Ruby Red Marionette

eleven | vicarious

I would have liked to think that after what happened, I ran off into the moonlight and disappeared. I would have liked to think that this was a movie and the nightmare that had taken place was just a figment of someone’s imagination, that I would be safe until the sequel.

But the icy, brisk wind seeping through the baggy sleeves of Isaiah’s jacket and the fire that seemed to burn the soles of my shoes every time they set foot on the ground were evidence enough that this was far from escapable.

My mind felt like a tangible sphere, rotating faster and faster each time a new thought formed. What my brain was doing couldn’t be considered “thinking”; by the second, as I ran through streets that I couldn’t even begin to identify, the progression of these incoherent sentences coming into my mind were nothing but a manifestation of the little sanity I had left disintegrating.

I could feel myself running faster than I ever had, than I ever thought I needed to. I was keeping up with cars most of the time, and other times my speed was marginally compromised due to the illusion of the clown still following at my heels.

Even as I blazed through the streets, going and going for what felt like miles, my destination seemed to never come. I didn’t have a specific place I wanted to go; I decided that as soon as I set eyes on somewhere familiar, whether it be a hardware store I’d been to before or a house whose owner I vaguely knew, I would stop. I fantasized about that moment as I went, thinking of what it would feel like to finally stop moving, to not feel like my lungs were about to explode. But I didn’t stop, and it dawned on me that maybe I had been running so fast, and for so long, that I missed my destinations long ago.

Somehow, though, it happened. I had reached a neighborhood where, at the wee hours of this morning, people were still out and about. People who didn’t hide their curiosity and amazement at me, whether it be my speed or stamina or the bewildered expression that was probably on my face. I couldn’t feel my hands. I couldn’t feel the ground below me.

Suddenly I stood in front of the studio.

I tore through the front door, only stopping when I reached the lobby. The lights were off, Sarah was gone, and the entire building seemed to be asleep. I had never heard my own breath so loudly.

I leaned over the table, wincing as the fire in my chest died down and my legs stopped shaking. My fingers began to defrost, the feeling coming back to them at an agonizingly slow pace. The recovery process was not nearly as relieving as I had imagined it.

As I stood there, bent over a secretary’s counter feeling close to fainting, the thoughts that were in my mind before had fled. The rapid rotation had stopped. A pulverizing pain had replaced it, an excruciating throbbing every few seconds. There was only one thought in my mind now, one image, one sequence of words and letters and sounds that would haunt me forever unless I didn’t die here, bent over Sarah’s desk.

You shouldn’t waste water.

His last words. Four of them. Twenty-one letters. The pain grew as the image became more vivid in my mind. Other images of Carlos joined them, like his walk when he was beside me as we led the drunken group, or his voice when he spoke to the bartender. Everything he did, everything he said, everything about him from his hair to his feet resonated in my mind. Somewhere in the whirlpool that was my chastening method of mourning, tears had fallen from my eyes. I cried by myself in the dark, panting and bawling over someone that I hadn’t known for a week.

The little time that I had known him was what made it worse. And what replaced my sadness with a bone-chilling terror was the realization that in the little time that I knew Carlos, he gave me knowledge of what could happen to me if I even asked questions about my own fate. The fate that I feared was mine instead became his.