Spoiler! :
), so I have changed the name of the main character so that if this opening gets ripped off, I can still salvage the character; beyond that, all I can say is that if this story is ever published under a name that is not Paul Clover (my pen name) something is definitely rotten, and do send me an email so I can The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. - Albert Einstein
Jack Milligan lived in a small little house in a small little town in a small little world that was growing smaller every day. He went to school, just like every other child in America. It was a normal school that taught normal things like Science, Math, English, and even Geography. The name of the school was Ross Junior High, and the name of the town was Ross. See what they did there?
On August 17, 2007, Jack crossed the lawn outside his aunt's house, on his way to what would become the last week of his school career. He was fourteen years old, short for his age and about as skinny as a stick with an eating disorder. His hair was larger than his head, a jumbled mess of unkept blond hair. His eyes were an almost black shade of brown. Despite the scorching Mississippi sun and all the time he spent outside, his skin was a not-quite-sickly-but-maybe-you-should-get-out-more shade of whitish pink. His hands, ears, nose, and fingernails were just the right size, something that couldn't be said about his abnormally large feet. They were so large, in fact, that he had to wear a specially-sized pair of shoes he bought off the Internet. They fit fine and were cheap enough, but they were rough and itchy, and the strings never stayed tied for long.
This is why, on this warm morning in August, he bent down to tie his shoes and happened to notice that his Aunt's prized lawn gnome was floating. He blinked twice, forgetting his shoe-laces. The longer he stared, the more sizable the gap between the gnome and the grass seemed to become. Four, five inches max, but floating is floating, right? Garden gnomes don't float. Do they? He was reminded – briefly – of a painting he had seen in Sunday School years before, of Jesus floating to Heaven with his arms outstretched to show the scars on his wrists. But Stumpy was no Jesus, and before Jack could fully process what he was seeing, the Gnome-Christ settled back down onto the grass without a sound.
Jack blinked again. It was impossible. He was tired, that was all. It was Monday, after all. He had a right to be tired. But still...
He stood up and – cautiously – approached the gnome. Stumpy was completely still, his freakishly large blue eyes staring forward towards Jack's kneecaps. Jack reached down, touched the tip of Stumpy's hat, and immediately retreated his hand in some irrational fear of retaliation. Stumpy was still and silent as ever.
Jack shook his head. “Idiot,” he told himself. “Stupid, stupid...” Floating lawn gnome? Seriously?
He finished tying his shoes and half-walked, half-ran to the bus-stop.
Mississippi, by its own ineffable nature, is probably one of the hottest place on the planet. On days like today, it was probably the hottest place in the whole of time and space. Here and now, it was approximately seven in the morning, and still a little too stuffy for comfort.
The cheese wagon arrived like it always did. One by one, Jack shuffled onto the bus. Jack nodded politely to the bus driver (an old man who never talked or smiled or opened his mouth, probably because he had no teeth) and sat in the same seat like he always did, sixth row, next to the window. A boy with ear-buds settled down next to him, bopping his head as his hearing deteriorated by the minute. Jack ignored the sound.
He stared out the window, his head comfortably fixed inside the corner between the glass and seat cushion. There was something beautiful about the early-waking world. Maybe it was the mildness of the weather, however brief and somewhat unsatisfying it was. Not cold or even chilly, the weather was decent compared to the destructive, unmerciful heat that would come later in the day. But that wasn't it. It was something deeper, something unconscious. The gray hue of the sky, the clogged traffic that adults so hated, the way the bus's shaky frame bounced when it hit a pothole, the old ladies and gents getting their newspapers, the empty parking lots that were usually full, the comfortable silence save for a small blurring of unknowable music. All these small things reminded him of a place, somewhere lost in time and memory, where he felt loved and unreasonably, unfathomably happy. For a while now – he couldn't really remember exactly how long – he had been trying to place it and perhaps feel it again.
~
Eight hours later, Jack stepped off the bus, feeling no more wiser than he did when he had stepped on.
He crossed through the backyard again (Aunt Patty's garage was ridiculously cluttered) and gave a double take to the Stumpy the Lawn Gnome. The demon-thing was standing in the same spot he was when Jack had left for school, and still staring that insane, crazy-neighbor-who's-actually-an-ax-murderer stare. He wasn't floating.
Satisfied, he went inside, and was instantly hit by the smell of cat. Aunt Patty was nowhere to be seen. But then again, she had only gotten out of bed twice in Jack's entire tenure at her humble abode. What was to be seen, however, was cats. Four in the living room alone, and more in the kitchen, cats were the Oompa Loompas that kept poor Aunt Patty's magical chocolate factory up and running.
The living room, like the rest of the house, was a complete wreck. Being a more-or-less typical teenage boy, Jack Milligan had no interest in cleanliness. And since his aunt had long since given up house-keeping in favor of the home-shopping network, it was safe to say that the house had almost literally gone to Hell. Unwashed clothes lay crumpled up on the couch, cat fur covered virtually every piece of furniture and empty food containers, water bottles, and Diet Coke cans lay scattered around like poorly-hidden Easter eggs.
A large piano occupied the far southeast corner of the room. Now dusty and covered in cat hair, Jack felt a familiar pang in his heart every time he recognized it for what it was.
He sauntered off into the kitchen. The cats, knowing full what time it was and what this meant, followed behind him eagerly. If the living room was Hell, then the kitchen was the place that Hell went when it needed a good sauna. Pots and pans were scattered all over the counters, old food still stuck to them. Dishes in the sink piled up above Jack's head which, despite his humble height, was still an extraordinary accomplishment. None of the lights worked simply because they hadn't been changed in a few years.
His aunt's Electric Mobility Scooter was stood dusty and unused next to the pantry. It was a small, blue scooter with a basket atop the steering wheel. Whatever function it once served, the Scooter was no longer function, as Patty's legion of cats had long since made the tires their own personal scratching posts. There was something sad about it sitting there alone and unwanted. Even if it did work, he doubted his aunt would ever use it. Ever since she quit her job at the hospital, Patty had felt very little need to leave the house. All she needed to live, she said, was her Diet Coke (had to watch the hips, she said) and Judge Judy, and neither of them were going anywhere anytime soon.
Jack opened the pantry door, nudging the scooter out of the way. The cat food was next to the cat litter which was
next to the cereal which was next to the cat treats which was next to more cat litter. Everything else in the pantry was either canned, Hostess, or microwaveable.
As he lifted the bag of cat food, a sound – barely above a whisper – vibrated inside his ear. He didn't so much hear it as much as he felt it, and instantly he knew that it wasn't in his head. It was a word, one simple word that could mean anything and anyone, everything and everywhere.
Help.
It sounded like a hiss, like something out of a snake's mouth. But snake's don't talk, do they? His eyes darted around the small pantry, half-expecting something small and ugly to jump out at him from behind the cans and bite at his eyes. He felt it in his ear again, and the hair on his arm stood erect.
Pleeeaase...
There it was again. Sadder this time, desperate, in fact. There was something about the voice, that desperate voice, that hurt him in some strange and innocent way.
Gripping the bag of cat food in his arms, Jack staggered backwards into the door, forcing it open. He heard the scooter crash onto the floor, and didn't care. Still holding the bag, he kicked the door shut, glad to be out of the pantry and glad – beyond his wildest expectations – to be surrounded by warm, fuzzy cats. He swallowed, the saliva going hard down his throat.
A cat – perhaps the bravest of the bunch – pawed gently at shoes and looked up at him with eyes that clearly meant something alone the lines of “I am very hungry, sir.” This, of course, snapped him back to reality. He was imagining things. He needed more sleep so, logically, he was imagining things.
He fed the cats, watching them gather around him like he was a prophet declaring the words of God.
“Jack,” came his aunt's loud, increasingly raspy voice from the other side of the house. “Come heeeeeere.”
Jack sighed, but didn't dawdle. He set the scooter back up against the wall, and went off to see his aunt.
Patricia Anne Henning was – to put it bluntly – a somewhat large woman. “Somewhat”, in this case, translates to “ungodly large”. Weighing in at roughly four-hundred pounds, Aunt Patty had proverbially bitten off more than she could chew. Let's not be crude, though, poor Patricia had always been a big woman; but never, in hers or in anyone else's wildest dreams, had there been any idea or suggestion that she would get this big. And the cholesterol, it seemed, had rooted itself into her heart. She didn't like people all that much, at least not anymore. She just didn't care for them the way they seemed to care for her. At one point or another, she had swapped two-legged companions for four-legged ones, and thus the Clayton Street Cat Farm was born.
He went to Patty's room to see her. She was already fast asleep, an angry-looking cat cradled in her arms.
~
He awoke at six thirty the next morning, and his first thought was that “the world is ending.” People are always saying we're in the last days, right? The trumpets were sounding, the skies cracking open and this – true believers – was Judgment Day. That sound had been the Voice of God, declaring to all nonbelievers that the joke was on them. That had to be what it was, because nothing human could have made that sound, like the loudest thunderclap in the history of all things.
Jack fell out of bed onto the floor. His head hit the carpet, but the impact was more than enough to wake him out of his lunacy. Something – he somehow knew – had crashed into the house.
Wearing nothing but boxers, a t-shirt, and mismatched socks, he stumbled out of his bedroom, through the hallway and into the living room. He discovered, upon his instant arrival, that he was now the proud owner of an incredibly large window.
It was large enough to fit a truck through, and Jack had to do a quick scan of the room to make sure it was – in fact – truck-free. Whatever had created the large, gaping hole where the side of his living room used to be, it was not in this house and it was – hopefully – nonliving. He approached it carefully, his eyes till adjusting to the early morning sunlight beaming through it. Broken, splintered wood hinged back and forth all along its highest curve.
It was the north wall, he saw now, the one with the sliding door that led to the back yard. Glass, gleaming and sharp, was scattered all along the green grass of the backyard, a million little remnants of the large screen window.
Whatever happened to the wall had apparently had a similar beef with the fence. It was broken (shattered, really) in the middle, in the exact same spot as the wall. It was like some sort of inter- dimensional train had come tumbling through here before disappearing back into its own realm. That, or a misplaced rhinoceros.
He cautiously stepped through the new window and made his way across the yard. He almost immediately turned his attention to Stumpy, who was in the same place he always was, still obeying the laws of gravity. The gnome sat there was a smug innocence that seemed to say, “Who? Me?” Jack felt the sudden urge to smash the gnome.
Little pieces of wood were scattered along the small lawn. What was now a mass of broken wood lying on the street had almost surely “skipped” across the yard after crashing through the side of his house. Most of it had piled up in one spot. He squinted.
As his eyes accustomed to the light, he was beginning to make out what was more or less the truth, however impossible the truth may be. It was hard to make out at first: the polished black surface blended with the charcoal street effortlessly, though there was no mistaking the splintered wood, the broken strings sticking out awkwardly. A chill ran up Jack's spine when he recognized a faint hum in the air, a fading ghost of the piano's last song.
His father's piano – the poor man's pride and soul and joy – was now nothing more than a heap of broken wood and gears. Something had hurled it across his living room and destroyed a good portion of what was – arguably – his home. He felt an all-to-familiar pang deep down inside his heart.
A sizable crowd was beginning to gather around the mess. Of course there was a crowd, there was always a crowd. They heard the noise, and who wouldn't? Young and old, big and small, man and woman, all gathered here to witness the event of the hour.
Ladies and gentlemen, said Jack Milligan' imagination, we now present for your entertainment, the amazing flying piano!
“Jack!” said a woman.
He turned his attention away from the wreckage. A middle-aged woman with curlers in her hair was running towards him. It took him a moment to recognize her as Miss Palmer, the lady who was always telling the skater punks to “quit riding those death-machines” on her sidewalk. In her arms she was cuddling an angry-looking Mozart, who was also sporting curlers.
“Oh, Sweetie!” she said. “Oh, what happened here?”
Approximately thirty pairs of eyes instantly shifted to Jack Milligan, who had just as little, if not less, to say about this as the rest of them did.
“I don't know,” he said, trying desperately to come up with something more satisfying. “It's a piano. Something... someone...something threw it out of the house. There's a big hole now.” He resisted adding, “And that's all I have to say about that.”
Silence filled the street. Somewhere, a bird was singing.
“Sh-sh-should we call the police?” said an old man, staring at the piano as if it were a dancing frog in a top hat. “I mean, this here ain't normal, is it? Things just don't go flying around like this. Maybe it was pranksters.”
“What kind of pranksters could do that, Gerald?” said another old man grumpily. “Why, they'd need more bells and whistles than Big Ben to pull off somethin' like this. No, this ain't no smoke and mirrors here. I say this here's the work of Satanists!”
Murmurs again, some of disagreement, some of worry.
“I mean, whose to say the Devil hisself ain't inside this here piano,” said the crotchety old man, riding his theory. “He could be inside it right now, just waitin' to come out and possess one of us.”
No one stepped away from the piano, but no one got any closer either.
Jack struggled to compose himself, get back to reality. His head was spinning. This is not happening, he kept telling himself, this can't be happening.
Only it was happening, and there was nothing he could do about it. Because of his ineffable crime of existing, this was his life whether he liked it or not. He would have to make do. He had to say something, anything, that could make some sense out of this. In his mind, he grasped for things to say, wise things, logical things, things that made sense.
“It's not witchcraft,” said Jack, his voice cracking. “There's no such thing. There's always a logical explanation to these things. Every time. Rule out the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
His voice squeaked as he spoke, and he had the innate feeling that Holmes would have been ashamed. The crowd seemed equally convinced with his stance. Murmurs of disagreement spread throughout, and he heard one woman mutter the word “liberal” in a condemning tone.
“It could be aliens,” said a little boy in pajamas. He had blond hair, blue eyes, and was no older than six. In his hand he gripped a stuffed teddy bear. “One time, I saw in this movie where aliens came from outer space, and weird things started happening. They made storms happen all over the planet to weaken our defenses and stuff, and then they made the power go out and everything. Then they came in their spaceships and landed on earth, dressed as regular people before shedding their skin and turning into these evil bug things with thousands of eyes and sharp claws made for slashing eyeballs out. Then they harvested people, and took them to these laboratories where they dissected them and sucked their fluids out while they were still alive, so they could use their guts as fertilizer to grow alien plants and stuff.”
For a moment, he said nothing.
“It was just a movie, though,” he said shyly.
This time, everyone did take a step back.
Jack was among them. He hadn't thought about aliens, crazy as it may sound. Yesterday morning, his aunt's lawn gnome had floated. Yesterday afternoon, he heard a strange voice inside the pantry. Now his father's prized piano had sprouted wings and flown through the side of his house. This was like an episode of The Twilight Zone, only everything was in color and the only narrations were his own scattered thoughts.
“I don't know what it is,” said Jack. “And neither does anyone else.”
Aunt Patty, apparently, didn't know either.
“WHAT IN THE HOLY NAME OF SAINT MOSES IS GOIN ON OUT THERE?!”
She had somehow positioned herself next to her bedroom window, her thumb of a head sticking out for everyone to see. She had a look of both incredible strain and amazement.
“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THE PIANO?”
Nobody said a word, because nobody knew.
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Part Two: viewtopic.php?t=80026
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