Elysian Fields (A Kyman Fanfiction)

Chapter 1: Fail Hard to Regain

Sometimes, I swear I can fly. The bass rattles my skull while the euphoric high hits me long and hard. My eyes roll back and I give into the weightlessness, feeling finally free for mere seconds before the inevitable fall, when I open my eyes again and submit to reality. 

Those brief seconds between the lows, though, are fucking fantastic.

Red warmth trickles out of my nose as I dab it, glancing around the vanity already littered with duct tape and tampon applicators. Porsche's cigarette tail wisps out of the ashtray to my right, while Ferrari jabbers emphatically at Cadillac.

A personification of regret stares back at me through the streaked looking glass. The cloudy muted green of my eyes rests in bruised hollows of eyeliner and fake lashes.

When I was just a kid, I was almost killed... a lot. It was probably then I decided dying would be a great option. It's easier, supposedly.

I've been in more near-death instances than I'd like to recall. Thanks to my best friends, I always managed to pull out of them in the nick of time.

It might be stupid but, a teapot changed my life. I was coming home from school, it being colder that day than usual, my breathing melting the snow on my cheeks. That etched white thing did not leave its spot on the entry cabinet for sixteen going on seventeen years.

My whole life, it hadn't been used. Touched, even. It sat there, the very spirit of the white China seeming to drain from it in pessimistic oozing. So I threw it. Liberated it, if you will.

The satisfaction of the explosion proved short lived. Soon, all dishes were crashing. Wall shelves leaving kisses of nails, the hall painting being made into two halves of a table setting. The next thing I remember is Ike screaming six inches from my face, my hands pinned behind my back pinned to the floor. Broken ceramic made abstract snowflakes fall through the hallway and kitchen. My forearms and neck covered in red blood blossoms.

"Look dude, sometimes people just snap."

Stan and I met over a cinnamon bun at the South Park mall. He stabbed a frosty piece with his plastic fork and put it on his tongue, wrapping his lips around it. I heard the licking and smacking and crushing of the disgusting thing in his mouth.

The echoes of his digestion ring in my head as I fight the urge to run. To keep running, and never turn around, never look back, leaving him to his school and sleep and girlfriend.

My parents want me close, I'm the older brother, the brains to my brother Ike's brawn and popularity and looks. I could be the next Steve Jobs if I wanted, or so I thought.

I needed to escape. The walls began to close as my throat tightened, my brain working fast to come up with solutions to my own personal hell.

If I don't leave this quiet mountain town I swear I will die here. So there's dying, or there's leaving.

My escape is simple:

1) Do well in school for scholarship to prestigious Ivy League on the East Coast. Away.

2) Make money to afford rent and fund future endeavors. For the away.

School was easy, I could bury myself in equations and ancient European conquests until I forgot my name. Easier than facing myself transforming into something unrecognizable.

And so in the wee hours of the nigh, the job hunt began.

No one was really hiring. I couldn't let my family find out about my job because they wanted me focusing on school and SAT prep, so I couldn't have asked them for help. Asking peers at school seemed out of the question considering I had basically been acting like a corpse for the last two years, and I doubted any of them really wanted to help me out.