#1

Read and find out what happens.

"The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want. 
-- Ben Stein"

--

The airport was empty but you could still feel a presence. A presence that, when you felt it, you knew you were being irrational. How do you know? You don't, but you think you do. Why do you think you do? There's something in the air. Or in the water. Whichever medium it manifests itself in, you can still feel it. 

For the most part you could only feel it for a split second in paranoia. The rest of the time it fooled you by letting you think that it was really just the frigid air jutting out of airport's AC, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Or it was the steady thumping of airship engines getting ready to take off into the sky. 

As long as anyone's been working in this airport, no one has really known what happened. No one bothered to find out why your paranoia suddenly became sentient when you entered this large, shady, and gray building. No one bothered to call a priest.

--

Amy stared out the gargantuan window of the airport that displayed a brilliantly colored panorama of the Take-Off Site. Every fifteen or so minutes a rocket-shaped rod would fly into the sky, each one holding it's own destiny as passengers. It's funny, she thought to herself, how people put the fate of their lives into the calloused hands of Captains. Little do they know, everyone that shoots up into the sky on that little machine has the responsibility. Poor Captains, however, as they're always to blame when bad karma proves inconvenient for the next guy. 

Her eyes scanned the asphalt as it crumbled helplessly under the weight of another airship shooting into the blue. 

"Hey!" a voice behind her plucked into her thoughts suddenly. "What're you doing? It's almost time to board." said the boyishly endearing Escalus standing behind her. Amy her head around, worried that Escalus hadn't found her thoughts yet. He should be more worried than he is. 

"I'm sorry, Escalus. I... just...," she trembled as her own thoughts frenzied, preventing her from getting her point across. Helplessly, her eyes darted around until they settled on Escalus' sultry pink lips and she calmed herself. "Listen, just go get our bags and I'll be over there soon, 'kay?" 

"Okay, babes, but don't wander off like that anymore." he said, holding her arms and trying his best to hold her volatile attention for just a second. She knew he was worried, and she also knew that it was because they were growing apart, but with that thought in mind, she just nodded. It wasn't time yet to bring such things up. There wasn't time to waste... yet. 

Amy took one last look at the Take-Off Site and wondered about the dirty deeds done by the passengers on the latest airship. She wondered how their karma would come back at them, and how that same karma would f**k up someone's day. Fools, you damned foolsshe thought to herself, eyes welling up in fright. 

Fools were the people who boarded themselves onto a ship that could crash and burn just because some f****r deserved to die. Fools were people who did things to mend an already dying relationship. A fool was what she was.

--

Out of the small speakers of the cell phone wafted a lucid tune. Hopefully, it wouldn't escape the turquoise colored stall walls. What was the point of hiding in the bathroom otherwise? 

Titus sat, criss cross applesauce, on top of the radiantly white toilet. His arms held each tight and close, damned if they fell off in a possible nervous breakdown. The phone was squished in a sandwich between his sweaty cheek and his sore shoulder that had been in that position for 15 minutes and counting.

A tear slowly escaped his busy eyes as they drifted erratically from place to place, trying to contemplate what would be happening next. What would happen next? He didn't know. He didn't know anythinganymore, it seemed. He needed control, if only to save his sanity. 

"Criss cross, apple sauce,
Spiders crawling up your back," he recited to escape his own excruciating mind. 

"Spiders here, spiders there,
Spiders even in your hair," he said, feeling more tears escape and mix into a piquant concotion with his sweat. All he needed was blood now.

"Cool breeze, tight squeeze,
Now you've got the shiveries!" he finished on beat with the infinite tones of ringing that emanated sadly from the phone. Soon as he finished, and automated voice came on explained with her ever-calming accent how to record a message. 

I don't need a message, he said to her in his mind, feeling his lungs tighten in anxiety. I need my parents! 

Bending the child labor laws, to him, might've been the most devastating event in his life. Oh, the ever appealing idea was that minors over 12 could bring home forms that allowed them to go to work if they wanted to. If their parents signed, then it would be so. Little did the makers of this law know, a child's mind is a fickle thing. 

-- 

Mariana stood before the bathroom mirror, no one else to gaze upon her spectacle. No one but her to judge her. Her eyes widened as she looked at her eyes, mascara streaking down from her tear ducts and ending at the bottom of her jaw. Eyeshadow smeared and thick. "Damn it, Mary," she spoke to herself, her voice wavering and tears falling out of her eyes like they were the eye of a hurricane. "What have you done?" 

She'd fucked up, but it wasn't her fault. She'd come out with pale skin, but it wasn't her fault. Her eyes were a musty brown, but it wasn't her fault. Nevertheless, her parents--her mother, found it to be her fault. To her mother, in a list of things that could never happen, having a daughter like Mariana was on the top her list. 

She could only blame herself for that. 

And so Mariana came to be Frankenstein's Monster and Mrs Mariana became--or she always was--the insidious Dr Frankenstein. The modern day Prometheus. 

Mariana had to break her gaze or the consequences would lead to suicide. Instead of looking back on her life, her universe, and everything, she started on the first step of recreation. The sink below her ran with hot water and she slowly let her hand get in te way of the clouds that thunder. Her eyes closed and she brought her hand to her cheek and ran her fingers down upon it. 

The caked up make-up jammed under her soaked fingernails as she destroyed an image brutally. She destroyed her image. She destroyed the image of her mother. She destroyed the homunculus. 

And when it was all gone, Frankenstein was left. Now, the second step. 

--

"All aboard, Flight 78! All aboard, Flight 78!" 

Author's Note

Sorry that the last part is in all italics.

Reviews

[J. W. Hester]

I wish I could be this descriptive.