longer than you think

The sun shines on the Parisian streets, just rising to greet the melancholic city with its brilliant radiance.  Shadows are cast; a boy, and a woman, walking towards a small coffee shop beneath the gaze of a three-story apartment complex.  The skyline is stunning, the sun bathing everything in a light orange haze.  It’s dominated by a large steel tower, and the city expands outward, and not upward.   The boy takes a seat at a table, and the woman goes inside.  The boy is uneasy, and dressed in a white tee with crude disposable pants on.  He has a band on his wrist, saying amidst numbers and dashes, “PATIENT”, beneath the date “4/11/95”.

 

After a short while, the woman walks out of the shop with a tray of coffee and pastries.   She sits down, and interrupts the patient’s anxious placidity.  

 

“Croissant?”  She asks.

The patient responds, “No thanks, but thank you.”  He bites his upper lip and looks away, clearly uneasy.  

“Alright…”  There is a slight silence as the first of many cars drives by.  “How are you feeling?” The woman asks.

 

“I’m… You know.” The boy says.  Suppressed emotions well up and manifest in a lip quiver and an anxious voice, scampering out from a mind buried by a tempest of trauma and emotions.  “We’ve done this before, you know how it goes.  You ask me questions, I tell one truth and two lies, and I get crazier and you get more frustrated.”

The woman lets out a sigh, and takes a sip of her coffee.  The woman is in her mid thirties, brunette, and slightly on the short side. “How often do you tell these lies?” She asks, visibly perturbed.  

 

The patient quickly responds, “When… Whenever I’m scared.  I’m not scared for a particular reason I don’t think.  Not sure what else can happen to me now.”

The woman begins to say something, but is interrupted by the boy’s next thought.  

“I feel like I’m all alone.  I know I’m not, but even those that are undoubtedly trustworthy make me anxious.  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, I feel like they might turn on me any second…. D-does that sound crazy?”

 

 The woman takes another sip of her coffee, and pulls a post-it note out of her pocket and places it on the table.  “This is what they say you have.”

 

The words are alien, and ultimately meaningless.  Just another cloud drifting into his mind, obscuring the future.  

The patient gives in, breaking like the support beams of a house in an inferno.  Tears begin running down his quivering face, and he holds his head in his hands.  The word only digs another tiny grave that he’s expected to fill.  It’s not the first word either, and probably won’t be the last.

She sighs again, and looks off into the distance.

 

“This is what they do there?  Just, give someone more shit like this?  More seats they have to fill?” The patient asks rhetorically, knowing the exact answer he’s going to get.  

 

The woman responds nonchalantly, “Well, it does fit you.. It only makes sense you'd have it...”

With this answer, the patient falls a little further down.  It doesn’t seem like it, but he’s that much closer to the edge, whatever vista it may bring.  

“God, my head hurts…” he says.  “Anything else?”

The woman responds, lost in her own labyrinth of thoughts and expectations.  “No, we’re done for today.”

The sun is turning a bright white with the advent of a new day, shedding its orange haze and graduating into a bright blue, cloudless sky.

 

The boy, sad, frustrated, and alone, gets up and walks into the coffee shop.  He passes the cashier, who turns a blind eye to him.  The woman, confused, calls his name.  "Adi!  Where are you going?" she asks.  He ignores her, and grabs a glass plate off of a table as he walks through to the bathroom.  He opens the door, and is met with a bright pink light coming from above the mirror. His ears ring, a stinging euphony of sine tones sawing through his brain.  He hears the woman walking down the hallway, her heels clicking on the tile floor.  The clicks turn to stomps, then all is interrupted by three earth-shaking pounds on the door.  The doorknob rattles open, and she stalks through the bathroom to get to him.  

 

"Where do you think you're going, Adi?"

This question is answered with silence as he steps back a few feet.

"We really have to go, Adi!"

This statement falls on deaf ears as he backs himself against the wall.

"W-what are you doing with that plate, Adi?"

This question is met with the plate being shattered on the wall, followed by a quick jab from a shard in the boy's hand.  The shard pierces her neck, from which spews forth a red and pink ichor bubbling out from her windpipe.  The boy backs up into the wall even further.  He begins to run off into the darkness as the woman drowns in her own blood.  

 

The boy's panting begins to dominate all that is audible, overshadowing even the sine tone that splits his brain in two.  After running for what seems like hours, the boy trips and falls, and keeps falling.  The fall is longer than you think.