Run Away: Chapter 9 (Patreon)

Runaway- Chapter 9

Some bad news and some good news.  Good news first:  I’ve been going to church and it’s working.  It took a couple tries, but I think my theory about the Fay and religion was at least a little bit correct.  On the right track, let’s say. 

There’s this one church in the historic part of town.  It’s old.  Very old.  Doesn’t even have heating or air conditioning.  If it weren’t for the electric lights I might think it was some kind of freako time travel thing.  It’s Catholic.  I know because the sign outside says it's Catholic and all the priests want to be called Father.

I’ve been going for a month and a half and I still know jack all about Catholicism. I know they worship Jesus and they really like statues and they’ve really got their panties up in a knot about abortion...I think.  Is that so different from the Korean Baptist place I stuck out like a sore thumb in?  I don’t know.    I don’t actually go there to worship or whatever.

I did enough worshiping at the teat of The Green Lady.  Like I said, I started looking into religion as a way for answers (who doesn’t?) but not the kind for spiritual absolution or learning about the afterlife.  The Land Beyond the Real was close enough to the Pearly Gates and The Pit for me.  I started doing it for protection and some kind of relief.  If I was lucky, maybe I’d discover a kind of weapon against the Fay.

And I found it.  Twice  a week when I attend mass and sit in the back row, I actually start to feel some kind of relief.  I stop smelling people’s emotions.  I stop having weird fits of fear that a certain Someone is going to find me.  For a few minutes after I eat the little cracker and take a sip of wine, my memories of There slip away, and I’m just bored.  Blissfully bored.  Normal.  Twice a week for a little over an hour, I get to feel normal.

Last week, my hair slipped out of place and someone saw my pointy ears.  They didn’t react.  No cooing or offers to help.  No trying to comb my hair for me!  It was glorious.  I’m seriously considering doing that confession thing soon.  Father Tom (the priest, duh) might be able to hear my story and only think I’m a loon and not a child with a creative imagination!

 There’s some bleedover effect, too.  For a day, sometimes a day and a half after the service, I still feel normal.  The forgetting part doesn’t last that long, but I can look at my roommates and not know what drugs they're on or which celebrity they're masturbating to.   I’ve actually started to have off days at my job in the toy department!  Days where people didn’t find the perfect toys for their children and gush about me to my manager like I was a precocious and helpful little girl.

It’s amazing!

I don’t think it’s the religion, either.  I think it’s the church; the building not the organization.  I’ve been shopping around for different religions and I wanna say some of them were Catholic too, but it’s only this one place that seems to have this effect on me.  Why?  Don’t know.  Don’t care.

At the very least, this is the one place on Earth that I’m aware of where I don’t have to worry about Mommy Dearest coming to snatch me back up and lock me behind ironwood crib bars.  It works for me.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is, that the effect is sadly temporary.  The feeling of being a normal girl...woman...fades eventually, and I relapse.  Hard.  You know how if you’re sober for a long while and then you have just one drink and it totally floors you.  You instantly become the world’s cheapest drunk.

It’s a bit like that, but worse.  It’s like all this mojo, this leftover magic, this curse just gets built up over the day or two of relief I’ve had, and then comes back with a vengeance.  I start learning so much about strangers based on phantom smells that I feel psychic in the worst possible way.  People start being even nicer to me.  I swear my manager the other day kept offering me breaks every hour.  

It’s affecting more than just how people treat me, I think.  It’s affecting me too.  On the days right before Church I sometimes start trying to throw out my jeans and blouses and tops; anything that isn’t cute enough.  I’m bored, I tell myself.  I’m just reorganizing my closet.  Next thing I know, I’m opening up a trash bag and I’m about to put my most conservative, most adult clothes in the garbage.  I’m not reorganizing, I then realize, I’m in the midst of purging everything grown-up about me.

I was working a Saturday shift and coming back from the bathroom when I saw a frilly baby dress on a hanger and thought it looked cute.  Of course it looked cute, that’s what baby clothes do.  But then I felt this terrible shift in myself.  I heard myself wish that it was in my size.  I felt... I felt jealous.

I made it up to myself by buying a teddy bear after work.  It wasn’t until one of the cashiers made a joke about “taking work home” that I realized what I was doing.  That bear’s head ended up in the bottom of an outdoor trash can; its body was left on a bus. 

I might have become a nun or something.  Or I dunno.  Tuesday nights are AA meetings.  Maybe I could pretend to be an alcoholic.  When I first escaped, I felt like a survivor.  Since going to Mass I’m starting to feel more like an addict.  I don’t WANT to go back.  

I want my old life back more than anything.  But old habits are hard to break; even if they were forced on you; even if they’re demeaning and disgusting.  I think the worst thing that the Green Lady ever did, worse than anything else, worse than capturing me and stripping away bits of my memories and dignity and terrifying me...I think worse than all that is that She put a piece of Herself- of how She saw me- inside of my being.  

I’m only just now consciously realizing that I’ve been putting Her pronouns in proper name capital letters.  Like God.  I can’t consciously fix it either, like that old ass Jim Carrey movie where he can’t lie.

The pen is rrrrrrrrrrrroyal blue.

Such a silly movie.  Some days I feel like a silly little girl that’s run away from home and is only pretending to be an adult.   At the very least I’m still potty trained.  No accidents, public or otherwise.  No bed wetting.  No waking up from a disturbing memory dream sucking on my thumb.

I’ve been thinking that going to that old church is like a dam.  All the Fay things...all of the baby things that are still left over inside of me get built up over my little treatments and just flood out once it wears off. But maybe going to that old building is more like morphine.  It’s taking away the pain but is doing nothing to treat the cause of the problem.  My soul has been limping on a sprained ankle but I’m now so hopped on pain killers that I’ve started sprinting on broken legs.

I’m still going to be going to that place.  If I’m addicted to anything, it’s to the feeling of being normal.  Every Sunday, I get a new dream, but it’s not of The Land Beyond the Realm.  It’s of me, the real me, before I got taken by The Green Lady.  I close my eyes, and just as I drift off, I can still hear the clanging of that church’s old bells ringing in for Mass.

I don’t know how far away I was from being taken.  The timeline is still a little screwy.   I was innocent, truly innocent.  It was back when getting a cup of coffee didn’t feel like a treat but something I needed to function. Back when I got woken up by an alarm on my phone and checked my Twitter feed just before I hopped in the shower.   I was bored out of my mind and just trying to get to the weekend so I could have a drink, or go on a date, or watch something on T.V.  Just distract myself from living so I could get to the next big thing.

 It was when I took everything I would lose for granted because it was normal.  

I woke up with the alarm, showered and dressed, and then sat my computer naked for a few minutes after I’d toweled off.  Read the news.  Okay, not really the news, but the updates on Yahoo and Facebook and Google.  A mix of headlines and dumb clickbait articles.  Turns out that day my perfect dog would have been a corgi, even though the last stupid test swore I was a poodle person last week and the day before that, it was obvious that a great dane would have been perfect.  

Ate breakfast; just a power bar and a glass of water. Bullshit breakfast.  Something to make my stomach feel full so I didn’t get hangry before lunch and give me an excuse to take a bathroom break if things were slow.    The good stuff like waffles dripping with butter and syrup and a side of bacon?  That was safe for the weekend when I had the time and energy to cook and treat myself, but just thinking of having to go to work right after breakfast soured the whole concept for me.  I’d rather sleep and stall before work than be productive.   Maybe tonight I’d break the waffle iron out and have some brinner.   None of that frozen waffle crap. Fuck Eggo...there I said it.   

I was still naked.  It was my apartment.  No roommates, no company, and thick curtains.  Life was good.  Good enough.  I got dressed.  Got into my car and drove to work.  I worked as an office manager for a local business.  Office manager is basically a secretary on steroids.  I would know, I’d started out as a secretary before being promoted.  The big difference was I got to tell some people what to do instead of the other way around.

I organized office operations and procedures, prepped payroll, worked in correspondence with different branches along our company’s supply chain, maintained and oversaw filing systems, reviewed and approved supply requisitions, and oh my gods even now I’ve just accidentally bored myself by typing that all out.  

I mostly sat at my desk typing out memos from the people above me to the people below me and popped into other people’s workspace to make sure they’d gotten the latest memo.  My dream job it was not, but it payed the bills.

On the way to work I listened to the same boring old shock jocks making stupid dick and fart jokes inbetween Top 40 songs that could be classified best as familiar.  I was zoned out, and not thinking about anything in particular.   Who isn’t on their way to work?

It was a foggy morning, the air wet with ground clouds.  Bad weather for traffic but the road I was on wasn’t a passing lane anyhow.  No one would be stupid enough to even try something on the road this time of morning.  Between the glare of the sun at the wrong angle and the mist near the ground I kept tapping the brakes and going at least five under the speed limit.    

I was so afraid of rear ending somebody, I was practically leaning over my steering wheel in an effort to magically see farther in the mist.  It didn’t help that my windshield needed cleaning and I’d run out of fluid ages ago.  I saw neither brake lights ahead of me, nor headlights in my rearview mirror, but I wasn’t chancing it. I was more in danger of being late for work than of getting into an accident.

That’s when the body launched across the hood of my car.  Full ass over tea kettle.  For a hot second I lied to myself and told myself I’d hit a dog or something.  Dogs didn’t wear green running jackets.  

Fuck.  Fuck fuck fuck.  I’d hit a jogger.  I pulled over into a ditch and got out of my car. Looking around frantically for the man I’d likely just killed.  Fuck!  My life was over.  Vehicular manslaughter never looked good on an end of the year employee performance evaluation.

I was going to the hospital or jail or both.  I knew it, I just knew it!  With the music of my car out of my ears, and a slightly dirty windshield out of my face, I could tell that I was well and truly alone.  

No sounds of oncoming traffic.  No witnesses.  Nothing but a crumpled up body laying by the opposite side of the road about twenty feet behind me.  Were I a worse person, a less decent person, I’d have had every opportunity to flee the scene .  But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did.

I ran over to the body and began running through every CPR and first aid class I’d taken since high school.  That wasn’t a dummy lying there on the side of the road, but a man.  His clothes were mismatched and dirty, like a kid who’d climbed into a dirty laundry hamper or more likely a homeless person who couldn’t afford to be picky.  

He had the green jacket and a pair of ratty cut off jeans.  His socks didn’t match, one was a white ankle sock and the other was a yellow tube sock that went up to his knee.  The ankle sock had a sandal strapped on top of it, and the longer sock  He reeked like he hadn’t bathed in days, and his face was already starting to swell.  He’d hit my car literally head on.

No bleeding  at least, that was good, right?  I told myself yes and forced the existence of internal injuries out of my brain.  It was just a little car accident.  Nothing major.  Maybe just a broken nose.  I didn’t consciously note it at the time, but despite smelling like the worst parts of a grown ass man who hasn’t had a shower but plenty of sweat, there wasn’t a fleck of stubble on his fucked up face.

I forced myself to be calm and droned in my head all of those little steps that they tell you to follow.

Step 1: Determine consciousness.  Aka.  ‘Annie, Annie, are you okay?’.

He was crumpled up and lying on his side.  Fearing a broken neck or something I didn’t try to roll him over.  I  took a knee and just  patted his hip and shoulder.  “Sir?  Sir!  Can you hear me?  Sir?”

I got a groan and that was it.  Groan? Okay.  Groan. Groan was good.  Groan meant alive.  I hadn’t killed him yet.

I whipped out my phone and dialed 9-1-1.  “9-1-1,” the lady on the other line said. “What is your emergency?”  She sounded calm.  In control.  Good.  I needed calm and in control.

“Yeah.  Somebody got hit by my car.”  Passive voice.  It’s a wonderful thing.  No admitting guilt over a recorded phone call.  My future lawyer might thank me for that.  “He’s breathing and appears conscious but we need help.  I haven’t moved him for fear of exacerbating any injuries he might have.”  Exacerbating.  You’d be surprised what words your brain fishes out of old SAT cram sessions when the adrenaline is pumping and you’re trying hide the fact that you’re completely freaking out.

Words started coming up out of the poor guy. “No…” he said. “Hang up.  Pleesh.”  Is speech was already starting to slur.  Fuck. Shit.  Damnit.  He reached up, his arm shaking and tried to take my phone.  ‘Tried’ is a bit of a strong word.  A snail could have dodged his reach.  I just had to stand up and take a step back.

“What is your location, ma’am?”  Fuck.  My mind went blank.  How did I give an address to a stretch of road highway that I’d just traveled mindlessly for years? I was shit at directions.

I racked my brain.  “Highway 595” I finally said.  “Between…”I paused and tried to envision it like I was giving directions to some lost tourist on a road trip and not tattling on myself to save some hobo’s life.  “..between Johnston Rd and 96th Avenue.  That long stretch.”

“Thank you.”  The woman still sounded amazingly calm.  Made sense.  It was her job to be calm.  “Please stay at the scene until medical help arrives.  May I have your name?”

“Don’! Teh! Yernay!”  The guy I’d hit’s face was super puffy and swollen now.  “Hnnng uph!” I did not hang up.  “Lussen...nng.”  I translated his slurred speech in my head. Don’t tell my name? Hang up?  They’re listening?  I’d knocked the poor guy senseless.  Either that or I’d accidentally run over an escaped criminal.  

He pointed across the road to where I’d hit him.  Nothing there but cows out at pasture and bits of weeds and mushrooms growing by the side of the road.  I’d liked this stretch of road for my commute because of how remote it was.

“Ma’am?  Your name?”

With one eye swollen shut, the homeless man, more of a kid, really, started tearing up, and it wasn’t because of the massive amount of pain I’d put him in.  “Alice,” I lied. Something about that name seemed to give him comfort.  I’d always liked that book.  Okay not the book, the cartoon.  A good enough name to give a random dispatcher.  

The side of a road next to what might be a dying boy felt like it was far enough down the ol’ rabbit hole.

“Okay, Alice,”  the lady on the other line said.  “Help is on the way.  Please stay on the scene until medical help arrives.  Would you like me to remain on the line until help arrives.”

The begging look from the kid stopped me.  “No, we’ll be fine here, thanks.”  And I hung up.

“Thuns…” he said.  A puddle started forming beneath him.  My mind buzzed with the worst possible.  He was bleeding out.  Blood was pooling on the pavement beneath us and trickling into the grass by the side of the road.  Soon there’d be nothing left of him but a shell.  Except it wasn’t blood.  And the puddle was originating straight from the front of his ratty jeans.  Poor little guy had pee-peed on himself.

“Sree,” he apologized.

“It’s okay, kiddo.” I said.  “You just got hit by a car.  I don’t think anyone will care.”  I felt motherly instinct creep into me as I brushed aside scraggly hair, filled with dead leaves.  Poor kid probably didn’t know how to comb it.  He was so young if he was potty trained, it was just barely.

I’d just hit a kid with my car.  A baby.  I was going to prison.  Even if he pulled through I’d lose my license.  My life was over.  But I had to be strong. For him.

The kid moved his arm over and held his face.  “Notta kid,” he said. He could talk better when he held his jaw.  “I’m older than you.”  He let go of his face long enough to pull a matt of hair back over his ear.

I felt this weird itching over the back of my brain.  Not even two minutes ago I’d known he was a man, but for some reason as I talked to him I started thinking of him as younger and younger.  “Sorry,” I said weakly.

From his piss covered spot on the floor, he grimaced.  “Happens…”  

“I called 9-1-1,” I told him, just in case he’d been knocked so hard he didn’t know what was going on.  

He replied with, “Do you believe in God?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “You’re gonna be fine.”  Another lie.  I wasn’t a devout atheist or a skeptic or whatever.  God or gods just wasn’t something I’d thought about in my day to day life.

“Do you believe in fairies?”  He said, his voice starting to break, likely from all the hurt he was in.  

“You’re gonna be fine.”  I repeated.  “I’m gonna wait here with you until the ambulance arrives.”

“Do you believe in fairies?”  

“Sure,” I lied.  “Of course I believe in fairies.”

“Help me.”  His voice was lowering in tone and volume.  “Please help me.”

“Yeah,” I told him.  “Sure sure. I believe in fairies.  Anything.  Tell me what you want.  Do you want some water or something?  I think I’ve got half a bottle of water in my…” I stopped talking.

“Shadow,” he croaked.  “Get my shadow.  Please.”