Read Online The Everborn by Nicholas Grabowsky - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nicholas Grabowsky
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occurrence, when I came to, felt like I’d blinked out rather than blacked .
The abrupt rudeness in my unforeseen dismissal left me with a resentment of having been cheated out of a promise. Had I done something wrong? Had the plans been diverted, relocated elsewhere? Had the torch been passed to a more suitable and less clumsy candidate?
If I opened my eyes, would I find myself home again, shaken to attention by Auntie Emm’s black-and-white realities where all my friends had been with me all along?
It appeared that the scene had made its debut almost as awkwardly as I had made the scene, toppling from what I knew into what I knew the next moment, then into what I was learning still. I was a victim of parody, a parody of myself, an obscene portrayal of mock tangibility suffering sporadic power failures from a projection room in the theatre of my mind.
As for the Powers That Be...well, for me, the Powers That Be weren’t the powers that they used to be.
I opened my eyes.
I was no longer in the diner.
I found myself before an electric typewriter baring a blank sheet of inserted paper.
I jolted upwards and awake.
Jumping the gun of throttled instinct gave way to realizing I had not been rejected and returned to my home after all. My environment remained foreign. I faced a cheap wooden student’s desk, its two drawers planted like two weathered square boxes to the right of the encompassing leg space beneath my view. I faced the swirls of plain plaster yellow of a wall against which clung the desk’s backside, and the wall opened to my left, into a gaping black vestibule which reflected dim movement from deep within its center. An overhead lampshade blossomed from drooping chain links in a tarnished embroidery of rose petals, bathing me in a spotlight of webbed fumes from a cigarette.
Without thinking, I reached towards a desktop ashtray that wasn’t there. I’d quit smoking years ago, sometime in my mid-twenties, and I had to remind myself so.
Someone else was smoking.
The movement of light within the black vestibule upon my next gaze was now a splinter of reflection from a mirror hung over a wash basin.
Someone was with me.
Someone was behind me, smoking a cigarette behind me.
I was no longer in the diner.
I was in a motel room.
***
The Watcher made himself known when I turned to face his presence behind me.
He was smoking, exhaling smoke which tumbled and twisted in vaporous streams throughout my realm of lamplight. He was seated at the edge of the room’s only bed, a queen-sized bed, unmoving and silent, his cloaked configuration facing an average-sized rectangular motel room window, his back turned toward me. The drapes were opened, the window was shut, my lamplight’s reflection bouncing blindness off the window’s glass surface together with the circular birch brown embroidery of the bedcovers thrown evenly and smoothly over the mattress and bloated twin pillows.
Cigarette ashes fell from a smoldering filter tipped between fingers tenebrous and pale. It lowered, the figure lowering himself slowly with it, crushing the butt into an ashtray nest half full of smokes previously spent and destroyed upon the bed beside him.
His countenance drawn for a moment beneath a perimeter of light, I beheld the windowed reflection of a wizened and familiar creature, clothed under a thick garment of cotton-white complimentary motel bathrobe, complete with what appeared to be an attached hood shrouding its head like a Bible-land holy man.
My pulse quickened at its very sight, and I was at once frozen in a half-twisted turn against the padded cup of my chair’s wooden back rest. Speechless, I knew only the thrill of enchantment within the presence of destiny’s unspeakable climax of enlightened truth; I could not imagine a sensation more sobering than this, than at long last brought into an intimate confrontation with mankind’s ageless mystery in the flesh.
Rubber-smooth knuckles curved and curled
The abrupt rudeness in my unforeseen dismissal left me with a resentment of having been cheated out of a promise. Had I done something wrong? Had the plans been diverted, relocated elsewhere? Had the torch been passed to a more suitable and less clumsy candidate?
If I opened my eyes, would I find myself home again, shaken to attention by Auntie Emm’s black-and-white realities where all my friends had been with me all along?
It appeared that the scene had made its debut almost as awkwardly as I had made the scene, toppling from what I knew into what I knew the next moment, then into what I was learning still. I was a victim of parody, a parody of myself, an obscene portrayal of mock tangibility suffering sporadic power failures from a projection room in the theatre of my mind.
As for the Powers That Be...well, for me, the Powers That Be weren’t the powers that they used to be.
I opened my eyes.
I was no longer in the diner.
I found myself before an electric typewriter baring a blank sheet of inserted paper.
I jolted upwards and awake.
Jumping the gun of throttled instinct gave way to realizing I had not been rejected and returned to my home after all. My environment remained foreign. I faced a cheap wooden student’s desk, its two drawers planted like two weathered square boxes to the right of the encompassing leg space beneath my view. I faced the swirls of plain plaster yellow of a wall against which clung the desk’s backside, and the wall opened to my left, into a gaping black vestibule which reflected dim movement from deep within its center. An overhead lampshade blossomed from drooping chain links in a tarnished embroidery of rose petals, bathing me in a spotlight of webbed fumes from a cigarette.
Without thinking, I reached towards a desktop ashtray that wasn’t there. I’d quit smoking years ago, sometime in my mid-twenties, and I had to remind myself so.
Someone else was smoking.
The movement of light within the black vestibule upon my next gaze was now a splinter of reflection from a mirror hung over a wash basin.
Someone was with me.
Someone was behind me, smoking a cigarette behind me.
I was no longer in the diner.
I was in a motel room.
***
The Watcher made himself known when I turned to face his presence behind me.
He was smoking, exhaling smoke which tumbled and twisted in vaporous streams throughout my realm of lamplight. He was seated at the edge of the room’s only bed, a queen-sized bed, unmoving and silent, his cloaked configuration facing an average-sized rectangular motel room window, his back turned toward me. The drapes were opened, the window was shut, my lamplight’s reflection bouncing blindness off the window’s glass surface together with the circular birch brown embroidery of the bedcovers thrown evenly and smoothly over the mattress and bloated twin pillows.
Cigarette ashes fell from a smoldering filter tipped between fingers tenebrous and pale. It lowered, the figure lowering himself slowly with it, crushing the butt into an ashtray nest half full of smokes previously spent and destroyed upon the bed beside him.
His countenance drawn for a moment beneath a perimeter of light, I beheld the windowed reflection of a wizened and familiar creature, clothed under a thick garment of cotton-white complimentary motel bathrobe, complete with what appeared to be an attached hood shrouding its head like a Bible-land holy man.
My pulse quickened at its very sight, and I was at once frozen in a half-twisted turn against the padded cup of my chair’s wooden back rest. Speechless, I knew only the thrill of enchantment within the presence of destiny’s unspeakable climax of enlightened truth; I could not imagine a sensation more sobering than this, than at long last brought into an intimate confrontation with mankind’s ageless mystery in the flesh.
Rubber-smooth knuckles curved and curled