SkylerOcon
Tiny Dancer
I hate the title I have now. Does anybody have any suggestions? Please?
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The scalding water of an early-morning shower came down over my fair, pale skin. My hands mechanically grabbed the Shampoo from the ledge of the tiny shower window, beginning to uncap it and squirt the translucent fluid out as I brought it down.
“Shit!” I cursed loudly, my voice disguised by the water slamming into the floor. The shampoo had slipped out of my fingers.
My mind slowly began to drift away, letting my body begin to take care of the shower, by memory of years of repetition. Yet, in the same way my body repeated the same motion every morning, my thoughts always returned to one person.
It was never the same; changing nearly every day. It varied from me and her slowly, sensually kissing to me saving her from some hideous beast. It didn’t matter exactly what happened in these – all I cared for is that it made her happy. Nothing else mattered.
Cloaked in a clearing of a lush forest, our faces begin moving towards each other. They moved in a slowness that felt like each second was longer than one thousand eternities. Awaiting our lips to meet, our eyes drew to a close.
The warmth of her lips came as a comforting shock. I’d half expected it to never happen, and it felt more like a pleasant surprise when it did. Our lips remain locked for quite a while.
It continued like that for a while, just holding one long kiss after another. It grew into a heated frenzy, a battle for dominance.
Eventually, my shower ended as did my daydream. I returned to reality and began to dry off with a towel.
“Honey! Hurry up! You’re going to be late for school!” My mom shouted at me from the downstairs. She was right – I still had to put on clothes, do my hair, and eat breakfast.
“I’ll go fast!” I returned.
I dried off quickly and slid the towel around my chest. I walked down the hallway and into my room and pulled out a pink tank top and a pair of brown capris to wear. I threw on my clothes and returned to the same stale morning routine.
The kissing continued from where it left off, the same intense battle. It felt better than a dream should; almost as if my fantasy had turned to reality. Suddenly, I could feel her slowly disappearing, dissolving from my grip.
“Help me!” She screamed in terror.
I saw her being carried off into the darkness by a sly shadow. My feet began to pound in pursuit of them.
“Elliot!” my mom’s voice interrupted the nightmare. I returned to consciousness slower than melting plastic. “We’re at school! Snap out of it and get out!”
“Sorry!” I chirped. “I’m going now! Love you!”
I scurried off to the school building before I gave my mom a chance to say she loved me back. The cold autumn air sent a chill through my body, and I immediately regretted not putting on a jacket before I left the house. I entered, and the school building didn’t offer much help either. The inside was cool, and the janitor had obviously not taken the time to set up the heater yet. My teeth began to grit by force of irritation.
I stopped in front of the school gymnasium, where the squeaks of the Basketball Players sneakers floated out through the doors.
“Hey, Elliot!” My friend Jasmine called out to me.
I nodded my head in recognition and walked over to her. I already knew what to expect from this conversation – she was going to begin going on and on about some cute boy, most likely from her biology class, and wouldn’t shut up about him all day. The next day she would find somebody cuter and immediately being obsessing over him.
I tried to be a good friend and contain my focus, but I soon drifted back into the nightmare.
I’m sprinting as fast as I can through the forest, running into tree branches, tripping over plant roots, and slipping in the brown mud. I began to feel my face tear and blood begin to leak out of the cuts. No matter how much I pushed myself, the shadow slinked farther and farther away. I began to fear that I’ll never catch up.
My body began to lock up, and my speed came to a screeching halt. I’m left breathless in the middle of nowhere, bruised and beaten. All I can do is gasp for breath that isn’t there.
“Elliot? Are you all right?” Jasmine’s voice distracted me from my daydream, “The bell just rang. I started to head in, but you’re just standing here. C’mon, let’s get to class before we’re late!”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry, I just stopped thinking for a second there,” I lied. My mind was racing. In any of my daydreams I never lost to any of my enemies. I would always win. And I locked up like that? I knew I could run farther than that, even in real life! However, I cut that train of thought short. To make it seem like I was paying attention, I grinned, “That boy sounds really cute!”
“He is!” Jennifer smiled. We hugged goodbye and went out separate ways. I don’t know what class she had first period, but I went down the hallways towards my English class.
I plopped down in my desk near the back of the class and silently waited for the bell to ring. There wasn’t much to do, unless I wanted to listen in on a few conversations that weren’t my business in the first place. The bell rang about two minutes later and my teacher, Ms. Aron, stood up and began class.
She began to talk about Mark Twain and his influence on American writing, but I had already heard this a few times before in other years so I began to subconsciously tune it out. I began to drift away into a bored sleep.
I returned into the same setting as before, panting. Eventually I regained my breath and began to stumble out into the forest once more. I knew from tales that friends of mine in track had told me that you would tire out faster if you had just recovered from running.
I took off at a fast jog. I didn’t want to sprint again because I would tire out to fast. The wind felt good on my face, cooling down the hot sweat that had plastered it from the chase. The dark green tree branches were now possible to avoid, and the cuts had stopped bleeding.
I continued running for a good while, until I saw a foreboding castle up in the distance. It appeared to be straight out of Imperial Japan, with its formation so organic that a man could not have possibly made it.
“Elliot! Do you know what the answer is?” Ms. Aron’s voice pierced through the dream, shattering the image of the castle. “What was Samuel Langhorne Clemens' pseudonym prior to 1863?”
I was instantly grinning. “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.”
Ms. Aron frowned. “Nice try, but no. ‘Josh’ was the pseudonym he used before using Mark Twain. He did use Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass for a series of humor letters, but only once.”
I sighed; I could’ve sworn I knew it. Ms. Aron began to explain when the idea of using Mark Twain came to Clemens, but the bell rang and cut her off. I rose out of my seat and drifted off to my second period class.
I arrived in Spanish class and took my seat. I was in shock over the dream. Not only was it continuing like it was something out of a cheesy kung-fu movie, but I felt absolutely powerless about it. Like something else was at work, other than my subconscious.
Jasmine strolled through the door, saw me, and flashed a smile. She ran over and took her place in the seat next to me.
“Hi, Elliot!” she greeted.
“Hey, Jasmine!” I returned. I was hoping this wouldn’t break off into her ogling over some silly boy. “Anything new?”
“Yeah… I have a question,” she began.
Oh God! Did she know? My heart began to pound like a horse’s hoofs against a racetrack.
“Do you know why Jude is absent today?” she questioned.
I failed at trying to hold down a blush at the name. “No… I don’t. She’ll probably be out for a few days – whenever she’s sick it’s usually for something serious.”
“Alright. I was just wondering and figured you would’ve known because the two of you have known each other since you were little,” she sighed.
“Yeah,” I said. I began to think about Jude and I – We had been best friends for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t until puberty hit though that I began to have a crush on her. Everything about her seemed perfect to me. Even though I know she isn’t the best looking person in the world or has the nicest personality, she’s perfect to me. And isn’t that what love is?
Mr. Arryson, my teacher, interrupted my thoughts by beginning his lesson. I forced myself to pay attention through the class because I knew I had trouble with this subject. I attentively began to listen to his lesson.
I slouched in my chair, bored for most of the class. I silently scribbled down notes in my notebook, most of which I would probably never use anyway. Boredom sunk in and my mind began to drift. I tried to resist it, because that dream scared the living shit out of me, but to no avail. The vision of the castle began to take over the walls of the classroom.
I worked my way back up to the pace I had before, and the castle drew closer. The brick red tile and stone columns were becoming clearer. The glow of moonlight overtook the rainforest landscape, causing the castle’s beauty to seem even more perfect. It seemed to have no flaws in its design. It looked completely surreal, but still not a remnant of an era passed.
I got near the entrance, by this time the sky was an evening blue. A blazing light was illuminating the inside walls, in a manner that I could see from where I was standing. A quiet, intense rhythm coming from an instrument which I assumed to be a GuQin floated over the walls.
Soon, the music grew louder, and aggressive. A bizarre, ritualistic chanting began in harmony with the music. Piquing my interest, I began to climb a nearby rock wall. As I got closer to the top muffled screams became louder. I heart began to thud harder and harder.
Bring! Bring! Bring! The sharp ringing sound of the bell sent me flying back to reality. I was somewhat relieved, because I was worried about who the screams belonged to. I took a weary glance at my half-finished notes, groaned, and closed my binder. I jumped up from out of my seat and left the campus for lunch.
I walked across the street in the chilled air, instantly regretting not bringing a jacket for the second time. I eventually reached my destination, a Pizza Hut across the street.
During the walk there, my thoughts were on the dream. I was more afraid that a lost dog. I knew it was Jude that they were harming. And the daydream just wouldn’t let up. My fear from the dream began to seep into reality.
Only three people were ahead of me in line when I got there, so I waited about a minute for my turn to come up.
When I reached the front of the line, I said: “I would like a small pepperoni, mushroom, and olive pizza with a Pepsi. Hand-tossed, please.”
“Alright. That’ll be five sixty-three,” the cashier confirmed. While I’m pulling out the cash from my wallet, he walked back and got my drink for me. We exchanged the money and soda and I took my seat.
I knew that it would probably take about fifteen minutes for my Pizza to be ready. I become instantly bored and the insides of the Pizza Hut fazed into the distance.
I scaled to the top of the wall, and saw group of men surrounding her, dressed in white robes, looking almost like a Pastor. I watched in horror as the most extravagantly dressed man took a knife and began to carve hole around her heart; the life drains from her eyes. He pulled the heart out from her open chest and blood filled in a pool around the gaping wound. Blood leaked out of the heart and onto the man’s hand.
I gasped and instantly felt dizzy. I just witnessed the murder of my love right in front of me. Something in the back of my mind was attempting to remind me that it was only a daydream. I lost grip of the wall and fell to the ground.
My body convulsed. Suddenly I was back in the pizza store, surrounded by a bunch of noisy teenagers.
An older girl walked up to me, carrying a pizza. “Small, pepperoni, olives, and mushrooms?”
“Yeah,” I replied weirdly.
She left the pizza on the table. I took a bite, but had since lost my appetite. I sat there for a few minutes eating, until I saw my mother walk into the pizza store. I waved my hand at her and she runs over to me.
“Hi, Elliot. I’ve got some bad news…” my mom frowned.
“What?” I asked, fearful. As much as I tried to crush it, a small voice in the back of my head was telling me what I least wanted to hear.
“Jude. I just heard that she was killed.”
If there was ever a moment when you felt as if the meaning of your life was wrongfully stripped from your grasp, I can promise you it wasn’t like this. My longtime friend and secret desire had died, and I hadn’t even been one of the first to know about it.
“H... how?” I demanded.
“In a gay bashing, apparently. She was only two streets away from ours, with a bunch of roses and a note too,” my mom began. “The police believed that she was going to confess to somebody, but was stopped and beaten by somebody who had already found out. By the time anybody found her, she had bled to death. They won’t say who the note was for, to prevent any other attacks.”
My mind instantly jumped to one conclusion – she was going to talk to me. There wasn’t anybody near our age on the streets around where I live. A few boys, sure, but she was killed in a gay bashing, so the roses couldn’t have been for them. Tears begin to form in my eyes.
“I understand if you want to come home now, Elliot.”
“Yeah…”
I left the Pizza Hut with her, no doubt leaving a few people confused at what had happened. I got into the passenger’s seat of my mother’s car and we drove home. Once we got there, I went to my room.
I contemplated my options. What else did I have to live for? Going through High School for another three years, then being trapped in College for another four and maybe more? Then work for the rest of my life? It didn’t mean anything without Jude. It didn’t mean anything at all. I grab the spare rope that was meant as a last resort replacement for my fire escape ladder and went to work.
I began to climb on top of my chair and thoughts were rushing through my head. My family? My friends? What would Jude think of this? After a moment of doubt I decided it wasn’t worth it and threw the rope around my neck.
With a noose hung around my neck, I swept my leg. The chair supporting my feet toppled over. I instantly regretted it.
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The scalding water of an early-morning shower came down over my fair, pale skin. My hands mechanically grabbed the Shampoo from the ledge of the tiny shower window, beginning to uncap it and squirt the translucent fluid out as I brought it down.
“Shit!” I cursed loudly, my voice disguised by the water slamming into the floor. The shampoo had slipped out of my fingers.
My mind slowly began to drift away, letting my body begin to take care of the shower, by memory of years of repetition. Yet, in the same way my body repeated the same motion every morning, my thoughts always returned to one person.
It was never the same; changing nearly every day. It varied from me and her slowly, sensually kissing to me saving her from some hideous beast. It didn’t matter exactly what happened in these – all I cared for is that it made her happy. Nothing else mattered.
Cloaked in a clearing of a lush forest, our faces begin moving towards each other. They moved in a slowness that felt like each second was longer than one thousand eternities. Awaiting our lips to meet, our eyes drew to a close.
The warmth of her lips came as a comforting shock. I’d half expected it to never happen, and it felt more like a pleasant surprise when it did. Our lips remain locked for quite a while.
It continued like that for a while, just holding one long kiss after another. It grew into a heated frenzy, a battle for dominance.
Eventually, my shower ended as did my daydream. I returned to reality and began to dry off with a towel.
“Honey! Hurry up! You’re going to be late for school!” My mom shouted at me from the downstairs. She was right – I still had to put on clothes, do my hair, and eat breakfast.
“I’ll go fast!” I returned.
I dried off quickly and slid the towel around my chest. I walked down the hallway and into my room and pulled out a pink tank top and a pair of brown capris to wear. I threw on my clothes and returned to the same stale morning routine.
The kissing continued from where it left off, the same intense battle. It felt better than a dream should; almost as if my fantasy had turned to reality. Suddenly, I could feel her slowly disappearing, dissolving from my grip.
“Help me!” She screamed in terror.
I saw her being carried off into the darkness by a sly shadow. My feet began to pound in pursuit of them.
“Elliot!” my mom’s voice interrupted the nightmare. I returned to consciousness slower than melting plastic. “We’re at school! Snap out of it and get out!”
“Sorry!” I chirped. “I’m going now! Love you!”
I scurried off to the school building before I gave my mom a chance to say she loved me back. The cold autumn air sent a chill through my body, and I immediately regretted not putting on a jacket before I left the house. I entered, and the school building didn’t offer much help either. The inside was cool, and the janitor had obviously not taken the time to set up the heater yet. My teeth began to grit by force of irritation.
I stopped in front of the school gymnasium, where the squeaks of the Basketball Players sneakers floated out through the doors.
“Hey, Elliot!” My friend Jasmine called out to me.
I nodded my head in recognition and walked over to her. I already knew what to expect from this conversation – she was going to begin going on and on about some cute boy, most likely from her biology class, and wouldn’t shut up about him all day. The next day she would find somebody cuter and immediately being obsessing over him.
I tried to be a good friend and contain my focus, but I soon drifted back into the nightmare.
I’m sprinting as fast as I can through the forest, running into tree branches, tripping over plant roots, and slipping in the brown mud. I began to feel my face tear and blood begin to leak out of the cuts. No matter how much I pushed myself, the shadow slinked farther and farther away. I began to fear that I’ll never catch up.
My body began to lock up, and my speed came to a screeching halt. I’m left breathless in the middle of nowhere, bruised and beaten. All I can do is gasp for breath that isn’t there.
“Elliot? Are you all right?” Jasmine’s voice distracted me from my daydream, “The bell just rang. I started to head in, but you’re just standing here. C’mon, let’s get to class before we’re late!”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry, I just stopped thinking for a second there,” I lied. My mind was racing. In any of my daydreams I never lost to any of my enemies. I would always win. And I locked up like that? I knew I could run farther than that, even in real life! However, I cut that train of thought short. To make it seem like I was paying attention, I grinned, “That boy sounds really cute!”
“He is!” Jennifer smiled. We hugged goodbye and went out separate ways. I don’t know what class she had first period, but I went down the hallways towards my English class.
I plopped down in my desk near the back of the class and silently waited for the bell to ring. There wasn’t much to do, unless I wanted to listen in on a few conversations that weren’t my business in the first place. The bell rang about two minutes later and my teacher, Ms. Aron, stood up and began class.
She began to talk about Mark Twain and his influence on American writing, but I had already heard this a few times before in other years so I began to subconsciously tune it out. I began to drift away into a bored sleep.
I returned into the same setting as before, panting. Eventually I regained my breath and began to stumble out into the forest once more. I knew from tales that friends of mine in track had told me that you would tire out faster if you had just recovered from running.
I took off at a fast jog. I didn’t want to sprint again because I would tire out to fast. The wind felt good on my face, cooling down the hot sweat that had plastered it from the chase. The dark green tree branches were now possible to avoid, and the cuts had stopped bleeding.
I continued running for a good while, until I saw a foreboding castle up in the distance. It appeared to be straight out of Imperial Japan, with its formation so organic that a man could not have possibly made it.
“Elliot! Do you know what the answer is?” Ms. Aron’s voice pierced through the dream, shattering the image of the castle. “What was Samuel Langhorne Clemens' pseudonym prior to 1863?”
I was instantly grinning. “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.”
Ms. Aron frowned. “Nice try, but no. ‘Josh’ was the pseudonym he used before using Mark Twain. He did use Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass for a series of humor letters, but only once.”
I sighed; I could’ve sworn I knew it. Ms. Aron began to explain when the idea of using Mark Twain came to Clemens, but the bell rang and cut her off. I rose out of my seat and drifted off to my second period class.
I arrived in Spanish class and took my seat. I was in shock over the dream. Not only was it continuing like it was something out of a cheesy kung-fu movie, but I felt absolutely powerless about it. Like something else was at work, other than my subconscious.
Jasmine strolled through the door, saw me, and flashed a smile. She ran over and took her place in the seat next to me.
“Hi, Elliot!” she greeted.
“Hey, Jasmine!” I returned. I was hoping this wouldn’t break off into her ogling over some silly boy. “Anything new?”
“Yeah… I have a question,” she began.
Oh God! Did she know? My heart began to pound like a horse’s hoofs against a racetrack.
“Do you know why Jude is absent today?” she questioned.
I failed at trying to hold down a blush at the name. “No… I don’t. She’ll probably be out for a few days – whenever she’s sick it’s usually for something serious.”
“Alright. I was just wondering and figured you would’ve known because the two of you have known each other since you were little,” she sighed.
“Yeah,” I said. I began to think about Jude and I – We had been best friends for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t until puberty hit though that I began to have a crush on her. Everything about her seemed perfect to me. Even though I know she isn’t the best looking person in the world or has the nicest personality, she’s perfect to me. And isn’t that what love is?
Mr. Arryson, my teacher, interrupted my thoughts by beginning his lesson. I forced myself to pay attention through the class because I knew I had trouble with this subject. I attentively began to listen to his lesson.
I slouched in my chair, bored for most of the class. I silently scribbled down notes in my notebook, most of which I would probably never use anyway. Boredom sunk in and my mind began to drift. I tried to resist it, because that dream scared the living shit out of me, but to no avail. The vision of the castle began to take over the walls of the classroom.
I worked my way back up to the pace I had before, and the castle drew closer. The brick red tile and stone columns were becoming clearer. The glow of moonlight overtook the rainforest landscape, causing the castle’s beauty to seem even more perfect. It seemed to have no flaws in its design. It looked completely surreal, but still not a remnant of an era passed.
I got near the entrance, by this time the sky was an evening blue. A blazing light was illuminating the inside walls, in a manner that I could see from where I was standing. A quiet, intense rhythm coming from an instrument which I assumed to be a GuQin floated over the walls.
Soon, the music grew louder, and aggressive. A bizarre, ritualistic chanting began in harmony with the music. Piquing my interest, I began to climb a nearby rock wall. As I got closer to the top muffled screams became louder. I heart began to thud harder and harder.
Bring! Bring! Bring! The sharp ringing sound of the bell sent me flying back to reality. I was somewhat relieved, because I was worried about who the screams belonged to. I took a weary glance at my half-finished notes, groaned, and closed my binder. I jumped up from out of my seat and left the campus for lunch.
I walked across the street in the chilled air, instantly regretting not bringing a jacket for the second time. I eventually reached my destination, a Pizza Hut across the street.
During the walk there, my thoughts were on the dream. I was more afraid that a lost dog. I knew it was Jude that they were harming. And the daydream just wouldn’t let up. My fear from the dream began to seep into reality.
Only three people were ahead of me in line when I got there, so I waited about a minute for my turn to come up.
When I reached the front of the line, I said: “I would like a small pepperoni, mushroom, and olive pizza with a Pepsi. Hand-tossed, please.”
“Alright. That’ll be five sixty-three,” the cashier confirmed. While I’m pulling out the cash from my wallet, he walked back and got my drink for me. We exchanged the money and soda and I took my seat.
I knew that it would probably take about fifteen minutes for my Pizza to be ready. I become instantly bored and the insides of the Pizza Hut fazed into the distance.
I scaled to the top of the wall, and saw group of men surrounding her, dressed in white robes, looking almost like a Pastor. I watched in horror as the most extravagantly dressed man took a knife and began to carve hole around her heart; the life drains from her eyes. He pulled the heart out from her open chest and blood filled in a pool around the gaping wound. Blood leaked out of the heart and onto the man’s hand.
I gasped and instantly felt dizzy. I just witnessed the murder of my love right in front of me. Something in the back of my mind was attempting to remind me that it was only a daydream. I lost grip of the wall and fell to the ground.
My body convulsed. Suddenly I was back in the pizza store, surrounded by a bunch of noisy teenagers.
An older girl walked up to me, carrying a pizza. “Small, pepperoni, olives, and mushrooms?”
“Yeah,” I replied weirdly.
She left the pizza on the table. I took a bite, but had since lost my appetite. I sat there for a few minutes eating, until I saw my mother walk into the pizza store. I waved my hand at her and she runs over to me.
“Hi, Elliot. I’ve got some bad news…” my mom frowned.
“What?” I asked, fearful. As much as I tried to crush it, a small voice in the back of my head was telling me what I least wanted to hear.
“Jude. I just heard that she was killed.”
If there was ever a moment when you felt as if the meaning of your life was wrongfully stripped from your grasp, I can promise you it wasn’t like this. My longtime friend and secret desire had died, and I hadn’t even been one of the first to know about it.
“H... how?” I demanded.
“In a gay bashing, apparently. She was only two streets away from ours, with a bunch of roses and a note too,” my mom began. “The police believed that she was going to confess to somebody, but was stopped and beaten by somebody who had already found out. By the time anybody found her, she had bled to death. They won’t say who the note was for, to prevent any other attacks.”
My mind instantly jumped to one conclusion – she was going to talk to me. There wasn’t anybody near our age on the streets around where I live. A few boys, sure, but she was killed in a gay bashing, so the roses couldn’t have been for them. Tears begin to form in my eyes.
“I understand if you want to come home now, Elliot.”
“Yeah…”
I left the Pizza Hut with her, no doubt leaving a few people confused at what had happened. I got into the passenger’s seat of my mother’s car and we drove home. Once we got there, I went to my room.
I contemplated my options. What else did I have to live for? Going through High School for another three years, then being trapped in College for another four and maybe more? Then work for the rest of my life? It didn’t mean anything without Jude. It didn’t mean anything at all. I grab the spare rope that was meant as a last resort replacement for my fire escape ladder and went to work.
I began to climb on top of my chair and thoughts were rushing through my head. My family? My friends? What would Jude think of this? After a moment of doubt I decided it wasn’t worth it and threw the rope around my neck.
With a noose hung around my neck, I swept my leg. The chair supporting my feet toppled over. I instantly regretted it.
