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  I turned and saw Erica take the last few steps down the stairs, “Ben stopped by to make sure we remembered it’s dues month.”

  She nodded to me, “We’d give you the check now if we had the money.”

  “That is exactly what I had told him. Great minds think alike,” I smiled at Ben. This was probably the most successful attempt at small talk I had ever made.

  “You two are a match made in heaven. Well I’m off to the Owens next door. Have a good day you two.”

  More rings of sadness roll slowly out from the core.

  I look at Erica and she nods, “Hey, Ben, wait.”

  “Is something wrong?” He turned with a concerned look on his face.

  Erica pulled the door open, “We were just about to sit down to some coffee, maybe some bacon omelets and I was wondering, did you eat yet?”

  “I don’t usually eat breakfast, but coffee sure sounds nice, can’t beat the company either.”

  “Come on in then. I’ll show you the photos that didn’t make the cut and you can tell me if I was crazy to think they should be in the magazine too.”

  I watched the two of them talk as she explained the various photos. His colors swirled with happier light-green sprites and flares of gold around the edges. I suddenly felt a wave of sadness as I realized that once he walked our front door, he would again be alone in the world. I can’t even let myself live in the moment in front of me. See, I live in a very dark world.

  Chapter Three

  One Step Up

  Regardless of what had occurred with Ben, I rode the high from stopping the kid in the park for nearly a week. I had been sleeping better and allowed myself to actually be happy for the first time I could ever remember. The nightmares had nearly stopped and I felt energized almost every day. It wasn’t until the following Friday that once again reality decided I needed to be put firmly back into the dark place I apparently belonged.

  I pulled into the same grocery store I always do on my way home from work. With the season moving into fall, the sun was already setting behind the hills to the west and dusk had moved in. I had called Erica on the way home and we both decided we really wanted to make some steaks with two big, fat baked potatoes for dinner. I parked in the nearly empty lot and started heading into the store. I was intentionally looking around more, coaxing myself to allow my natural awareness to take in everything it could and not shy away from people so much. The Darkness near the part of the lot where the employees parked their cars caught my attention and drew me in that direction.

  A man was moving from car to car looking into the windows. He was dressed entirely in black. He even had his hood pulled over his head. He did not look nervous like most of the criminal types I have seen. That probably should have been a warning.

  His shadow flared and pulsed with reds and blacks. Green sprites as he looked into various car windows.

  I quietly walked over to the side of the building where I could get a better look and watched him move about the lot. He couldn’t have made it any more obvious that he was going to attempt a break-in. I watched for several more minutes before he finally settled on an older model blue Toyota and pulled a Slim Jim out of his pant leg. He deftly slid the tool into the door jamb and unlocked the car with one tug. It took him less time to break in than it would have taken me with the keys. I decided now was the right time to approach.

  “What are you doing there buddy?” The sound of confidence in my voice surprised me. I wasn’t exactly sure where it came from but it had a cocky edge to it that I was pretty sure I couldn’t back up with anything.

  “Who the hell are you?” He said as he stared me down. Apparently, he did not see me as anything but a minor annoyance. He waited a moment for my reply then when none came he pulled the door open.

  I hesitated another moment then replied, “Just someone that thinks maybe you shouldn’t be doing what you are doing.” Again my overconfidence sounded out of place.

  “Are you a cop or somethin’?” He waited for my answer but never once broke eye contact.

  “No sir. Just someone that doesn’t like seeing things like this happen. These people work hard for what little they have and someone thinks they can come and take it. It just isn’t right.” I felt the confidence leaving my voice as I continued, “Don’t you think maybe you should just head home?”

  Hints of red in the black mercury. Smears of dark-red flow out from the core.

  “If you ain’t a cop maybe you should mind your own damn business before someone gets hurt!” He bent over and I could hear him opening the glove box in the car.

  He stood up out of the car holding a handful of change and what looked like a cell phone charger. Why didn’t I notice this guy was a good four inches taller than I was before deciding to walk over and play hero?

  “Why are you still here? Do you not understand basic English?”

  “You can drop what you took and walk away right now,” for the first time I could hear the actual fear bleed through into my voice. The way the red and green flashed through his Darkness, he heard it too.

  “Or I could keep what I took and beat your ass for bein’ a little snitch punk that thinks he’s some kind of dumb-ass superhero.” He closes the door and walks around the car to face me.

  Standing roughly twenty feet away as he flexes his fists I am starting to wonder about my extremely poor choice of action choices so far tonight. Every fiber of my being tells me to run for the store but I stand my ground. I have no idea why.

  Flashes of red and blue in the deep pool as he lunges at me. The light is overwhelming! Red and green sprites detonate in anger, curls of red.

  He closes the distance far faster than I thought someone of his size could.

  I fend off his first blow and attempt to push away from him. He hits me solidly in the side of the head and I feel the world spin around me. Two more times he lands blows to my head and I crash to my hands and knees. I cannot think straight, I can’t even tell which way is up. I feel the heavy blows from his feet as he kicks me in the stomach over and over. I can no longer hold myself up and feel my head hit the pavement hard. The world is growing dark, I can taste metal in my mouth and know it’s blood. I curl up and attempt to protect my head and stomach from his blows. I have lost count of how many times he has kicked and stomped on me. I can hear him screaming at me but the sound of his Darkness is drowning out everything. I can hear the rushes of wind as the waves pulse and race around his black-mercury. The smell of dry wood burning and copper surround me. My world is spinning clouds of pain. Slowly the light fades away down a long dark tunnel. From somewhere in the distance I hear a female voice yell at the man.

  “Get away from him! I’m calling the cops right now!”

  Another solid kick to my head and I hear his footsteps rapidly retreat toward the small park behind the store.

  “Are you OK sir? Cops are on their way, I can already hear them.”

  She carefully rolls me over onto my back. The pain is surprisingly sharp in my chest and arm. I want to throw up but can’t find the energy to even turn my head to the side.

  “Oh my god, Mr. Carter, is that you?”

  Flashes of blues and greens. Hints of silver in the ripples. The light is so bright.

  The checker that usually works the night shift walks out of the haze around me. Her colors are always subdued and nonthreatening. I find I have no voice. She appears to be pulling away up a long dark elevator shaft. I am falling into darkness. I marvel at how warm the pavement feels but how cold I am. Another shock of pain through my chest and the light goes out. I no longer exist as far as I know.

  ~1~

  My head is pounding but it is dulled by the soft pillows and sheets. I startle when I wake as I realize I am no longer in the parking lot. The blinds are closed but I can see sunlight coming in around the edges. It appears to be early in the morning. I have an IV in my arm but no other monitors are attached to me. For some reason, not seeing any extra equipment relaxes me a lit
tle and I find myself thinking I’m not in that bad of shape. I look over at Erica sitting in that uncomfortable looking chair while she is sleeping peacefully. I can clearly see that she is dreaming.

  Colors flash in small sprites of light, blues and greens ripple across the Darkness. Random colors float to the surface and fade slowly.

  Watching someone sleep always reminds me of thunderstorms from the air. Like the random patterns of lightning, the Darkness shares that same effect. Some flashes are deep in the cloud layer and simply light up the storm while others shoot from cloud top to cloud top.

  I lift my arm to reach out to her and gasp loudly as the pain shoots down my left side all the way into the leg and past my knee. Only then do I realize my ribs are tightly bound. My left shoulder is in some kind of sling and I have several bandages on the side of my head. A wave of pain moves down my body. I hurt, a lot. I do a quick self-assessment to see that everything is at least where it is supposed to be. Aside from the pain in my ribs, shoulder and head, nothing else seems to be out of place. I try to adjust how I am sitting in bed and quietly groan in pain.

  Erica stirs at the sounds of me trying to move and sits up rubbing her eyes, “Are you really awake this time or are we going to get another lesson in strange lights and all the things they mean?”

  I’m scared to think of what I might said but move on, “I think so. How long have I been here, and as far as that goes where exactly is here?” Last thing I remember is the checker from the store. I may have left the parking lot thirty minutes ago, or thirty days. One second I am getting my ass handed to me by some stranger, the next I wake up in the hospital in a world of hurt.

  “You are in the Harborview intensive care unit. You have been unconscious, more or less, for a little more than forty-eight hours. It was touch and go the first night. They were pretty concerned about some of the trauma to your abdomen, there was a lot of organ bruising, things like that. They let me stay the night. That kind of gives you an idea of how close it was.”

  “More or less? How have I been unconscious ‘more or less’? I’m not sure what that means.” I tried to adjust my position again and was rewarded with another wave of pain. I felt my ribs through the bandaging and felt several sharp jabs of pain. They felt broken.

  “You would occasionally talk about seeing lights or something. No one could really make any sense of what you were saying, it was kind of strange, very unlike you. They were concerned that the boot to the head might have caused some brain damage but the scans didn’t show anything. Other than that you managed to get three ribs broken and a fractured clavicle. Not to mention the pretty healthy beating your head took, heavy concussion.”

  She is quiet for several moments then I see her eyes begin to mist, “What the hell were you thinking? Why on Earth didn’t you just call the damn cops? Do you have some sort of damn hero complex now? Do you have any idea what you have put me through over the last few days? They told me to prepare for the worst, Adam! Do you know what that means?”

  The anger in the black-mercury is unmistakable.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. Honestly I just saw a man breaking into a car and didn’t go much beyond thinking that maybe someone should do something. I certainly didn’t start things out with a plan to get squished like that.”

  “That someone you talk about should have had a badge and a gun! What if he would have killed you! Are you trying to get away from me? Are you trying to push me away? I care about you damn it! Why don’t you see that? What you did was totally reckless and stupid!”

  Silver edges with sprites of blue and green. The edge is curling and pulsing.

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just something I felt as if I had to do. It’s hard to explain. Wait, that isn’t entirely true,” I pause for a moment as I try to get my thoughts together. “I think it’s impossible to explain. I don’t think there is any way I could make you understand what was going through my head as I stood in that dark parking lot. To be honest, I don’t really know.”

  She walks over to the window and looks out over the city. I can see she is thinking carefully about her next words.

  Without turning away from the window she quietly says, “I have been seeing a counselor.”

  “I figured as much,” I closed my eyes to block out the swirls of pain I could see in her Darkness. Swirls of pain caused by me, caused by her being around me.

  When she turns back toward me I can see tears are flowing heavily down her face, “I want you to go with me. I need you to go with me.”

  I had never in my life ever once sat down and talked to anyone about any single problem I had. I was an island unto myself and felt that was the only option I would ever have. How could anyone ever see the world the way I do? How could any person ever stand in my shoes and try to understand why I am the way I am. They can’t. They simply couldn’t begin to understand what my place in the world was. They would spend a dozen sessions just talking about my mother and how that has affected the person that I am. Maybe they would go into the fact that I didn’t know who my father was and that made me feel incomplete. All well and good but just a drop in the bucket that was the curse of my world. Even if I convinced them that what I saw was real, they would just throw some sort of antidepressant at me.

  I look into her eyes and wonder what she thinks will come of this.

  Random color combinations make it hard to read what is happening.

  I feel my walls beginning to come up around me. I want to protect myself, to be alone and not talk to anyone, not admit I’m a freak of nature to anyone else, ever. I want to hide under that pile of dirty clothes in the closet and not have to see the Darkness let alone explain it to anyone. For a brief moment, I realize that I am not the same person I was few weeks ago. There is something different growing inside of me now. The part that was able to confront people doing wrong and do something about it had awoken something I can’t quite put my finger on. I am starting to think that maybe I have missed my purpose all along. To read the Darkness and make something better from what I see. I remind myself again that hiding is no longer an option.

  Her eyes watched me without blinking. They are almost pleading with me to say yes, to say that I think what we have is worth fighting for. I could see how desperately she wanted me to say yes to everything. I couldn’t think of a strong reason not to go, besides, it would be interesting to see what the doctor was like. Maybe find out if there was anything going on between the two of them. I didn’t see any way that it could possibly help me though, “I will go. For you, I will go.”

  The tension left her shoulders and reflected in her Darkness, “Thank you.”

  She carefully rested her head on my good shoulder, “And for future reference. If you get yourself killed being stupid, the afterlife is going to suck for you once I get there. I mean really suck. You are going to wish you were alive again when I get done with you, if there isn’t any hell in the afterlife, I will make one just for you.”

  I smiled and closed my eyes as sleep came over me.

  ~3~

  Erica pulled the truck into the driveway circle early on a Sunday morning. With a creak of the ancient metal hinges, she opened the door. I accepted her helping hand and stepped down from the passenger side. Moving was still painful but the hospital pharmacy was kind enough to load me up with some industrial grade pain killers. The painkillers they sent me home with were different from what I was given through the IV while laid up. One of the side effects of the pills I was given is I found the Darkness around people became considerably muted, almost blurry. I stared at Erica for several moments as she helped me down. The colors were much more flat and the edges less defined. Instead of the black-mercury I was used to, it was now thick cigarette smoke. A blur that I found much easier to ignore.

  “You’re doing it again Adam,” she said with a frown.

  “Doing what?”

  “Staring at me like you are high as a kite.”

  “Well, that’s because I am
in fact, high as a kite,” I give her my best ‘I’m stoned’ smile held up my hands making peace signs.

  She smiles back at me and holds my arm as I walk toward the front door. I cannot recall the last time I was in as good a mood as I am. As comforting as it would seem to be able to turn off my curse, it was in fact quite the opposite. I felt like my vision was fading. Almost as if I were handicapped in some way. It was difficult to say which was better but I could easily see the possibility of a brutal addiction forming. It my life hadn’t taken the turn it did in the hospital I would spend the rest of my life in this drug induced stupor.

  My hospital incarceration lasted a total of eight days and seven nights. As it turned out, the stay was far more of a soul opening experience than I could have ever anticipated. In the late evenings when Erica would reluctantly head home, they only let her stay overnight when they thought I might not make it until morning, I would grab one of the wheelchairs and slowly, painfully, roll myself around the halls. I felt locked up when I would stay for too long in my room. I can’t really watch television so for the most part I only listen to the radio. To me people on the TV look so flat and two-dimensional that I find it to distracting to watch, almost uncomfortable in its lack of life. The same thing goes for movies. I may see the Darkness as a curse but seeing people without it is like watching the animated dead. It completely creeps me out.

  The physical therapist said the best thing for my body was movement. She recommended I go for walks around the ward when I was up to it but the wheelchair allowed me to rest when I got tired and I didn’t have to deal with that stupid IV stand.

  The hallways were filled with the refuges of the worst life lessons Seattle had to offer. Gunshot victims, people on the bad side of car accidents, people involved in any of a myriad of possible violent endings that left them in horrific states of barely living.

  On my third night of what had already become my normal rounds, I was hit by the most bizarre sensation. By hit me, I mean that in almost the literal sense. A gust of wind had silently blown over me and left traces of something I couldn’t identify in its wake. At first I attributed it to the pain killers but that as the feeling continued to grow I knew better. The energy was all around. Something inside that energy was calling to me, calling for me. I found myself looking for something but I didn’t know what. Somewhere around me, somewhere nearby there was someone that needed to be found. I knew it would be here but I had no idea how or why I knew. I slowly pushed the chair past darkened room doors. Turning a corner just past the nurses’ station I knew I had found what I was supposed to. The pain in the Darkness ahead of me nearly made me gasp.