The eternality in our ephemerality

Chapter 44. Of course my stupidities had to kick in.

"Ah!" Jane screamed as she rescued the ball from touching the ground. All of our bodies were hunched over, knees bent and our asses being pointed out. Animals in its natural habitat, waiting to attack and unleashing our inner fights. Pain, struggle, sweat...win

Arms throws out into the space, sore forearms and gasps of air. Water Bottle sprinkled into reddens faces wetting everything.

Seconds slowed, delayed multiple into fragments waiting to be yelled.

"Go!" A gasp. The second fled. My turn, poker face. "Set- ready!" Jane commanded. Dove her panther hands into the ball, saving it barely from inches to its predictable smack to the ground, saving something from the cliches of fate. Save it from losing a point, all for the points.

Flickered and spun, up the ball went. Fluttering eyelids blinded by the sun's welcome. A sphere of white pure light blurring everything out of sight. Beams of transparency, white, grey, all there was a ball of shooting light, arrogant enough to fade everything out....

Quivering lips, wrestling each other, concentrating on the exact, precise indisputable moment my hands will lift the ball.

But a slip, an unmanageable slip, cost everything out of sight...

A dumb step, skippering sand, jello on my feet, ice on my feet all lead to one thing; the moment in which the blinding light takes over your chestnut eyes and curtains your gaze forever.

I threw myself out of the scope and dared to reach the ball, a glimpse of effort.

I managed to touch it, and that was it.  

The ground.

A rough surface landed on my back, pointy at the edges and rough at the sides. Sandpaper gliding over my curious hands exposing where I fell.... Pain... Needles.

The same needles imprinted on me, the same second I fled away into the woods. The trees, the fog, chirping birds singing to my heart's drumming. Droplets sinking into my skin, falling from a verdant leaf of a proud oak tree.

Polaroids, beams of memories skipping inside my mind. His hand, my tired body. The needles stabbing me as I curled into a frightened tormented ball.

Earth, breathe. His voice boomed again. What is she doing? Ale, ale, ale... He is calling.

An electroshock curving my back into an uncontrollable arch of gasping air. An imaginary force choking my throat into inhuman stillness, pressed above me the dark cloud remained.

Where did the oxygen go?

The polaroids. The lilies scent dancing on my nostrils, the wet dirt mud meaning my fingertips as my hands gracefully expanded across the humid floor. The perfume of lemon pine trees in each gasping, desperate breath I took. The view of my whole life crumbles and creeps once again into the soil I was born in, a rebirth where my tampered petals resurged from the dirt in a dandelion; floating away and slowly drifting.

"Ale!" A booming. Earthquake. My hands trembled, clenched into the rough floor with my eyelids. A sound so distant yet so close, as if I could caress it with my fingertips...

Fluttering unfocused eyes, snapped open. Wide and desperate with enormous panicked eyes slowly rolling upwards. The same permanent blue sky on my radar, white bleached clouds decorating the endless zafiran blue, look at the pretty clouds.

Pain, pain, again.

Rationality battling...

But the unsighted silence was hushed, replaced by an internal beep. A beep in an OR after a soul joins the dandelions' path up in the air and dances in the wind, a beep when all you know and love is snapped away from existence and buried human cruelty emerging up into the shallows. A long, lasting, wrenching beep.