Third place winner in the Synapse Storytelling fiction category.
The auditorium was completely full. The breath of thousands rose and fell like the soft November tide. I fumbled with my shirt cuffs and slid my sweaty palms up and down my suede pants, creating patterns in the fabric.
There was a lady standing behind the podium, just a few feet away from me, and yet her voice was muffled and incoherent. Her arms were thin and she had a bright diamond necklace hanging low against her chest which seemed inappropriate for the occasion. Her dress was a dark charcoal gray like the carbon copy paper in my lab notebook.
I twisted the ring on my finger clockwise - always clockwise. The lady meandered away from the podium for a while, speaking freely, moving her hands to the subtle rhythm of her melodious voice. She painted my accolades across the stage with sweeping, urgent gestures: one giant mural of achievement spanning all my life.
After all, she had started out the speech speaking of my childhood, my adolescence. Just skip that one part about my childhood, please – ah good, they’ll never understand anyway. And my young adult years, nobody wants to hear about those – that’s right, I’m glad she missed that part too. To witness my entire life neatly cleaned and sorted by such capable hands was humbling to say the least. In fact, I began to believe she was telling the truth by the time I took the podium.
It wasn’t a podium at all really – it felt more as if I was clutching the signpost at a bus stop, and I shivered in the cold air. It was dark in the auditorium such that I could see no one individual’s face and yet I had a distinct feeling I was not within those walls any longer. The fickle and thin lights flickering before me that so resembled eyes could easily be city windows. Wasn’t that me reflected across the way, near the back – yes wasn’t that me reflected in the glass facades of the banks and bureaus across the street?
I knew it must be me, as clearly as one knows oneself the moment before death. As I clutched what had once been a podium, contemplating this, a large metallic caterpillar slowly dragged its overloaded belly alongside the curb, and I allowed myself to be consumed.
On the bus, I went to the back, and I sat between two young girls. One couldn’t have been more than 12, the other no more than 21. The 12-year-old was almost prostrate in the seat, her hands in her pockets, sullen expression, dark eyes. Her matted hair hung in hastily cut bangs across her forehead. She kicked her Nikes back and forth against the base of the seat, and the erratic vibrations traveled straight to the base of my skull.
As the headache set in, I turned slightly toward the older girl, who by now had consumed herself in some small electronic device she had just produced from her jacket pocket. The light illuminated the dark circles under her eyes and the uneven complexion she tried to hide underneath her foundation. Her fingers were long and slender, suited to their task, and they moved like sand across glass. I looked at my own fingers with repulsion.
Stubby, calloused, never cut out to play piano or be a surgeon. I twisted my ring clockwise. It shone a little under the spotlight, like she once had, before she became pale, before she shaved her head, before her wrists evaporated, and then her breasts, and then her eyes. Before me, images carefully repressed struggled to find form. There were no other faces on the bus. People, yes. So many people.
We stopped at a depot. Many people disembarked, but the two girls and I stayed, stationary. New people boarded, and then, a new face. A horrid, cut face. A face with features glued all over it like a 5th grader’s art project. Was it a girl, or a boy? A man or an animal? It walked upright and shambled toward me. I straightened and let my shoulders relax into their natural positions.
A great inhale and my lungs filled with the stagnant bus air, my ribs realigned, and I could feel the hairs on my arms bristle against polyester fabric. But I didn’t flinch. I worked too hard for this. This ugly thing approached and then halted, sat facing me, pushing itself into the faded cushion and letting its unkempt head teeter at the neck like a ball on a chain. I stared at it and how it stared back, its lidless black eyes both limitless and shallow, little pools of a giant, overbearing, impossibly concentrated darkness.
My stop came. My stop passed. I could not wrestle myself from the gaze I had invited. I was staring deep into something I wasn’t sure what, and it troubled me. It swayed too, not with the natural movements of the bus, but according to its own primordial rhythm. Its bones crackled and its arthritic fingers curled and straightened like pipe cleaners.
A single ring slid back and forth across its knuckles. Its arms were thin and around its neck it wore an amulet made of garbage. On its feet it wore plastic bags tied at the ankle, with dirty wool socks of two different origins.
The head fascinated me the most – abnormally large and magnified at the cheekbones. It made as if to speak but its pronounced jaw could not form coherent words and its nostrils flared in frustration at the attempt. Its spotted, translucent skin bubbled and burned red hot and then altogether it became too much and I closed my eyes and waited.
“You’ve been waiting a long time.”
That’s what she had said. I had been a chrysalis all my life. Cut from my tree I fell and hatched into an unimaginable beast.
The bus stopped. The girls were gone. The beast was gone. The bus was gone. It was just me, in a full auditorium, sweating palms clutching the podium, staring out into the darkness. I would now dictate to the crowd who I was and what I had done to earn my moment on this stage. But not all of it. No, never all of it.
