` in my hopeless slumber {{nat}

[amysinclaire]

living is easy with eyes closed

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- - - - misunderstanding all you see - - - - [/font][/color][/center]

I guess it's another night alone. Certainly. Solitude is a constant in the life of Amy Sinclaire; this thought is nothing new for her. She's had it before, and she'll have it again. Unlike the other times she's felt this way, tonight, it doesn't matter. Because she may be alone, but at least she'll be gone in the next few hours. Gone, gone, gone - with irreparable distance between herself and her demons - to a place she hasn't even yet invisioned.

The tears streaming down her cheeks in silence are black and bloated, mocking little caricatures of her right eye, which was beaten out earlier this evening in her father's sick fight for daughter's submission. It was a battle easily won, her mother missing - out for dinner wiith some friends - and Amy was too weak to try any longer. His weight was too much to bear with the burgeoning numbness that came with it, that all too familiar feeling of his body trapping hers. A moth on display, fragile and pinned. She shuts herself off, sinks into unconsciousness until the sounds of his breathing drown out the ticking of her mental clocks and track of time is lost.

This stranger, finished for the night, lifts himself off of her - blessings, she can breathe again - pulls back on his work trousers. Suddenly, he's her father again, tucking her in and saying I love yous with kisses on bruised cheeks like nothing has happened. Amy whispers goodbye, but he hasn't seemed to have heard her - he never does any longer. The door is shut, and darkness swallows up the room. It swallows her too, and her bedside table with the digital, real-world clock; through the swelling of her eyes she can still see the glowing red numbers. 12:18. She has forty two minutes to make it across town. Her father is soundly asleep in ten, where he'll peacefully dream of employment and promotions, salary raises and houses with white picket fences. Amy is out the door in fifteen with nothing but her camera hanging about her neck and twenty dollars in her pocket. Lock the door behind, quietly tiptoe out of the complex, wait for the light at the crosswalk, and then run run run run run. Fast as she possibly can.

Was it wrong?

He'd told her he needed her. He'd die without her. She knew he loved her with all of his heart, more than she could ever understand. But she had to go. No, she couldn't possibly stay. She'd been prying off her fingers, one by one. He'd just have to go on alone with his failed marriage and his empty house, his distant wife, the son who'd disappeared. She couldn't be his baby girl anymore. Daddy I miss you and Dadd I love you. Daddy why is Josh screaming at us? Daddy I'm scared.

It used to work, telling him that. He listened, once upon a time.

Things were different now. And it certainly didn't matter if she were frightened. Amy was frail, shaking, covered in evidence of her mistreatment, and steadily freezing in the warm summer night. She made her way through the park, around the neighborhoods that grew shabbier and darker the closer she came to the train tracks, the houses matching her sinking hope. She was running away, planning to hitch a ride on one of the boxcars passing through tonight. When she was younger, every night around 1 A.M., she could hear a lonely train whistle if she stayed up late enough and listened hard. She used to imagine that there was some perfect stranger on that train, blowing that whistle for her, trying to reach her with a message - sometimes she'd wake up in the middle of the night just to wait for the sound. She might have continued the habit into her late teens, but her father's interruptions made sleeping impossible.

She still believes in that train, she supposes. Ten years of intuiton couldn't possibly lead her wrong.

She would should feel safe now. But the tall stalks of grass in front of the tracks scratch at her thin-skinned calves, and she's afraid of snakes. Can they smell blood like sharks? Are they more likely to bite if they do? She tore her skin open on the chain-link fence when she jumped it. The city tries to guard the public from tracks that are still in use. Whoever installed them must have read Anna Karenina, Amy smiles to herself despite the empty, lonely oblivion that is settling in around her. That's not the reason she's here. She's got to keep living if things are ever going to get any better. Her head is already spinning from the changes. Or maybe that's just the dizziness that comes with starvation and exhaustion - paired, they make an invincible duo.

So she lays herself down low in the grass, where so far from the sky, she can still smell the rain coming. The heat from the day rises up from the ground, contracting and expanding, a breath. The world is asleep, but the earth is alive. She is hopelessly numb, and waiting again for that train and its whistle and the perfect stranger and the better place somewhere out there. Waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting.


tag nat/prospice
words 891
lyrics strawberry fields forever - the beatles
credit a girl with kaleidoscope eyes @ caution 2.0
notes she makes me so sad ):

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[prospice4]

Trains don't run under the covered bridge anymore. Once upon a time they might have, slipping through the dark over the brook and into the sunset. Now the bridge is collapsing, sagging under the weight of iron tracks. It bows in the middle, two halves instead of one whole, each leaning on the other for support. Holes in the roof worn away by years of neglect let in the sunlight, when the sunlight shines. In the moonlight it takes on an altogether different quality, lonesome and haunted. The eaves creak. Bats fly off in ones and pairs and flit down across the long grass, the rusted track.

About a quarter mile down the track, around a bend, it joins with the much straighter north-south line, which is seldom used except for cattle cars coming out of the country because there are no slaughterhouses in Someplace, Somewhere. In most parts of the world, stock is no longer commonly transported by train, but for the people in this lonesome timeless place it is a necessity, energy saving, but much cursed by the ranchers because of the fare to carry such cargo. Once a month except in winter, rattling down the old line, a train comes through carrying passengers to their deaths down the line.

It is stock car night.

Nat, always enchanted by the old tracks and the covered bridge that lay within walking distance of his home, always considers that midnight ride the pinnacle of symbolism in his country home. The train would pull in empty at a dilapidated station in the morning and all day cattle and pigs would be loaded onto separate cars. Some days the train is full and the cacophony of noise and putrid smell of animals in fear would carry on through that mostly abandoned place. Other days, it is almost empty even by nightfall. All day it stands there and around midnight it departs, chuffing and shuffling along the overgrown tracks down to where they split and onward, some silver beacon streaking on into the light of morning.

Nat knows of the train, but he has never seen it. He has heard it, once a month, letting out a lonely whistle at some signal box far off in the distance. As a child, whimsical as he was, he had thought that it was a ghost train, carrying vague shadows, fleeting memories, off to wherever such creatures belong. He knows better now, although he often considers that he hadn't been too far off. At least, the nature of the train to him is the same as it has always been. It carries a sort of melancholy nature but at the same time a duty, a purpose that must be fulfilled no matter how dark that purpose is.

It is his desire to just once see the train, it's blaring lights, it's rattling wheels, that brings him to this place in the middle of the night alone. He heard the train pull in last night and knows that tonight it will depart, like it always does. It had taken him hours to convince his parents to let him camp out by the abandoned tracks alone, but he had succeeded in that particular venture. Up a small hill and under a birch tree a little ways away from the track, his small red tent sits alone. His back is against the tree, his is looking Southward, where he imagines there will soon bloom a tiny light, the ghost of a light, looming larger and larger. He does not know if he will hear the train before he sees it, or if, though it is improbable, smell will come first, that damp fetid smell of manure and cowflesh and pigskin and sweat, and fear.

It is in this waiting that a far off sound catches his attention, a rattle of chain. Has something jumped the dilapidated fence that runs across part of the track, built to keep people - and, perhaps to a greater extent, livestock, - away from the tracks when trains actually ran here long ago? This makes no sense to him, because there is no need for anyone to jump that fence. In places it has fallen down completely and it's fairly easy to get to the tracks. Was it an animal? He thinks not, because most animals can either see well enough in the dark to see that the fence was worn away or know that it is. So he figures it must be a person, and this alarms him slightly. He hadn't thought that there would be anyone else out here...

Grabbing his flashlight he sets off down the hill and towards the track, the beam illuminating a gap in the rusted fence. He has to slide through it but makes it through easily, standing in the overgrown grass by the side of the track. The flashlight beam illuminates the dead straight lay of the metal, the tops of the grass beyond, but nothing else. He wonders if he might not be hearing things, spectral mirages of sound born from lack of sleep and the darkness itself. But his intense curiosity will not allow him to stop now. He runs the beam over the high grass again, just in case he missed whoever... or whatever... it was. Nothing.

"Hello?" he calls out, softly, but loud enough so that if there is a person out there they will hear them. He strains his eyes in the vague direction from which he thought the sound came. If there was a sound at all. If it wasn't just the wind rattling the fence or a bat or something. It really is silly when he thinks about it, but... he just has this feeling. "Is anyone out there?" He waits and listens, not really expecting an answer but still wondering if he will get one, tense with the strange ways that moonlight effects men and makes everything seem more eerie and significant. The night is silent in reply.

[amysinclaire]

living is easy with eyes closed

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- - - - misunderstanding all you see - - - - [/font][/color][/center]

She hadn't dreamt of the possibility that somebody might stumble upon her. Feeling so alone in the midst of the primal, callous night, Amy assumed that this is the way it would stay. Who else might be wandering around this broken down bridge and it's abandoned train tracks at this time of night? For half a second, the possible scenarios flooded her mind. Strangers leaping out of the shadows, irrational criminals who only hoped to do her harm. But the images faded quickly. Let them come, she thought. What more could possibly go wrong?

Even lying flat out in the tall grass, she could see her audience coming long before they had any real knowledge of her presence. A faint, bobbing beam of light, moving slowly across the ground, shining on a space of fence she wished she'd found earlier, coming closer and closer. A picture of a lighthouse with it's searchlight filled her head. She imagined the perfect stranger on the train, finding her in the grass, the savior she'd never had. And she wanted to scream that she was here, right here, but her lips wouldn't move. She was paralyzed with indecison, split down the middle by a craving to be found, and an equally strong desire to waste away alone. The advance of the shadowy figure stopped still.

Hello? A decidedly male voice calling out to her. Is anyone out there?

She doesn't want to cause the boy that has sought her out of this empty field any more harm; he sounds timid enough already. In slow motion, her fingers dig into the sod beneath, she drags her figure up from the ground as if she were quite heavy, and faces her rescuer, the sudden light in this impenetrable darkness. She's forgotten the black eye for the moment, but in the back of her mind, the faultless lies are ready for use, lies she has concocted after years of this kind of experience. No, my friend and I were horsing around the other day and I ran into a doorknob. A genuine smile will fool almost anyone. Or if that didn't work, then it's okay okay, I'm bullied at school. I stole my best friend's boyfriend. Sue me. All she has to do is paint the picture that she's not the victim, and people will be quick to jump back on the offensive. It's her fault; she knows it. Don't pity her.

The beam of the flashlight hasn't hit her yet, so she assumes her guest hasn't heard her. "Yes, hello, hello." Her own voice, alien and hollow, is enough to terrify the already barely audible Amy into silence. Her words are those of a morbidly ill child, a little girl too young to be resigning herself to fate. But Amy continues on, trying to build the convincing, smiling image that once came so easily to her.

"The ah ..." She's cut off as the light pauses over her for a moment, blinded and then plunged once more into the darkness as it is shifted away from her eyes. A mordant smile. "The stars are beautiful out here, aren't they?" A wholly dubious false face, and obviously so. The smile fails her, and so does her weakening facade. It's not even worth the effort any longer.

Suddenly, the numbness has also dissipated. All the emotions that should have been flooding her earlier this evening, for the past three years, have hit her like that train she's so obsessed with. No warnings. Aching guilt, fear, hopelessness, disgust, agony, regret, all washing over her in individual, powerful tidal waves. And the nausea so strong she fears passing out. "I just ... came out to ... to see them..." She's started to sob before the first syllable has even left her lips.

tag nat/prospice
words 645 ugghhhh
lyrics strawberry fields forever - the beatles
credit a girl with kaleidoscope eyes @ caution 2.0
notes

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[prospice4]

The wind picks up slightly and rustles the grass. It rattles the rickety chain fence, and Nat, turning to look at it, realizes that this noise is quite like the one he heard earlier... Folly! There was probably, he decides, a stiff bluster like that one, that just rattled along the chain. He feels foolish, like a small child or a rabbit jumping at every little sound. The darkness must be getting to his head.

He is on the verge of giving up, thinking that what he heard was a mere illusion. He chuckles at himself, jumping at the wind and shadows, and lowers his light. He is just about to head back up the hill when a faint motion causes him to startle, jumping back and turning towards it, his hand trembling as he holds up his flashlight to illuminate... a girl. His age, or thereabouts... and with a black eye. He lowers his light slightly with a low-voiced apology for shining it right in her eyes, attempting to regain his composure. What had he taken her for? A vampire bat? A ghoul? He isn't quite sure, but the truth is startling enough, this girl bearing her proud bruised face, laying in the grass, in the middle of the night.

"Uh, hello," he responds to her greeting, unable to sort anything out of the questions pushing up against his tongue. What is she doing here? How did she get that bruise? A million thoughts flicker briefly, gutter, and fade one by one. He doesn't ask any of them. He's not entirely sure why he has lost his tongue. Perhaps it's because of the pure outlandishness of the scenario in which he finds himself. Of all things, somehow he wasn't expecting this. He would have believed anything before believing this.

She's talking, something about the stars. How bright they are. "Yes, the stars are really clear out here, far away from the city," he says, almost glad for the sudden mundane turn of topic. She hasn't challenged his being here, he decides, so what gives him the right to challenge hers? He looks at her now, really looks at her. Before, his eyes had been fixed somewhere in the region beyond her head, as if he's afraid that looking at her will somehow cause her to vanish. He takes in the wide eyes, that bruise... He can't take his gaze off of it, it lingers. Then he breaks away. The color of her hair, the bits of grass tangled there.

The stars. Their light is constant. Out here, they twinkle bright against a satin scarf of milky way. Every so often, a meteor... a shooting star... will dash across the blackness, faint, easy to miss. One does now, brilliantly, long and low and close to the horizon. He watches it go past in less than a second, it's light so brief-lived. The tracks behind Amy glint in the beam of his flashlight, cold, hard, biting steel cutting through the soft earth. He looks back up. The bruise... he can't take his eye off the bruise.

Then she is crying, and he steps forward instinctively, like his mother... either one... always did when he came home crying, bullied, something of the like, and puts an arm around her. He doesn't even know her, but this doesn't really occur to him. The action is born purely of sympathy, no deeper meaning. "Hey... hey, it's alright. You're alright..." he says, softly, "you're safe, ok? You're fine, right here. Whatever's wrong, it's not here, ok?" he sounds a little freaked out, but mostly speaking on autopilot. Nat is an empathetic person to the extreme, the kind of person who will ask a random passerby what's the matter if they seem longfaced. It's in his nature to comfort. "Hey, what's the matter?" Not a demand, a soft-spoken question.