|
|
|
- x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x -
She could have sworn it was a dream. Could’ve sworn to god that it never really happened. Or that it had happened to someone else, and the story just went along with the statistics.
Because it made perfect sense that things like that happened to everyone else. She just couldn’t accept that she had become one of those microscopic statistics, dehumanized as little black numbers on a piece of paper that could be crumpled up and thrown away.
It’s insulting and cruel for anyone to be considered less than human. And to the people fortunate enough not to be her; she was. But she was a real person, real enough to wind up and slap you across the face-- and she would have, just to prove to you that she was no less human than the rest of the world, and nothing like a printed number.
The reality, the one she wanted so much to believe wasn’t real, was that she was a natural anomaly. She was truly one of a kind. The first, and I had hoped, for the rest of the world’s sake, she was the last.
I wouldn’t wish what she went through on anyone.
- x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x -
It is called Treslawikian syndrome, and Cassandra was the first known case.
To the best of our knowledge, it is caused by an unknown mutation in the brain that occurs at birth. It is extremely rare, and therefore, very little research has been done. From what cases have been documented, only some sparse concrete information could be gleaned in the limited timeframe the affliction allows.
The syndrome manifests itself in the form of “attacks”, which occur periodically over time. Records of past cases show that these attacks will follow a decreasing, Fibbonnacci-like pattern; almost as if the disease were counting down from the afflicted’s birth. Many of the victims’ personal records have compared the syndrome to Fate’s own hand; a sentimental allusion for something science had yet to comprehend. The time between attacks decreases at a steady rate as a Tressy—as those with the Treslawikian mutation have been called—gets older, but at puberty, a spike in the mutation occurs—some more severe than others—and the rate of the attacks will accelerate even further.
The syndrome exists in the nervous system, but its effects are widespread, dramatic, and the only real signs of the affliction’s existence, as the mutation itself is still unidentified.
During an attack, a Tressy will undergo severe physical changes as well as mental ones. Some of these changes are subtle when they occur, often undetectable, and some are more severe. The exact reasons for some of these changes are still unknown, due to the natural complexities of the human brain.
Most recently discovered is that the state of a Tressy’s brain is radically altered during an attack. Conscious thought processing and reasoning are slowed when the mutation triggers an attack, and in turn, instinctive muscle responses are greatly heightened. Because the thinking area of the brain is reduced so drastically, Tressies will wander and become disoriented very easily. Also due to this chemical imbalance, Tressies’ faces are usually without expression, similar to normal humans when sleepwalking. This lack of expression, when combined with the more noticeable physical changes, is acutely disturbing to any individual not afflicted with the syndrome or who is simply unfamiliar. In this way, it can be argued that the mental changes a Tressy suffers affect them most. Indirectly; through the eyes of others.
But the most noticeable change is the hyper-accelerated bone growth in both the radius and the ulna—the forearms—and in the tarsals—or the arch of the foot. Externally, the Tressy’s arms will appear to stretch, starting below the elbow and ending at the wrist, and the arch of the foot will become almost a third bone in the leg, growing long enough to look like the hind paw of a canine. The dramatic growth of these bones, mainly in the legs, forces the Tressy to carry him or herself differently; crouching and loping in a completely animalistic manner. The muscles in the area are also forced to change, in order to compensate for the extra length of the limbs and the greater effort now required to move them.
As a side-effect of a Tressy’s hyper-accelerated bone growth, the fingernails and toenails will grow very long. And again, for an unknown reason, the Tressy’s teeth will become sharp and uniform inside the mouth, and the features of the Tressy’s face flatter. The skin of the face tightens and smoothes out like glossy rubber as most of the Tressy’s blood rushes to preserve the vital organs throughout the stress of the transformation. This prevents the mouth from being able to close completely, and also leaves the afflicted’s skin much paler. The circulation is weakest at the farthest points from the internal organs, which causes the Tressy’s fingers and toes to be tinged slightly blue from lack of bloodflow. Unlike the growth of the forearms and feet, the Tressy’s face itself will not have changed, but recognizing a victim between attacks can be quite difficult.
After such severe changes, both mental and physical, it is still debated whether or not a Tressy can still be scientifically classified as part of the human species. With their mental capacities reduced and their posture altered, both specific requirements of any humanoid being, there has been much debate. However, any kind of legal standpoint still has yet to be reached, while the small minority of individuals burdened with Treslawikian syndrome are constantly made the victims of ignorance. Normal individuals find it very difficult to consider a Tressy as still human; and history has taught us that even small differences can be regarded cruelly. Through no fault of their own, those afflicted with the Treslawikian mutation have been faced with much discrimination. And in some cases, the discrimination comes from within their own families.
For many Tressies, if not all, this is the most difficult part of their condition.
Every Tressy is born a human being, and for them, that is a fact that never changes.
Unfortunately, there are even more symptoms of the Tressy mutation. Their physical appearance and brain chemistry are not the only things altered during the course of an attack. These additional side-effects are less pronounced, but still physically noticeable after long periods of time, and therefore just as difficult for a Tressy to accept.
As a direct result of the brain’s mutation, a Tressy will suffer extensive nerve damage throughout the course of his or her life. According to what little information has been gathered, when a Tressy suffers an attack, the mutation triggers an almost complete shutdown of the nervous system, which acts as a novacaine during the intense physical changes a Tressy’s body undergoes. This unique combination of overloading and shutting down the nervous system mostly affects a Tressy’s sense of touch. But aside from diminished sensations, the only other known tendency among Tressies is bad short-term memory. And like all nerve damage, it is permanent.
The drastic bone and muscle growth that Tressies experience drains their bodies of nutrients, especially calcium and different kinds of proteins, and leaves them with fragile joints and tendons. Like the disease itself, this is a condition that lasts a Tressy’s entire life. However, after an attack, a Tressy’s body will try to regain the nutrition it has lost by re-absorbing the calcium and proteins from the elongated bones and nails and the strengthened muscles, leaving the Tressy extremely sore, and exhausted from the extra amount of energy required to work their enhanced muscles during an attack. It is common for Tressies to be thin and malnourished, and become easily injured or disoriented during their attacks.
As a Tressy’s attacks become more frequent over the course of the syndrome, it becomes harder and harder for the Tressy’s body to compensate for the lack of nutrients and cope with the sudden, violent changes. Eventually, the strain of the attacks and the increasing rate they occur at will send a Tressy’s body into epileptic shock, resulting in the Tressy’s death.
Almost all Tressies die before the age of twenty.
She was only nineteen.
Her name was Cassandra Treslawik, and she was the first to be born with the syndrome.
Fortune was with her in that she grew up like a normal child, with no hints as to her condition at all. At least none that anyone would have recognized at the time. Even now, there is still much we don’t know about Cassandra’s disease.
Although, to call it a disease is a bit unfair. And to speak as if it were hers alone is also. She no more wanted it than anyone with terminal cancer wishes for a tumor.
Up until a certain point, Cassandra believed the ‘attacks’ to be strange recurring dreams that she had been having for as long as she could remember. Until that point, no one had ever seen a Tressy, let alone recognized it as a human affliction. At that point—with no regards as to what we seemed to be, or what we looked like...
When we met, we were both acutely human indeed.
- x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x -
It was the oddest feeling, she thought, for having no feeling at all.
From the way her hands were shaking and twitching, it seemed like she should be feeling at least something. But no; she had just dropped onto her side and lay there, staring at her hands in the bluish darkness of nighttime, on the ground in front of her face as her fingers jerked and wiggled. Everything was perfectly numb. She couldn’t even feel the grass or the hard ground underneath her body when she fell, and she wouldn’t have known that she was twitching at all if her hands hadn’t ended up landing in front of her face.
She might have considered trying to move, but the thought never occurred to her. All of it was too engrossing to see happening; it was even interesting that she didn’t blink. Not once at all, during the whole dream.
Of course, the dream was familiar, if only faintly. She’d been having different versions of it since she was little, and they were always so lifelike. She used to try to describe them to her parents, but both of them worked long and stressful hours on the third-shift. They were either far too cranky or far too busy to listen very attentively, or they just weren’t home. Eventually, she had learned to enjoy the dreams on her own.
In spite of the fact that she could barely remember anything about them afterwards, they were always fascinating.
First, everything became sort of hazy. It wasn’t that her vision became hazy exactly; it was the things that went on in her mind that got sluggish and dull. Later on, when she tried to recall it, it had reminded her of the feeling she got when she sat too close to the television and stared at it for hours at a time. She could see things happen as clearly as always, but the change was in the way she thought of them, in the form of a distance she barely perceived between herself and what she saw, like looking through a thin glass screen at a show. Most times, it was—not just a little, but almost exactly—like she was watching a particularly interesting movie on television, and she simply absorbed what she saw without thinking anything at all. What few things that did come to mind were thick, slow facts and arrived late.
Next was always the numbness, and the transformation that her body could never feel. Usually, after a while she would get back up from wherever she had fallen and just know that her body was different. Eventhough her mind remained hazy and slow after she had changed, she would always know it immediately, as if it were instinct. She didn’t need to see or feel it happen in order to know that it had.
However, this was the first time she could actually see a part of her body during the first part of the dream, the part where she changed into something else.
At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, as she looked at her hands, the nails looked longer than they had been all of a sudden, and still they continued to grow. It seemed to happen so gradually that her thickened mind slipped across the surface of seeing it, so that eventhough she had neither looked away or blinked, there seemed to have hardly been any change at all, except that now her hands looked vaguely wrong compared to how they were normally.
The nails were half an inch long from the tips of her fingers, and the distance her hands were from her face when she had fallen was different. Her wrists looked stretched and startlingly delicate, as if any kind of harsh impact might snap them in half. When she moved them across the ground to get up, her arms felt too long and they felt heavy below the elbow for a moment when she raised them.
All this now, as she righted herself in a feral squat on the grass behind her house, was familiar. The odd way her legs now bent, coiling underneath her like an animal’s haunches, and the comfortable crouch she settled into as she worked the toes of her hugely elongated feet out of her sneakers. It felt, not so much ‘normal’, but like it had happened many times before, and therefore was ‘normal’ in that sense.
The light from two headlights in the darkened street attracted her attention, and her long limbs crawled fluidly across the grass and into the driveway, in pursuit of the lights. The smooth motions of her legs and arms working together felt good; too good to stop just because she had lost sight of the bright lights. Heading down the driveway like it was a runway and turning, she cantered from shadow to shadow between the streetlights, following the wet sidewalk to its end, without paying the slightest attention to any of the identical houses that lined either side of the quiet suburb street.
At the end of the road, she gathered her strong legs beneath her without the slightest pause and moved in great flying bounds down the dark, intersecting main street. She leapt from one side of the black, wet asphalt to the other in an erratic zigzag, as if too excited to contain herself or unable to decide which side of the road she liked better, all the while getting lost in the floating arc of each huge leap after the last. Her limbs felt strong underneath her, and the power bunched in her muscles each time she pushed off the ground and spurred her on, higher and faster.
A gray-shingled roof flashed solidly underneath her feet, but she was already soaring off it, without any destination, or need of one in her hazy mind. She watched the scenery go by, rising and falling away from her as she jumped, feeling the soaring motions of her body and barely noting the silent neighborhood in the dead of night all around.
It hardly registered that she was almost a dozen streets down the main road, or even that she was in an unfamiliar place, until the sudden yellow burst of a light switching on and the quiet garble of voices ground her flying leaps to a halt on top of a low roof.
As soon as her body stopped moving, it felt heavy again, but the light and the voices had snared her attention entirely. She leaned over the edge of the roof, across the vertical shadow cast by the light coming from below, and saw two men speaking on the cement doorstep of what must have been a small clinic that doubled as a home.
One of the men was old; the combed gray hair fraying away from his head in places, and the shoulders of a worn, faded blue sweater-vest were visible from over the edge of the roof. His face was partly in shadow, and his voice sounded as tired as he looked old when he spoke to the other man:
“Well then, Doctor... Thank you, for all your help.”
The old man shook the Doctor’s hand once, and then left.
Left standing in the thin yellow light of the outside fixture, the other man seemed small and weary. He wore thin glasses and a heavy dark scrub of a beard on his jaw and throat, and the short cut brown hair on his head was beginning to bald, making him look even more tired and unkempt. There was a sag in the man’s shoulders that suggested the white medical coat he wore over his creased brown pants might very well be made of lead weights. His drained figure on the doorstep seemed to make the shadows surrounding him even longer, as if he were in danger of being engulfed.
He reached up and adjusted his glasses, a rough weary sigh escaping him, sounding hollow in the dark beyond the doorstep.
The man glanced aside at the subtle white garage beside the clinic, and hesitated, as if anxious to go somewhere but wary of keeping it a secret. Then he stepped off the cement block, into the shadows cast by the thin yellow light behind him, and went towards the garage, shrugging off the long white coat.
Draping it neatly over one arm, the Doctor stopped in front of the closed garage door. He glanced once over his shoulder toward the street and the lighted doorstep of the clinic, before he grasped the old-fashioned black iron handle at knee-height and heaved the garage door up and open.
The man disappeared into the swimming blackness inside the garage, and the sound of his footsteps crunching grittily around in the farthest corner reached the roof of the clinic, where an enraptured pair of eyes watched.
Completely absorbed in watching the man down below, she crawled fixedly along the roof and dropped silently down past the white siding, cantering quickly into the inky blackness of the garage before the yellow light could reveal her presence. The tinny click of a pullchain lightbulb illuminated the safety of the darkness, and she hid herself in a corner of the garage that was still dominated by heavy darkness, below a simple square-paned window that allowed some thin light through.
As soon as the man had clicked on the small bare lightbulb that hung in the middle of the garage, he returned to the large raised door, and closed it, shutting out the watery yellow light from the doorstep outside.
By the puny aging glare of the naked bulb, the sparse furnishings of the garage took on a musty, antique feel. There was a thin old oriental rug laid down over the cement floor, all its color entirely faded to a feeble pattern of reddish brown and dirty taupe. Set on top of the poor rug was a dusty mustard-colored armchair with a spring protruding offensively from the underside, and an ancient sagging sofa with dark wooden legs and made of what might have once been rather plush fabric. The dulled vermilion color suggested it had been a more vibrant hue in its heyday, but some of the sofa’s aged glory still lingered in its scalloped back and tarnished brass rivets that gleamed in the single bulb’s dingy light. However, the old couch itself was not nearly as catching, or as startling as it’s three occupants.
There, arranged with obvious care on the sagging old sofa, were three medical manikins; a man, woman, and child, cast in peachy artificial flesh.
They wore real clothes, which, closer inspection would have revealed, had been specially tailored to fit their clumsy fake joints with the careful sutures of a practiced surgeon.
The man-manikin sat stiff-backed in an old navy uniform, the dark blue coat free of dust or wrinkles, and the gold cords and buttons shining. The neatly molded hair on his head was painted nicely, and socks and glossy black business-shoes had even been fitted onto the man-manikin’s feet where he sat.
The woman-manikin beside him wore a buttoned white blouse and a long floral skirt that fell to her crassly jointed ankles and comfortable-looking tennis shoes, which was all half-hidden underneath a spotless white apron with pretty yellow ribbon dashed around its edges. A painstakingly styled wig of brown hair sat atop the woman-manikin’s head, and a fine gold chain glinted around her neck. Her blank manikin’s face even wore some careful makeup, and she looked all the more alive for it.
But it was the androgynous child-manikin that showed the most attention. There were artificial grass-stains on the knees of the little pair of jean overalls it wore, and the collar of the little crayon-box yellow shirt was rumpled beneath the overall straps. The ugly reddish rug at the child-manikin’s feet was scattered with a few secondhand toys, and an old picturebook had been laid open across the small manikin’s stiff lap. The little white socks and sneakers on its feet had been falsely caked in mud, as if the child had just been playing outside. But where the two adult manikins’ faces had been carefully painted and brought to life, the child-manikin’s was blank, and the molded and painted hair on its head was left faded and thin on top, as if suffering from too much tender head-patting.
With all the fine detail that had been put into their clothing, and the faces of the adult manikins, and the way they all sat together on the ancient sagging sofa, they seemed almost alive.
The very picture of a diligently-created false family.
Throwing his white coat over the dusty arm of the mustard-colored armchair, the Doctor had gone immediately to each of the manikins with a sad, doting expression lingering on his scruffy bearded face. He brushed away the beginnings of cobwebs on the arms of the sofa and looked over their perfect clothes with a soft spark of sentimentality glinting behind his glasses. He did not look down to them, but got down on his knees on the thin old rug, to look each manikin directly in the face, with much the same expression as one addressing old, dear friends. And when he touched them or adjusted their clothes in some small way, he moved nothing unnecessary, as if to show clear respect for their individual boundaries. The Doctor treated them as people, and looked at them as if they were not only alive, but held his fondest hopes and dreams. And they simply sat; unresponsive and ungrateful—as dolls will be—for all the heartrending care that they had so obviously been given.
The Doctor lingered over the family of manikins for a moment, the pained portion of time seeming to go on longer than each touch of his hand on a sleeve or the faint rustle of fabric lasted. The Doctor finally stood, a hand rubbing the back of his neck, and turned to sit down heavily in the dusty yellow armchair. He sat with his legs and arms splayed out, as if trying to convince himself he was relaxed there, and knowing only a deep kind of exhaustion that strikes mercilessly and without any one cause. The way the ugly yellow back of the chair swelled behind his head, it looked like the chair itself was trying to either smother him or crowd him out of its musty seat, and once again the Doctor seemed small and unwelcome, even in this place that he himself must have created.
At last the Doctor drew himself up a little in the chair, and it creaked as he sat forward and opened his scrubby beard-rimmed mouth, as if unsure how to go about addressing the three across from him, waiting utterly motionless on the ancient sofa. The Doctor’s eyes flickered across the floor when he tried a second time, and finally managed what might have been the start of a quiet, heartfelt conversation between old friends.
“I...” he started to say, perhaps feeling the need to explain himself for something, and suddenly stopped. The Doctor’s eyes darted into the dark corner beneath the four-paned window, searching for the source of the shadow he had glimpsed. He stood, and the spring beneath his seat twanged as if the chair had just coughed into the silence and broken some kind of spell. But, across the dimly-lit space in the general direction he looked, the melancholy way the man had touched the man-manikin’s sleeve, and the woman-manikin’s plastic hand, and the child-manikin’s worn molded hair, all with absolute tenderness; the way he had looked into their artificial faces, as if imagining them smiling where they sat, it left a feeling of forlorn emptiness in the stale air all around. It fascinated the one in the corner to the man’s figure in front of the chair, as to one who has seen something private and secret and cannot forget it.
“Who’s there?” the Doctor called, the old wood and dust of the garage stagnating the sound of his voice on the walls and the low wooden rafters where the meager lightbulb hung.
The glare of the bald lightbulb in his vision made it impossible to see the trespasser, motionless in the dark corner, and the light from the window caught in the lenses of his glasses as he moved steadily, cautiously, toward the deeply shadowed spot below the window, casting a film of obscuring light over his eyes, which he tried to remedy by squinting and holding his hand up to block the light. As the man advanced blindly into the shadows, the one who had been spying from the corner backed deeper into it, her observing gaze fixed to his searching frown, his eyes peering back and forth behind his glasses, probing the thick darkness for something not seen. His expression was so mistrusting, so guarded, so different from how he looked at his plastic family.
Backed into the rough wooden boards of the corner, the musty cobwebbed smell testing her nostrils, the man’s narrowed eyes seemed to catch sight of something, and his hands moved slowly, with a purpose, as his narrowed gaze locked onto her with a frown of uncertainty, still unable to see, like the beam of a dead flashlight that constantly points the way but illuminates nothing.
His hands groped very near, and she shrank as tightly into the corner as a stray cat backed into an alley wall, her elongated arms crossed in front of her face. She could feel the air move as the man grabbed and missed by inches; her defenses tensing when his other hand reached toward her, so directly this time, that he couldn’t possibly miss again.
The man’s whole body jumped with shock when his hand closed on her long thin wrist, and his mouth opened as if he meant to yell, but in his momentary fright had forgotten to make some sort of sound. He moved to drag her forward, into the light from the weak lightbulb in front and the watery square beam from the window behind.
In an instant of numbed urgency, a rush of instinct as powerful as lightning flashing through her body, she lurched forward and sank her teeth into the man’s wrist.
He cried out and yanked back his own arm from her quick bite, clutching it to his chest. Without thinking, the Doctor glanced down at his wounded arm, seeing the half-moon shape of the red teethmarks in his skin. His glance shot up again, glasses askew on his startled face, at the terrific crash of the small four-paned window exploding, a few of the brittle shards tinkling across the bare cement floor onto the Doctor’s shoes, as the humanoid shape hurled itself through the shattering glass and splintering crosspiece out into the night.
The dark shape landed at a run, padding on all four limbs without looking back, and the Doctor saw the way it moved through the destroyed window, its back arcing like a greyhound when it bunched its hind legs and sprang forward, onto arms too long and too thin at the wrists to be human, so thin that he thought they might snap with the next great leap, and delicate hands that folded onto the knuckles at the end, supporting its weight like a graceful feral chimp. It wore clothes; a pale blue shirt and loose jeans that fit its willowy body perfectly; wrinkling, sliding and moving with the motion of its muscles and limbs, the normal length sleeves and pants highlighting the too long arms and canine legs. It’s five bare toes as they flashed in and out of view were tinted purple, like a finger bound up in a rubber band starving for proper circulation, and the nails were too long. They clicked on the pavement as the creature bounded away, sounding far less human than its body looked. And glimpsed in a flash of pale yellow light from the clinic doorstep, a mane of human hair, tied into a streaming ponytail, could be seen bobbing above the thing’s arched spine as it bounded swiftly into the night.
Then the thing was gone, swallowed up by the darkness in the street, and all was still.
The stillness and quiet seemed to deny everything that had just happened, and if it weren’t for the smashed hole he stared through, with shattered glass glittering everywhere on the pavement like ice shards in the yellow light, and the light throbbing of the arm he still held against his chest, then the Doctor might have instantly assumed he imagined it all. But when he looked at his left wrist, there was the small half-moon of teethmarks, bleeding slightly on his white shirt, and the few glass shards that had landed inside the garage crunched as he walked on them, turning around, away from the splintered remains of the small square window as if in a stupor.
Across the garage, sitting still as stone on the sagging old couch, completely unaffected, were his beloved manikins.
It was them that convinced him. It was the way that nothing about them, nothing at all, had seemed to be changed by the commotion. They were acutely real in their falseness, and had something in their frozen scene shown what had happened, changed in the slightest; had one of them tipped or had one of the child’s toys been moved, it would seem to have chased away the acute realness that they imbibed, and with it, all the rest of reality, so that nothing would have been trusted to be believed anymore. To the Doctor, the one that knew them best, their utter unresponsiveness was proof. With their oblivious, blank faces, they confirmed it: Really and truly, it had happened.
That meant that the long delicate arm he had grabbed, was real. He flexed the fingers of his bitten hand, as if the remembered arm was suddenly more solid and he could feel it there. But that arm; it was far too long and frail... could it really have been human? He recalled the shape of the thing’s body as it bounded away; human, beyond any doubt. It had even worn clothes and pulled its hair back. He had seen the face flash out from the shadow when it—no; it was a ‘she’—when she had bitten his wrist.
It was only a flash, but it was enough to tell it was a human face.
And also enough to see that it wasn’t quite right. The expression there had been even duller than the stare of his manikin-family, and the skin was pale and stretched shiny. The mouth that had bitten him, it didn’t close, and perhaps it couldn’t with as taut as the pale skin of that face had been; he had felt it in the firm lips that had closed around those teeth.
The Doctor looked more closely at his bleeding arm. All those teeth had been pointed, but human-sized nonetheless. And what could be said for those disturbingly long limbs? The hands that the creature—that the girl—had been running on were perfectly ordinary human hands, but those legs... It looked like her feet had been seized by the heels and by the toes and stretched out until they were as long as a dog’s paws.
It was clear from the speed and almost beautiful fluidity that she leapt away with that there was nothing deformed about that body, that it worked exactly how it was supposed to, while clear stark logic insisted that no human was built that way. It baffled him as an ordinary man, but it was his medical mind that sought the middle ground, probed the possibility of possibilities, and questioned feverishly, if there could be some way—any way—that a normal human could become what he had seen.
In the end, the Doctor couldn’t decide: Was she human, or wasn’t she?
In the end, as he swept up the broken glass and splinters from the window, and taped cardboard over the hole in his manikins’ secret room, and bandaged the strange bite on his arm, inside, in the bright fluorescent light of the clinic, with a roll of soft white gauze, he couldn’t help but wonder: Who was she?
Not what was she, but who was she, this girl who was both human and not so human...?
The Doctor tried to remember the flash of a face in the weak light of a bare bulb, tried to see that face more clearly, scrutinizing his memory over and over again while his scrubby bearded mouth frowned and his brow furrowed down to the rims of his glasses. He shut the lights of the clinic, staring hard at the blue-white ghost of his bandaged wrist in the semi-darkness, thinking hard, wondering so feverishly that he almost forgot how exhausted he was, in many ways.
He wondered: What was her name....?
- x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x -
(Currently working on part 2)
Mitsukeru Furidomu · Tue Sep 25, 2007 @ 01:23am · 2 Comments |
|
|
|
|
|