When were you last scared Ch.1

Look to the sky, clear and unmistakable Milky Way arm stars revolve and spin in still speckled luminance, it is an embrace with eternal reassurances that "you I or we are never alone."  In no time since or before is it possible to appreciate or explain “grand,” to even try to make sense of it.  The view renders everything small.  Holds a conscious particle infinitely finite, but not alone.  Out in the expanse, a billion times seven particles wriggle, mingle to make sense of the cosmic worm’s eye. 
At this moment, the finite bit of human space dust sitting with me' a dear friend, a brother, a wise rogue crazy as hell with the grit and stones to balance it all out. We’re two weeks into a six-week, four-man bachelor party.  A road trip from Las Vegas to New Jersey planned by the mad and executed in the way of travel by snakes.
The night's calm, clear.  Little fire dances light shadow upon faces we sit here drifting through thought story and life lived as future comes.  A fine collection.  Brave bold riders in the know of the spell.

Landed in sin city, with great haste got the hell out...fast.  Leading the world's gambling and artificial light, opened the town to corner the market on dispensing cheap RV’s to strangers on credit and subtle imagination songs.  The whole crew - me, Alex, Bobby, and Mayfree - hit the highway two hours after touch down.  Set loose to roads, endless desert sands, rich rock wealth, and other forms of persistent stubborn life.  

Plan is a circle.  The way: imperfect but circular.  Snaking through the tip of Arizona into Utah come Colorado great Grand Canyon make a left to start back around and bring the snake to its tail.   It’s about twenty, thirty minutes into Arizona, just out of the high, gray canyon walls that flank Vegas' eastern exit before my lips part, “the desert’s alive.”

Little physically alive, other than us, and still the unmistakable breath of life saturates all around - in every blending, fading color of sky and stone.  A contrast, an archetype space between two things, this is the desert west of song and mythology, it is our present unfolding maze.  The loose goal at this point is to make it to the south edge of the Grand Canyon then turn west and run the canyon's length west to the north end and arch back down into Northern Nevada returning to Vegas with every whim and loosely constructed plan along the way given its due time and grace before the plane leaves the desert to lx’s wedding day.

Nothing compares to a desert sunset. As a whole, the desert’s a body ever in flux and every change trades on majesty and awe. Days shift seasons in substance and earth. The desert becomes and wears, but something of a sunset in its cradle humbles all other passing, transient time there. Our sun vanishes into distant foothills. We two, us, me, him trek to the fading. Savoring the exquisite death dance as long as possible in the pull of the compulsory watercolor melting into the west of legend. Darkness, distance, and a confused sense of direction snap our mutually incompatible total awareness and sputtering judgment. We return in the dark to our spot and mobile lifeline to civilization.

Lx built the fire. He could make a fire from raindrops. It takes the place of the sun between us and grows deep smiles and easy rest. I’m laughing my ass off ten minutes later.

Now, here’s why we’re laughing. Walking back to the camper, neither of us discuss the possibility that we’re lost and heading in the wrong direction, certain we’re lost. I can’t stop laughing, at the dual admission. Except out there, for a minute, it wasn’t funny, not funny at all.

"When was the last time you were scared,” the question rises out of lull silence, “terrified?"

“I’m fearless.”

“Fearless…You do better than most, but I figure that’s stupidity.”

“Right. Course, there’s no difference between em’. Ever seen a cliff jumper in a flying squirrel outfit…fearless and stupid…yin and yang.”

“Hand in hand. So what is it? Was it? Everyone’s scared of something.”

“Everyone gets the fear.”

“I like that, the fear. It sounds…it sounds exact, accurate. Scared comes childish and terrified exaggerated, but the fear. The fear’s a pierced bulls eye on the dart board of terror, dead on.”

“Dead on, yea…dead right. I was young, but it was the worst I’ve known. I was kidnapped.”

“What? Seriously?”

“In Western Pennsylvania. Fuckin weird place. You been?”

“Na.”

“Well, it’s coal country. The whole region is sort of collectively beaten down and broken. Generations of unsympathetic, underground work. Human fodder tearing away at the earth and the earth taking just as much back.”

“Only thing I know of the area is from the trails. The Appalachians shift from one kind of creepy below Virginia to a whole other kind of fucked up in the Alleghenies. Nothing but decrepit mutant Norman Rockwell towns. Old houses bereft of the hope and former glory. I’m couldn’t tell if the people follow the lead of the houses or the other way around, but something’s missing up there, something you can’t quite name. I don’t think they can name it either, but they know it’s gone and not coming back. Your right though, working the earth’s bowels forever shapes you, shapes every thing. I guess mother natures got a long memory.”

“She better. But yea, the people are surface nice but trust not or maybe just be weary. It’s beautiful country, that’s the thing, especially when it has a layer of snow over it. But you’re right, there’s another side that’s dark and sad and unnerving. Something scarred stirs beneath that snow, something disturbing.”

“The Amish?”

“Yea, the fucking Amish. American Gothic.”

“So what happened?”

“We were at some big store in a strip mall. I wandered outside. These two, this lady and some guy, they just grabbed me up. Not even hard or belligerent. They weren’t shaking me or running or anything. They just took me by the arms, lifted me up like a plastic ball rolling down the street. Just picked me up, walked to their car and left.”

“God damn. That would give me the fear. For life. They let you go? Or you run away or something?”

“No, I think, or I’m told, it was a few minutes after the car left before mom realized I was gone and started freaking out. Someone told her that they saw me leave in an old, beat up Cordova with two people. I guess she started screaming. I can only imagine it was gut-wrenching panic for about an hour or so,…for her.”

“Your poor mom. You know there’s nothing…there is….that’s terror…terror without answers. The worst kind.”

“So I’ve heard. The car was pulled over heading into the mountains. I was rescued.”

“Man, nothing, not even your own death compares to that level of fear. Your poor mom.”

“I hardly remember it,… what actually happened. I don’t even think at the time I knew what was going on. Still it fucked up the rest of my childhood. Hearing constant stories about it. Listening to recreations and what if’s and all this shit that was finished, over, left behind, not to be relived. That one hour was poison. My family made it poison and just as poison its effects took time but once they set in the hobbling was total.”

“Well, every parent screws up their kids eventually.”

“I guess, but what should have been an emotional end and reunion, a light at the end of the tunnel, caved in both sides of the track. Nothing could ever come or go again, not for a while anyways. For the first time in my life I had fear. Every night they came, powerful, vivid nightmares of vicious kidnappings, every night for years. The only repeating dreams I‘ve ever had. I recreated an event in my mind I couldn’t even remember, and I helped it grow worse and worse every night feeding it all the shape and color others dangled around me, and my fear night and day consumed years.”

“Are you ok to talk about it?”

“I guess I am now. If I talk about I control it, and it has no power.”

“You should write it down. Let other people know, and that way you wouldn’t have to actually go through it over and over. Just write it down and it can live there, forever. Never bother you again.”

“Maybe you’re right. I guarantee you I’m not the only one with some ugly in the background. We should start collecting these stories. Everyone’s got one. We can take them and make something of this fear. Besides I’m a good listener and my fingers work. What’s to lose?”

-- Chap 2. --

"A Scene Added" (to Chapter 27 of The Hunger Games)

I keep an eye out for places in texts where the author has not told the reader everything I want to know and when we found, these places deserve a pencil and fill in the missing link.

I started reading Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games.  I liked it and there were times I couldn't put it down the basic plot was reminiscent of Stephen King's The Running Man.  As I was approaching the end of the novel I came across this opportunity to add to the story.

".....the needle jabs me from behind.”

 When I wake, I’m afraid to move at first......"

On page 348, in between the third and forth paragraphs, immediately after Peeta and Katniss win the games and are picked up by the hovercraft and Katniss is put under…….

This is what happens to Katniss while she is unconscious in surgery following the games:

(P. 348) “...........When the needle jabs me from behind.”

I’m pounding on the glass, raving mad, angry. Anger and fear control my thoughts and body. I’m a wounded, cornered beast protecting its cub and its fragile hold on the status quo and life itself. Pounding and shrieking till my fists go right through the glass without shatter or sound and then I’m falling.

Slowly at first but quicker and quicker I fall right through the floor of the hovercraft. No, not through it, with it, down a tunnel colored hovercraft grey then blurred with speed. Falling and falling and falling. I’ve been drifting down for so long that the absence of time and rushing wind or any feeling of momentum is lost and I can no longer tell if I’m even moving or in which if any direction. Weightless. I can’t feel my body. Lifting my arms up and kicking my legs around and shaking all over assures me everything is there and still working. As I float and dance limbs just to make sense of basic functions, the color and substance of my body starts to fall off with every movement I make. Like undone yarn in a knit sweater I watch in terror as the color, the appearance of my body, my me, comes unraveled and falls away and I think one last thought, “the games have finally taken away everything that Katniss was, is, could ever be.” And then it’s silence and nothing and I am gone.

My eyes open and I’m back in the arena, back in the games. The forest ruffles and flutters all around. It’s alive with life, alive with dinner I think and smile. I can hear the movement of various game, large and small, everywhere. Its loud, too loud, nothing but Peeta moves that loud through the woods. Feeling a tremble build in the ground, I wonder if the Gamemakers are creating an earthquake, and looking down I see cup size pockets of the earth open up all around me, hundreds of them, and ants pour out of the earth like black lava and run an ever shrinking circle around me as they get bigger and bigger until the ants are the size of cats and are running up my legs and chest and bore into my eyeballs. I can feel them crawling through my head and in the groves of my brain and then I can see inside of my self and the ants are all small again but have images like pinpoint televisions on their midnight black backs. Yet I can clearly make out every detail, and every detail is manifest terror and fear. I watch Prim and my father die a thousand times in a thousand different ways on a thousand different screens and then the ants pop like cooked corn into orange bubbles and my entire body fills with orange bubbles squiggling and scrunching and bumping and rolling smoothly turning over on each other. Congealing and opening up turning inside out and expanding and absorbing until I realize the orange bubbles are just fireflies, no nats and I swat at them. With an invisible brush of the hand they are gone and I’m on my side in the fetal position shaking with violent convulsions until I pass out and come to 50 ft up in the air in a tree and I move and fall but my belt catches and breaks and then I fall again and pass out just before I hit.

My eyes open and I’m still in the wooded arena but everywhere around me, save this patch of trees, is in flux. The sky is revolving, spinning a fast motion blur of color, like a million designer candles melting inside one of the capitol’s brass and nickel laundry dryers. Only it’s not just colors spreading like spun mercury. Clear as point blank range in the sky above, the nightly death-tell images of the tributes, everyone of them bear down on me, point at me, and stare with distant eyes ripe with unmistakable sad, angry malevolence. Then even they begin to shift and transition with the colors into and out of beastly-mutated wolves and then back to human apparitions pointing and flailing their arms and growing fur and then back to skin and hands, paws, nails, and claws emerging and tearing away at the space between us when suddenly the tribute wolves begin falling to the forest floor one by one. They land with a crash and in a heartbeat’s flit and blip they encircle me. Instinctively, I reach for arrows and fire off ten or so before I watch the arrows hit the wolves in the face and turn into flowers, the violet-yellow-white wildflowers I put on Rue’s face. Rue, I think for the first time and without realization I scream her name. “RUEEEEE….,” My voice pierces the air and suddenly she materializes lunging straight at me, all wolf save for Rue’s fearless eyes. As the compact mass of fur arcs at me the head seamlessly shifts to a deceptively docile Rue face. She pounces on me tearing away at my body with razor claws and whistling her end of work song while tears fall out of my eyes and drift straight up landing on her face and run along her cheek bones and seep into the cracks of her eyes just as a spear flies out of nothing piercing her chest cavity. She screams and a dark crescent shaped loaf of bread explodes and falls from her mouth as she is blown backwards by the impact and disappears. In a instant it begins to rain. The wolves fade away with each drop until nothing is left. It rains harder and harder and the beads grow more thick and massive and constant, and soon, so much water falls, that I’m completely underwater and suffocating, and I realize I want to live. I want to live, but I can’t move. “I want to live,” I shout but only silent bubbles break forth. As I look around I see the floor of this ocean and then I see the roots, my roots, Katniss, and I pull them out of the mud and clench the Katniss tightly in my hand and push off the floor of the ocean and with my right hand upward holding the Katniss I explode out of the water and then I am on a bed.

“When I wake, I’m afraid to move at first.................” (P. 348)