striking looking man leaned over and gave Ms. Grace a deep, delectable kiss that lasted far too long according to Doug. Then the tall Adonis walked over to the cowering teenager and with his thumb, wiped his woman’s lipstick from his mouth.
His other massive hand extended to Doug’s throat and the boy could already feel the deadly constriction, pinching his eyes shut, but Vince simply fisted Doug’s collar in his hand. He wiped the lipstick onto his own shirt and tugged lightly at the boy’s collar to bring him closer, within earshot.
“Don’t be crushing on my fiancée, pal,” his raspy voice whispered in Doug’s face, “this shade of lipstick doesn’t come in ‘Loser’.”
Doug scoffed. In his opinion, Vince belonged in some X-Men comic as a mutant gone wrong, or a zoo. What could she want with that rodent? What on earth did she see in him? Doug couldn’t imagine those lips kissing that freak.
But those lips told him to study his English assignments with a hint of discipline and a splurge of sexuality. This had Douglas taking time out from “Game of Thrones” to study English, an astounding feat on the part of the luscious Ms. Grace. The tale was not dull, at least.
As Icarus struggled to rise above the city below, he flew too close to the sun and his waxen wings began to melt, leaving him, eventually, flapping only his arms and finally he plummeted from the sky into the sea and drowned. Doug fully embraced the poem and the story, imagining what it would be like to soar above the expectations of all who knew him, but he also considered the sun of his perceived abilities perhaps blinding him to his weaknesses and he suddenly nurtured darker possibilities of his wings being clipped by the heat of his positive outlook, leaving him to fall.
“What the hell?” he suddenly said out loud to himself in the midst of the loud mess of punk rock that oozed out of his computer speakers. What surprised him most was how such misery, such unkind doubts, could suddenly cloud his normal state of mind without warning. He was not thinking of anything in particular. He was just reading the story, so how on earth could its negative subtexts infiltrate his subconscious and steer it, once more, towards the falling, the failure and the death of it? Even in context, it appeared as thought something subliminal would use the most trivial matters to remind him of people killing themselves. He knew at once that this was a brand of demon he would not easily be rid of, no matter how he wandered in sunlight and happiness.
He shut the thick book his hot teacher had given him the second week of the new semester and stared into space as the blaring riffs of the unknown bootleg CD pounded his ears. Doug baffled his parents. He could study to a fault and score the highest marks in class while studying in the chaos of heavy metal or punk rock at its loudest. This was the only reason why his folks allowed him to murder the beautiful sounds of birds and wind chimes outside with his unholy taste in music, on occasion. It was as if the cacophony locked out the world and its distractions and truly enabled him to focus. Ludicrous, but true. Now was such a moment. His mind filled with the similes of Icarus, he realised something profound – the thought of suicide in general, its causes, its victims and its hold was not going to stop.
“Well I may as well study it, then,” he said with conviction, agreeing to let the stalking mind demons have their day. If they were going to plague his thoughts, he may as well get to know them and he put down the book to log into the Internet.
Where else could he find unlimited knowledge on a subject? Certainly not in books. On the World Wide Web, he could not only study the phenomenon, but actually interact with others like him. Of course! Why had he not thought of this before?
And this is where it all started. Day after day, he would lock himself in his room after school and seek out like-minded
His other massive hand extended to Doug’s throat and the boy could already feel the deadly constriction, pinching his eyes shut, but Vince simply fisted Doug’s collar in his hand. He wiped the lipstick onto his own shirt and tugged lightly at the boy’s collar to bring him closer, within earshot.
“Don’t be crushing on my fiancée, pal,” his raspy voice whispered in Doug’s face, “this shade of lipstick doesn’t come in ‘Loser’.”
Doug scoffed. In his opinion, Vince belonged in some X-Men comic as a mutant gone wrong, or a zoo. What could she want with that rodent? What on earth did she see in him? Doug couldn’t imagine those lips kissing that freak.
But those lips told him to study his English assignments with a hint of discipline and a splurge of sexuality. This had Douglas taking time out from “Game of Thrones” to study English, an astounding feat on the part of the luscious Ms. Grace. The tale was not dull, at least.
As Icarus struggled to rise above the city below, he flew too close to the sun and his waxen wings began to melt, leaving him, eventually, flapping only his arms and finally he plummeted from the sky into the sea and drowned. Doug fully embraced the poem and the story, imagining what it would be like to soar above the expectations of all who knew him, but he also considered the sun of his perceived abilities perhaps blinding him to his weaknesses and he suddenly nurtured darker possibilities of his wings being clipped by the heat of his positive outlook, leaving him to fall.
“What the hell?” he suddenly said out loud to himself in the midst of the loud mess of punk rock that oozed out of his computer speakers. What surprised him most was how such misery, such unkind doubts, could suddenly cloud his normal state of mind without warning. He was not thinking of anything in particular. He was just reading the story, so how on earth could its negative subtexts infiltrate his subconscious and steer it, once more, towards the falling, the failure and the death of it? Even in context, it appeared as thought something subliminal would use the most trivial matters to remind him of people killing themselves. He knew at once that this was a brand of demon he would not easily be rid of, no matter how he wandered in sunlight and happiness.
He shut the thick book his hot teacher had given him the second week of the new semester and stared into space as the blaring riffs of the unknown bootleg CD pounded his ears. Doug baffled his parents. He could study to a fault and score the highest marks in class while studying in the chaos of heavy metal or punk rock at its loudest. This was the only reason why his folks allowed him to murder the beautiful sounds of birds and wind chimes outside with his unholy taste in music, on occasion. It was as if the cacophony locked out the world and its distractions and truly enabled him to focus. Ludicrous, but true. Now was such a moment. His mind filled with the similes of Icarus, he realised something profound – the thought of suicide in general, its causes, its victims and its hold was not going to stop.
“Well I may as well study it, then,” he said with conviction, agreeing to let the stalking mind demons have their day. If they were going to plague his thoughts, he may as well get to know them and he put down the book to log into the Internet.
Where else could he find unlimited knowledge on a subject? Certainly not in books. On the World Wide Web, he could not only study the phenomenon, but actually interact with others like him. Of course! Why had he not thought of this before?
And this is where it all started. Day after day, he would lock himself in his room after school and seek out like-minded
Similar Books
