#veronica reality

[perfectlynormal33]

57

Her bare feet whispered across the grasses, finding their way to a rivulet laughing its way downstream. "Hi."

"Hi," a pair of surprised blue eyes stared up at her. The girl was sitting at the foot of a tree, cherub face tilted towards the water and pride echoing in her voice. 

"I'm angry at you. You left."

"I didn't leave, I was replaced," she indignantly responded. Atana fell next to her.

"You were never scared of people leaving," she whispered, suddenly quiet.

"I didn't know people left," she murmured. 

"And you were loud," a tint of envy filled her voice, as if she were trying to create a portrait with toxic paint.

"I was loud," she agreed. "And I didn't hear very much."

"But you saw everything."

"I know. I thought I did. But you said you see more now," her features arranged themselves in a puzzled expression. "You know you're actually the one that left. Why did you leave me then if it didn't help you?"

"I thought it did. But I think maybe you had just never burned your hand on the stove..."

"Was it worth it?"

"I want you to come home. But I know I've forgotten."

[perfectlynormal33]

56

She dipped her toes in the crystalline lake, as if to remind herself that it was only a mirror, or perhaps to disrupt the frustrated expression staring back at her. She watched the ripples flutter outwards until they were imperceptible. "I don't know how to explain-" SNAP The scarlet girl raced through the corridors, casting a glance through each door she passed. Her feet pounded the floor. Nothing, nothing, nothing... she paused at a closed archway, hesitant to pry the gate open. Of course, hesitation doesn't last long in a rush, and the tiles of the floor were sliding up behind her like a snake rising from slumber. She kicked the door down. SNAP Her sad gaze was entangled with her friends, their expressions woven inextricably together. She pulled away, "I'm sorry, I don't know..." "Are you afraid?" SNAP There is a silence infinitely more disruptive than sound, and it blankets the room. It isn't warm or cold, or really anything at all, yet you could describe it in terms of either a solar flare or a snow storm that cuts off the breath of anything it meets. Neither would be inaccurate. Nothing would be inaccurate, if only it wrecks what it touches. This is the silence that wrecks what it touches. SNAP A hand reached- "Don't touch me!" she shrank, alarmed. SNAP She reached into the silence, trying to see past the fog of soundless whispers. She just barely felt something on her fingertips before she saw it- so many tangled, tangled threads. SNAP "I just, it's so..." SNAP A child emerged from the cloud of possibilities, breaking the silence like one might shatter a mirror. "What are you doing here? If I can't untangle this-" and here she gestured, dismayed, at the towering mountain of tangled, silenced words, "then how could anyone?"

[perfectlynormal33]

54

The white elf was draped over a chair in the screenroom, watching her scarlet pupil shatter through dimension after dimension. "She's progressing too quickly; look at the dissonance," she muttered.

"We can take care of that, can we not? It's not a difficult problem. Run disassociation and startle her back into herself," suggested the dark elf, with a voice like oak bark and lakesides.

SNAP

"What is wrong with you?" her voice ripped through the child's head. "You don't even know what you are doing!" she grabbed the little one by the shoulders to shake her.

"Stop it!" the elf interrupted. With a lethal innocence, she added: "Why would you talk to yourself that way?"

[perfectlynormal33]

50

"What is going on?!" the scarlet girl screeched, slamming her fist on the longsuffering table before her. A million screens buzzed, flashing nascient scenes before zapping into the ether and out again in fits. She melted into her seat like a wilting rose, her hands screening her face from the horror of uncertainty.

"What is going on?" her mentor glided into the room without a glance at the frustrated machines.

"They won't let me watch. I have so many questions; it's mine to know and I don't understand and why can't I see?" Angry tears escaped her eyes to rest like dew on her flushed cheeks, which she promptly hid in her arms. A muffled sob shook her as she seethed, "I've had enough. I want to be done now. I'm done with training and I'm done with the program. I give up." She slowly opened to look at her mentor. "Do you hear me? I give up! I've had enough of this."

Her mentor's fingers glided across the keyboards, pecking at various buttons. "No, you don't. You're the one who set it on this program. See? I'll pull it up." Her eyes flicked to her student's, watching them widen in awe and fear as each screen, like a row of dominoes, slowly flashed the name of the program running: "/{[<T.R.U.S.T.>]}/"

"So then there's no way to see?"

"There is. But you don't need to."

[perfectlynormal33]

49

Kell tried to kick a small rock as she meandered around her old home, but of course her foot slipped through it. Pushing a sigh, she glanced at her companion. "I used to live here... but it's so small now. I don't know how I fit."

"Because you don't anymore. When you lived there, you lived as much in the physical space as in the idea of it, but now, returning, you are looking at the idea of it suspended in another time. You don't see a future, but a past. You, Kell, are bigger than your memories -- which is why you will never fit there again." Kell whirled from the aging bricks with a puzzled brow.

"But that doesn't happen with people, surely? You never outgrow a person the same way. They never feel small...they feel big. Big and frightening."

"Oh Kell, of course it doesn't happen with people. You will always be bigger than your memories, and so will they; you will put your memories of them upon a shelf, and you will forget, and they will explode like a storm from a container too small for them."

"Is that why we get so angry when they grow?"

"We get angry at anything that scares us. Is there anything so frightening as that? To remember a person, and then to have them in front of you, so different from the idea you still hold in your heart. You go again, trying to reconstruct that comfortable memory, but they cast it down like so many mirrors as you mourn your fragmented perspective. Faced with their new image, you will usually reject it. It's unknown, and that makes it big." Her eyes grew apologetic. "I'm so sorry for you, humans. Anything that is big makes you feel so small."

[perfectlynormal33]

48

She wrapped her arms around each other, as if they had, independent of herself, sought each other out for comfort. Of course, arms don't need comfort. People do. And people rarely seek each other out.

"It's like an ironic metaphor...an anti metaphor..." she played with various names, her attention shifting between this mental task and the lights playing around her. Not to be trite, but the lights always won, especially when they were singing and laughing like that... they fizzled.

She found the notes tipping from her voice, dancing off her tongue without her permission, until she gave in. It's usually better to give permission if you don't have control; at least then you can sort of pretend, right? But then, how many decisions do we make based on the illusion of control? The notes kept coming... Oh, look. That one danced differently. "It's a song," she mused, "I can feel it right behind.... I can almost hear it." Slowly, the deviant notes started making their way through her voice and into reality. It's a slow process, that. Pulling things into the reality you understand.

Hello, hello," voices nudged against her like groping hands. "Why are you here? What do you hear? Do you hear, here?" She shrunk inside herself.

"Go away!"

"What do you know? You know, no? No no, only know and you rarely..."

SNAP

It was behind a door, and she had to find it. Was this the door? She pounded at the door...it flew open and let her tumble through it.

She stood at the edge of blackness, looking into a river of crystalline light that flowed like water--that is, if water contained the angular dimensions of every universe we don't yet know. Its brilliance was maddening in the same way that clarity is: truth is startling. Truth stuns us into metaphysical daylight when we've dreamed of walking through our world. Truth sings, laser-like, into cobweb filled corners and dusty shelves filled with meaningless books. In nothing else is precision so broad nor perspective so animate. So of course, the river was colorful, but she couldn't see the spectrum of color--only the shocking white light sifting through the shadows.

"I always knew it was a river," she whispered to herself. As she released those same notes, she could see tiny fingers of light whispering their way to meet the sound waves. The song was finding itself...

SNAP

The song had disappeared again.

[perfectlynormal33]

47

The scarlet girl sat at her vanity, sliding a brush through the waves of hair that fell to her waist. A mist of intrigue sat all around her, watching every moment she made.

"I'm told I'm very deep," she purred, eyes trained on her own reflection. The eyes snapped to a light green hue as they gazed back at her.

"So is a hole, if you dig long enough."

[perfectlynormal33]

46

He sat at the wooden table, jerking boxes and ribbons from one spot to another like a frantic child. Glancing at the heart beating beside him, he began to close boxes, starting with the smallest. Soon he had composed them like the Russian wood dolls- small inside large, layers and layers and layers. With a satisfied snap, the lock on the last box clicked into place. "Let's watch anyone get to my heart through this," he laughed, then stuffed the box inside his chest.

Kell watched with a puzzled brow- why had he left his heart on the table?