Spirals

the creator

~~~

It will be a few days before my school is going on a winter break. My family has been winter cleaning, and I have been trying vainly to keep up. Given all that needed to be done today, it was a very poor time to be transported into a long, vivid spiral.

The spiral began with me standing on a stage, looking out from a bright spotlight into a dim and empty theater. The air was warm and musty, and the space was mostly silent, save for a few humming appliances, and for a tinny, classical piece playing somewhere behind me. I turned to look there and saw, simply, more of the stage, a vast stretch of wooden floor that faded into darkness. I took a step back, uneasy, and the spotlight moved with me. Realizing what the light was for, I looked again into the darkness and began to walk into it, towards the source of the music.

The spotlight illuminated the path around me as I traveled along it. The further I went, the dustier the path became, and the more miscellaneous items lay scattered along the way, mostly broken or visibly neglected: a half deflated soccer ball, a sketchbook with scattered pages, a fishing rod snapped in half, etcetera. I came across a broken ceramic pot surrounded by brittle dirt and shriveled leaves, and it reminded me of a plant that I had owned and forgotten a very long time ago. Eventually, the items grew scarce and the source of the classical music grew closer until, finally, I arrived at the end of the stage, facing a small door embedded within a red brick wall, hearing the loud tinny music playing clearly behind it.

I tried the knob, but the door was locked, and so I knocked briefly. Moments later, I heard a click and the door cracked open, releasing a blast of slow piano music and revealing not a person, but a single, wide eye and a collection of black hands gripping the edge of the door.

H-hello, it said, with a quiet, croaky voice that just barely lifted itself above the loud music. C-come on in, I have some coffee and s-snazzy music. The eye glanced briefly at the floor, and its hands pulled the door closer. I mean, if you don't- if you don't want to, t-that's fine too...

I stood confused, watching about a dozen of this creature's hands tapping nervously against a small door in a brick wall at the end of a dark, empty stage, and while I felt an awkward sort of compassion, I was still unsure of whether it was safe or not to enter its abode.

O-oh, my hands, do they scare you? I'm s-sorry. The creature looked down again and opened the door a little wider. T-they can't hurt you; they're for my m-many hobbies and trinkets. Do you- do you wanna see?

I was skeptical, but I did not see anywhere else I was supposed to go, and the creature in front of me appeared harmless, so I accepted its offer to enter. The creature ceased its nervous tapping and tensed, and as it carefully opened its door, the spotlight that had been hovering over me traveled back the way it came, leaving the end of the stage awash only in the light that came from the creature's abode.

With the door wide open, the creature was fully visible. It was unnaturally tall, yet hunched over to match my height, and it had a single, large eye that darted back and forth across the room. It had dozens of hands of various sizes, each connected to its shifting black body with twig-like arms. Its legs, which were mostly concealed by a sort of cloak that blended into the creature's figure, were loosely chained together, forcing the creature to shuffle, and upon its back were several cavities, some around the size of my fist, even, that were filled with the same reflective, numbing substance that resided within my own.

The creature beckoned me inside with six hands, and I entered. The abode was just a bit larger than the size of a bedroom, and yet it was filled with various items and projects. Stacks of books and folders lay in one corner, topped off with pens or sticky note pads or the occasional magnifying glass, and in another corner resided many musical instruments, some that I could not define, along with the source of the classical music, a running vinyl player that was surrounded by a collection of other vinyls, colorful CDs, and half-finished musical scores. The walls were covered in detailed brainstorming sheets and posters of obscure yet familiar references. The most obvious aspect of the room, however, was its back wall, a wall that brought me both unease and confusion, a wall covered in dozens of similar, smiling masks, each with a note hanging from the chin, each uncanny in the way that they very closely resembled a human expression, yet were too vague, feature-wise, and too cheery, with their frozen grins too wide for any human to pull off.