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hiii am in i have to delete my thread i'm new don't shoot run-on sentences bode well, yes
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Oct 16, 2018 16:59
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Oh God. I didn't read anyone's yet because I won't post if I do. This is called Doge, and it's 1499 words. # “Isn’t it weird that there aren’t any dogs here?” Justin always did this. “It sure is,” I said, curling my finger under a glossy page of an old conspiracy rag. “How’d you notice that?” He rolled his computer chair back and faced his bed, leaning toward me. “So my mom said that someone was going to open up a pet shop right next to her café, but that they dropped out of the lease.” “So?” I snorted. “No one stays in business for long here. Especially in that plaza. Parking’s a nightmare.” The next story in De-Classified 51 showed some gory picture of a reptilian-looking baby; I went on, paying attention to the ads more than to Justin. “But I was reading on this forum about epicenters, where the dimensions rub together, right?” I laughed. “That’s your problem, man! You’re always reading this poo poo.” I flipped the cover over my finger, where the lizard baby stared crookedly up at the camera. “Normal people don’t obsess over this, dude.” Justin stared at me straight on; he does this at school too, when Jake Perry takes his manga, and Jake isn’t altogether wrong when he teases him for trying to Jedi-mind-trick him into giving it back—Justin updates me frequently on his progressing psychic abilities. He drew back, rolled his chair over to his desk, and shut down his laptop, snapping it shut. “I don’t want anyone to hear this,” he said, leaning over me and pulling the blinds. “Dude! My mom will think we’re doing stuff.” “I can’t let anyone know what I’ve been tapping into lately.” I sat up on my knees and began picking at a callus from field hockey. “You’re not going to convince me, Justin. This is a stupid idea.” “No.” He closed his door, and he came to the foot of the bed and sat across from me. “I want to know if I can trust you.” I rolled my eyes. “I haven’t told anyone any of your secrets before, and I don’t believe in this, so who would I tell?” “Blake, come on.” “Go ’head, dude.” Sometimes he just needed to be listened to; he had four younger brothers and his parents both worked, so. Justin stared at me for a while again, and I was just about to get up and leave when he began; apparently he’d been dreaming about a shaman from the tribe that used to control this area. The shaman’s face was in all our schoolbooks, because there was a statue of him in the park next to the courthouse; Justin told the dreams like he was privy to some secret. Actually that’s just how he always spoke. “The shaman is frightened,” Justin went on, intently watching the dream again, using more collegiate words to prove how enlightened and serious he was. “He’s always just watching me with these guilty eyes, right, and he doesn’t blink. And I knew he wanted to tell me something, but I kept waking up because I’d realize it was a dream.” I shrugged, letting one of my legs go off the side of the bed in case I had to jump up and run home. Not that I was scared; just the blinds were still down and I had actually told my mom Justin was gay, so I couldn’t have her thinking anything was going on. “So all you have to do is dream it again and go up to him,” I said, just following the logic to its obvious end. It was always easier to leave if I gave him some kind of distraction, like a mission. “I have homework, man. I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Don’t be dumb.” Justin pulled me back down by my sleeve. “I already did that.” “Uh huh. So what did he say? Flying Eagle wasn’t exactly great at English.” “He doesn’t say anything. He opens his mouth, and—” Justin’s eyes filled; it was getting dark in there, but the streetlamp outside made the blinds glow orange, and I could see that he was scared. “It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard.” I swallowed, not wanting him embarrassed or to regret being vulnerable with me. “What is it?” Justin moistened his lips, tried to say something, and then gave a half smile, looking kind of behind me. “You can’t hear it when you’re awake. It’s only when you’re tapped into the other world. My brother can hear it, I think, because he wakes up every night the same time I do.” “You mean his crying wakes you up.” He shook his head. “The other three didn’t. And I wake up first, then a little bit later, he starts crying. The shaman is pressing his mouth against me, putting the sound in me. I get away, though. I think he holds Tyler for longer.” “That’s your baby brother, dude.” “It doesn’t matter, Blake. That sound is the barriers breaking. There aren’t any animals here anymore, because they’re tapped into the spirit world. They can hear what’s coming, so they left.” I rubbed my face. “So what’s coming? Some big, catastrophic crash? Monsters? Zombies?” Tears were streaming down Justin’s cheeks. “It’s so much worse than that. He’s so scared. He was a general, Blake. He’s seen famine and fighting and every kind of death. And since he died, he’s seen so much more. And now that’s all coming for us.” “We were all gonna die anyway.” I was just opening his door again when he slammed it from behind me. “Dude—” “I thought I could trust you with this,” he sobbed into my shoulder. “I’m so scared, Blake. I can’t tell anyone. They’ll just put me in the facility again, and we can’t have psychic warriors in a ward. We need every little help we can get. Don’t you get it?” I stroked his hair like he liked and snuck a kiss onto his forehead. “You get yourself worked up over nothing, Justin. I promise. You know I do.” “The puppies they brought in,” he began, then began having a panic attack. I took him to his chair and did breathing exercises with him, which calmed him, but made my heartbeat pound in my head. “Don’t think about it anymore, okay? It’s getting late.” “They wouldn’t stop howling,” he murmured. “And it wasn’t like…no. It was like they were being skinned alive or something.” “You didn’t even hear it, dude.” “I hear them every night. I heard them coming. Tyler hears it. He cries out of nowhere and, like…” He put his hand sloppily up to his ear, as a baby would. “Like he can’t make it stop.” “But you said you can’t hear it waking.” “Babies are tapped into the spirit—” I just kind of blew up on him, then. And I shouldn’t have, I know. But he keeps going into this rabbit hole of paranoia, and it’s just totally unfounded. His parents don’t like dealing with his mood swings, so they check him into Behavioral Health for a month, and he comes back worse, but better at hiding it. If interdimensional beings were coming, if the world were ending…wouldn’t the shamans already in the spirit world, like, choose people who didn’t have a file in every mental hospital in the county? He interrupted me about the drat dogs. “Dude!” I said, my voice breaking. “I had a dog before you moved here. Scooter. He died right before you came, okay? And it really sucked, because we had him for just a couple of years. He wasn’t old,” I said, before he interjected again, “he was four I think. And he didn’t run away. He was hit by a car.” Justin took my hand and kissed it. “Thanks,” I said, calming a little as he brushed his lips over my callus. “The people driving said they laid on the horn. He never was any good about listening. But hey, he didn’t leave.” Justin kissed up my arm and I felt myself getting all hot, and I was saying we shouldn’t, and his mouth was on my lips, my cheek, my chin, my neck, and then he stretched his lips over my ear, and there was static coming from his throat, and he jerked away or maybe I pushed him, and he began to throw up. I fumbled for the door and ran out of his house and back over to mine. My mom was in the kitchen squinting over some package by the stove. That was normal. Okay. Breathe. If I’m freaked out, she’ll wonder. “Hi, honey,” she said idly. “Ready to eat?” The microwave beeped, and I jumped, making her laugh and then get mad. “Blake, are you high or something?” I couldn’t breathe. “Is the microwave still running? I can hear it.” It wasn’t humming I heard, though; it was whispering. And I kept seeing Scooter, but I heard Justin through it all. He was gagging and saying one thing over and over: Deaf! Deaf!
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Oct 22, 2018 04:55
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