TWYLA PORTER | THE QUARK | HUMAN | 26
You collect secrets like some collect stamps or sexual conquests, each one displayed like a jewel inside your mind. You watch, look and listen— you drift through the world as a simple bystander to the madness. You’ll never revel your own secret, the visions that plague you in the middle of the night. You’ve been given a gift, to watch the present and the future as they unfold. You might not be able to change the horrid future you see, but you can compel others. It’s the only way.
BIOGRAPHY
(TW: CAR ACCIDENT)
You were born with stars in your eyes, darling girl. Your father, an astronomer at the Very Large Array, taught you to keep your chin up and always keep an eye out for those less fortunate. He wanted to help those coming to your planet, every night he looked for signs of more weary travellers. And every day he helped your mother organize paperwork as she went to court, trying to fight the injustices that were befalling other species as they tried to make homes here. Calling your life sheltered isn’t quite right- you never lack for information, you’re never ignorant to the problems of the world, but you see it all through rose tinted glass. Every problem can be solved with the right amount of courage, wit, and luck; every question you have can be answered with enough time.
Except for those visions. The ones that rumble in like thunderstorms and startle you in the middle of the night; they leave you sweating and breathless, crying for your parents. They take you to all kinds of specialists, trying to find out what could be causing such vivid dreams, what on earth could be waking you up in the night in cold sweats. They do sleep studies, MRIs, CT scans, they run every test imaginable and find no reason why your night terrors should leave you screaming for help. Maybe it’s puberty, maybe it will go away with age, there’s no telling what the next thing to unfold. After months of hoping, they don’t go away. They get worse, rooms that you swear you’ve seen before, people who are too familiar to be strangers, jokes you know the punchline to. You don’t know when you decided it was the future that you were seeing, but somewhere along the way deja vu just kept knocking you in the stomach.
Which is not something that you tell your parents. Instead you swear that the nightmares have gone away, that you’re so sure that you’ve gotten better. With nothing to show for, they have no choice but to believe that their little girl was just the victim of some anomaly that’s left her. They did have their own lives to focus on anyways. And really, it starts to matter less to you. Your vision are of strangers talking in allies, people dancing at night without any regard. Sometimes there’s violence, but you’re too young to do anything and too scared to call a police department. You can’t even be sure there’s something you could have done. The news reports are so definitive as you scan them, print them, store them away. Nothing would have changed what happened, let alone a growing girl with wide eyes and a father who tells her silly stories.
Despite this one secret that pulls at the corner of your every thought, you grow up in a completely normal life. There’s nothing picturesque about your hometown, but it’s safe enough for you to ride bikes with friends and avoid any kind of trouble. Almost any kind of trouble- but really you come out unscathed, the kind of sweet and gentle daughter only your loving parents could have raised. There’s nothing holding you back in this world, least of all college. The University of New Mexico greets you with open arms, promises of a degree in astrophysics and courses in pre-law. Your visions don’t push you there so much as your parents, hoping for someone to follow in their footsteps, continue to fight the battle for those unheard. And you’re genuinely happy with the possibility it could be you. There seems to be no other way that your life could go, if you really thought about it. You were supposed to listen to their words, follow their examples, continue the path that they left behind. There was never going to be peace in this world unless you were there to see it through.
And yet you were always just a little distracted in classes, needed an extra cup of coffee to make it through lectures. Joked with yourself that your visions should have shown you test answers not the next extraterrestrial announcement. Something didn’t sit right with you about the experience, but you weren’t about to go back on the promise that you made your parents. You keep your chin up and your eyes out for those less fortunate, and you’re set to graduate on the honor roll. Invitations to humanitarian work, law schools, and lobbying firms pour in, your life extends in front of you in a constellation of different patterns, each one shining more than the next. None of them fit perfectly in your heart, but your mother tells you over the phone that they don’t need to, you’ll grow into the career that you choose. That no one is happy at twenty four, but you will be.
And then you have the vision. Glass shatters in front of you, metal crunches in your ears. Somewhere you smell smoke, and there’s the taste of blood in your mouth. You’ve experienced car accidents before, but never like this. This is quick and turbulent, sparks fly as the car skids across the street, this is fatal. And then you see your father’s glasses fly and your blood runs cold, it freezes in your veins, threatens to stop your heart. You know who’s in the car, you know just where it’s heading, and you know, as dread pulls the air from your lungs, that it’s not going to reach its destination. The first thing you do when you wake is call your mother, your voice is hoarse from the screaming you must have done, tears uncontrollable as you tell her that they cannot come for your graduation, that you refuse to let them drive. She doesn’t understand that you’ve seen the future, that you’re trying to save her life; she puts on her best mother voice and tells you that it’s only a nightmare like when you were a little girl, that all you need is a cup of warm milk and they’ll be there in the morning.
You can’t let it happen. You get into your own beat up station wagon and fly into the night, for the first time in your life taking action, doing something about what you see. Your parents had the same idea- jumping into action to calm their only daughter. Maybe you were always meant to be the first person to arrive at the scene of their accident, the one to call the cops and tell them that there’d been a head on collision in the middle of the night. Maybe if you had never called in the first place they would have still been in bed sleeping. Maybe there was nothing you could have done; they were always going to end up as the tragic victims of an accident that no one could have seen coming. And just maybe, this is all your fault.
It would seem for someone trying so hard to stay away from politics, Roswell would be the last place for you to go, but you’ve never been one for subtlety. You’ve resigned yourself to a life on the fringes, one as far away from the memory of your parents, and one that doesn’t require other people to help. It takes some time to adjust to the life you’ve created for yourself, every time you overthink things, they just get more confusing and convoluted, you create a life that could only suit a girl hiding from the future. After all, what good has it ever done you.
CONNECTIONS
THE ISOMER: Friends. A word that once propelled you far away pulls you close, they’re very existence in this web of lies interested you from the beginning. They were just always around, always taking notes of everything and everyone. While you might have not had the purest intentions when approaching them, whatever ulterior motive has melted away in their company.
THE HEXADECIMAL: You offer them a solution, a brilliant idea if you say so yourself. They give you guidance, like the older sibling you wished for, but it won’t be enough. You plead with them to start something, a group, a society of sorts. To pass down what both of you know, so this never happens again.
THE ISOTOPE: They didn’t keep their secret hidden very well, especially for such a prize on your wall. The scorned royal, it always brews something and a rebellion would certainly lead directly towards the ruin that haunts you. So you offer your time and nothing else, and they seem to take it. Even if you spend most of it in silence, there’s a breaking point somewhere.
THE QUARK PORTRAYED BY EMILY BROWNING AND IS CLOSED