wanted him to live, to fight for his life. It did not matter if his life, the life he cherished and could not forget was just a resurrected memory, a mere lucid dream he could touch and cradle in his arms. Her passionate embrace felt as real now, in this wonderful dream, as it had ever felt. Her sweet breath curling against his bare skin was yet warm with life. That was all that mattered to him now.
Living with a dead woman was there a more gruesome way to catch a fish. If there was, he could not think of it.
“Kathy, “he yelled, rising from the rocker as he smiled at the sight her long golden hair spilling over her left should and sweeping across her flawless left cheek. “Getting’ kinda warm isn’t it?”
The petite young woman pulled off her dirt encrusted garden gloves, gathered her yellow mane between her thumb and index finger and pushed it behind her left ear. “Yeah,” she said standing up in the ankle high patch of purple and orange flowers. “I’m ’bout ready for my morning coffee. The weeds and I will just call it a draw.”
“You know what I like in my coffee,” Mace said as he stepped off the bottom front porch.
Kathy rolled her eyes at her lanky young husband, “Yeah, a little sugar.”
“Then come give me a little sugar.” He said just before he stepped up to her and gathered her tiny frame into his arms.
Her shorts and T-shirt clad body was warm soft against his bare chest. He ran his hands up her spine. His fingertips lifted dropped as they roller coasted over ever tiny vertebra in her back. He didn’t count them, but he could have.
“Hum I like that,” She murmured into his right ear.
“Just checking,” he replied with less humor than he had intended.
She smiled as she pulled away and grasped his right hand and led him up the front porch steps. It was a perfect morning and his last clear memory of her.
He wanted more, so much more, but he was not about to share her with a bunch cowardly voyeuristic aliens.
“What’s wrong,” she asked, when she felt his hand slide through fingers.
“I, I have check on something, on the computer.” He stammered.
“Work, again,” she chided.
“Yeah, that’s it Kathy, why don’t you just go up without me, while I stay downstairs and check my E-mail.”
“Yeah okay,” she replied, “I‘ll be waiting.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to keep my clients happy.” He said, bracing for an icy comeback that never came.
“I understand, we got time, all morning, just don‘t get so caught with him you forget about me.” she said sweetly.
“Never,” he said as followed her inside, and watched her climb the stairs. “Sometimes I wish I could,” he thought, as he turned and walked toward the large U shaped entrance of the ‘computer room’ otherwise known as the exit membrane.
“Sorry to disappoint,” he said looking up at the ship’s smoothly curved beige ceiling as his lean frame easily passed through the deceptively compliant partition, “no sex show today, or any day.”
“You will betray,” the words came at him from everywhere, like stale air being pumped in through a thousand unseen air vents.
“Never, you can’t make me.” Mace yelled as he spun around, knowing full well he would not see anyone. “Cowardly perverts, kill me, you want to feel something, feel me die.”
“Your rage will suffice for now.” The ship did not speak the words but produced them with the same dispassionate efficiency it employed to the produce the thrust that was at that very moment propelling Mace to his next planet.
The ship, not it makers was talking to him. He knew he had never spoken directly to them. He knew he never would.
“What if I kill myself, will that suffice?” Mace thought bitterly.
“Two percent of Earth’s population is Senders, and your ability is inherited. Leave if you must, your sister brother or mother will perform as well as you.”
Mace started to scream ‘Leave my family alone’, but realized their well being was totally dependant on his ability to keep himself alive. The Ship, like it makers could not conceive of being merciful to what they considered to be nothing more than a valuable commodity. He could no more reason with them than a fish could reason with a fisherman.
Shivers of icy truth crystallized in his heart as the full horror of his predicament seized his mind.
“Resistance is not merely futile,” he mumbled as clumped defeated down the long curving hall way that led to the observation deck, “it’s just another drop of blood for you lazy vampires to lap up.”
Mace stood at the archway of the observation deck and remembered the first time he stood there. It felt like years but he knew it had only been a few days. He was so stupidly happy then. It had been six months since the accident, six months since he had laid his dear young wife in the ground, and he was happy!
Two days before then, happiness was lying in box beneath six feet of cold gray earth. Her name was Kathy and she was dead, which was why he awoke one morning with cold gray dirt stuck to side of his face.
No sane person sleeps in a graveyard. But, he did. And, no one sleeps on a grave but he did.
No, he had not had not planned to do such a crazy thing, never though he could ever do such a thing. However, after the funeral, after his brother and sister had helped away from the hole, away from the tent, the pile of dirt covered with green plastic carpet and the empty chairs, away from the box that held his heart, he came back…
The black wrought iron gates closed and locked for the night, made the graveyard look like a prison. The sun hiding behind the dark distant tree was shooting it last beams of light over the head stones. Shadows stretched across the ground making the graves look headboards and the graves like black sheeted beds. However, no one was sleeping, at least not yet.
Mace did not recall, telling his family he just wanted to go home and be by himself. And when he pulled up to the cemetery gate got out and found it locked, he did even not blink.
He simply got back in his car drove it to a nearby abandoned gas station, parked got out and walked a quarter of a mile back to the cemetery.
It was twilight by then, grayness hung over everything like an ink fog. So no one saw him climb the iron fence like a ladder and climb down the other side-no one saw, no one, that he could possibly be aware of anyway.
He did not hear the soles of his black loafers crunch and grind against the asphalt road that led to Kathy’s grave. All he could hear was Kathy’s laughter in his mind. The sun was shining there, shining down on her grinning face as she chased him around their car with a water hose. No pain could live in such a happy place-that one perfect yesterday, so neatly packaged and preserved inside his head.
But then he smelled the freshly turned earth. It smelled sweet. That was not right. It should wreak of a stench strong enough to make one’s nose bleed. But it smelled sweet-sweet! How dare it smell sweet.
Darkness began to slide beneath the door seal of his mind. Her laughter faded. The inner light dimmed until his mind became a dry black well. Something hot began to burn the corners of his eyes. His eyeballs were soon floating in acid. Cold black hands ripped a sheet of steel behind his heart. A spur fringed splinter ripped through his chest, slicing open his heart as it shattered his breast bone and pushed open his rib cage like saloon doors.
He jolted his head down fully expecting see blood and gore dribbling down the front of his white shirt. He saw nothing but blackness. “It’s not right!” he muttered through earthquake sobs, “Such pain should kill a man. How could he still be alive, how could she be, so dead, It’s not right,” he screamed at the stars and all the blackness that held them in place. “It’s just not right!” The words banged around inside his head like ball bearings in a cement mixer.
He did not remember sinking his knees into soft cold soil that covered the box containing his wife. He did not remember falling face unto her soft dewy dirt mattress, so neatly covered with darkness and tears. However, he did remember closing his eyes actually fearing his tears was about to wash his eyeballs right out of their sockets.
Sleep came as a merciful thief. It slipped up on him, as he lay quivering in the dirt. He didn’t feel it come. He only felt his pain go, as yesterday’s sunlight shone down on him and his beautiful new wife, and Christmas morning dreams gave him back his wife, at least until morning.
Last edited by Rayjones; 06-18-2009 at 08:15 PM..
Reason: more story
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