Alice
An Excerpt from "28 and Raped"
Her waist-length black hair shimmers in the moonlight as she runs from me, a white willowy dress rippling like waves in the sea. She ducks behind a tree and disappears. When I peer around its trunk the sun is shining bright at my seat on the train.
I’ve been in and out of this fugue state for the good part of a month and a half. I left New York as soon as it happened, returning to North Carolina and locking myself in my apartment for a month, drinking every night until I woke up covered in my own piss. I thought numbing myself would be more than just a band-aid, but I was smarter than that. I knew what I had to do. I had to run. So I bought an Amtrak ticket to Arizona, a three day ride with a few layovers on the way. A fresh start.
With no recollection of having left my seat I awake in the empty observation cart, staring out into a pitch black void.
My body is in a seated position, I can feel my weight even though the thought of mechanical action renders nothing. I don’t know if my eyes are closed or they no longer exist. I feel at peace coming to terms with the latter, wondering if feeling is still an applicable term. Perhaps I am passing over and my residuals are dissipating into the firmament. Theoreticals take me back into the past where marble busts made from blurred faces of people I once knew line the walls. They tell stories of a better time, way before I packed my bags left home.
The darkness finally begins to crack when a tiny square off in the distance changes hues, becoming ever so noticeable. Flames plume out this focal point and I’m pulled in as the space between myself compresses into a single frame. A familiar one. The Devil’s Tramping Ground.
I don’t want to relive this, I already know it’s the moment where I fucked up. Two roads both leading to Hell, and I chose the easier of the two, now I’m paying the price. It’s all catching up to me now. Time and space compress into one another, everything happens all at once. I don’t want to be here but I’m still stuck in a seated position, now on a log in front of the fire. The outline of a person is seated across from me but it’s not his outline. Just the standardized shape of a man.
The flame sizzles and cracks as it did back then, before the noise is drowned out by a low hum.
The hum of the train.
It’s still pitch black outside of the observation car. I’m no longer alone. There is a presence here, his presence. The seat begins swiveling inward through no doing of my own, a low foreboding chuckle coming out of the corner opposite of me. He’s sitting ankle on knee, chin to neck. I can’t see his face, but I never have. It’s an unimportant detail, I’d be better off knowing his name, at least then I might stand a chance. We sat motionless for what could have been a minute, or an hour. My sense of time has been skewed immensely, more so than it was already. He ended our standoff by rising slowly, too tall with his hat on, he removed it with an air of class.
Though his entire body is a shadow I can tell he’s smiling behind the nothingness, the malicious intent rancid in the air of the car. His steps are methodical and with purpose. This being our first face to face—if you can call it that, interaction, I am entangled in his web. A shiver is sent down my spine and inaction further paralyzes me. I can only watch him move towards me. His motions can only be described as freezeframe; the pages of a flipbook being turned with remarkably dramatic pauses. When he finally plants his second foot, blinding light surges in from the windows, taking us into a room of unending white. My eyes adjust and I’m able to see again, finally standing, legs aching from having been locked in place.
She’s standing in front of me, only visible from the thin black lines tight-roping around her frame, her bare feet dirty as if she’s just run in from the forest. Beneath wavy jet black hair is a rosy mauve oval face, no features, nothing to identify her. The first time I’ve seen her without her facing away from me. She stands parallel to the now frozen mid-step Shadow Man. A low hum begins, but not from the train, this is the beginning of a fan—no, a turbine. The Shadow Man gravitates towards her, the hatchings of his shadow being absorbed. A vortex forms in her face.
As she is, it is barely visible. Another flipbook unfolds in front of me. When the proximities between them close, he is compressed in an instant. Where there was a void, only light is now left. Her face is once again expressionless, but I can tell she’s smiling through the nothingness, this one beaming altruistically.
This story is an excerpt from the forthcoming novel “28 and Raped” by H N K. You can find his previously-published works on Amazon or on his blog.
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