symbolic 46: scene i, part ii
...Gardner’s right leg buckled and he fell awkwardly to his knees. His hand came up to his face as if he was just beginning to feel the wrongness in his skull. The drop of blood grew darker, spreading out on his cheek.
Ruiz dropped the clipboard and rushed back to Gardner. He checked the portal to Patient 178’s room and didn’t see anything in the glass, didn’t see any breaks or fractures or holes—nothing to indicate what had caused injury to the other man.
There was a white spot in Gardner’s field of vision. It was flat and had square edges and it took him a few seconds to realize the shape was Ruiz. His depth perception was gone; everything looked like it had been reduced to basic geometric shapes. As Ruiz leaned in close to his face, he could make out the other man’s features, but only as a series of triangles and circles.
His hand was wet and his face burned like a hot shard of metal had lodged itself in the corner of his eye and was dripping molten tears onto his cheek. He opened his mouth to tell Ruiz, but all that came out was a thin whine.
Ruiz stood on his toes and quickly peered into the room, ducking his head up and back quickly. He did the motion a second time before reaching for the keys attached to his wrist by a rubber strap.
Gardner tried to grab the right angle corner of Ruiz as the other orderly slapped his key into the lock of the door. Don’t open the door, he thought, the words refusing to go all the way to his lips.
The lock turned heavily and Ruiz pulled at the door, swinging it wide. It looked to Gardner like he was lifting aside a sheet of green paper. Ruiz’s flat shape stepped in front of Gardner, blocking the view of the room.
When Ruiz’s form began to shiver and lose its outline, Gardner spun away from the open room and began to crawl across the floor of the hallway. The panic button was a tiny silver dot on the wall, so much smaller than he remembered it being. He collapsed at the base of the wall and stared up at the distant button. So far, he thought, when did it get so far off the floor?
He reached for it, stretching up against the cold wall. His fingers had almost reached it when a hand touched his shoulder. He pressed his good eye to the wall, refusing to look behind him. The touch was firm, insistent, yet still gentle. He felt an exhalation of breath next to his ear. He squeezed his eye shut, his other eye only feeding lines of red fury into his skull, trying to shut out what came next.
There was a chattering sound in his head, a magnified thunder of a thousand crickets...
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.