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feynmanisgreat · 10 years

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Desperate and Lost

Lost and Desperate

Clara felt depressed, like total shit, but she knew as long as there was that angry little voice in her head telling her to keep going, she knew she’d be fine. It was raining, and as Clara was never really popular, she always walked home alone after school. The block ahead of her was wet, a typical midwest suburban view with trees on either side crawling up into the sky. Clara walked down the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. She felt more free, more alive, more rebellious this way.

Her jean jacket soaked, her socks underneath her boots wet, what little eye makeup she wore was flowing down her face like soft black tears. Underneath the hood of her jacket, her short black and red hair was damp. It was misery, if she was goth or emo or any of those conformist labels Clara would have said she was happy with it, but she was not. She did not like misery, and if she didn’t have that little angry voice inside her head constantly commanding her to take the next step forward she probably would have given up, laid on the curb, and cried till someone walked by and took pity on her. They might possibly just offer a ride home, or perhaps something worse.

It was getting dark and it was already beginning to get foggy, but still Clara kept to the middle of the road. If she saw the headlights of any cars coming from the distance she would move over to the side and keep walking, letting them pass. Sometimes the cars would honk their horn, other times they would simply drive by, fast or slow depending on the emotional disposition of the drivers. Her cell phone was dead, she was out of cigarettes and she had no other form of entertainment. It was just a hard miserable trek forward down the street.

But things were changing, as the day slowly crept forward into night the fog began to roll in, making the way forward more obscure with each passing second. After a few minutes of the further amalgamation of the fog she began to notice the car headlights were beginning to get less visible as they passed by, not a good thing. She heard the revving of an engine behind her, her intuition kicked in and she leapt to the side of the street just as a blue sports car raced past her.

Some people have a death wish, or think they are invincible, Clara didn’t have either of these qualities. The only thing that saved her in that moment was the age of that car. Before almost all cars had gone electric, they had gasoline powered engines in them, though these were slowly going extinct. She had heard the gas motor, if there was another person just as crazy but with a newer car, she would not be able to anticipate it coming in the density of this fog. Clara probably would not be able to avoid a collision. Clara hated conforming to rules, but for once in this dense a fog in which she could hardly see the hand in front of her face, it seemed like a good idea. She moved out of the middle of the street onto the suburban sidewalk, except she couldn’t find a sidewalk. Oh, of course, this was the woods.

Clara had left the normal suburban area by her school and entered the part of the town bordering the forest. That last little remnant of nature that had remained unclaimed by man except for the single road that ran through it. On either side of the road was trees and nothing man made for about a mile straight down this road until you reached more suburban homes where Clara lived.

Well, it’s better to trek on the edge of the forest than dodge invisible silent cars…

Clara walked out of the street into the forest, moving through the leaves, she would occasionally hear the wooshh of a car as it flew by her, but she was safely out of harms way on the right side of the road bordering the forest. There was a slight slope on each side of the road that got narrower and steeper as she walked further down the side of the road that leaned down into the forest from where she was. It got really narrow until she was balancing a bit onto the curb of the road, and that’s when it happened.

A car zipped by, piloted by some maniac that caused an air vacuum behind it that knocked Clara forward causing her to fall forward and then down the slippery slope to the right of her into the forest. She tumbled down for a brief moment, trying to grab onto something to stop her descent, but all she could feel was slippery mud and leaves. She hit the bottom, unharmed physically but confused mentally. The forest was full of mist, she could hardly see her hand in front of her face. She had a lighter in her jacket pocket fortunately and lit that up to see around her. She saw the slope, it was taller than her and actually quite steep and slippery, she tried climbing it back up but kept slipping back down. Well, got to carry on, as far as she knew it only got steeper past that anyways. She’d just trek through the forest towards home following the road. She flicked off her lighter, she didn’t want to waste the gas in it when she could still see with the scant light remaining in the sky.

Being so foggy, she would be walking and sometimes would have to dodge tree branches that suddenly appeared in her field of vision repeatedly. She sometimes couldn’t tell if she was still following the road, and who designed a road that was several feet off the ground anyways? Moronic civil engineers… She sometimes thought she saw figures, moving in the mist. She knew it was just her imagination, just tree branches or woodland animals or something, but it still startled her whenever she noticed.

It seemed like ages since she had fallen down the slope, yet she didn’t see any end of the forest yet. She pulled out her lighter, it had the anarchy symbol engraved on it, and lit it, looking for the slope she had so precariously fallen down that connected the street with the forest, she couldn’t find it. What the hell. No. No. No. Lost.

Clara was lost.

Now, the sensation of being lost is an interesting thing to experience. It’s subjective effect upon a person can vary. For people who have experienced many things in their lives it is a sort of happy sensation. It means they have stepped out of the mediocrity that has become their lives and escaped into another world, the world of mystery, of which they have no understanding of. For people who have not experienced much, it is a feeling of fear and dread. They fear the unknown because to them they experience the unknown everyday, and they are sick of it.

One thing is prevalent however in either case, and that is a feeling of confusion. You thought you knew you were going the right way and now you aren’t. You were certain about something, and now that certainty is shaken and that is practically the definition of confusion right there.

Clara felt confused of course, but other than annoyed with the fact that she would have to now find her way out of the forest cold and wet, she would have to admit there was a little bit of a happy crazy feeling in the back of her head coupled, with that angry voice that told her to keep going.

When you are lost, the first thing you should do is find something stable, something unchanging which can be used as a fixed directional reference point. There was a dense fog all around her, so she couldn’t tell which way the sun was setting or the position of the stars.

The ground, that was something she still had. The trees, she still had that, but she had no way of knowing her way around this mysterious forest. She lifted her wet finger up into the air, she couldn’t feel a breeze. There was nothing to hold onto…everything was a fluidic dark mess.

Well, she had to go somewhere, at least find shelter. Behind her, she couldn’t even seen footprints, too many leaves covered the ground. There was nothing she could really do, she was truly lost with no real certain way of knowing which way to get home, not at least until the fog died away.

Clara stood still and closed her eyes. Opening them up again she breathed slowly, watching each exhalation be expelled as more fluidic mist out from her mouth. If she couldn’t use her eyes to find her way out, perhaps she could apply her other more primal senses to benefit her conundrum. She closed her eyes again, better to damp out one sense to help boost the others after all. It smelled of petrichor and damp leaves on soil, oak and pine and…a slight smokey smell, as if a fire burned somewhere far away.

Clara knelt down and touched the ground. She felt her relatively heavy damp linen on her back over the fine machine woven cotton shirt under the jacket. This heavy cold feeling, she felt it on her jeans and socks and all over her. It was no longer raining, just foggy, so she no longer felt any rain, just the dampness of the soil and leaves as her hand traced along the ground.

Clara stood up again and closed everything else but her ears. Time to hear, time to hear the sounds of the twilight before the final dark of this forest of darkness, fog and mystery. No sounds of cars from the road no matter how hard she concentrated her ears, but Clara could hear toads croaking in the distance rather un-periodically, the sound of a whispering wind slowly creaking through the trees, causing a slight rustle of all the leaves above. Not really any sounds of predatory animals, but what was this other noise? The crackle of leaves on ground, the chattering of voices, the clink of metal, the subtle sound of the rustle of clothing… People!

There were people, probably. She could barely hear them to the right of her. It was getting dark, she took out her anarchy lighter and opened her eyes, better a slight light than no light at all. Clara dodged by trees, trudged over roots and avoided the forest rats that sometimes scurried by her. The sounds as she approached them became more pronounced and definite, she could definitely hear voices. The voices…they sounded almost like a rhythmic chanting of sorts.

Clara kept following the voices to their source. They stopped, the forest became silent again, but Clara knew the direction of the voices and so could still track them to the source. Who could the voices belong to? Campers? Hippies? Transients? No, no transients. Clara had only seen a group of Hobos once in her life when she was really young. Ever since the hegemony took power, the homeless population has practically become extinct. Clara’s grandparents used to tell her stories of long ago when they were almost everywhere, in almost every city you could find such poverty.

Was that whom these people were? Were they dangerous? Clara did not exactly know much about them, only the stories of before the hegemony her grandparents used to tell her. Some were misunderstood, some used to be great before betrayal, others were simply psychotic and would submit to their most primal urges of violent behavior if only given the slightest chance.

As she now cautiously approached the source of the noise, the mist began to get less pronounced until finally it faded altogether. Before her was a circular clearing surrounded equilaterally by trees on every side, completely clear of mist. In the middle was a campfire, still burning. surrounding the campfire were three old and rotted wooden chairs, traces of moss and fungi apparent around them. However, outside of the clearing, the mist made the outside forest almost entirely obscured from Clara’s vision.

Looking up, Clara could see the moon peeking through the clouds. There was still very scant daylight remaining, the moon must have come up early, it appeared to be twilight, but Clara wouldn’t know because she didn’t have a watch.

“Hello?” She called out into the clearing after building up the nerve to do so.

“Is anybody there? My name is Clara, I’m a little lost, was hoping if anybody could help me back to the main road? Directions? Something?”

She heard a sort of unintelligible whisper, then a slight pinching pain on the right side of her neck. Probably a bug, she swatted at her neck but her arm completely missed it. Things started to get blurry and double-visioned, her knees felt weak and her head dizzy. The angry voice in her head urged her to push forward, to stay afloat in the engulfing sea of unconsciousness. No longer angry, it was pleading with her. That wasn’t a good sign.

She took one shaky defiant step, and collapsed. The sea of dreams overtaking her waking senses as her face hit the soft leafy ground.

***

Clara’s first dizzy sensation upon awakening was the feeling of the light touch of a human hand supporting the back of her head. The next sensation was a hand holding her left hand and then one holding her right, all supporting her weight from falling. Clara opened her eyes, she was seeing a blurry double vision of what she supposed was the moon and stars, it was now a relatively clear night it seemed. Clara heard the crackling of flame beneath her, the slight feeling of heat, the feeling of her boots on the ground, she gradually became aware of her situation as she began to regain more and more consciousness from the sea of unawareness.

Her boots were on the ground, she was being leaned backwards over a fire and being held up by three people. The one supporting Clara’s head appeared to be female, the other two on her right and left Clara couldn’t really pick out many details of. They were all chanting something as they held her relatively prone body bent backwards above the fire she had seen when she had entered the clearing. Clara still had all her clothes on, that was a good thing.

Clara tried mouthing words, but all that came out of her mouth was unintelligible babble. Still feeling dizzy and confused, Clara could hear the chanting began to intensify. Clara began to notice the weight she was pressing upon the people holding her up seeming to get less and less. She couldn’t tell if it was due to hallucinations or whatever, but her whole body seemed to be getting more weightless.

No, it wasn’t a hallucination. Her right boot left the ground, then her left boot, then the people that were chanting stopped holding her up altogether. Clara was now weightlessly suspended above the fire, slowly rising into the air. She couldn’t move, she felt helpless in this levitating state. That voice in her head, it was still alive, it was still urging her to fight and not stay motionless. It was still urging her to stay alive and keep going even with all the dizziness and unconsciousness.

Clara fought to twist her head, tried so hard, kept pushing. The voice shouted, more pronounced and loudly than ever before. Pushing against an invisible barrier that she herself seemed to keep erecting around herself. She pushed past it, her head inched to the right slowly, then gaining momentum until she could see below her.

Below her, the fire was slowly dying into embers. The three people she could now see were all wearing tattered and dirtied white robes and chanting something, holding some sort of oil up. The two to her right were both white males with curled black hair, except for the one Clara had initially noticed to be female. She was white with long blonde hair and ultra-blue eyes. Their bodies began levitating as well.

Then Clara heard a voice, except it wasn’t coming from outside, it was coming from within her. It wasn’t like any voice she could think of, because it wasn’t part of her. It wasn’t that angry voice that always urged her to keep going, or any other internal voice. It wasn’t an outside sound, yet it wasn’t an internal one. She tried articulating it, concepts and pictures flashed in her mind and an unknown language dissonant and deep racked through her mind.

Clara struggled to articulate it, to understand it, and she did.

“You are one of many. The rebels, the unbelievers, the madmen who defy tradition and stick to their own rules.”

Pictures of men and woman all throughout history, some she could pick out as famous and not so famous visionaries and great thinkers, others she couldn’t. Some didn’t look exactly human, others were garbed in extravagantly colored dress she had never seen before belonging to cultures that were either long dead or to obscure to mention.

“The cycle always continues, your kind come along and stir the status quo up. A great betrayal happens and you fade from power. Then, your ideas become the new status quo, until another one of your kind comes along and stirs it all up again, and the cycle continues.”

A slideshow of pictures showing countless societies being born, surviving and ultimately perishing flooded Clara’s mind. Feelings of hope, sadness, misery… in what seemed like an eternity she saw and felt in a second.

How could Clara respond to this disembodied voice? This thing that was her, but not her simultaneously? She tried thinking of her school, of her family, of her own life. The voice, the pictures, the feelings. They were still there, but unintelligible until she focused her consciousness on them. They were real, only so long as she made them real.

“It has been seen, you will begin the cycle again and subvert the hegemony. It is foretold, but I give you a choice.”

It was no longer pictures, just the voice.

“What choice? Just let me go and get out of my head!”

Clara cried out aloud, overcoming whatever spell had been cast upon her ability to speak intelligibly. This startled the rhythmic chanters and they stopped and looked up at her in shocked surprise.

Time stopped. The forest faded.

Clara was now back on her feet, the scene being replaced by a split down the middle, one white and one dark.

The voice, it appeared again seemingly speaking deeply yet ethereally in front of her in between the two lines of light and dark.

“Of course, your kind are always a feisty lot. I will give you something few before you have ever been given.”

“What’s that? What could you possibly give me? All I want to do is go home…”

The voice laughed at Clara.

“Home? What home! You have no home. You are an outcast, a rebel, a visionary.”

“I have a family! They still care about me.”

“Perhaps, but family doesn’t last forever, and even their relationship with you is strained, of course, it typically is with your kind.”

“Then what could you possibly offer me?”

“To not have it be like this, you can go back into the world and be one of them, what you would call sheep. You can live a happy normal life. No loneliness, no more being an outcast, you will be a normal functioning member of society and be able to grow old and die without any worries, except perhaps how much cholesterol is in your diet, or whatever the average person worries about as the years creep up on them.”

To say she didn’t pause and consider would be a lie. She thought of a family, of children, of a house with a little green lawn and growing old and picking children up from school and having barbecue with the neighbors…

“I obviously have to ask, what if I refuse such a strange and unbelievable offer?”

“Then you will awake and find you have disturbed my follower’s ritual, thereby freeing yourself from it. You will go forth towards your destiny. I of course cannot guarantee you will survive, only that your actions will eventually lead to the hegemony’s collapse, and the cycle will continue. From the moment you awake you will find yourself running for the rest of your life. First from my followers, then from the hegemony, then from your friends and trusted ones, and finally even yourself.”

“I have given you a choice none before you have been given before, a chance to finally break the cycle until the next one of your kind comes along. To live a happy normal life, isn’t that after all what you in the end crave beneath everything else?”

“But…but what will happen to me? Myself? I am… myself. Not a label, I’ll always be the outcast unless…”

“Your personality is drastically altered through advanced metaphysical trance hypnosis. You will not feel any different when you awake, you won’t even remember this of course, you will simply remember walking through a misty forest and finding your way home. It will be inch by inch steps, but eventually you will shed any form of subversive and rebellious behavior in exchange for a more normalized conservative conformist worldview. You will begin to notice some people have affinity towards you, that you actually care what other people think about you and that you aren’t lonely. Like layers your anarchistic personality will peal away, replaced and appended by conformity and safety.”

“You can either go right or left, you already know which way is which decision, this is after all happening in your mind.”

All was silent as Clara stopped to weigh her decision, except she already knew what her decision was. The thinking was just to delay the inevitable, as all thinking before a decision simply shows an inability to confront the decision itself.

“Creature, entity, god. Whatever you are. You have no authority over my life,”

The scene faded away and changed as Clara stepped forward over one of the lines, Clara could still feel the beings presence as she slipped back into reality.

“Times must change, and so must I. But it will not be on your terms.”

Clara was shouting coherently with her fist raised as she fell back to the Earth.

“I am the curator of my own destiny and the master of my own fate, I have an angry voice in my head that tells me to keep going and thats about the best company I’ll ever need,”

Clara leapt up, faster than the priestly followers near her. She kicked one in the gut and leapt away into the misty forest, but not before turning one last time towards the clearing with her head to the sky and finishing her sentence.

“and if I die running, at least I will die free!”

#scifi #writing #fantasy #rebel #anarchy #original #stories

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