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I came up with this story concept after watching one too many Marvel superhero movies and getting frustrated at their stories and characters. My opinions on superhero movies are for another thread, though. I have an outline for the story planned out and I figured I might chuck out the introduction for your enjoyment/criticism. ---------------------------------------------- He stood, naked, his back to the hole he had crawled from. His bones poked through his skin. The snow from the afternoon flurry reached to his ankles. A gentle breeze rocked him forward. The tips of his fingers had worn down to their bone: they poked through to the air like talons. He tumbled with the wind, losing his balance, fighting to catch himself. His skin froze in crystals, but he wasn’t cold. His eyes burned in the sunlight. The sun – he had dreamt of it. He shifted from one ankle, spindly and brittle as it was, to the other. The crunching of his toes digging into the crisp snow grated in his ears until the wind whistled over the sound. Beneath him was a roiling plain, the grass turning auburn as winter approached. He had shambled down the mountainside until the snow gave way to stone and then to sand and soil. Long blades of grass caught between the creases of his toes. He wandered. Flies licked at his skin and left when they found no salt to taste. He strode, arms swinging limply, through a brown rat’s nest, the animals undisturbed by his gait. Starlings followed him, waiting for him to collapse to pick at the few strands of his hair. A road cut through the plains. Paved with asphalt and painted with yellow-and-white lines. The cuts on his hot feet cooled and stung when they met the mashed stone, but it didn’t stop him. A red car came roaring down the empty road. It turned the corner, going faster than he could track. It made a loud noise as it came for him, and then it struck him, knocking his body onto it and against the thick glass of its front. It knocked the wind from his shriveled, dirty lungs. Muffled screams came from inside the car. It screeched as it stopped. He flung from it and slammed to the ground, side over side, stopping face down. His skin did not bleed – he wondered if he had any left in his shell. He collected himself before struggling to pull himself back up. A man and a woman burst from the car. The woman hysterically tried and failed to put three numbers into her phone. The man came up to him, resting his hand on the bones of his shoulder, shoving and urging him, speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. He ignored the man. He had to keep going. He had to find Dereliss. He got back to his feet. The man stopped talking, awed by him, his thin form and his bruise-less body, some bones snapped and splintered, piercing through the thinness of his skin. Wailing sirens cut through the stillness of the sleepy road in the valley. Blue and white lights fought the orange air of the setting sun. A stout yellow-and-green truck joined the red car, the lights shining from its roof, and a number of men piled from it. One of them pulled a stretcher from the back of the vehicle. Some of them began speaking with him. He stared at them, and they reeled at the sight of him – the way his nose was crushed flat; the way his eyes sunk into his skull; the way his few strands of hair swung helplessly with his movement. His lips peeled back and were stained black. He never responded to them. He put one foot in front of the other again. He had to find her. They pulled him by the shoulders back to the road. The wind shuffled him forward again. And then they brought the stretcher to him. They said something to him, but he didn’t answer. They put him on the stretcher. He tried to climb out, his bones scraping against the steel frames and poking at the soft fabric, but they held him down. They shut the world to him again when they put him in the truck. He had said nothing when the light of the sky disappeared. ---------------------------------------------- They had stuck things to his body. Machines searched him for any signs of life. People in coats and blue scrubs studied the signs and the readings, scratching their heads. He laid on the bed, gazing at the ceiling fan above him, enjoying its breeze. They sat him on a chair and hit his knee with a small hammer. They put a cold stethoscope against his chest. They wrapped his arm in a sleeve with an air pump and squeezed. They shone bright lights in his eyes and down his throat. He responded to nothing. They dressed him in light clothing. They tried to feed him. They put him in a room with no windows and a table and two chairs. He sat alone for hours – or so it felt – until a woman entered the room from the same door. She wore much thicker clothing than he did. She carried a clipboard with some paper and she had a pen hanging from her breast pocket. She pulled out the pen and wrote some things on the paper. Then she looked up at him. “Getur þú talar færeysku?” she asked him. He didn’t answer. She scribbled something on her clipboard. “Kan du tale Dansk?” she asked him. He kept his eyes on the door. She scribbled something on her clipboard. “Pouvez-vous parler français?” she asked him. He blinked. “Can you speak English?” she asked him. He scratched at his cheek. “Kan du tala svenska? ¿Puedes hablar español? Kannst du Deutsch sprechen?” They sat there for many more minutes. She asked him question after question, and he ignored them all. She was enduring, speaking softly and assuringly in every language she could. She read the scribbles on her paper with a disappointed sigh. She watched him and bit her lip. She wiped a strand of hair from her eyes. ”Sahn,” she said, then paused. “Sahn hanha doh atelenta?” They both did nothing. Then, he glanced at her. Their eyes locked. He waited for her. She repeated herself. “Sahn hanha doh atelenta?” He blinked. He opened his mouth, letting his tongue snake out and lick at his teeth. The woman watched him, her pen’s tip pressed to the paper, ready to write in the margins if she needed to. “Tahm sahn,” he said. He spoke in whispered breaths. She had to strain to hear the syllables in his speech. She wrote down note after note, then flipped the page over and wrote some more. She turned to him, elated, then distraught, as she realized she didn’t know enough of the man’s obscure, ancient language to ask him more. “Dala so hanhla mahn?” she asked him, exhausting her knowledge of his language. He had to think about it. He had almost forgotten it. “Ove Hakon.” ---------------------------------------------- They kept Ove boxed in the building. They ran test after test on him. He didn’t try to communicate with them. He didn’t meet the woman that spoke his two sentences to him again. They tried to feed Ove again. He didn’t realize what they were giving him was food. They demonstrated by eating it in front of him. After days of attempts, he lifted the spoon from the soup and drank it. It was too hot for his tongue. The liquid stung as it went down his throat. The people around him celebrated and excitedly waited for him to continue. Days later, he tried again. One day, they dressed him in thicker cotton clothes. They gave him a padded bedroom, with a double-bed and some plush furniture. The light of the sun bathed his room in the morning. He spent his first day at his window. He clawed at it occasionally. Someone from the building brought him food and opened his window for him. The breeze cooled his soup and made it easier to swallow. He drank another spoonful. The winter season came and went. They catered to him several times a day, offering him different foods and drinks, taking his clothing every day and giving him new ones. The winter chill got intense some days, but Ove didn’t care. He sat at his open window, observing the world. His weight returned to him quickly: the bones on his arms and the ladder of his ribs vanished under the fattening of his skin. The ends of his fingers painfully healed, covered in scabs and itching as the nails regrew. They moved him again the next spring. They put him in the backseat of a car and drove him to a different building. It was the same size as before, but much more open and with a gated fence. People milled about the yards of the building, playing games, tending to the gardens and enjoying the air. They put him in a room similar to the one he had. Some new people, wearing new clothing, speaking the same unfamiliar languages, tended to him. They spoke to him more often, giving him the foods he grew to like. They tried to communicate with him more often. They said the same two sentences they knew he knew over and over, and he answered sometimes. His weight was coming in by the summer. He had filled out his clothing by then. They showed him to their gym and demonstrated their machines. He wasn’t interested at first. They tried to give him a dumbbell. It slipped through his weak fingers and stayed on the ground until someone picked it up for him. After another month, he started learning their language. His caretakers would show him an object or point to a picture and say what they were. They showed him how to work the machines in the gym. They took him on frequent walks around the premises. They bathed him once a day and dressed him in freshly cleaned clothing. Ove began dressing himself. His doctors obsessed over him and how he survived – and how he recuperated. They studied him as he took himself to the gym, his back straightening and his stride widening day by day. He showed himself to their library often, at first preferring the easier children’s books. When he was outdoors, he enjoyed the breeze the most. The wind was often weak, but when he was out and he lifted his arms, it accommodated him, whipping his loose clothing against his skin and his hair against his scalp. He never tried to engage anyone. Another year passed. He understood their language and though he never spoke first, he often answered. Despite his caretaker’s pleading, he never talked about his past. His body’s muscles grew evenly every week. Ove had been with his doctors for two years. He learned to speak English and French fluently, and was learning Danish and Spanish. His bones and ribs vanished under the muscles of his arms and pectorals. He had a large appetite for someone of his stature. He read a new book once a week, favouring non-fictional history but having a flair for high fantasy – and superhero comic books. Throughout it all, every day, come rain or sunshine, sleet or snow, he would leave his room to enjoy the air outside. He kept his window open no matter how cold it got. Sometimes, the breeze would be gentle, and other times, it would be strong enough to lift his arms from his sides, no matter how flawless the weather was. The machines the doctors hooked him up to detected his pulse once he had the thickness for the machine to wrap around, and his blood tests came back normal. But the fact remained: he had been a living skeleton, and he had made a full recovery over some years. They asked him about how he found himself on the road, but he never answered. It was a late spring day. Ove was on his third year with his caretakers. His hair – long, straight, and black – reached to above his neckline. His muscles did not bulge, but pronounced beneath his long-sleeve shirt and through his blue denim jeans. His shirt had a Superman logo on it. He wasn’t Superman’s biggest fan, but it was a gift from a nurse. He walked among his fellow patients outside the building. Many of them were disabled somehow. He was on his daily walk along the outermost pathway of the hospital, his hand drumming between the metal pickets of the fence surrounding the property. The wind brushed gently against his face. Ove knew they watched him. When they first stopped escorting him, his caretakers followed from afar, so that he didn’t hurt himself, or try to escape, or whatever he imagined. At first four doctors followed him. And then two, and then a single nurse, not because she enjoyed it. The nurse followed him from a safe distance, trying to appear casual. Ove followed along the fence, going off the path and over a grassy hill until he got to where one wall met the other and the fence turned sharply along the property. He stopped at the corner. There wouldn’t be anyone there to see him other than the nurse that followed him. He imagined her trying to explain what she was about to see to her peers. She’d be the only witness. Just as the nurse climbed the grassy hill, standing beneath its top so only her eyes peaked over its crest, Ove stretched out his hands to his sides, standing like a scarecrow in the fenced-off corner of the hospital. The wind whipped around him once more, ruffling his hair up. Then Ove lifted off the ground. The wind spun up and around him, forcing his jeans up around his ankles and his cuffs up over his wrists. His hair stood on its ends, making him appear taller. The nurse gawked as he lifted higher and higher, until his chest cleared the corner picket. Mimicking the superheroes he had read about, he lowered his left arm to his side and rose his right high above his head, making a fist. And then he shot off into the sky, flying faster than any human could run, or any of the land’s starlets could fly. He angled his ascent, and then he vanished behind the clouds. The nurse stood on the hill, seeing the grass where he had been spin as the wild wind around it calmed. She turned up to the sky, mouth agape, watching where Ove had disappeared, until her legs caught up with her eyes and she ran back into the hospital.
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Jun 30, 2015 10:08
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 19:37 |
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