The next day sucked.
It was so bad, Charlie worried if he would remember it forever, due to it's awful severity.
It started with a phone call. His high school, informing him the English class he had been taking wasn't a class he needed to graduate on time. Now it was a semester too late to do anything about it.

The next thing to go wrong was all his fault. His mother entered his room. A laundry basket held in one hand, the other held something behind her back. Her face was a stew of disgust and disappointment.

The porn. Damm!

After getting a lecture on Adam, Eve, Aids and a cousin Eric he'd never met, but according to his mother - was quickly becoming, Charlie went for a drive.
His head was swimming. It was just after 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning. He felt dizzy with guilt. How could I have been so stupid! he thought to himself. It was then he saw the lights. Red and blue.
The cop wrote the ticket quickly. Probably in a hurry to wolf down more doughnuts, Charlie thought.

"Don't worry," the officer said. "Traffic school will keep ya free and clear. Directions are on the back, you drive more carefully ya hear?"
"Yes officer." Charlie said.

Charlie closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I got to slow down, he thought to himself.
He opened his eyes after about a minute, noticing the shovel he purchased the day before on the floor board next to him. He picked it up, admiring its antiquity. Charlie's brow furrowed in a mask of memory and confusion.

The yellowing tag now read: ONE.

Charlie flipped the ancient tag over and over, as if by doing so it would turn back to how he remembered it.
It was no use, the number one stared back at him - and, if it's possible for ink to emote, Charlie would swear it was mocking him.
"BBBZZZZ" Charlie jumped at the sound of his cell phone, vibrating in his back pocket.
He fumbled with it, his fingers dexterity suddenly resembling cold sausages. He didn't recognize the number.
"Hello?"
"Charlie." The voice was sad, lost.
"Mom? What is it?" Charlie said, he'd never heard his mother sound so innocent, so feeble.
"He's gone...my Jack is gone." After a time, the sobbing faded into a dial tone. Then the event slowly dissolved into nothing.
Charlie swallowed hard. It felt like a punch in the throat.
"MEEEEEEPPPP!" The policeman was still behind Charlie, honking his horn. Wondering why it was taking the youngster so long to get a move on.
Suddenly, Charlie's car was in motion. He didn't remember getting home, but he vividly remembered getting out of his car and through the front door of his mothers house. That, took years.

The coroner's report stated his stepfather Jack had died of a heart attack. Sudden and immediate.
Even in the troughs of grief, Charlie had serious doubts about this. Jack was a man of iron, both mental and physical. His regimen of exercise was so extreme his heart would be the last thing to go. Jack WAS Charlie's father, even though science would argue otherwise. He'd always been there, a teacher, a father, a friend.
Charlie finally fell to sleep that night holding his grieving mother, sticky with her sweat and tears.

He dreamt of a yellowing ocean, full of rusted paint cans and dead baby seals. The seals faces were human. Every face was Jacks.
Charlie woke startled, in a wash of remembrance and revelation.
The house was empty, but his mother's tears were still damp on his shirt. He got off the couch and stretched. It was then he saw the note.

Dearest Charles,
I'm at Linda's. If the mortuary calls, give them her number. I have to get away. Hope you understand. I love you so much darling,
Mom

Next to the note was a twenty. Jackson never looked so depressed.
The shower that morning was a miracle. Charlie let the scalding water wash away yesterday until his skin resembled a radish.
Charlie dressed quickly and started up his Volkswagen. While waiting for it to warm up, he slowly glanced at the shovel in the passenger seat.
Giving in to his curiosity, he hoped karma didn't view him as a cat.
The tag was face down.

Charlie turned it over. Slow as a nightmare.

Amongst the yellow-brown filth, a number was written. A number that Charlie would now forever view as the most horrifying digit of all. It was at that moment Charlie knew that what he was seeing wasn't a trick. This was real.
TWO.

Charlie stopped the car, or more accurately - it stopped him, due to his foot forgetting the clutch, jolting Charlie against his seatbelt.
He pulled the emergency brake up and grabbed the shovel in one angry motion.
Charlie marched inside his house, taking a match from the shelf. He pulled the tag off the shovel and threw it into the woodstove, the old ashes embraced it in a gray cloud of ruin.
A satisfying red flame. The heat warmed his face, much too hot considering the fuel. In seconds it was gone.

"DING DONG," the doorbell.

Charlie bolted up from his squatting position by the stove and in doing so, cut his arm on the handle. The shovel dropped beside the stove with a dull ting of iron.

"Sorry, it was open." A man stood in his doorway, dressed in mourning black, even his tie was black.
"Bit warm for a fire isn't it?" the man was clearly as uncomfortable as Charlie, attempting, but failing to lighten the mood.

"Yeah," Charlie said absentmindedly. "Burning receipts, you know, identity theft these days."
"Hrmph.." The man grunted, holding forth a variety of colored papers, neatly stapled.
"Your mother will need to sign these. My number is here if there are any questions."

The truth of yesterday's events hit Charlie like a wet punch in the face.

Jack was gone.

The mortuary employee saw the change come over Charlie's face and gave him his card, his emotions memorized and well practiced.
"This place should help." He handed a pink bordered card to Charlie.
It was a counseling service for grieving families.
"Thanks."

Charlie took the papers and card and closed the door. He then collapsed against the front door, the tears threatened to choke him.
Jack was really gone. He held the proof in his salty hands.
After some time, Charlie steadied himself and walked into the kitchen. He left the paperwork by the phone for his mother.
His head was swimming. A headache was forming.
Charlie locked the door behind him and sped off, attempting to outrun the swelling feelings of desolation and bereavement.

His brain hammered against his skull, worsening with every mile.
To Ben's house, Charlie decided. Ben was a friend from school and his father was a pharmacist, and his medicine cabinets held all sorts of miracles. If you needed to stay up all night to study, or drift off into blissful nothingness, Ben was your guy.
Charlie considered his proximity to Ben's house, and felt foolish but the pain was so great he was forced to pull over. The percussion inside his dome continued to throb.
Now accompanied by flashes of Black synchronous to the beat. A concert of pain.
The beats got closer, as did the black, until everything disappeared.

Ben saw Charlie's blue Volkswagen rounding the corner towards his parent's driveway.
The Galen household was massive. Ben's room sat atop the tan colored house, allowing him to see far off into the distance.
A strategic stronghold and lookout post for parents during his numerous hosting of high school parties.
Ben bolted down the stairs, a practiced motion he knew better than anybody on Earth, due to being born in the very room he now resided in. Seventeen years in the same place granted him the movement of a gymnast within his fortress. Within seconds he was out the front door.

"Charlie should be visible by now," He thought to himself.

In the distance, Ben heard the familiar sound of Charlie's car horn. It wasn't a friendly "Beep" it was a constant drone.

Something was wrong.
He started running towards it.

Charlie was stuck in a gelatinous mass.
Smooth, transparent walls of blue held him slightly upside down. If he were the hands of a clock, he'd be 4:50, his head the hour.
It was then he realized the shadow above him.
It was humanoid and shoveling more gelatin atop him, the light blue prison slowly turning a dark purple. Each salvo of gelatin pulsed with the same beat he heard inside his head.
Charlie felt a glimmer of hope when he realized he must be dreaming, but the dreams logic wouldn't let this fact ever fully develop the courage to be clearly heard. It sat and laughed from afar, daring him.
Charlie felt like a coward.

Ben saw Charlie's Volkswagen about a block outside his driveway, still running and partially in a ditch.
When Ben approached the car, his heart sank.
He threw the door open and was hit with a black cloud of monoxide fumes.
Charlie was collapsed, unmoving.
Ben quickly turned the car off and grabbed his friend from his near tin coffin.
Without hesitation Ben spotted a wheelbarrow from a chore he’d put off for most of the summer. For the first time, Ben was happy to be a procrastinator.
Dumping Charlie into the wheelbarrow, Ben took him as fast as he could up the driveway and to the front door.

Charlie groaned.
“Thank god” Ben said as he pulled Charlie into the house, “C’mon buddy, I got ya covered.” After laying Charlie on the cold tile entrance, Ben bolted up the stairs, grabbing enough medications to make any senior salivate with envy.
A bit later Charlie awoke, confusion and pain fighting for his attention.
His lungs burned. His brain was a walnut inside a bowling ball. Every movement bounced.
Everything hurt.
After some drugs and tea, followed by even more medications, Charlie finally felt like Charlie again.

“So seizures run in the family huh?”
Charlie took a deep breath, his lungs had finally stopped burning. “Thanks man. I don’t know what happened.”
“Well the next time you decide to go suicidal, do it somewhere else.” Ben winked at Charlie, a mixture of caring and mischief, but mostly relief.
Charlie told him everything. The mention of Jack’s demise almost brought Ben to tears. Jack had been a father-figure for most their friends growing up. Jack had always been one of the guys.


Something awoke inside the Earth.
It had a purpose. A strength.
It rose through the soil by becoming it – a transparency becoming more real with every foot of it’s rising.
In the hills behind Moor Park something moved like a low-tethered kite, smooth and weightless.
It had straw skin.

Linda Comer sat patiently in the Owl's Den, sipping her much-too-hot mint tea. The coffee shop was her first choice in comfort and so far it was doing pretty well as a safe house for grief.
Mary-Ann Hassler had been Linda's friend ever since meeting over two cold coffees at a temp agency a decade ago.
There friendship was immediate and lifelong.
She would have never guessed that the hardships of death would be foremost on there minds just ten years later.
It was too soon.
Jack Hassler was only 41.
A strange guilt settled over Linda as she sat waiting for her best friend to return from the ladies room. A guilt based on unresolved feelings she had for Jack. It was so easy to cry with Mary-Ann, because deep down, although she would never admit it to anyone, she had loved Jack Hassler from the start.
This wasn't a hard thing to do.
Jack was a stunning specimen of a man. All the usual things, tall, dark and handsome, but there was something else. Jack had a movement about him that hinted of another time and place.
He could attend a dinner party in his pajamas, and still be the cat's meow.
A piece of Linda Comer had died with Jack. A piece that knew it could never be, but pulsed with desire nonetheless.
She sipped the tea, forgetting the temperature, and in doing so burnt her lips. She caressed her lips with the softness of her tongue, imagining it was someone else's.
Mary-Ann emerged from the ladies room, here eyes looked as if she'd gone 10 rounds.
"Let's get out of here." Mary-Ann said, her eyes dark with memory.

Mary-Ann and Linda drove up to where the old airport used to be. A vantage point good for geography and self-reflection. It also had the added benefit of no passersby, except on Friday and Saturday nights, where it becomes suddenly infested with teen lovers.

Linda Comer was quite the driver. Friends and family teased that in another life she could have been a stunt driver, or even better, a drag racer.
Mary-Ann's knuckles were a familiar off-white color as her best friend sped around the corners towards the top of Airport Drive. The thrill of speed served as a great intermission to her troubled mind. It felt as if she was a teenager again, if only for a few moments.

Mary-Ann felt a slight hesitation in the driving, and time seemed to slow.
At first, Linda thought it was a deer. Her adrenaline caused her eyes to take in more than they should and what she saw chilled her to the bone. In a blurred moment, she registered 3 things: Shadow, pestilence and a face.

Mary-Ann looked towards Linda's face and saw a look of what could only be described of recognition.
Swerving to avoid the thing that was now in the road, the car spun out of control. Before going off the road and into a tree, a funny feeling settled on Linda's mind, a feeling of admiration. The feeling was quickly ended with a thud and the sounds of airbags deploying.

....to be continued.