Mind (Complete five-hundred pages)

Day 3 Friday, November 3, 2017

My body jolted violently awake, like a stingray stung me in the chest before the fibers of my body convulsed and my eyelids curtained open. My face rolled over and a spray of red clay collapsed onto my face, getting in my eyes, stinging me cruelly.

I cursed with a fright and tried to rub my eyes, but that was futile for my fingers were moist with the same bitter clay that stung my eyes even more. My eyes surged with blinding red like I had been splashed by a red wave of bitterness.

Cursing and crying, my eyes batting before settling to the least painful, half closed state, I managed to move my limbs around and discover I was in some sort of four-walled hole. I froze when I concluded the familiarity of the four-walled shape of the hole. And my breath stopped in my lungs.

It was a grave. And the bitter taste and smell was all too familiar as well. It was the wet sand of Mars. My burning eyes raked open slowly, in sorrowful terror. No, I thought, this must be a dream. The thought rolled over in my mind and repeated. This MUST be a dream. It can only be a dream. A terrible nightmare. Had I imagined it all? Had I fallen asleep and only dreamt I escaped this horrible planet of cold isolation.

My eyes bridged the tall wall of my red grave, and I could hear the sound of water trickling, the way it does when a person carries a heavy bucket up a hill.

The sound steadily intensified as I pushed myself to my feet, and I gasped at the sight of a young man standing in a vast crater lake of milky bluish red water; the colors swirling around each other as separate liquids, never mixing to a full purple body. I peered my chest over the edge of the grave and saw the small figure from a distance. He had his hand pointed up to a frightening array of unnaturally colored tree canopies. The canopies stretched over the entire crater lake, and the leaves and branches seemed to furl, stretch, and communicate with each other.

One branch of rolling purple leaves was descending to the outstretched hand of the boy, its leaves coming to a stop before reaching the boy's outstretched palm. I couldn't help but notice that the boy seemed to soak in the majesty of the tree as though he was in a trance; the boy was perfectly still.

I thought about calling to the boy, but I thought better of it. I had no clue where I was. And there was the slight chance that that boy was who put me in this grave in the first place. I turned my head all around to take a look at my surroundings. Behind me was an extension of branching rivers that led into the giant crater of multicolored tree. Those branching rivers circled around the mound where my hole was, and my eyes followed their glittering milky blue and red water along the meandering slopes of the MArtian land, until they began to climb up like sleeping snakes through the spines of hills and towering red mountains to their distant peaks. The sky was cloudy with dirty clouds of yellow-brown color.

The butterscotch sky looked down on me with that yellow dome of its eye, like it could feel something inside me. It towered over me like a hungry god, feeding me that feeling I'd been carrying for so long. And that feeling finally surfaced out of me like tears. I clawed over the edge of my grave, and began to struggle my way out, the whole time gritting my teeth, feeling the bulging pulse of the veins, which throbbed in my temples, my mind racing as I thought about only one thing:

My father had put me here.

His ugly face splashed on the canvas of my mind like from a swatting paintbrush. And I moaned while I kicked and clung to hoist the weight of my entire body out of the tall, clay-mud hole. "Fuck you!" I shouted. I hadn't even meant to utter a sound, but the sprawling portrait of him in my head sent the blood climbing up my neck in a heated throb.

I looked over and saw the boy who had his hand up to the trees had turned suddenly. His eyes switching toward me, he could only barely see me as I had lumbered flat on my belly over the red mound. Both of us had frozen, neither of us could entirely see just where each other's eyeballs were looking, but after a tender second...