Friday, April 18, 2014

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW YZ... a story (A to Z Challenge)

This is a serialized story; for links to previous installments, go to the end of the post.




Passages opened and we rushed off from the meeting pell-mell to a panoply of experiences!  I followed, though I did not want to, drawn, pulled in, compelled in the way one looks at an accident or perhaps the way one might walk downstairs, late at night, cautiously, one’s heart beating in one’s throat, palpitating, telling oneself over and over that it was nothing, just the cat, but not believing it, anyway.

Interesting that I did not at that time realize that I had never walked down any stairs at night, had never had a heart to beat.  Interesting that I did not realize the change that had been coming over us at that time.

We rushed, after Diana, towards nowhere and everywhere, there being nowhere to go in the abstract, only suddenly there was a where to go, there, in that place that had never had places, and we were able to move physically from
Here

To
Here
To
Here
And even


There

And we moved without moving in that place without places, but we also moved the way real things do: we becoming real as Diana became less so, maybe? Our existences

Existence!

X-istence!

Becoming more alike each other's and less like they had been.

In an instant or an eon, we were there

Here

We were here.

The cottage, where Diana’s sister lived. We were there.

It was nighttime.

It was dark.

So dark that the room appeared an inkblot, and the only smudge in the complete obscurity before us was the small window through which shone the faint light of a moonless sky clouded over. So dim it was that we could make out nothing in the room, other than that the room existed.

Diana’s mad sister slept, and in her sleep was absolutely motionless, or so it seemed at least in the dark.

I, myself, marveled that I could be here, at all – here, here! HERE! – without anyone calling on me. I had not gone through the dance, I had not been summoned, I had not been pulled out of a dreamless dream into an unreal reality. In the past, I had been unable to make this trip on my own volition, but now was here.

Here. In the dark, where a madwoman slept.

“She is there, sleeping,” Diana told us, those of us who had come with her, who after hearing her story had decided to help her find David, had believed that David must still exist somewhere.

We knew that, of course. We could sense her sister’s presence, even though we could not see her. And something more: standing there, I was aware of the many times I had been called to her bidding, the words we had helped her write down, the poetry she had completed and then hidden away.  I could look around the room in the dark and see the spots, without seeing, knowing they were there: those scraps of paper on which we had helped her write her delusions.

Or were they delusions?

If nothing is something and something nothing, if sense is nonsense and nonsense is sense, if the existence of one thing requires the existence of all things, then wouldn’t the existence of reality mean that there must be dreams?

And would it not then be a matter of perspective, which is which?

“Shall I wake her?” Diana asked us.

We murmured, unsure enough of this new way that we were not willing to lead, we who had always followed.

“I am awake,” came the sister’s voice from the obsidian shadows.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Each letter has had a turn to talk.  Here's links to all of them.  They're best, probably, if read in order but each is also more or less independent and they can be read in any order and result in the same story.

3 comments:

Robin said...

So not only are there more realities, the letters and Diana can now move among them. Interesting stuff.

And, yes, sometimes I've had dreams that seemed more real than anything I've lived.

"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."
~Emily Bronte

Briane said...

You've got to be really good to pull out an Emily Bronte quote like that. Well played.

Andrew Leon said...

I think the sister...
oh, well, I'll wait and see.