11-18-2024, 05:12 PM
Since that night at The Reaches, the sensation of Jude’s bullshit magical whatever has been another memory collecting dust on the same shelf where all unpleasant experiences go to fade away. Since Near hasn’t made a habit of pulling it out for review very often, it’s been shoved farther and farther toward the back with the passage of time, so that now he can recall the objective fact that he found it upsetting then, but in a secondhand way – a scene from a book he read or movie he watched years ago, severed from whatever salience had made it so upsetting. It’s easy, then, to tell himself it wasn’t so bad. Really. An overreaction. He’d been caught off guard by some weird shit in an unfamiliar place. He’d been drinking. It wasn’t really that big a deal.
But again he is caught off guard: the snare of his fingers tightens fast around Jude’s wrist, but not before Jude manages to stick the knife into his own palm. Something clicks into place. Self-mutilation as requirement? The two pieces hadn’t aligned the last time. In fact, Near had outright forgotten that part: how there was not only the bottle stitching itself together, but the blood, too. And as someone who was not a stranger to cuts on broken glass, he had empathized, shoved a towel or something at Jude to staunch the wound. Thing A and Thing B had never linked up in his head, and both were overshadowed by what came after. But it had been intentional, hadn’t it?
God, what an idiot he’d been.
For ever feeling sorry for Jude. For wanting to help.
There is time for only this flash of garbled recollection/recognition/regret before the ground under his feet goes haywire and that feeling rears its head again: something turning upside-down deep inside of him, a dissonant tune just beyond his range of hearing. Everything is wrong. His pulse surges a second time, explosive tickticktickticktick concentrated in the vein below his ear as something impossibly solidifies around his legs. The bellowed “fuck” that escapes his throat is a mixture of terror and frustration. He still has Jude’s wrist, squeezes viciously and yanks down as something adjacent to a loss of footing sends a wave of something adjacent to vertigo upward into his gut, his throat, his head.
Bloodspatter in the corner of his vision.
Near struggles for a few seconds, glaring with wide-eyed wordless panic at the line where floor meets leg, his free hand testing this horror geography, proving it, until, a moment after, it begins to erode. Small fissures in the vinyl spread outward, grow deeper, wider, join into a lattice, a crisis, a rejection.
But again he is caught off guard: the snare of his fingers tightens fast around Jude’s wrist, but not before Jude manages to stick the knife into his own palm. Something clicks into place. Self-mutilation as requirement? The two pieces hadn’t aligned the last time. In fact, Near had outright forgotten that part: how there was not only the bottle stitching itself together, but the blood, too. And as someone who was not a stranger to cuts on broken glass, he had empathized, shoved a towel or something at Jude to staunch the wound. Thing A and Thing B had never linked up in his head, and both were overshadowed by what came after. But it had been intentional, hadn’t it?
God, what an idiot he’d been.
For ever feeling sorry for Jude. For wanting to help.
There is time for only this flash of garbled recollection/recognition/regret before the ground under his feet goes haywire and that feeling rears its head again: something turning upside-down deep inside of him, a dissonant tune just beyond his range of hearing. Everything is wrong. His pulse surges a second time, explosive tickticktickticktick concentrated in the vein below his ear as something impossibly solidifies around his legs. The bellowed “fuck” that escapes his throat is a mixture of terror and frustration. He still has Jude’s wrist, squeezes viciously and yanks down as something adjacent to a loss of footing sends a wave of something adjacent to vertigo upward into his gut, his throat, his head.
Bloodspatter in the corner of his vision.
Near struggles for a few seconds, glaring with wide-eyed wordless panic at the line where floor meets leg, his free hand testing this horror geography, proving it, until, a moment after, it begins to erode. Small fissures in the vinyl spread outward, grow deeper, wider, join into a lattice, a crisis, a rejection.