The Book of Jacob: There Are No Last Words

The following is a 100-word story inspired by the word “Pretty”.

Shared at Velvet Verbosity’s 100-Word site.

Pounding.

My heart,

My lungs,

My feet.

Sweat beads

Upon my brow

Runs into my eyes

And blends with

My tears.

The faster I run,

The harder I cry.

The harder I cry,

The faster I run.

No matter how far

I run,

I cannot outrun

The ghosts,

The demons,

Of my past

And my present.

The darkness

Is my mask.

The night

Is my cloak.

The unseen

Is my burden.

When the dawn

Finally comes

I have run

To the edge

Of the earth,

Where land

Meets sea.

The rising sun,

Cleanses the sins

Of the damned.

So pretty.

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I have never ridden in a hot air balloon. The very idea of such a ride sounds, in theory, exciting. I have always been enthralled by the notion of flying unrestrained through the open air like a superhero. Of course, I over-think even my own fantasies and begin to worry about getting bugs in my teeth, whether or not I should wear goggles to keep the wind from making my eyes tear up, and should I put one hand out in front of me in a fist or should I have both hands in front palms down, or should I have my feet close together and arms at my sides like Iron Man?

I imagine flying in a hot air balloon to be very little like flying like Iron Man but, the fact is, that I would be dangling below a flame thrower that is shooting fire up into a large, albeit colorful, sack in a woven basket that looks like it would be more at home holding eggs on some giant’s dinner table. I mean, how much control can you really have over a hot air balloon? It seems to me that you’re pretty much at the mercy of the wind while constantly fighting against gravity to stay aloft.

All of this was racing through my mind as Davis and I drove to the field where we were to meet the Aeronaut who would be taking us up into the sky. The whole thing was Davis’s idea to begin with. He said that he was sick and tired of me moping around and wallowing in self pity over Kylie. I hadn’t done much of anything in the six weeks since she had left. Yeah, I missed her, but I wouldn’t say I was wallowing; it was more of a sulking depression. I know, I know: semantics, right?

So, Davis and I were driving to some farmers back field out in the middle of who-knew-where so that we could experience the thrill and adventure of soaring like a bird through the vast open air of the In Between. We had ridden for the past twenty minutes in silence because, though neither of us would admit it, we were both a little scared.

Davis put up a good front when he was trying to sell me on the idea, but I could see that he was biting the inside of his lip fervently, the way he only does when he’s nervous about something. I decided to break the silence and hopefully alleviate some of our fear.

“Why a hot air balloon, dude?”

“What?”

“Why a hot air balloon? Why not skydiving, or bungee jumping, or kayaking?”

Davis barely repressed a laugh.

“You’re thirty-four years old and you have the physique of a sixty-year old. Your parachute probably wouldn’t slow your fat ass down, the bungee cord would probably snap as you reached the apex, and you’d get stuck in a kayak, roll over, and drown. This was the only way I could think of that didn’t involve you getting flattened or drowned.”

“You’re a dick.”

He was right, though. I never was very much in shape, even when Kylie and I started dating. I was always surprised that someone that looked like her would have even been interested in me. She was model hot and I looked like John Goodman. Okay, I wasn’t that big, but you get the idea. It was like when you watch sitcoms on TV where they have some hottie playing the wife and some chub rock dude playing the husband. Jim Belushi and Courtney Thorne-Smith; Kevin James and Leah Remini; Mark Addy and Jamie Gertz. Just to name a few.

Kylie was always the outgoing, experimental type; I was the one who was mired in tradition. She always wanted me to go out with her friends and do exciting, adventurous things that I was convinced would end with me being taken to the emergency room. I guess that’s what happens when you date a woman twelve years younger than you.

“So, Davis,” I asked. “Where did you find this guy?”

“What guy?”

“The guy with the balloon? Did you just open up the phone book and look under hot air balloon, or what?”

“Uh…no. It’s…well, an old friend.”

That was an odd answer. Davis and I had moved in the same social circles for nearly two decades. We had been friends since high school and had always lived near each other and had even worked together for the past ten years. Who could he possibly know that I didn’t know?

“Who could you possibly know that I don’t know?”

“Ummm…you do, kinda, know ‘em…sort of.”

“Who is it?”

“Just wait until we get there. It’ll be better if the Captain explains everything to you.”

“Captain? I didn’t know balloons had captains. I thought they called themselves Aeronauts?”

“They do. And…they do. You’ll see.”

Davis went back to nervously biting the inside of his lip. He refused to meet my gaze. I stared intently at him as drove, trying to decipher his enigmatic behavior. He avoided my gaze even harder. I don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered the last time Davis had acted so strangely around me.

It was one year ago at a Halloween party. We had been invited to the party by some younger girls that we worked with. Davis had been chatting these girls up for a few weeks before the party, flirting with them in that way that came so naturally to him. I had tried talking to them a couple of times, but they were kind of standoffish. I wrote it off to their surly, Eastern-European demeanor.

So, all of Davis’s flirting resulted in them inviting us…well, him really…to a Halloween party they were having out in the boondocks somewhere. I wasn’t going to go, but Davis talked me into it. He has this natural charisma that makes it hard to refuse him. I tried begging off at the last minute that night, saying that I didn’t have anything to wear. He had anticipated my attempted boycott and came prepared.

He said that he had hit up the local thrift shop on the way over to my house and grabbed some random bits and pieces. The result was that I looked like a dandy pirate. I mean dandy in the truest sense of the word. Individually, each piece of the clothing Davis brought looked like something hauled from the back of someone’s grandfather’s closet. There seemed to be articles of clothing that represented many different eras.

I had knee high leather boots, the kind that fold down at the top; pants that were a hybrid of cargo pants and parachute pants: they had lots of pockets and zippers, but were made of a supple, suede-like leather; a puffy vintage white shirt like the one Kramer tried to get Seinfeld to wear; a three-button, leather vest; a large belt with an even larger belt buckle that looked like it may have belonged to Mr. Kringle himself; a three-cornered hat adorned with large peacock feathers; a couple of vintage looking pirate pistols (Davis assured me these were inoperable models); and an ornate sword that hung from the belt. Davis suggested that I not “unsheath my sword” lest I frighten the ladies.

Davis was dressed in a strange array of clothing that looked like a mixture of Victorian Era formal wear and World War I pilot. His top hat had a pair of aviator goggles strapped to it, he wore a heavy white scarf wrapped around his neck, and he had these strange brass and copper elbow and knee pads as well as various cogs and gears that festooned his clothing.

Properly attired for a costume party, we headed out. We drove for nearly thirty minutes out into the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but Davis was biting his lip nervously then, too. He suddenly turned the truck down an apparently overgrown two-track and we bounced and banged our way over the washboard terrain. Just when I thought we couldn’t get any deeper into the woods, we emerged from the thick foliage into an open meadow.

The whole place was lit with what looked like gas lanterns that marked out a large perimeter. Inside this perimeter there was a huge throng of people dancing and revelling to some sort of techno-electronica. Davis maneuvered his truck along the tree line and parked it amongst a few other vehicles a ridiculously long ways from the party. Even from that distance, as we got out of the truck and walked back toward the party, we could hear the thrumming music and laughter that ebbed and swelled.

I was struck by the absence of any traditional Halloween decorations or costumes.Everyone seemed to be dressed in a vaguely similar fashion as Davis and I. There were an inordinate number of pirates, and a large number of men and women wearing some variation of the Victorian garb that Davis wore. I saw a lot of brass and copper, a lot of antique looking weapons with subtle hints of futuristic anachronisms, and a lot of corsets. More to the point I noticed what the corsets enhanced.

The whole field seemed to have a lot of strange apparatuses that had lots of hoses, piping, and gauges. Most of them were steaming, clinking, or chugging. Even the DJ stand where the strangely hypnotic rhythms emanated from was an intricate study in metal-work and electronics from a bygone era.

As Davis and I neared the center of the party, the girls from work came rushing up to us all giggles and jiggles. They brought with them several other girls and they began dancing and gyrating to the pulsing beats while pressing their bodies to us.

Someone pressed a bottle into my hands full of a shimmering green liquid. Davis had a similar bottle thrust into his hand, and with one hand on the hips of the closest girl to him, he tipped the bottle up and drank deeply. I followed suit and was surprised by the slightly bitter, licorice flavor of the liquid. Suddenly the bottle was pulled from my lips by Davis and it disappeared into the crowd.

“Take it easy, Man. Absinthe is some potent stuff, especially if you’ve never had it before. You’re not even supposed to drink it straight.”

I wanted to be puzzled by Davis’s inexplicable comfort at this party where he was supposed to be as much a stranger as I was, but I found that it was difficult to concentrate. It was not at all unpleasant, it was just…different, new. I felt very comfortable and at ease. I could feel my inhibition slipping from my shoulders like a heavy coat.

I looked around and saw that the small crowd that had been surrounding us had parted and that everyone was looking over my shoulder at something behind me. I turned round slowly to see what it was and my breath caught in my throat.

The most beautiful woman I had ever seen was walking toward me. She was tall, nearly six feet; of course, she wore thigh high boots with tall heels. Her costume was a cross between the Victorian, corseted garb most of the women wore, a Revolutionary War officer, and some sort of pilot. All of these styles, on her, converged into a glorious vision of beauty and power. She walked deliberately up to me and held out her hand.

“I’m Kylie.”

Her voice was like that of an angel.

I was snapped out of my memory of the first time I met Kylie by the sudden lurch of the truck.Davis had turned sharply into an apparently overgrown two-track. We began bouncing and banging our way down a washboard trail into the green folds of the forest. Just when I thought we were as deep into the woods as we could go, we emerged from the thick foliage into an open meadow.

It was the same meadow as that night of the Halloween party, but it was nearly empty. Suspended by a large, shimmering air bag was what looked like a small pirate ship, floating some thirty feet above the field and secured by guy lines to thick wooden stakes pounded deep into the earth.

Davis pulled the truck over along the edge of the woods, cut the engine, and got out. Without a word walked toward the airship. I jumped out of the truck and ran up to him, grabbing his arm and spinning him around.

“What the hell is that thing, Davis? You said we were going for a balloon ride.”

“It’s got a balloon on top of it.”

“It’s a ship. Like the kind that’s supposed to be in the water. Why is it floating above the field. And why this field, Davis? Why did you bring me here, of all places? If you wanted me to forget Kylie, why did you bring me to the very place that we met?”

Davis sighed deeply and shrugged his shoulders.

“You should probably let the Captain explain everything.”

“What Captain?”

He pointed at the ship. I turned and saw that someone had walked out on deck. The figure swung their legs over the railing, grabbed hold of one of the guy lines, and deftly slid down the rope to the ground. The Captain, I presumed, walked purposefully and deliberately toward me. I quickly realized, from the shape of the body and the movement of the hips, that the Captain was female.

She was tall, enhanced by the high heeled, thigh high boots she wore. Her outfit was a cross between Victorian Era, corseted garb, a Revolutionary War officer, and some kind of pilot. All of these styles, on her, converged into a glorious vision of beauty and power. She stopped just in front of me and held out her hand.

“Kylie?” I said, failing to restrain the sound incredulity at what I was seeing.

“Actually, it’s Captain Kylie.” She turned to Davis. “Get out of those ridiculous clothes and get into uniform. Then get the ship ready to sail. I want to be under way in five minutes.”

Davis snapped off a salute, said, “Aye, Cap’n!” then ran toward the ship and shimmied up one of the guy lines to the ship.

Kylie…Captain Kylie turned to me and said, “I think I need to explain a few things.”

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I woke up feeling as though I had slept in a moving cement mixer. My head and body pounded relentlessly and every joint ached from deep within itself. My mouth was dry and my tongue felt like a dehydrated sponge. As I opened my eyes, the sunlight streaming in through the large picture window in the living room sliced through the narrow slits of my eyelids and pierced my cornea like a thousand tiny arrows.

Wait a minute, I thought. The living room window?  Why wasn’t I in my bedroom? At least in there the shades were perpetually drawn to ward away the penetrating rays of harsh morning light.

I blinked my eyes several hundred times to get them used to the light. After a moment, I could finally discern some shapes and even a few colors. What I saw was perplexing to say the least. The first thing I noticed was that this was not my apartment. At least that explained why I wasn’t in my own room.

I was lying on a burgundy leather couch, the large, overstuffed kind. Aside from the fact that my bare skin stuck to the leather, it was rather comfortable. I had a small black pillow and a blanket covering me, so I knew that my sleeping on the couch was intentional, though I couldn’t recall going to sleep here. The headache and sensitivity to light lead me to believe that I was suffering from a massive hangover, which the lack of memory seemed to confirm.

I sat up to get a better look at my surrounding and instantly regretted it. My head began swirling in and around itself in a very surrealistic, undulating manner. The sensation made me quite nauseous, and I very nearly threw up. Several deep breaths through my nose suppressed the urge, though.

When I felt that I could turn my head without making myself ill, I looked around the rest of the room. On either side of the couch on which I reclined there were two identical chairs upholstered in the same paisley pattern and adorned with hundreds of brass studs. Between the chairs and in front of the couch was a heavy, dark-stained, oak coffee table that was completely covered with empty beer and liquor bottles.

I was about to turn and examine the rest of the room behind me, when the corner of something yellow caught my eye from under an overturned bottle of Jack Daniels. I moved the bottle and withdrew what turned out to be a large manilaenvelope. The envelope was addressed to me, but not at my home address. I’m not sure why this information sent a chill down my spine. Maybe it was because I didn’t even know where I was, yet somehow the mail carrier did. The postage stamp was cancelled and the post mark showed that it had passed through the local post office two days ago. There was no return address.

I looked around surreptitiously, still unsure of where I was exactly, and therefore unsure of who could be around or could come in at any moment. If the address on the envelope was any indication, I was on the Other Side of town. I say Other Side with capital letters because it is the equivalent of the Other Side of the Tracks, but our town is sans railroad tracks. I tried to think if I even knew anyone who lived on the Other Side. I could not bring forth a single name.

I lifted the envelope off of the table and was surprised by the heft. It was not heavy, per se, but its size belied the weight it apparently contained. I lay the envelope across my knees and stared at it for a moment, struggling to recognize the handwriting. There was something vaguely familiar, yet somehow…immature…about the handwriting. All of the words were capitalized in block letters which, of course, makes recognition more difficult.

I turned the envelope over and tore open the flap carefully. Inside was a thick packet of papers. They were eight by ten photographs. The very first photo on the top of the pile was a picture of a very attractive blond woman getting into a black car. The next photo showed her driving away from the camera, her lisence plate centered in the picture and clearly visible.

As I continued to flip through the pictures they appeared to be telling a shutter-frame story of this mysterious blond woman. Through the photos, I watched as she drove to a hair salon, then went to a couple of clothing stores. There was even a six photo series of her shopping at a grocery store where she purchased some fruits and vegetables, a couple cases of beer, and four bottles of Jack Daniels.

Then I watched as, frame by frame, she drove to my apartment. She rang the buzzer then waited. She smoked a cigarette on my front stairs. A couple frames later, I emerged from the apartment and she kissed me on my cheek.

In the strange living room, with a stack of photos in my lap, my heart leaped. I could clearly see myself in those pictures meeting this mysterious woman, yet I had no memory of it. I racked my brain trying to recall even the faintest detail. Nothing. I went back to the pictures. Flipping through them faster and faster.

The blond and I got into her car. I drove. We went across town to the Other Side. I parked the car in the driveway of an old, Victorian style house. We got out of the car and walked up to the front of the house. We each carried a case of beer and the bags with the booze inside. The door opened and two girls, twins by the look of their identical, black haircuts and matching outfits, smiled and greeted us. They ushered us inside.

The next series of photos became blurry…out of focus…as if the photographer was moving the camera too much while trying to take as many pictures as possible. The pictures made my head spin. They looked the way my vision always did when I had had too much to drink.

I watched as me the girls walked through the halls of the house and joined a large group of people in the living room. Beers were passed out and the bottles of Jack began making the rounds of the room. The photos looked as if they were double exposed because I kept seeing dual images of each person, almost like a ghost image. The party began to take on a frenzied pace and people began to pair up with others. The weird part was that as people paired off, the ghost images seemed to gather at one side of the room and watch.

I was surprised to see that the next photo was black. It was followed by one showing the group of partiers suddenly looking surprised. Then another black photo. The next one showed a dark figure moving in among the partiers. Every other photo was black, as if the lights had been flickering on and off or, as if the lights had gone out completely and the image was only illuminated by the flashing of the camera’s strobe.

Garish streaks of red splashed across the scene like someone had sprayed paint across the crowd. Then I realized that the people in the pictures, as the dark figure streaked past them, had horrible gashes ripped in them and that the red that sprayed forth was there blood. My eyes bulged and one of my hands flew to my chest as I watched the picture of myself scream silently as a deep wound opened across my front. In the picture I collapsed to the couch. The same couch on which I now sat. I dropped the stack of photos at my feet and pulled up my shirt. I was relieved and a little shocked to see that I was unscathed.

Confused, I picked up the stack of photos and noticed that even though I lay apparently dead or dying on the couch in the photo, there was still a double exposed image of me, along with the others, huddled in the corner of the photo. The next several photos showed what appeared to be the same image repeated. The bodies of myself and my fellow partiers lying in growing pools of blood while ghost images sat still watching. The dark assassin was nowhere to be seen.

At first I thought those last few pictures were the same, but then I realized that with each successive photo, the images of the bodies grew fainter while the double images grew more substantial. When the bodies had faded all together, the ghost images began exiting the frame until only I was left. My ghost image then walked to the couch and lay down upon it. The blond walked in and handed me a black pillow and a blanket which I used to cover up.

Several photos showed me lying asleep on the couch. Then I noticed that the light from the window was growing steadily brighter. I stared at the photos, transfixed, as I saw myself sit up and squint in the bright light. In the pictures, I looked around the room then noticed something on the coffee table. I picked up the manila envelope, looked surreptitiously around, then opened it. I pulled out a stack of photos and began leafing through them. As I continued to leaf through photos in the picture, the figure of the blonde woman appeared in the photos behind me. In the photos, I looked up suddenly. In the room I looked up suddenly.

I turned and saw that the blond woman was standing behind the couch just as she had been in the photo. She spoke and the sound of her voice startled me.

“Something terrible has happened,” she said. “Come with me.”

She held her hand out to me. I rose from the couch and walked around to her and accepted her hand. She lead me into the kitchen. Seated around the table were all of the people I had seen in the pictures. They all appeared to be nursing identical headaches and they all looked to be about as confused I was. Many of them were sipping steaming mugs of coffee.

I could see that there were several doorways that lead into the kitchen. Each one of them lead to a living room identical to the one I had just been lead away from.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded, my voice sounding less forceful than I had intended.

“That’s what were all trying to figure out,” the blond said. “We each awoke in one of those rooms,” she gestured at the many doors, “to find that we had no idea where we were or how we had gotten there. We all found an envelope addressed in our own hand to ourselves. We’ve all seen the photos and none of us has an answer. You were the last to awaken.”

“Perhaps I can help,” said a new voice.

We all turned to see a woman standing in the doorway to room that was engulfed in shadow. The darkness seemed to drift like a black mist from the room and wrap around her like a living robe of shadow.

“I summoned you all here without your knowledge. I allowed you to become drunk on spirits so that your physical bodies would release your True Self. Then I wisked through your useless shells and killed the flesh vessels that were imprisoning you. Now that you have been freed, the real adventure can begin.”

I succumbed to my earlier urge and promptly threw up all over the kitchen floor.

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He tries hard not to look at the empty bed as he comes into the bedroom to change his clothes. He slept in yesterday’s clothes again. On the couch again, too. He never could sleep very well when she went away on trips with her sister or for work. He always spent the first night on the couch, preferring to fall asleep while forcing himself to stay up late watching anything and everything on television.

After that first night he would move back into the bedroom and reluctantly crawl into the empty bed and drift off to sleep feeling incomplete. He always stayed on his own side of the bed even though she wasn’t there.

One time he had inadvertently drifted across the invisible median that separated his side and her side of the bed (her side was slightly larger; though, he was much bigger than her) and awoke to find his head buried in her pillow. It was the lingering scent of her floral/citrus shampoo and the faint odor of sweat that had awakened him. He was unable to get back to sleep after that.

This time, when she had gone, he did not allow himself to go back into the bedroom to sleep in their bed alone. He was afraid not of smelling her on the pillow, but of not smelling her at all. He was afraid that her scent may be fading, and he just couldn’t handle that.

As he pulls his shirt off and tosses it into the hamper next to the dresser he catches a glimpse of the bed reflected in the mirror. He can see the sheet lying slightly askew, still in the position in which they landed the last time she threw them aside and crawled out of bed. Her pillow still carries the faint impression from where her head had lain that last night.

He was certain that if he ran across the room and jumped on the bed and thrust his face into her pillow he would be able to inhale the rich scent of her as if she had only just left. For the tiniest fraction of a second his muscles tense with the anticipation of the movement, but relax again as he restrains himself.

He looks away from the mirror and crosses the room into the bathroom. The cold tile against his bare feet is a welcome shock, snapping him from his private reverie back into the present moment. He reaches into the shower stall and turns the hot tap on full blast to give the water time to heat up.

He removes his pants and then his underwear and leaves them lying in the middle of the bathroom floor just the way she always hated. He can almost hear her voice telling him to pick up after himself. A small, half smile turns the corner of his mouth upward for a moment. A second later all traces of the smile are gone and he is rigid with instinctual fear.

He is certain that he just heard her voice from the other room. His eyes dart randomly around as he strains at the edge of perception to hear the sound of her voice. He ignores the building the steam and humidity  as the scalding hot water continues to cascade from the shower head and down into the porcelain bathtub. The sound is continuous but rhythmic. It is the sound of laughter and of crying. It is from within this sound that he heard her voice.

He used to do that all the time, before she left. He would turn on the shower then think that she had said something to him and have to ask her what she said. She always said that he heard voices in the rain. He relaxed prepared to take his shower. He carefully reached into the steaming shower and turned up the cold water to take some of the edge off the heat. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of the vanity mirror that hung above the sink. He froze.

He saw something written in the steam on the mirror. The letters looked foreign to him. They did not spell out anything, but rather seemed to be a random arrangement of letters. He turned away from the shower and looked closer at the letters. He could see then that they looked strange because they were written backwards.

He was never any good at puzzles or riddles. She was the one who enjoyed brain teasers and crosswords; though, she always tried to get him to figure something out in clues rather than tell him straight out. He turned away from the mirror and back towards the bedroom. He could see himself reflected in the mirror above the dresser, naked and shrouded in the steam of the bathroom. Over his shoulder he could just make out the message written in steam, but now it appeared normal.

It said, “I love you always and all ways.”

It was too much for him to accept. He dropped to his knees and started crying great heaving sobs. Every day for the past year he had gone through this same ritual. He would spend the night on the couch and then shower in their bathroom, trying desperately not to look at the bed where she used to sleep. Never, in all that time had he ever noticed the mirror. Never before had he seen that message, her final message to him.

One year ago today, while away from home with her sister and while he slept on the couch in her abscence, she was killed in a violent car crash. Since that day he has not been able to bear the thought of sleeping in their bed knowing that she will never again join him. He has longed to touch where her body had lain, and to smell her lingering scent, but he has resisted the urge every day.

Until now.

He quickly rises to his feet and walks into the bedroom. For the first time in a year, he looks at her vacant side of the bed directly. Still weeping, he lowers himself down into her side of the bed a pushes his face into her pillow.

He can still smell the faint scent of her floral/citric shampoo and the subtle odor of sweat, lingering.

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I am the one who is standing at the top of the stairs, looking down into the increasing darkness. I am the one who is at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at my own dark silhouette filling the white frame of the doorway. I am each and every stair in between.

I am the footprints in the dust of each stair and I am even the light that cascades over my own shoulders and down the steps that are me. I am the darkness that surrounds me at the bottom of the stairs and I am the air that I breathe, both above and below, within and without.

I am my own fear and I am my own courage. I am my doubt and my confidence; my shame and my pride. My innocence is shadowed only by my guilt and my purity is stained by my own sin. I am thought and reason and word and reckless abandon.

I am the slave chained to the bench and I am the chains that bind myself there. I am the shadows that dance on the wall before my eyes. I am the flames that flicker behind my own bonded self and I am the shapes that cast the shadows. I am the cave in which I dwell. I am the world that awaits me outside the cave, at the foot of the stairs, at the top of the stairs, beyond the door in which I stand.

I am all that I know; though, even I do not know all that I am.

I am and nothing more.

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