| Revolutionby Elizabeth SparenbergI stepped into the bitter sunlight of a new morning, myself bitter from waking. My miscarried dreams still clung to me. I dragged myself and them across my building's parking lot until the damp and bitter sunlight corroded the film of fantasy on which they fed, and they dropped off me like old moths, and I was alone in the brass reality of morning. My car looked dirtier than it had last night. It was covered with an unfamiliar film. I remembered suddenly, with the jarring force of nostalgia, that the wind last night had been so strong it had entered my dreams and tossed me from year to year of my life so that instead of the usual linear nonsense, I dreamt a howling puzzle of memories. The dirt on my car, then, must have blown there from the construction site down the street.
I got into the car, turned it on. It also found this commute too early, but with heaving sighs and grunts, it conceded to back out of the parking lot and amble onto the road. We passed the culprit construction site, the thrift store, the pet shop with the doleful, short-lived exotics, then met the curve onto the freeway, where we joined other sleepy cars and bitter workers being herded by traffic signs to the metropolis ahead. I imagined, with the guiltless certainty that others imagined with me, breaking suddenly and screeching horizontal across two lanes, causing a massive, bloody pileup, and stopping so many days abruptly in their tracks. I buzzed with the thrill of the idea, but there was always the fear of the questions that would certainly be asked of me if I survived. I reached my exit and left the traffic behind me unmarred.
Then I could see the Serenity Inn, my daily destination, where I earned my rent by catering to preoccupied guests who would not offer any serenity to the inn, but expected the other guests to do so. Having connected parking lot to parking lot, I left my car, a smutty smirk between the expensive, freshly washed rentals the guests brought in. The sunlight was voluptuous now, and almost incarnate in its intensity. It swarmed the concrete of the parking lot and encrusted the northeastern half of the building. I swallowed the sunshine in the manner of the shadows, who fatten with the day and become lean when the sun wanes. I gulped it in until I nearly drowned in the heavy, unrelenting luminance. Only then, when I had to escape or be transformed into a brittle shadow-thing, could I bring myself into the inn and position myself behind the front desk. Across the lobby I saw the breakfasting business men, and tourists, disillusioned with travel, who would soon become an onslaught of guests checking out and disputing bills.
My first interaction of the day was with a man, mid-50s, who had a bristled face and scorched voice. He slapped his blue plastic room key on the desk.
"I'm in room 303." Though he worded a statement, he voiced a command.
I cocked my head slightly, hoped I was smiling, and asked, "How may I help you?"
"I'm in room 303." I typed his room number into the database to pull up his information. There was a note. I clicked it open. It was a frown-face.
"Mr.Warrell?"
"That's me."
"How may I help you?"
"You haven't heard about my problem?"
"No, I'm sorry."
He banged his fist on the counter. The couple checking out with my co-worker turned their hungry faces to us and inhaled the drama, eyes gleaming.
"I reserved a smoking room!" Mr.Warrell shouted. "I reserved a smoking room, but I did not receive a smoking room. I need a smoking room. I am staying here for a week and I need to smoke in my bed."
"I apologize, Mr. Warrell." I had stopped masking my apathy months ago, after realizing that sincerity was too strikingly alien in the commerce of this inn. He flicked his hand at me.
"Find me a smoking room."
"Let me see what I can do." I scanned the database. The management, attempting to conform to the new national ‘green’ trend, had eradicated most of the rooms designated for smoking, and only five remained. None were available. "I'm sorry, sir," I said in the vacant, placating tone necessary in customer service. "We don't have any smoking rooms available during your stay."
"I reserved-"
"I'm going to go ahead and upgrade you to a balcony suite. You are welcome to smoke on the balcony."
"I don't need no damn balcony suite! I need to smoke in my bed!"
"I'm sorry, sir."
"This is your fault. I reserved a smoking room." He yanked a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slipped one into his mouth, gripping it between his teeth as he spat, “This place is a shit hole." He sulked to the automated front door. It slid open. Before stomping outside, he lit the cigarette, turned, and swung his head as he exhaled so the smoke swept across the lobby. I watched the trails of smoke curl around the browning fruit left over for late risers, then dissipate into the shafts of sunlight weaving through the tree branches outside the lobby windows. I was working a ten hour shift.
After breakfast, I watched the front desk manager, a stocky man with sharp features and deceptively benign eyes, strut across the lobby. The previous year, he had been bestowed with the responsibility of choosing the new lobby design from a set of corporate templates. He decided on an ‘earthy’ green and brown color scheme, with curve-backed wooden chairs in the dining area, and, to his delight, pink lights which offered a diffuse, sleepy quality. He allowed the large lobby windows to remain uncovered during breakfast; he believed the morning light was invigorating, but after 10:30, when the graying breakfast buffet was carted off to be re-heated and eaten by the housekeeping staff, and the tree branches outside were skipping with contented birds, he pulled closed the thick lobby curtains to block out the increasing daze of sunlight.
Throughout the day, satiated guests tumbled in from the dizzy outdoors and, sighing out their happy exhaustion, settled gratefully into my boss' constructed ambiance. For them, it was a relief from the duties of enjoying their vacations. For me, the unchanging, calm lighting blurred the hours so that my shift became long and timeless. If I did not arrive early to work to stand outside and gorge myself on morning, I would succumb to a delirious waking slumber. As it was, by the end of my shift my temples burned, my visual track slurred, and my thoughts crawled. I did not even have the energy to change out of my uniform. I simply clocked out and walked outside.
The day was already slipping away. Long shadows like fingers clutched the light. I felt the coolness of a day in decline. The sunlight had ripened while I was inside, and now, thick and sweet and lazy, it was giving in to evening. I ducked into my car. It was hot, but I left the windows up so I could experience, vicariously, the moods of light my parked car had collected. I backed it out of the spot, and steered us back down the route we had taken that morning. Watching the same cars as the previous evening drive past the same streets populated by the same pedestrians, all of us united by our private routines, I realized it had become superfluous to observe my surroundings. I turned onto the freeway, knowing the green Honda would merge before me; I would pause for the silver Toyota truck, then merge and glide home.
The impact left me no room for breath or thought. I was solely feeling: The weight of my own car crumpling onto me, the lightness of spinning out of control, the aggressive burn in my left side, the painful itching on my neck, the jolt of a second impact. After my car crashed to stillness on the guard rail, my instincts rushed back. I dragged air into my mouth, but it squeezed through my lungs and there was not enough. I began drifting. My left arm was searing, heavy, immobile. My right arm tingled with an uncontrollable levity. But there was someone else. Between a medley of neon splotches I saw hands unclipping my seatbelt and maneuvering my body out of the crushed vehicle. It hurt. Maybe I screamed.
There was a period of chaos, when my eyes tried to manipulate the light into comprehensive images. Then, clarity. The pain and commotion became background as my focus shifted away from the influx of light. To my horror, I saw what I had unconsciously been avoiding seeing my entire life. The vision weighted me with an awesome, hollow gravity. Between the pictures built of light, pinpoints of darkness shaped a different image. A giant form towered over me. Like a sheet of night sky, it flickered with the little specks of light left over from life. The longer I looked, the dimmer became those familiar lights, until I saw the complete image this darkness was presenting.
The form was almost human, but sexless and larger than any man or any monument of man. It had no face, but when I looked where it should have had eyes, I felt a vacuum expand from my chest. Before I lost myself completely, I looked away from the empty face to marvel at its enormous antlers. They twisted and undulated like silent, dark flames, and reached forth a distance I imagined surpassed the sky. Hopping along them, gripping and uncurling their claws as they skittered on the great horns, were several vultures. They snapped their beaks greedily, staring down at me. I squirmed under their gaze. I sensed that they were waiting for me to die. These, however, were not the flesh-vultures to whom the Tibetans submit their beloved corpses. They were not interested in the haggard, blood filled mass of my body. They were waiting to make piecemeal the ineffable substance between my flesh, for love of which my earthbound heart beat and my brain tirelessly transmitted its impulses. The vultures' desire was stronger than my damaged, feeble organs; my mind began to wind down, and my own darkness began to unstitch from my frame.
One of the vultures jumped off the antler to come closer to me. I looked directly into its eyes. They were absolute darkness, unable to even reflect my decades of days. In those true-black eyes, I saw an exhilarating freedom. If I gave myself to the vultures, never again would I be bound to sunlight, never again would I ache at the perimeter of an idyllic day. I would be void. The other vultures jumped from their perches. Their beaks clapped with such force that I felt myself quake further and further from life. They surrounded me.
Something tickled my skin. Pricks of light broke through the darkness. At that sight I felt the exhausting longing to live and see and feel the warm, persistent sun; to breathe. The light conglomerated into an image of a face. It took me a moment to recognize the man looking at me, and then to realize that his tears were falling on my cheek. It was Derek, the man I lived with. The man I told I loved. He was smiling and crying and looking down at my injured body. Half of his face was harsh with stubble. Although I had little control of my muscles, I smiled inwardly. When he had gotten the news about the accident, he had been shaving. He always shaved his face just before I came home so that the bristles wouldn’t bother me when he kissed me hello. He had been thinking of my lips, and that kiss, when the phone rang and unexpectedly halted his evening custom.
Suddenly, I was angry. So angry that my heart jumped, causing Derek, startled, to look at the heart monitor that had just changed tempo. Who was he to be my last image? Each night, his face ended my day. Each morning, before I even saw my home, it was him I looked upon, that face that now hovered over me. His features were too familiar, that line of stubble that halved his face too easily explained; part of the unremarkable clockwork of my existence. Anyone, anything else to be my last experience of light, but not Derek! Not commonplace, inescapable Derek! I wanted to reach out my hand to push his face away, or to turn my head so I could see, instead, the hospital room with its foreign furnishings and strange devices whose uses I could end my life guessing. But I couldn’t. Whether by permanent damage, or by constraint, I was paralyzed. Derek was fixed in my visual plane. I glared at him with a silent, unforgiving intensity, until the darkness began again to push out the light
My breathing shallowed; the darkness became complete. In the abysmal vulture eyes I saw the same ultimate relief, but my anger persisted, roaring and binding me to my painfully crippled body. The vultures skipped along the expansive antlers, darkened eyes tracking my struggle, still hoping, but no longer certain, that they would feast on me that night.
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