Story #147 - A is for...

A is for...

A was for apple.

She was sure of it – she had to be. She’d heard the phrase so many times, how could it not have been true?

A was for apple, a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and don’t count those chickens before they hatched. Each one perfect in its easy simplicity, and each one embedded into her mind, stuck there since she was a child. Others she knew were the same – they couldn’t say when or where they’d learned the sayings, but they came naturally, as though they were part of the solid underpinnings of the human condition.

They weren’t.

It had taken her the better part of thirty years to discover it, and then only by accident. A series of tragic events had led her to a place where she found her mind stripped bare, her sensibilities reduced to little more than shaking and gibbering twists of her limbs. Parents dead, a husband crippled and two children lost to a creeping wilderness put her in a state of basic human survival, in a mindset where her only option was to survive, not evolve.

And what had happened? A glorious breakdown of all of her faculties, creating a boneless puddle of emotional goo on the floor? A deep melancholy, reducing her to a vegetative and silent state?

Truisms. Sayings. Catchphrases.

She’d tried her best to think of pain she was suffering, to writhe in the agony the world had decided she owed it, but with no luck. Phrase after phrase floated into her head and then went spinning out, no matter how long or how hard she tried to deflect. As her emotional state darkened, she found herself more and more beset by the words of her childhood, to a point that she lost track of her own movements, her own body. Emotional suffering would ramp up, and she would suddenly find herself in her bathtub, chanting a familiar phrase or humming a familiar song.

Going to the therapist hadn’t helped. He was a nice old man, but was convinced that she was suffering in the same way as everyone else he’d ever helped. The recitation of the words of her childhood were simply “artifacts”, he said, “unresolved issues that she was unwilling to deal with honestly”. She had paid for three sessions and forfeited the rest; the man was useless, and he had no interest in understanding what was actually going on in her life.

Research wasn’t her strong suit, but she knew that she had to start looking into her own problems. Solutions weren’t going to present themselves, and with dedication, she could…

“Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” the saying spasmed through her mind, and she grabbed at her forehead. No. She wouldn’t be deterred. Moving quickly, she headed for the study and turned on the computer. It wasn’t a University library, but perhaps she could –

“Haste makes waste,” her mind cried out, and she fell to the ground, clutching at her temples. That was barely a saying, but it seemed that whatever force wanted to keep her away was getting desperate.

Force?

Where had that idea come from?

What would make her think –

“Time above is as time below,” what the hell did that mean? She’d never heard such a saying, and it didn’t even make any sense. This wasn’t something she was remembering, something she knew internally. This was something else.

The mole behind her ear throbbed. It had always been the one blemish she was ashamed of, the one thing she wished she could change. Every specialist she had seen told her that it was either impossible to remove or that it was of such minor significant that she shouldn’t worry. After twenty years of being told she was wrong, she’d started to believe everyone who sold her the same line, but the loss of her family had bloomed pain behind her ear, a pain that wasn’t going away.

A pain that got worse when she thought about those damn sayings –

She screamed from the floor, wondering when she’d been knocked down. The pain was terrible enough to make her stomach turn over, but she’d be damned if she was going to stay down just because some – force – wanted to mess with her.

Her ear throbbed, and she could feel each pulse of her blood through and around it. She tried not to think about her mole most days, but the more she fought with herself, the worse it seemed to get. Reaching a hand back, she found it was twice the size it had been the last time she had looked at it, with a jagged and protruding edge. No mole, no skin aberration could grow so quickly. This had to be something else.

Moving for the kitchen, she kept her thoughts firmly the benign. Garbage day was tomorrow, the light fixtures needed cleaning and the cat had been sick in the entryway again. Such mental straining got her all the way to the utensil caddy, where she found a large pair of metal tongs.

The tongs were in her hand and gripping the back of her mole before a saying had the time to flash across her mind. An upholstered stool at the eating bar gave her something to latch on to with her teeth, and she twisted hard as soon as she had a solid bite on the furniture.

Agony raced through her as she pulled and twisted, and she could feel warm blood start to pour down her back. Trite sayings and hackneyed clichés ran across her eyes, like a scrolling text bar from a weather warning, but she refused to give in. Pain mounted, and she gave the tongs a final twist. With a popping sound, her mole tore free and clacked to the ground, and the words in front of her eyes faded.

Reaching down, she found a hexagonally-shaped piece of metal, covered in her own blood and strange markings. It was humming slightly, and as she held it the thing tried to drive into her palm and began to spin in an attempt to burrow.

This A was most definitely not for apple.


- D