Deep breath and falling. Soft stuffed animals, an even softer pillow, you feel how it surrounds you. Smell, that penetrating smell of your mother's perfume when she gives you a kiss. Then you stand up and look outside. You sort everything by color. Blue or gray skies, maybe just black, maybe burning yellow from the sun. Gray or black are good days. Blue or yellow are not.
They see a basketball, you see an orange ball that turns, as the Earth beneath
your feet. The Earth is covered by a gray sheet with white stripes, what they
call a basketball court. Why all those difficult words? Colors are easier to
sort, see, understand, feel and describe. It is autumn and the ground is
covered by rotting orange spots. Other people see their children – their little
angels – and all you see are screaming monsters with snakes. They scream that
goddesses with caverns, like you, aren’t allowed to throw the ball through the
hoop. You don’t care.
At home, your room is very big, bigger than those of
others. Through the floor, you hear thunderclaps and echoes. Grandma is visiting
again. You fire a small transparent disc from one robot to the other. Robots –
they are better. In their world there are no fights, they don’t scream at each
other. Their world doesn’t have angry grandmothers with clawed hands and
burning eyes that want to take you away from your parents. They don’t have ugly
monsters making the difference between snakes in shorts and caverns in dresses.
The robot falls.
You laugh.
You laugh again while a fist lands on your cheek. They feel the muscles, the bones. For you, it is nothing else but colors. Pink cheek on a pink face and then your pink turns blue. The small monsters look older now, but inside they are still the same. They still – even more than ever – make the difference between snakes and caverns. You are weird because your hair is short and spiky. That is wrong, that is what they say. You hit back. You feel something shatter, something triangular and see red exploding on the pink.
A monster, like the others, but older, screams
at you. You see a monster where they see a teacher. You don’t hear him – too
busy watching the small monster. He tries to stop the red dripping river with
his hand. Colorless water runs over his cheeks. That water mixes with the bits
of red to make them brighter. That water is salty, you have tasted it before. The
older monster grabs your hand and asks for something. The green rectangle that
he calls an agenda. You watch how he grabs a blue sticker and begins forming
shapes inside the green book, on the black lines crossing it. You know that
your mother will scream at you tonight because the mother of that monster
called her again. They'll talk again about troubled kids and something called a
council. You don’t care about what they say to her. Mama is permanently angry
or so it seems and Grandma has gotten better. Coarse sides are gone, softer with
the time.
You come home late, hoping to avoid your mother. First, you sit, looking over at
everything, from your personal mountain. They see nothing but a common roof,
you see your personal palace. You are the queen of this kingdom from glass and
concrete. White-orange sticks that become bright orange before they shrink,
they are your best friends. Even if they sting your tongue. They and still the
robots. The robots are better because the monsters that give you the sticks in
exchange for your allowance still make the difference between caverns and
snakes. They say that you look too young to buy the sticks, they ask you where
your mother is. You don’t care.
Sometimes you think that you look like the monsters that catch you in the halls
between the classrooms and hit you. When you look in the mirror, reflection, a
world within the glass.
The classrooms, you don’t like them either. Older goddesses – like you, with
caverns – tell you that the world is something, that one should try to
understand it and live in it. You don’t understand them. The world is mostly
nothing because the goddesses and the monsters that walk in the world are
mostly nothing. And if those that walk within the world are nothing, how can
the world be something?
Your room is just as big as it used to be, but now it is filled with more
stuff, mostly more robots. You now also have a rectangle, glas and iron, that
you received as a present from grandma. You light it up when you come home
after school, every evening.
Every evening on it there appears a goddess, living in a sunny village. She
destroys her own monsters. But her monsters are different, they drink blood, they
have horns and sharp teeth.
Sometimes you like to think that you are her. And that your monsters have horns
and teeth. Because that would it make easier to live in and to understand this
world. To feel this world. But your world isn’t hers, it is this, different,
filled with snakes and caverns, red and pink. It is like this now and will
forever stay this way.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
Hello! Thank you for requesting a review. I hope this helps. ^^
I think this is a really interesting start to a story. I definitely felt thrown, since the entirety of this first chapter is written in the second person, and I thought it sounded closer to a short story than a longer length medium, but I do like how this is shaped through our narrator's thoughts. Not to mention, I'm glad that I read the summary of this chapter since the protagonist having autism enhances some of these observations in ways that I doubt neurotypical people would be to notice or see.
The metaphors of using monsters as the bullies and the bad teachers, and the goddesses as the narrator and what I assume are either better classmates or adults, really brings to life Chloe's thought processes and how she views the world. No one should be made to feel unsafe in a classroom, nor should they be so mistreated from their fellow students and their actual professors. I can really sympathize with Chloe, but the way she approaches her scenario, especially with the last portion building on the symbolism of goddesses and monsters, has an intense understanding of how the world works for her.
A few moments do stick out to me as being chaotic in the sense of the reader might not get a great image of what is going on - Chloe getting punched is rather violent and unexpected at least for me, and I am a big curious on what the "white-orange sticks" are if she's too young for them. And while I do understand she labels herself as a goddess, I am curious if there are any other people she deems to be worthy of that title.
I must admit, I'm not quite sure where this story goes from here - maybe it will switch to Chloe's first or third person view, but this is a definitely interesting read. Thanks for the request, and good luck with this story!
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, this is supposed to be one puzzle piece in a larger interconnected story. In a couple of days, I think I'll post another side of the story, written from the perspective of her counselor, where we might get a better connection with what's going on. The white-orange sticks are meant to be cigarettes - she is in her late teens, so she is too young but old enough that the sleazy kiosk owners are ready to close an eye or two if she has enough money.
And the punching is because, well, she's bullied in her school and what we see is her fighting back.
Oh ok that sounds pretty interesting! Ahh, ok, the cigarettes makes sense, and the fights as well. Thanks!
Hi there!
As someone who is on the Spectrum themselves, the story resonated with me. All the descriptions of how an Autistic person views their world, especially sorting and receiving information, much less processing it, is very different than everyone else. We (me) are just wired differently. For this reason, I understood why the character analyzed colors in specific sections, into compartments.
In addition, Autistic people are picking out minute details of importance, where as the naked eye would never notice or pay little attention too. This is clearly conveyed so consistently while the MC is in the classroom. Moreover, I saw it fitting the teacher was referred to as, monster. In my schooling days, my teachers didn’t know how to properly teach the material to me. It was frustrating. I would try reading the words in the textbooks but they might has well as have been alien to me. Writing notes was difficult and retaining any of the lessons verbally with the teacher babbling on about nothing of importance or any articulate points of interests in my selected niches, put me to sleep. As a result, my grades suffered somewhat. Ironically though, I graduated from high school with High Honors.
I didn’t spot any grammar or spelling boo-boo’s so excellent job on that!