Blue Mirror: NCSSM’s journal of art and literature

He looked up.

There before him floated a ghostwood door trailed by purple satin strips of silk, lazily bobbing and waving about like urgent arms. Fixing his beautiful green eyes on the chipped doorknob, his body made a lunge for the door faster than a synapse could have fired in his brain. Tauntingly, the gray door shied just out of his reach, teasing him with its cracked paint and fading fabric. The satin fled from the door in synchronous waves.

The door began to float away, still maintaining its up and down rhythm. As it went, the passage began to open, with shining gold rays tinting the silent air upon which they struck, emitted from the treasure beyond the door.

Running and lunging, ever lunging, toward the door, the boy picked up speed and gradually the landscape unfolded around him. Soon he was sloshing into shallow water, and the day brightened with an intense sun that seemed to always be setting.

Beyond the door was completion, fulfillment, achievement of goals in life. Beyond the door was the world the boy knew transformed to his ideal. Beyond the door was a cosmic goodness not known in his own time, but apart from it, and time itself. Slowly unfolding its glorious treasure, the light manifested itself over the water above which it swayed, just out of his reach, and a novel shone out. The book was the source of light.

The water got too deep to run through, and then there were televisions. Massive congregations of televisions, stretching to the horizon. They all played sports, dramas, sitcoms, and rent confusion on the air about them, showing the voices of telecasters and anchors in nasty dark green auras. Hugh shook in his body.

Gaining on the door, he jumped from sitcom to sitcom, drama to drama, sport to sport, flipping channels with Olympic leaps. His old sneakers thudded against the wood, vinyl, and plasma techno-wonders of the modern age, sinking into each one like mud and shoving off. He always landed on the screens, even the glass bottomed inward like soft plastic, then leapt to the next. Dark smudges he had placed on the light boxes healed, and they turned to follow him with their ugly color and garbled sound.

The door was just within reach. He grasped, barely off catching it. Now the sun was setting, now the day was ending, now he would breach the boundaries. He did it, he caught the frame, he was there, he was groping for the book….

“Hugh, maybe you could tell us.”

Hugh looked up, startled to see himself tracing the line around his desk’s pencil holder, a line that had been traced by many students and left a dark smudge if touched. He was wearing a red jacket and black rubber sandals, with beige pants and a white shirt.

“Well?” His teacher looked at him with growing expectation.

Still in class, still in routine, still taking up the methodic mechanics his life revolved on in gears. Hugh sighed.

“Umm… I didn’t….”

“The question was, what is meant by the man rolling up his trousers in the Prufrock poem by Eliot? Do you have an opinion, or an answer, hmmmm?” She looked deep into his bright eyes, putrefying them with her controlling gaze.

“I think his old age has made him shorter, so he needs his pants to be rolled so he can walk.”

Someone snickered in the class, a boy. Then Hugh realized that he was the only other person in the room. The teacher was looking directly at him.

“Could you elaborate in any way, Hugh? That answer seems kind of short, and it is not concise or accurate. And what about cadence, Hugh, what about cadence, please?”

She accented her speech on the “cadence”, but there was no scheme that he could see, no pattern to make out in the jumbled imagery that came with an incomplete yet whole view of the poem. The idea was to read it through, take the poem as….

There was a girl in the room. She was beautiful, almost invisible and existed as a pure mist that hovered within the desk farthest away from Hugh’s. Her hair was curly and brown, down over her shoulders, showing nothing of the wire-like way other girls styled theirs. Fading in and out, her exuded beauty was too much for him to handle.

“Well, Hugh, we’re waiting for an answer. Do you have one to give us, hmmm? Did you even read the selection for….”

Then, a miracle, the harsh buzzing sound preaching the end of class came and left her hanging off the end of the phony cliff she built for herself. Buzzer, the savior, came with its grating and rescued Hugh from the manacles his teacher was easing around his wrists. In the hustle and bustle that falls on a Friday after the last class, he was out of the room before he completely realized he had ignored her commandment to stay after class, one she adamantly reminded him of in her shrill voice as the sea, the ocean, the pouring liquid of kids swept him down the hall. In the dazed state of mind that fell upon him, stemming from the crazy juxtaposition of dream and dreary classroom cadence, ignorance was bliss and he went with the tide.

Fury sat upon the couch. Fury was an animal, created with wings and horns, with dry cracking skin through which showed blue veins. It was completely scarlet, a lush evenly coated layer of arid wax under which its internal organs pumped and flowed, but the eyes were complete blanks, whites, the ever staring eyes of one who never looked away from the light. Muscles bulged, played with the outward representation, force of force by force. Hugh walked into the room.

“Sit down.”

Hugh was compelled, although fear was completely absent in his consciousness, as it had always been. For him, it was impossible to be afraid to face the eternal being. He sat directly across from the monster, a glass table between their Italian Leather Sofas upon which the very air seemed to rest. Sparks rested in the air, vulgar sparks that reeked of the Fury’s rejection of the human constitution.

“I can feel your heartbeat.”

Light filtered into the room from all sides, and the room turned into a studio lit by huge incandescent bulbs. The bulbs were outside windows, a substitute for the sun, and filtered in through large costly windows. Painters bustled about, and brushes strewn the floor, but all was silent, all the air stayed with the sparks on the table. Sound cannot travel with out air, and there is no air to be found in space.

“Machines.”

“Yes.”

“Are they trying that hard to be original?”

“They’re doing as they should be, debasing themselves to plastic models of the Greats. Caring is not part of their manufactured charisma, they are completely of their selves, and they come out on paper.”

“What is called art these days? I have worked hours for teachers who could never tell, when writing your signature in the corner of a blank canvas can send the message that you are ‘deep.’ Some might call it a paradigm shift, but they can bury the matter six feet under with words and it will persist existence.”

“Are you art?” asked the Fury.

Brushes scattered on the floor and scattered works burst into fire, consumed in a swirling mass of fire that took on no sound, but rose to the sky and left Hugh and the Fury in its eye. Meticulous work disappeared, and he could feel the Fury’s eyes resting on him, burrowing into his conscience trying to sense a change, a deviation from routine.

Another room appeared, filled with guests, laughing and drinking plain punch. Hugh could feel every person’s effort to make the party fun, as if smiling with their teeth would slake their thirst for thunder. Books covered the walls, and the host could clearly be seen, his purple aura enveloping those around him. Hugh could see the man’s desire to drop the explanation for the multitude of books, that he loved books.

“He buys them old. They are already cut.”

“How many has he read?”

“Few, but he loves books. Look what they do for him.”

The man picked up a very prominent novel and read his favorite part. It was the only part of the only book he had glanced at in the entire room.

“Can he read?”

“Yes and no.”

The guests, acting very impressed so as to keep the flow of artificial happiness going, made intellectual comments about the novel in passing, how great the passage was and how there was symbolism about this and chemistry about that.

“I love books,” the man said.

The scene burned.

“Well, Hugh, can you provide us with an answer?”

Instead of looking at her in startlement, his green eyes rolled to the clock, an ever moving, slow but consistent and leaving destruction and memories in its wake. Spitballs coated the front, so much that only the six and the twelve were available. The minute hand and hour hand were both fixed on the six, an impossible yet suitable assumption of state.

“Hmmmm.”

He looked at her and the icy stare caught him like a sledgehammer in the jaw. Landing on the floor, he took in the whole scene at once. An aura had formed around her podium, and it was pulsing purple, as if an unmentionable force hid within its infrastructure. The monster gripping the edges of it resembled his old teacher, but all anthropomorphic distinction was destroyed. Horns poked out of a bed of dead thorns that made her barb wire hair. Coated with streaks of green that seemed painted into her very skin, she crumbled the edge of the table and the edges of the chair with her fingers.

“Opinions seared through the edges, he is obligated by the society around him to, to attain certain characteristics before he can, can, love….”

The snicker came suddenly, and caught Hugh by surprise. He rose and, shaking, sat back in his seat. No fear, but the boy looked like Satan. Thin, fully red lips with white skin, he was looking for the next victim. Skin dripped off in wax, and his eyes grabbed Hugh’s soul and held it under the power of a million suns. Eyes stared back, the irises darkest violet, dilating, pulsing along with Hugh’s heartbeat.

Hands rose out of the skin puddle, hands rose from the podium, and the monster, with which Hugh had learned in the past, rose from its seat.

“What about the filth of the streets? What about the shortening of his legs due to old age?! DON’T YOU THINK….”

The tide of bodies swept him out, saving what was left of him, the soul the other student had failed to dislodge. More swimming toward the door with the outset of desks, grading papers, and pencil shavings than walking, he traversed the hallway, banged against the water fountain, and was borne toward the stairs. Right before he went over, the girl appeared. Her face was no longer visible, buried in the anthologies and text books she carried. The wave parted around her, she headed the opposite way down the hall, and all became silence. Her hair was so beautiful.

The boy’s eyes showed pain and images in rapid succession. Hugh couldn’t distinguish between the two. All the strongest emotions: love, fear of death, regret all passed by intermixed, a painful arrow to Hugh’s sight. The vibes radiated from him, casting a mood on the now airless table between them; the air now surrounded them in a torrent. Hands banged against the table, but were struck back by empty space.

“Did you do your best?”

“I have no idea.”

“You almost died?”

“Not even close.”

“Every chance is a last chance, and proving your self worth overcomes all these other emotions you see.”

“Should I be stoic?”

“No, feel the pain but learn to absorb without moving, take it in and learn from it.”

“That’s impossible.”

Flames.

“Hmmmmmmmm????”

There was a plant that sat right beside the windows, wilting and gradually dying from lack of water. It had previously grown though, its once green stems and leaves stretching outside, toward the sun, the sun that barely shone through the dusty double panes. Branches on the plant had begun to sag, and now it had a final chance.

“Fads and fashions, drawn in by society, taken advantage of by lust and driven to fool himself inside.”

Hugh tried to breathe, but couldn’t. The snakes sticking out of her head stared holes through him, slithering their poison tipped tongues in a temptingly evil way in and out of their heads. The edge of the desk did not exist, destroyed by her hands, which were heavily veined and pulsing a much darker purple, almost black, almost blending in with the chalk board behind her. Hair wiry, pupils fully dilated, and eyes bloodshot from concentrating on his soul for a different answer, she began to reach. The podium began to reach, the black board reached, the teacher reached, they all grasped his attention, his mind, and were working on his soul when the bell rang.

“That’s not it, Hugh! It’s filthy, it’s vulgar, you will never escape it!”

Hands grasped at him from all sides, but the river of students saved him, swept him out. The boy caught his gaze, and all heart beat stopped. All his skin had dripped off, and it littered the floor, getting eaten up by the passing tide. Now his eyes exerted a constant stare, the pupils expanded to fill the entire eye, and the bones that showed through underneath the running wax shone black like ebony.

“NEVER!”

Swept out of the door, he traveled down the hall toward the main staircase. His efforts to steady himself and resist the tide were futile. All of the bodies, combined, showed a concentrated tenseness. Hands pulled him, clutched his red jacket, pulled at it with the hunger of the mob, and he lost it. The crowd made a noise, too, and it sounded like a discrete pattern of stressed and unstressed symbols.

Forced to the edge of the stair, the tide disappeared, and Hugh was abruptly stopped in his motion, cast upon the top of the stairs. He groaned and rolled over, his jacket and sandals eaten up by the flow of students. All he had left were the pants and the white T-shirt, and these were stained purple and dripping wet. One arm outstretched, he stared back up the hallway.

The girl calmly came out of the bathroom. A girl so beautiful could never exist, but there she was, black curls falling upon slender shoulders. Freckles peppered her face, and her arms perfectly shaped dropped all of the books and turned to Hugh. She looked deeply into his bright eyes, and honest sparks flew in the air that existed between them, in them, and all around.

All his mind focused on her, and he gasped at the natural aura, seizing his breath and with a gentle tug wrenching it away. He did not miss it. Then she began to change. Her hair changed. The curls disappeared, and were replaced with short gray hairs, and her beautiful hands shortened, morphing into claws. She went down on all fours, her face shrinking. Pinkish ears sprouted, and a tail came from the once beautiful small of her back. Insides showed, and her past was the sewer.

She scampered off down the hallway and out of sight.