Young Writers Society

As he awakes, with the spectral amnesia of his dream, Abe finds that the heat and pressure that normally rest on his skin doesn’t rest there today. Lying in his bed, he stares at the flat even, white sea of sheets, when it dawns on him. He has no body. His head doesn't lie in the divot of his pillow but shivers silently through it. The tingle of sequestered blood runs through the outlines of his lost body. And, though he retains a sense of wholeness, the occasional toe or finger will diffuse slightly. The room is empty and the maid has made his bed, unaware of the molestation. The blinds are pulled up halfway, blocking in lanes of light and dark. The preliminaries of a great masterpiece. Abe can empathize, but in reality he’s farther from finish than the broad strokes that paint his room. He, after all, has no body. The initial shocks have worn off and he attempts to stretch his legs. The sensation is strange and difficult. It's comparable to laying naked on ice, he assumes. He stretches some more and the phantom blood circulates along the smooth, white sheets. The tingling doesn’t seem to be permanent. He gets up, without ruffling the bed, and stares at the door. A large, brown mahogany door that always gave him trouble as a child. He wonders how he’ll fare now. He stands up and immediately feels the phantom blood pool in his feet. His invisible heart doesn't pump with the same vitality as his old one. The exact anatomy will remain a mystery, but I assume, with special lenses, that'd you see a humanoid figure with see through skin and, inside, fluids flowing and mixing with little sense or drive. Like saran wrapped molasses in the clutches of a frantic child. He moves towards the door and immediately feels a sensation in his feet. His touch is seemingly disassociated from what he sees. He sees sharp edges, hardwood floors, and brittle shag carpeting. But, he feels fluid, bulbous structures. Objects that seem to have more give than the ones he’s used to. His feet enter the floor slightly and are cushioned by the limbo like material that have replaced the hardwood and carpet. He pushes his body up against the door in an effort to move through it but only sinks slightly into the wood. It, apparently, doesn’t work like that and so he tries the handle. But, to his actual surprise, he can’t muster the strength to actually turn it. And with that, he finds the first disability in an otherwise splendid morning of presents.

He lies on the sea of white sheets and tries to come to terms with what he’s become but for whatever reason he can’t bring himself to care. It seems like a healthy disconnection. He can touch, he can push, but he can never dent. It, also, seemed to arrive with perfect timing. Recently, life has begun to catch up with Abe. A bitter outlook that, like an obnoxious cold, had been increasingly hard to shake. For example, he believes that the people, the people in his life that live, that act, are drones. In his corner, most likely having been pushed there, he watches from afar the seeming fool who acts on shaky principals. The idiot who ignites their flame with faulty matches and who lives gleefully unaware of the demonstrative thing that shadows them. In his corner, Abe would watch that flame that would writhe, subside, and grow again. And, in his corner, the walls of his mouth would drip with the contempt that grew in him. Abe got pleasure from this. The saliva that dripped from the walls of his mouth meant he was right. The true thinker stays inert, he’d think. Fanning a smaller, but bluer flame.

After waiting hours, the door opened slightly and his mother peered in to see if he was awake. This happened every morning. Upon realizing he wasn’t in his room, his mother, Beth, flung open the door and said his name,

“Abe”. She was confused. She wasn’t, however, frantic. Abe had a tendency to leave at odd hours of the night and resurface at even odder hours of the day and his parents had become used to it. She checked the bathroom just to make sure. Abe got up and began to walk towards his mom, finally ready to the leave the room. And, upon following his mother to the door, she stopped in the middle of its frame. She made a tender sucking motion in her nose and you could hear the bits and pieces move farther up. Abe was majorly disgusted, as a tender soul would, but there was a hint of sadness in him. The snort could easily and grossly be attributed to congestion but there was a thought that, if she faced him, her eyes might be wet.

Abe followed Beth down the stairs but made sure to keep a distance of two steps. Unlike his previous fascinations, touching his mother seemed an immoral experimentation. Abe could assume that she would feel the same as the limbo like hardwood floor or crystal white sheets but this was irrelevant in his decision to keep a distance. His mother felt irreproachable in his current state. As he walked down the stairs, he felt the blood drain out of his eyes and could feel himself sloping into unconsciousness. He waited a while on one of the middle steps and the blood returned to his eyes. He was unmistakably sick though and he assumed it had something to do with the air or the light. The stillness that he had had in his room had been perturbed and it reverberated through his actions. He was on edge and gripped the side of the stairs with a post mortem grip. In his current state, he was starting to notice some differences in his newfound experience. For one, the air felt like it was being pumped through oxygen tanks. It was cold, dense, and stale. The light in the room was different as well. The difference between black and white wasn't as stark as it used to be. He knew he had a completely foreign perception from that of his mother who was starting to extend the gap of two steps. He loosened his grip and began to follow her again. The combination of the stale air and the bleached light made Abe feel as if he didn't inhabit the world. As if he was wrapped in colored, refractive plastic that slowly choked him. He gripped the railing once more.