There was indeed a mark to the right of my left shoulder blade. It was almost overshadowed by the blackening of my skin, which I thought for a moment might indicate I was dying, but the doctor did say that all I suffered was severe bruising. The bruise covered the left half of my back and infringed across my spine to the right, where the edges purpled and greened. Vance had probed it gently to see how it had been feeling, but being on the painkillers, I really couldn’t feel much aside from a tenderness.

“What did you get hit with again?” Vance asked curiously, a sad, pained look on his face
as he caressed my back.

“A tire, I was told,” I answered, trying to crane my head back to look at the mark. It was in a place that it was difficult for me to see it by just turning around. “What does it look like?”

Vance leaned in closer, and I could see him in the mirror with this concentrated look on his face that morphed into one of concern, and he glanced up at me and said, “It actually looks like a burn, Ama. Where did this come from?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.

“Do you know when you got it? Because it’s pretty big,” he said, tracing the outline with a finger lightly. Goosebumps arose along the path he traced, and it was a strange sensation to the bruise. I could feel him tracing the mark from the top, which was just below the start of my shoulder blade and ended a little below my shoulder blade. I looked up to the mirror, forgetting about the triangle, and surprising myself again to see that it was now a blushing pink against my caramel skin.

“Ah, what the hell is going on with me?” I sighed, poking at the mark beneath my eye.

Vance looked up, pulled my shirt down and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulled me close.

“Whatever happens, I’ll still be here, okay?” he said softly. I turned around in his embrace and buried my face in his chest.

“What if it’s something really, really weird?”

“Still gonna be here,” he said nonchalantly.

“Promise?”

“I pinky promise.” I held up my pinky without moving my head, and he wrapped his around mine.

“Remember, if you break this, I’m taking your pinky,” I said, looking up at him, and he smiled down at me with a warm expression, said, “I will happily give it to you if I ever break it. I can’t hold your hand if I don’t have you here, so what’s the point?”

“You–” I snapped, a wild expression coming over my face, “You’re too much.”

“Really? I don’t think I’m enough for you.”

“Why ever would you have such an absurd thought?” But he didn’t answer; he just shook his head and suddenly grabbed me and carried me back to the living room, and I let out a peal of laughter at the surprise.

For the rest of the day and into the evening, we sat in the living room just chatting and hanging out and enjoying each other’s company. My fears and anxieties dissolved around him,  and I loved him for that. I didn’t know how much I craved normalcy until he was around, and when he was, I couldn’t get enough of that. Hours passed, but they felt like moments with him, and I wished time could go on for forever with him, in this moment, even if it meant my back was messed up and I was essentially bed-ridden. He was here with me, and that made me feel better than before and forget about the world and its oddities.

Somewhere around five, my father arrived home, then around seven, my mother, and around eight, Jo stopped by to give me a rundown of what I was missing from school.

“Have you been here all day?” my mother asked Vance as she passed into the kitchen.

“Yeah, I’ve just been keeping Ama company. Nochi won’t do it,” he laughed, gesturing to my small black dog, who was now lounging on the adjacent couch.

“Ah, thank you for that,” she smiled at him. “Did you eat? Are you guys hungry at all?”

“We’ve been munching on and off all day,” I answered, stretching from a short nap I had taken. I’d been sleeping on and off all day, as well. Vance had insisted I lay down for most of the day to allow my back to rest and heal, and then he’d swaddled me in blankets and brought me cocoa.

“Lil’ couch potato,” I heard my father call from the basement. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a diet?”

“Hey, I’m a couch bean, okay,” I called back. “And I’m on bedrest!”

My father just scoffed loudly, and my mother said as she passed us, “Well, I’ve got some food here if you’re still hungry.”

Jo was sitting beside us, splaying out various school papers on the coffee table. I groaned, and she just laughed and said, “Yeah, tell me about it. I don’t want to do this either.”

Vance got up then and stretched out. I looked up at him curiously, and he said, “I should probably get going.” My face fell instantly, but I repressed the whine in my voice and the needy words I wanted to say.

“Aw, don’t do that,” he said with a sympathetic smile.

“But, I’m going to miss you,” I frowned.

“Hey, me too,” he said, bending down to look me in the eyes. “I’m gonna miss me, too.”

“Oh, shut up,” I sneered, playfully smacking his arm.

He smirked, said, “I actually need to take care of some business back at home. I’ll come by and check on you tomorrow later on in the evening.”

“You don’t have to,” I smiled.

“I want to. Gotta make sure my best friend is okay,” he smiled back.

I returned the smile with an exasperated look, and said, “Here, let me walk you out.”

“No, no, hang out. Relax,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “The painkillers are going to be wearing off soon, I think, because you only took one today, right?”

“That was a pretty intense one,” I exhaled, remembering how it had knocked me out about an hour after I took it.

“Yeah, well unless you take another one, I’m sure the pain is going to be intense, too,” he chuckled, bending down to give me a tight hug. I returned the squeeze, and he said, “Let me know if anything happens, okay?”

“Can I call you for a milkshake at 3 AM?”

“You can call me for french fries and milkshakes at 3 AM,” he corrected.

“You know me too well,” I smirked. He just grinned and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, sunshine.”

“Bye,” I beamed back as he left. I sighed happily, and Jo cleared her throat beside me, and I said with a playful smirk, “Right, you’re here, too.”

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” she said pointedly. I just laughed, and she spent the next hour or so trying to teach me some calculus and physics, which was just as bad as if I were in class, but it needed to be done. I couldn’t start the semester with a nose dive to the ground.

School. Right. That was a thing for me. I sighed, thinking to myself that one day I would be grateful for all this stupid boring stuff. I hadn’t even told Vance about that woman in my room, and I still questioned if she was real or not, but her words suddenly rang within me.

Someday, probably soon, I’d be in danger, and it’s because someone close to me was going to put me there. I glanced at Jo as she continued on about vectors or whatever. Shaking my head lightly, I laughed at myself. The sky was blue, and Jo was my best friend. She would never betray me.

The dream I had late that night was different than the dreams I’d had before. In those other dreams, I was always someone, and I knew exactly who I was, right down to concrete, intimate details. In this dream, I was flying through the sky, and it didn’t matter who I was. All that mattered was that moment, and that I was existing within it. It was serene and peaceful. It was a feeling I hadn’t felt in a while. I was soaring high above the clouds, the sun resting gently on the horizon, and the sky was a mosaic of warm peaches and pale blushes with rays of gold cast through its vastness. Streaks of red and pink and lavender danced on the edge of the clouds, and it was warm. I was warm.

This is home, I thought in my dream. This is where I belong. My place is here, among the clouds, with him.

And I turned around in the air and looked up to the sky, where I could almost see past the atmosphere to the stars above. It was so beautiful, everything was so beautiful and so amazing and just a miracle. I hit a cool breeze briefly, and feeling the air coursing through my hair and my feathers, I looked at my back and again realized I had a pair of glorious, crème colored wings on my back. As if realizing again that I was something more, something amazing, I spread them out wide and soared higher into the sky, spinning in the air and relishing in me, relishing in my life and the feeling of being alive. I’d never felt so joyous and wonderful and alive, but what commanded my attention most was gratefulness. I was forever and deeply
indebted and grateful to the one who gave me this life, to Omnis.

A wide, ecstatic smile spread across my face as I let out a wild cry of joy, the purest sound I could create, and someone was laughing with me, and I turned around to see him, relish in him, but he was just a silhouette. I knew him well, almost better than I knew myself, and I felt love. So much love. It was amazing; it was almost as if it was bursting out of me, and all I could do was shed a tear at him, at my One. I was so in love with him; at times I almost couldn’t comprehend it. If we were dreams to humans, he was the dream to me; something, someone so amazing and beautiful and loving and compassionate and someone so close to perfection, I almost couldn’t fathom it, and he was mine.

I beat my wings hard to propel myself up to him, and he stilled himself in the air as I reached my arms out to him, tasting his name on my tongue, feeling his name in my mouth, and relishing the word on my lips. Before I could call out his name, the One, my One– my alarm woke me up. I bolted upright, still almost feeling the exhilaration of the wind in my wings, and I looked around silently, breathing hard, thinking to myself, Is that who I’m supposed to be now?

I’d had those thoughts before, looking up at the sky and thinking, believing that’s where I should have been. In the sky, encompassed by such beauty and freedom was where I belonged. I always dismissed the thought as some fatally gorgeous idea of suicide. Looking side to side, I asked myself aloud, “Was I an angel?”

Of course, there was no answer to my redundant question. Shaking my head, I decided to put that thought away. It was ridiculous and didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. In the last few days, nothing was making any sort of sense, and my dreams didn’t add any clarity to any of it.

I went to stretch my arms wide, and stifled a yelp of pain immediately. The pain on my back had finally hit me now that my body had time to completely process the drugs out of my system. Stiffly and painfully, I leaned over to my side table and popped a painkiller in my mouth, swallowed it dry. I knew it would be a while before it finally kicked in, so I bit my tongue and soldiered through it for the next hour or so. In that time, I got up and brushed my teeth, washed my face, went downstairs to the kitchen, made some food, and situated myself in front of the TV. There really wasn’t much else for me to do. The stay-at-home order from the doctor had gone into effect immediately, so by the time I woke up, both of my parents were already out of the house.

This was how my days ran until the weekend, really. Sit in front of the TV, occasionally decide to pick up some knitting needles, play the flute, read a book, write a little, but I mostly just watched TV and anime, groaning out loud to a silent house about how the protagonist and love interest should just kiss already, or how this one-shot anime should have had a season two. I paid particular attention to the news. Vance, Jo, and Bond all came to visit me on different days, but they’d all sit with me for at least a couple of hours, of which I was thankful for since my parents really didn’t show up until the late evening. I spent most of my time alone and in my head, so it was fair to say I was fairly depressed for that time. I paid careful attention to not wander too deep into the depths, especially about the events that put me there in the first place. I tried to put those things in a box and hid it away while I studied the patterns of the news or escaped into the colorful worlds of anime.

Life outside the house was just as shitty as I knew it would be and had been before I was house-locked. It seemed drug use was on the rise across the country. There were numerous heroin busts especially. People seemed to lose their sense of humanity as they either killed people in a fit of rage or tried to. I noticed a lot of them said they blacked out. To add to the mix, the Azelian murders were on the rise, too, as apparently two more people had been added to that list of strange murders. One was in Canada, the other in Washington. Both people had their necks broken at impossible angles, as was trademark of the Azelian cases.

The Azelian cultists that had been detained still said nothing, and I wondered what all was going on. All across the country and the world, it seemed everyone was just giving up and giving in to themselves and their instinctual anger and violence. Our town was nothing special. The local news had come out with the details of the incident. The man I had dragged from the truck had survived. He was stable now, but it seemed he was paralyzed from his shoulders down. His name was Anderson Wells. His dog, Spike, had as well survived, but they needed to amputate his front paw. The little girl I had dragged out had indeed been Anderson’s daughter, and her name had been Bethany Angeline, Bethy for short. She was only seven years old, and they’d been on their way to some country town to deliver some prize horses that they’d bred, of which four of the seven had been permanently disabled, rendering them useless. Two had died in the crash, and one had died in surgery.

The man who had caused the accident was named Bradley Lowe, and he’d been under the influence of heroin mixed with meth at the time of the incident. No one still knows why he decided to cut such a sharp turn, but there’s speculation it may have had to do with a hallucination he might have been suffering from the drugs. The news had decided to look in to him, to try to understand how he had gotten that way, see if it could have been prevented, but it seemed he had only recently started using drugs. Before that, Bradley was a successful store manager for a retail chain for cosmetics. His life had pretty much been set, as he’d had a wife and child that were doing very well. During an interview, the wife, Lisa, couldn’t understand where or why he had chosen to all of a sudden turn to drugs.

“He was fine one day, and then all of a sudden he just starts sinking in all this money and becoming more distant and I couldn’t understand why,” she confessed to a reporter, teary-eyed and tired. “It didn’t take me long to see he was using drugs, but he’d just suddenly changed. Brad was so loving and caring and compassionate before, and then all of sudden, it was like he was a different person. He started to get more short and started yelling and he—he even began to raise his hands to us.”

“And you say this all just happened with no warning?” the reporter asked, and all Lisa could do was nod her head.

I changed the channel then. Shaking my head, the only thing I could think was that the world was just becoming progressively worse, and I wanted to try to make sense of it, find a pattern, see what was coming and if these were all just warning signs, but nothing made sense. Nothing ever made sense with things like this, these seemingly random acts of violence.

“Maybe you should consider other things, then. Things that don’t make sense,” someone said suddenly. I snapped around, trying to find the source of the voice. It was a man’s voice, and it was a familiar one, but I quickly dismissed it. My heart was racing then. Ghosts? Did we have a ghost problem?

The voice laughed, spoke again, “Maybe you should embrace the madness, Ama. You should know the rhyme or reason isn’t ours to know.” I jumped up, eyes wide and staring as I looked around, instantly on edge. That voice was too clear for it to have been a ghost. All my knowledge of ghost behavior, credit to numerous ghost movies, told me ghosts didn’t do the straight forward thing. They liked to get in your head and drive you crazy, so where was this voice coming from?

“Who’s there?” I called to the house I knew was empty. Nochi looked up at me from her place on the couch. I looked over at her and asked, “You heard that, too, right?” But she just gave me that look of hers, the one that clearly said, “You’re probably crazy.”

I shook my head and sat back down. This had to be some auditory hallucination from the drugs. I didn’t take strong painkillers often, so it had to be that. Closing my eyes, some deep part of me rumbling and overwhelming, I inhaled deeply, and on the exhale out, I breathed,

“You are stressed out and on drugs. This is all in your head, it’s nothing”

“You can keep telling yourself that until you can’t,” he said again, this time right next to me. I kept my eyes closed, forcing myself to push the voice from my head.

“You don’t have much time. This life is a farce, and the truth of who you are will be coming to light,” he whispered, his voice slowly fading away. The doorbell rang then, and I went to go answer it.

“Be wary of the ones around you,” he echoed to me once more before disappearing into the air.

“Oh, hey Evelyn, what’s up?” I asked, opening the door, forcing out nonchalance. She was wearing a band t-shirt and holding a tray of brownies. She gave me a big smile and said, “I came to check up on you. I brought some special brownies, too.”

“Did you really?” I smiled, leaning in to sniff the brownies, and sure enough, there was the tell-tale scent of something deep and earthy. “Sweet, we can hang out and watch Adventure Time, then.”

“Hell yeah, dude.”

“Is everything alright at work?” I asked as I gestured for her to come inside.

“Yeah, Tony’s being a dick like usual, but everything else is fine. Everyone’s a little freaked, but they’re all fine for the most part. It’s just kind of boring now since people haven’t wanted to come in as much.”

“Aw, so nothing new then,” I chuckled as we sat in the living room. Nochi was no longer in her spot, I saw. Instead, I heard her growling softly in the distance. I rolled my eyes. She just didn’t like some people, and this time it was Evelyn. She and I hung out for a while, just chatting lightly and munching on the brownies. Soon, my eyesight grew hazy and relaxed, and I slipped into a comfortable shadow, where I was hiding from myself but not running towards the darkness. That was a sticky peacefulness that was just almost too heavy.

I lay back against the couch, letting the drug carry me away to a place lighter than this one now, where the shadows of my world seemed a million miles away in a place that had nothing to do with me. All that mattered, or seemed even mildly intriguing, to me was what was on the TV, which was some old rerun of an Adventure Time episode. I vaguely thought of how I might cherish these moments, these slow, nostalgic moments sometime in the future. A wild thought crossed my mind as I placed voice to face to name. I couldn’t be certain the woman was Madison Grier, but the man had definitely been Donovan Cole from my dreams. The last sober part of me sank to the ground. Maybe I really was losing my mind, or why else would I be hearing these voices? Despite my attempt to rationalize my slipping mind, the words echoed ominously through my head. I chose to ignore it anyway. Madison Grier and Donovan Cole were creations of my overactive imagination, desperate to find something more in the reality of living that seemed too real, which was altogether too much and simultaneously not enough for my hyperactive mind.

But the chances of them being real were more in favor than against. I never looked into either Madison or Donovan’s history or life, or anyone else’s for that matter, for the sole reason of being too afraid of what I might find. Life wasn’t enough for me sometimes, complicated by trivial matters like maintaining relationships with people and trying to actually function and thrive where the odds were stacked against me. There was comfort and believing I was outfitted with a brain whose makeup was suited for survival, not living, but there was always that part of me brining me back to earth, telling me that I was destined for anonymity like the billions before me. There was a bitter comfort in being consigned to a position of no particular importance, no particular standard. What was I supposed to do if I found that there were things meant for me? ‘Purpose’ wasn’t a word I’d ascribe to existence, so what was I supposed to do if

I had one? Just do it? What then?

“You think too much,” Evelyn said shortly. I flinched at the sound of her voice. It wasn’t just that I had forgotten she was there, which I absolutely and completely had, but it was also the tone of her voice. There was a certain edge to it, a concealed malice that hinted at an almost boundless contempt for me.

I glanced at her sideways and said in a succinct tone, “Yeah. I do.”

“Quit,” she said shortly. She tried to cover it with a laugh, but it ended up sounding forced. My eyes drifted back to the TV, where Magic Man was exploring the chaos of his psyche with Betty. Simon was mentioning something, his character serving a metaphorical purpose in this episode. Don’t forget your floaties, I thought to myself as Simon’s character mouthed the words on screen.

“Can’t help it. I wasn’t blessed with mental autonomy,” I murmured with a smirk. Evelyn was quiet for a moment, and I glanced at her again. She was facing me now, and for some reason, her face looked distorted. Her eyes had sunken deep into her face and her face cheeks were hollow, her bones struggling to keep the structure. Her hair had become dirty, gray and, straw-like, and her lips thin and drawn back in a furious, menacing scowl. I spun my head to look at her full on, startled by the expression, but she was looking back at the TV with a dark sneer on her face.

“None of you are,” was all she said. In an instant, I was uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be rude and kick her out so suddenly, so I stayed silent and tried to focus on Magic Man and Betty, and I guess Finn and Jake had been turned into soup and bread. Despite trying to throw myself more into the high, Evelyn had someway somehow effectively killed it for me, and I was very, very aware of how little I actually knew about her, then.