Been falling behind on my Novel posts, what else is new. I'm about 6000 words behind where I should be in my writing. Sure I have reasons and none of them matter so I'll keep them to myself, lol.
Here's where things stand with the next segment of Cascade.. (sorry about the length)
Cascade-
"And from
that...you knew?” Roy couldn’t truly see
a concrete correlation. “It was a
dream.”
Danny, looking down,
averting his eyes, replied. “I have it
all the time though.”
“I’m sorry, buddy. You were right to, kinda, read into
that.” He sighed. “It’s just, when I was your age, I had a
dream, too. A little more graphic and
when you’re older I might even tell you about it.”
“What was it?!” Danny looked as if a huge clue to who his
father might really be had just landed on the table in front of them.
“I’ll tell you,
someday, I promise, but right now, look at that sun.” Though the peaks of the mountains the red
setting sun could be seen. “It’s beautiful. The way it picks up the top of the pines and
just illuminates everything. Truly
amazing.”
“Will it hurt.” The voice was small and suggested a healthy
amount of fear over the impending night.
“Buddy, I wish I could
tell you it won’t but I can tell you that, given time, you’ll get used to
it.” He held Danny’s hand with both of
his own, now. “Most of the time you
won’t even remember changing. It’s like
when you fall asleep, you never remember the moments just before, you only
remember waking up. Sometimes, though,
sometimes you’ll remember and I think those are the nights that it probably
hurt the worst.” He gripped the hand
harder. “Look at me, buddy.”
“Yeah, dad?” Danny was crying.
“I still don’t think
it’s only the dream that tipped you off.”
“Grandpa told me, last
year.” He cocked a smile. “He said to keep it a secret, even from you,
until the time was right. I’m guessing,
the time is right, now.”
“That guy.” A sudden rush of emotion came over Roy. “I miss him.”
“Me too.” Danny rolled his head around his neck,
stretching. “I feel tight.”
“That’s how it
starts. Like all your muscles are
clenched.”
“I knew it would be
this full moon.”
“How’s that, buddy.”
“Last time, my foot got
way long.”
They both laughed over
this image. “How long did it get?” Roy asked.
“Way long, like it just
stretched out. After that I knew I only
had until the next month to be normal.”
“You never said
anything.”
“Well you and mom
always go away, to Aunt Cora’s. And
nothing happened after that, so, I just didn’t think about it.”
“You’ll still be
normal.”
“No I won’t.”
“Yeah, buddy, you
will. We’re normal, we exist. It’s not like we were created in a lab
somewhere with nanotechnology or gene splicing, and I know you’ve seen enough
movies to know what I’m talking about.
We’ve always been around. There’s
cave art from thousands of years ago that show us on the walls. I’ll show it to you someday. Normal is relative. You’ll see, you might not understand now but
it’ll come to you, one day.” The last
bit of sun was peeking through the mountains, sending light straight at
them. “It’s funny, in the movies, when
they’re filming, they call this magic time, because the lighting is so good. I’d have to agree with them, though, it ‘is’
magic time. It’s this happy spot between
two worlds, not quite day anymore but not yet night either. This is where we slip into our other skin,
when we realize what we can be. I wish I
had some advice for you, like don’t run to far away from here, or don’t eat
this or that, but once you change you’ll be something else. Part of the reason, I guess, that we don’t
remember much of it. It’s usually just a
couple days in a row, the most for me, once, was four, and then the moon waned
again.”
“That’s a lot of
nights, in a row.”
“It’s not so bad, once
you get used to it. The best part are
the nights just before and after, when the moons almost full but not all the
way yet. Those nights are when our bodies
are at their strongest and fastest and everything seems sharper and, well, just
better. Those few nights of the month
are an easy price to pay for having all those gifts, the rest of the time.”
“And that’s why I can’t
play sports?”
“It would be unfair but
also it wouldn’t be practical. Imagine
your big game was tonight, the whole school is in the bleachers waiting for
their star player and here you are, out in the woods, about to change. It just wouldn’t work out.”
“Kay.” The look of resignation, deflated Roy’s
heart.
“There’s other things,
more fun, to do anyway, you’ll see.” It
couldn’t be all doom and gloom, Roy thought.
“Just try to relax, remember there’s nothing you can do to stop it from
happening.”
Suddenly Roy felt the
heat. Courses of it running up his legs,
down his arms, through his bones, charged through his body. “It’s happening, Danny. I love you and just remember that it’s going
to be okay. I’m going to change first,
because my body is used to it, and you’re going to go second. I’m going to head off, into the woods,
now. I don’t want you to follow me,
though. I think you’re scared enough
about all of this and I don’t want seeing me change freak you out even
more.” He said the words as if they were
humorous but neither of them laughed.
“Just breath, relax and let it wash over you. The best advice I have.” Then the fire in his bones was too much, he
couldn’t focus on talking anymore, so Roy got up and jogged off into the woods,
leaving his thirteen year old son sitting at the table, behind him.
He had only just made
it, when he doubled over and began to vomit.
True to his words, he wouldn’t remember it in the morning. The pain, so intense that he couldn’t scream
or even breath to scream caused him to toss up his lunch into the bushes around
him. And, then, the real work began, as
his body began morphing.
Danny sitting, back at
the table, unmoved, could hear his father’s grunts and moans and the stumbling
in the forest. He began to wonder if,
maybe, he had been wrong, maybe it wasn’t his time, it could be that he had
another month to go before it was his turn to change. But then his legs and arms got warm. It was a strange sensation. Not entirely uncomfortable, quite the opposite,
he recognized. This felt nice, like he
was back in the lake and the volcanic, thermal, action was warming him up. His hands were splayed out before him, and he
could see his fingers stretching out, bit by bit, the grain of the wood under
his fingertips was pushing past as they slowly enlarged. If it hadn’t been for that definitive
sensation he might have just thought it was his imagination or his eyes playing
with him, in the dimmed evening light.
When they stopped lengthening his fingernails seemed to inflate,
becoming thicker, and lengthen too. All
this, he acknowledged, wasn’t painful.
Again, it was warm and comforting, like he were falling into his true
self, like he was discovering who he was, after years of frustration, like
fitting the final piece into a jigsaw puzzle.
He got up from the
table, looked up at the full moon. When
had it gotten so full? So bright? How long had he been sitting at the
table? His body moved with an elegance
that he had never imagined. Watching the
Olympics, that summer, he had been amazed at the motion a human body was
capable of. He now felt, as if, he could
do all those same things, that every nerve and muscle in his body could be
manipulated individually to create all the beautiful artwork a body had the
potential of creating.
His father was before
him, now. Of course his father looked
nothing like his father but Danny found him recognizable, if only by
scent. Then his father bounded off into
the woods, a howl ensued.
When he woke up the
next morning he wouldn’t remember doubling over in pain, just after seeing his
dad. He forgot about crying out and
screaming and holding onto the root of a tree for some form of comfort. When he woke up the next morning his feet and
hands had scuff marks all over them, even bleeding in some spots, but more than
all of that, he felt great. As if the
weight of a thousand fears had been lifted from him. It wouldn’t always be like this, he would
find. Sometimes it felt like he had a
hangover and other times he had trouble waking up, he would just wanted to
sleep and sleep. This time, though, as
if to reaffirm that this was always his body’s full intention, he was rewarded
with the feeling of complete comfort and awareness. His father’s arms were around him, they were
huddled up together, lying next to a different lake. He got up and he walked into the water,
heated, as well, by, perhaps, the same thermal spring that heated their
lake. He walked into the water and
cleansed the dirt from the forest from his skin.
Teenage Dream –
His father had been
right. Sports were out of the
question. What his father had been wrong
about was that Danny would miss it.
Before puberty there had been an understanding that Danny would want to
continue playing sports to push himself into that field like most of his peers
were doing. After the change, Danny
could care less. What was sports when
there were so many girls to flirt with?
This turned out to be
his true frustration. Like sports, girls
were off limits too. His father was
always there to remind him of how a teenage pregnancy was dramatic enough without
the baby being born with twisted DNA.
For Danny it was frustrating in a hundred different ways. It was exacerbated by the fact that, with his
condition, his body was a chick magnet.
Not only did he have muscles to spare, without having to work on them,
but his body also produced a strong pheromone that not only worked on the
teenage girls he attended school with but most of the teachers as well.
Ms. Stewart would
always fawn over him, keeping his eye contact for that couple seconds too
long. He understood that the same could
have been said about him, he didn’t turn away her affections or refuse to keep
that eye contact going for those few seconds too long. Instead he accented to it with his
silence. If he couldn’t have ‘Suzie
Cheerleader’ then why couldn’t he have, some, attention from ‘Hot For
Teacher’. Or, at least, that’s how he
saw things.
She was tall, long
brown hair, with a complexion that hinted at her age but was still fighting to
keep it a secret. Out of the adults at
school that had ‘accidentally’ flirted with him, three teachers, one teachers
assistant and the gym coach, she was the only one that he had been interested
in. Ms. Stewart, with her mature curves
and confidence. When she kept those
looks and flirted with him, in her ways, she was never apologetic about it,
like the others were. The others would
say or do something then, immediately, a look would come over their face, a
vacant stare and a color to their cheeks, but Ms. Stewart would just go back to
doing whatever she was doing, without missing a beat.
She was also his drama
teacher. Without sports to guide him
through the norms of high school socialization he had decided to, instead, do
become better at something he was already quite good at, acting. He walked around all day with a façade upon
his face. Never letting anyone get to
know him, completely, and always hiding the dark secret that manifested on a
full moon.
Danny was seventeen and
in his senior year. The previous years,
after that autumn night at the lake, had gotten easier and easier, even if only
begrudgingly. That first year was
hellacious, he could remember. He felt
bad for his parents, what was worse than raising a teenage boy going through
puberty? A teenage boy who had his
hormones turned up to eleven and a sister that had closely followed, two years
later. For all he knew, though, it was
all payback for his parents. They had
gone through the same thing with their parents and who knows what all they had
gotten up to. His pity, though it was
real, came with conditions, he recognized.
The trouble with being
the biggest, best looking, most athletic kid who pumped out the most
overpowering pheromone was double fold.
On one hand you had the sexual attention from the women and on the other
you had the bullies wanting to tear you apart for no other reason than you were
the guy at the top of the high school food chain. In high school there was one thing you never
wanted to be, good at too many things.
Targets could be placed on your back for failing too many things
too. It was at either end of the
spectrum that terror lived. Like yin and
yang, the goal was to keep it in the middle, somewhere. For Danny and his sister though, this was
impossible. How could he keep it in the
middle when he wasn’t even trying? His
body was doing so much of it on his own.
He had no pimples because his skin was flawless. It healed with ease. A scrape in the morning was gone by lunch. A cut in the afternoon would be gone by his
next lunch. His and to eye coordination
was above average and his ability to read people’s faces had come in handy on
more than a couple occasions. These were
all things he couldn’t stop, if he tried.
In the end he had come
to a quiet resignation about all of this.
The same way a person that lived outside of the normal, probably
did. He imagined, back, in the day, when
those first black children were allowed to go into a ‘white’ school, instead of
being segregated, that that was what it must have felt like for them, as
well. You couldn’t hide who you were when
it was plain as day. Danny could hide
the big part but most everybody knew there was something special about him,
even if it was only that they thought he was going to be the one lifted from
their class and graduate to star status someday, as a movie star or something.
A
Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, wouldn’t be the play that lifted Danny across that
threshold, he knew, but it meant more time with Ms. Stewart and he liked
speaking in a pentameter.
“More
strange than true: I never may believe
These
antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers
and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More
than cool reason ever comprehends.
The
lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are
of imagination all compact:
One
sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That
is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees
Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The
poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth
glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And
as imagination bodies forth
The
forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns
them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A
local habitation and a name.
Such
tricks hath strong imagination,
That
if it would but apprehend some joy,
It
comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or
in the night, imagining some fear,
How
easy is a bush supposed a bear!”
He said the words, from
memory, as he walked through the autumn air.
Leaves fell as the wind kicked them off the trees, nature’s eviction
notice, in reds and oranges and browns.
Here and there, he could spot, some still green, mixed with the others. Danny would kick small hills of leaves that
same wind had formed, sending them back into the air, for, possibly, the last
time, before they decomposed and ran off into the nearby river.
“Hey, D?!” The voice came from the park. It took a second for Danny to see its
source. In a tree, halfway up, was his
sister, Lanna.
“Do I want to
know?” Danny was walking toward her.
“Act like I’m not
here.” She replied.
At fifteen, he knew,
she was still knee deep into wolf territory.
Things were still hard. It was
hard to hide the dramatic effects of puberty when you had that, as they had
come to call it, twisted DNA. A normal
boy has his voice breaking, every so often.
A boy with twisted DNA might go to jump up on a log and find himself
clinging to the side of a tree, fifteen feet up, accidentally. “You’re hiding?” This seemed unlike her.
“Only until first
period is over.”
Though he wasn’t
looking up at her, from his peripheral vision he could see that she had propped
herself between two branches and had a school book opened in her lap. “I think the purpose of cutting periods is
that you don’t have to open a book.
Seems strange to climb halfway up a tree, to get out of a course, but
then still sit there and do your homework.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She broke off a piece of branch and threw it
at him. “Have I told you how much you’re
‘know it all’ attitude annoys me?”
“Today?”
“If I forgot this
morning, I remind you now.”
“SO. Back to the hiding.”
“Sarah and that group
were outside the school this morning and I just wasn’t feeling up to the whole,
public humiliation thing.”
“What was it this
time?”
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not, it’s
all the same anyway, isn’t it?”
“I look and act normal,
most of the time.” She smiled. “But it doesn’t matter, it’s that group
mentality that something’s different about me, so they make fun of my clothing,
my hair, my height and whatever pops into their scrawny little brains.”
“Yeah, it gets old, I
agree.” He turned back to the road. “See you at lunch, then.” She muttered yep and he kept walking.
He imagined that in
twenty years things would be different.
He just wasn’t sure how, yet.
The football coach
caught him, as he walked across the field.
It was always hard shooting him down, knowing how his pheromones worked
on people. This time, though, the
interruption happened to be about football.
“Danny!” Coach Baker ran up to
him. “Danny, I have a proposition for
you.”
“Coach, I’ve told you…”
“No, no, no, I’m
serious, this time.” There was the brief
hint of anxiety and embarrassment upon the Coach’s face. “How well do you know football?”
“I can’t.” Danny kept walking.
“It’s a free spot on
the team, we need someone your build and with your strength.”
“I can’t, I said. I’m sorry.”
It hurt more than he could say, having to turn down a free spot on the
team. He kept walking and Coach fell
into the background.
Private school, Danny
thought. Why aren’t my parents sporting
for private school or home schooling, seriously what about home schooling, he
asked himself? Instead they felt he
needed the people skills. ‘You two, more
than anyone, need to know how to get along with others, properly.’ His mom had told them, one night. He supposed it was true. Already he was prone to bouts of anger, hence
his not being able to play football.
Sure, his father had told him, back in the day, that it would be because
he would run circles around all the other guys, but what his father hadn’t told
him is that before he ran circles around them he would beat them into a bloody
pulp, pile their bodies into a mound, and ‘then’ run circles around them. It seemed like he spent half of the day
talking himself out of getting into an altercation, of some kind.
The periods went by
without much ado. History was a droning
voice in the background. Algebra had
more of a nasally twinge and Health was just ridiculous. He had never asked but he assumed all the
same things happened with them as happened with regular people. He had been a sick a few times and taken
regular medication for it. A few trips
to the doctor hadn’t raised any eyebrows and as far as the sex education part
of the Health course his anatomy and his experimentation with his anatomy
hinted that sex would work out the same too.
Finally, Drama, the last
period of the day. His lines, he had
rehearsed all day.
Ms. Stewart was sitting
in the front row. “Could you lean
forward more? Look more engaged.”
Danny obliged. “Like this?”
“Yes, and when you’re
talking with her, look at the spot between her eyes. It gives the impression that you’re looking
into her eyes and not looking back and forth between the left and right eye,
individually.”
“I can do that.”
“Good. Let’s call it a day then. I don’t know about you, all, but I’ve had an
exhausting day and I’m ready to get out of here.”
It wasn’t the first
time she had let them go just before the bell rang, to end the period. Danny loved when she did this, it was nice
being able to get to your locker, grab your thing, and head home before all the
other kids caught up. He imaged people
that worked a nine to five shift felt the same when they left at four. “I can do that, too.”
This time he knew he
wouldn’t be leaving early, with the others.
Something over the course of the last few weeks was hitting its stride
and he knew that it would be culminating tonight, whatever it was.
He took his time
packing his things.
Ms. Stewart remained in
her chair, making notes on her copy of their script.
Finally they were
alone, the theatre silenced and only the low rumbling of the furnace remained
to keep them company.
“Is there something you
wanted to ask?” Ms. Stewart looked up at
him, her head still tilted down towards the script in her lap.
“It’s just.” Danny climbed down from the stage, facing
her, then used it to lean up against. “I
feel you keep wanting to say something to me but something keeps getting in the
way.”
She looked thoughtful
for a moment, perplexed, as if she were trying to secure the proper words for
the situation. “I suppose, I have.”
It was difficult, for
him; knowing what it was that drew her to him but not able to fully disclose
it. His father had explained once that
he would have to be stalwart against the tide of affections he would receive in
high school and college and university and the rest of his life. What was youth, though, without a few
indiscretions, he thought? “I’m not a
kid.”
She was taken aback,
his heart raced, he thought he might have said too much, right out of the gate,
but then she smiled and then she laughed.
“That I’m sure about.”
“But…”
“But? But, you’re not an adult either, Danny.” She got up and began collecting her
things. “I won’t say you’re not a man
because I’m sure, you are. The body
matures before the mind. It’s a
conundrum faced by many an educator before me and, I’m sure, it will continue
to frustrate individuals for years to come.”
“I don’t follow.” He tried to figure out what she meant,
thinking there was a double entendre in there somewhere.
“That, Danny, is the
problem. It’s not so much an issue of
using one for their body but of using one for their lack of maturity. That’s the disparity, you see?”
“I get it.” He nodded and walked towards her. “I just don’t care as much as you, I guess.”
“You will when you’re
older.”
“I’ll be upset I didn’t
grasp what was in front of me.” He took
a few more steps. “One thing I’ve
learned, here at this fine institution of knowledge…” he held his arms out to
his sides. “…is that you all seems to regret not doing the things you could
have done, while you were in high school.”
“Danny…”
“I’m just making sure I
don’t make your mistakes. Isn’t that an
education a little more valuable than remainders and whatever?”
“Remainders and
whatever?” She finished putting the
script in her brief case. “Look, I’ll
tell you this. I had crushes on teachers
and to be honest when I regret about high school is waiting so much of my time
wishing I could have out with Mr. Lopez, my Science teacher and quite the
looker. Instead I wish that I would have
focused on the guys that were actually into me, at that age.” She tilted her head, he auburn hair fell on
her shoulder. “I get it, I do. It’s complicated, more complicated that you
can think.”
Danny thought to
himself, how it can be more complicated than my life already is, I don’t
know. “I wish I could tell you more,
show you that it’s not as ‘out there’ as you think it is.”
“I think that’s the end
of our conversation.” She didn’t seem
uncomfortable, to Danny. I just felt as
though she were saying the right words for the situation, to him.
