The Following - Part 8

           Yes, you did read the title correctly, I've switched this week around! Basically, I haven't finished reading the 'trilogy of five' and I want this Hitchhiker's post to be as good and as well informed as it can be, so I want to finish it before I do the post. But, I wanted to post as well, so I thought it'd be better to just put this on a few days early and give myself a few more days to hitchhike. 

            I'm also sorry it's so late in the day, (in that it's Wednesday) I usually try to upload at about 3, but I went out for a quick drink which lasted for 5 hours. So, without further ado...

                             

http://www.sharks-diving.com/shark-myth-busted/

             

           I regained control of my senses some time later; I’d been placed on the sofa with a tea-towel under my face to catch the blood which had now congealed and caked around my face. I still couldn’t open my left eye and the vision in the other was fuzzy at best. I blinked a few times and it cleared a little. I had to raise myself to a seated position in stages, my shoulder weak from its meeting with the table leg. My head throbbed so painfully that I thought for a moment I would either vomit or pass out again.

I looked around the room slowly – there were three policemen, my elderly neighbour from downstairs, and my attacker was seated across the room with his hands cuffed behind his back. Seeing him handcuffed when I was the true criminal made me smile, although to them it looked like a grimace. My elderly neighbour was hovering as if there were hot coals beneath her feet and she was wringing her ancient hands together. She made a sympathetic noise somewhere between a groan and ‘oh, bugger it!’ and shuffled quickly into the kitchen where she began filling the washing up bowl with warm water. I watched as the largest of the three policemen questioning the intruder and I grinned again. The old lady sat down next to me delicately. She swirled around a cloth in the semi-warm water and paused as she wrung it out.

‘I just want to clean you up a bit, dear, I can stand you looking this way and I think you’d feel much better. Now, tell me if I’m being too rough and I’ll do my best to be more gentle.’ She began dabbing at my face. I flinched at first, knowing how vicious my grandmother had seemed cleaning my wounds as a child. After three or four strokes, I discovered she was the most compassionate and merciful people I’d met. She poked her tongue out in concentration as if she were knitting and had the look of a concerned mother as she cleaned my wounds. I felt a burst of affection for her and wanted to cling onto her as if she were the mother I’d been missing. A tear ran down my cheek and I bit my lip. She wiped replaced the cloth in the reddening water and took hold of one of my hands. She wiped the tear from my face and kept her hand on my cheek for a while as she lifted my head so that my eyes met hers. I raised her hand and kissed it. She smiled and continued her quest to cleanse my face.

        After ten minutes or so, I noticed that the policemen had converged in the centre of the room and were whispering. I began to grow anxious again. The old woman seemed to sense my tension and squeezed my hand – she’d been holding it since she’d taken it in hers before. The smallest of the three policemen broke from the group and moved towards me.

  

          Next week the ordering should be back to normal! Come back Thursday for the feature on Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy series/radio show/film etc., I hope you enjoyed this bit, I think there will only be one more part after this, which, for once, is mostly written! Therefore, it may actually be uploaded at the time I intend it to be. 

            Have a great week and thanks for reading! Laura

                                                                             xoxoxox

Awakening

   Hiya, same thing as before, the 'Awakening' post is making it's reappearance! I'll be done with my deadline, and the whole of this term on Thursday this week, so hopefully Friday, I'll get on at least writing part 3 of 'The Following', which I didn't realise until yesterday was a TV series here in the UK, after I saw it in the newspaper. Oh well, I hope you like this, it's been chopped about a bit but I think it's better for it in many ways. 

http://www.zazzle.co.uk/heaven_and_hell_poster-228508853192806505

                I am awake. This world is not dissimilar to mine, yet it feels so abstract; so alien. It smells different and the clouds are pink; not in that lovely, almost dusk, sort of way, but rather, in way which screams of difference. I have never known the clouds to be like these. Nor have I ever encountered the strange feelings which are aroused by the curious little animals moving past, almost floating on the breeze. They are not unlike rabbits of squirrels, yet have a dark and mystical quality to them. I can only liken my feelings of awe and confusion to picking a sweet in the dark, and finding that it is not the flavour you’d been expecting. I wonder if I’ve regained consciousness at all, for the land which I find myself a part of is most certainly not the world which I left behind. I pinch myself; Pain. Certainly awake then, but how can this all be real?

                I wonder if there’s still a trace of the drug in my system; if the fanged, red-eyed animals caressing past me are, in actual fact, wrappers from crisps and sandwiches, dropped by careless individuals, whom my eyes do not perceive. I’ve been pumped full of morphine for days. No, weeks; months. I barely have a concept of time anymore and I’m not even sure if my pain has been taken away or repressed. Maybe I can still feel it - but then, really, I can’t feel anything.

                The creatures are circling me now and I can see myself reflected in their glass-like red eyes. I don’t know if they’re hostile or if they just want to be helped, loved, like I do. Their appearance was at first startling, however I seem to have grown used to it over the short time I’ve been here. S I watch them, their appearance seems to be softening – though perhaps that is my own perception as a result of not finding them quite so fearsome any more. They are moving away now, some of them seem to be guiding me, others seem to be trying to tempt me from the path. Even though I have no knowledge of this world; I can safely deduce that to stray from the path is foolish.

                I’ve been standing completely still for this time, not daring to move, less I fall into some sort of void in this illusion. I decide to take the risk. I squeeze my eyes shut and pin my arms to my sides. I move one foot out in front of me and hold my breath, muscles tightening. Then my foot lands. I open my eyes and peer tentatively to the floor. The ground is solid, but there’s something quite strange about it which I am, at present, unable to identify. I decide to walk on, hoping to find some sort of explanation of the universe in which I find myself present. The nature around me (if you can call it natural) moves and dances alongside me as I make my way down a slowly emerging path.

                The scenery appears to be moving - as opposed to myself - so I look back down at my feet, and realise that they seem to be floating. Shocked, I kneel down in an attempt to disprove my theory. Imagine my combined relief and awe when I placed my fingertips delicately on the floor, to find that it is made of glass! I at first believed it to be a mirror, however just as soon dismissed this idea, on account of only being able to see my own reflection very slightly.

                I stand, trying to take in as much of the place as I possibly can. In terms of colour; it’s mostly yellow - the colour of duckling feathers in the spring sunlight – calm and soothing. There are flashes of pink from the clouds, and splatters of lilac foliage. I wonder if I’m in heaven.

                The small animals have gathered close around me again, they are stifling me. I feel hot and cold, and weightless and heavy all at once. I feel like laughing, like crying, like screaming; like vomiting. I didn’t know I could feel like this, but then again; I don’t know what I was feeling. What I’m feeling is the result of my brain shutting down. I heard them saying a while ago that they were going to ‘pull the plug’, as it were. At the time, I was angry with them, all of them. I didn’t want to die and I didn’t understand why they didn’t care if I did. Then I heard my mother whisper ‘I love you, darling’ into my ear, ever so tenderly; the way she always did, and a sense of calm washed over me.

                I’m not sure if you ever truly come to terms with your own death; but in this instance, I felt pretty close. I’ve not heard anything more for a while now. I’m going to miss them.

                I walk on, trying to look around, however finding myself captivated by what lies beneath the glass path. The colours under my feet are altering, yellow darkening to orange, pink to crimson. Eventually it becomes a swirling smog of black and blood-red. It brought such pangs of fear and trepidation to my heart. I look up, intending to run from the blackness below, only to find that the plane I was inhabiting had begun to mirror the one below. I let out a small yelp, which made no sound. This was the first time that I noticed the absence of sound in the world. Until now, I had been so wrapped up in the colours and beauty in the world that I forgot leaves are partial to rustling, while birds have a tendency to chirp.

                The black and scarlet clouds were now whipping around into a spiral of tentacles, reaching out to me, ever so gently. I stood frozen in shock. I should mention retrospectively, that standing still in such a situation is ill-advised; as, at that very moment, one of the tentacles took hold of me around the waist and withdrew me into its midst.

                I believed this would be my conclusion. However, after a few terrifying minutes of being thrown around by what I could only perceive to be clouds; I was spat out, landing heavily on the glass floor. I felt shaken, but relieved. I sat motionless for a moment of indeterminable time, observing the ordinary colours of the world return. I was about to stand when a sickening crack pierced the silence, drawing more attention to the fact that, until now, there had been not one instance of noise. I looked around, expecting to see the branch of a tree fall, or a storm cloud building. There was nothing; and then I was falling. Falling into obscurity, into the bottom half of this inexplicable place. I felt like I had no substance, I felt like Alice when she fell in Wonderland. I felt free. I Knew I was dying. Then the world went black again, but this time, it was peace.       

            I hope you liked this, I'm quite fond of it as a piece and I think it's a bit of a display of the way that I place so much emphasis on colour, as discussed in my synaesthesia post. Aside from that, I'm hoping to be back soon with something new, assuming that between now and 3pm on Thursday, I don't have a massive, brain melting break-down :)

                            Thanks for reading! Laura

                                                           xoxoxox

Blood

              Hey, everyone. I say everyone, I doubt anyone would wait this long for a new blog post. Let me apologise, first of all, for my absence. I've juggling the start of my 2nd year at university, as well as my birthday, and various other things. I also lost my USB stick, which had everything on it, so it's lucky I took a back up. 

              Without further ado, this was a piece  I wrote in my first year of Uni. I think the assignment that week was to write specifically about a colour. So I chose red, because of its many and varied connotations. (Anger, love, passion, aggression, prosperity (in India), power, etc.) 

                

                                                                 Blood.

Red; The colour of love, anger or passion. I would say that when I think of my mummy, I see red. Red because she loved me, red because she was a vibrant, confident and happy woman and red because it was the last colour I ever saw surrounding her; on the floor, ceiling, and everything in between. It drenched her clothes, caked her beautiful, pale, clear skin, when I found her it was mostly dry and her skin was already a greyish colour. The coroner said she’d been dead for at least 8 hours.

I was eight when I found my mummy lying dead in our kitchen. I’d been at a sleepover, wearing red pyjamas, and I got a lift home from one of the other boys’ mothers. She drove a red car. I should have known something terrible was going to happen that day, because of all the red, almost like every time the boy in ‘The Sixth Sense’ sees a dead person, there’s something red in the picture.

I let myself in, mummy keeps a key under the flower pot. I was wearing my denim dungarees and my favourite red T-shirt, the house was submerged in an eerie silence. Nothing has ever been as quiet to me as my childhood home when there was no sound of my mother singing in the kitchen.

‘Mummy?’ I waited for a reply. Perhaps she was in the garden. I dropped my red and black back pack at the foot of the stairs and kicked off my shoes. My feet made no sound as I moved forwards towards the living room, adding still to the deafening silence which should have been serene, but terrified me intensely.

I don’t remember our house having any colour inside it. In my head, it’s like a drawing somebody has done but not coloured in, the walls are white, the floor is white, the furniture and the ornaments are white. Perhaps because the red was so vivid that all other colours faded into oblivion.

It wasn’t the red I noticed first, though it should have been, it was the way her hair had fallen. It was as if she’d placed it herself, flowing around her shoulders and across the white floor tiles, slightly curled at the end, the way it always was. She didn’t have to ever do much to make herself look pretty, her lips were a beautiful colour, somewhere between rose and coral, and her cheeks were naturally dusted with the same shades. I remember people saying she was ‘a real English rose’.

I knelt down beside her, not knowing what to do. I did all the things she’d do for me when I was sick, so I put a damp flannel on her forehead and held her hand as I read her a story about ‘Whinnie the Pooh’ after a while, I thought that perhaps I should go and tell my neighbour that mummy wasn’t very well, and see if she could do something. I went and knocked at Mrs Hodge’s house, she lived next door and she and mummy used to drink cups of tea and laugh together.

I don’t really remember what Mrs Hodge looked like, except that she was shorter and tubbier than mummy. She had rosy cheeks all the time too, as if she’d been running up and down the stairs. And I remember her smiling. But she didn’t smile on that day, she screamed. Her scream scared me, but it alerted me to the fact that something was really, really wrong, and mummy probably wasn’t going to wake up and cuddle me anymore.

Mrs Hodge made a phone call, she sounded frantic, but at the same time she was trying to stay calm so that the person on the other end could understand what she was saying. The time between her hanging up the phone and there being a knock on the door seemed like hours; neither of us said anything, Mrs Hodge stared at the floor in what I think might have been disbelief, and I looked at her, wondering why she thought making a phone call was a good idea when the kitchen and mummy were all messy.

Eventually lots of people knocked on the door and all came in at once. Some of them went into the kitchen; two of them sat Mrs Hodge down and spoke to her quietly, offering her tissues. One of them came over to me.

‘Hey, champ, my name is Robert, can you tell me your name?’ Robert had squatted in front of me so that I didn’t have to look up at him. He had a kind face; dark hair, dark eyes, smooth looking skin. He smelt like coffee.

‘James’ I replied, meekly. Robert smiled, still looking concerned.

‘So, James, why don’t you tell me all about your day today?’ he crossed his legs and sat in front of me, and listened to everything I had to say. He wrote some of it down so that he could use it later on, he said.

It was dark by the time all the people left, they cleaned the kitchen after they’d taken lots of pictures of everything. They put mummy into a black bag on a table with wheels and put her into the back of one of the vans that they’d come to my house in. I was about to go back inside, because I thought it was probably nearly my bed time, but one of the policemen took me by the hand and said i couldn’t stay in the house by myself.

I don’t know where it was they took me that night; I never saw the outside of it. But it was cold, and everything seemed hard. I had to sit in a huge chair while the policeman told the lady behind the desk what had happened. After a while, another lady and a man in a white coat came out of a room, and invited me inside. They also talked to me for a long time and asked lots of questions; they weren’t nice like Robert.

I’m still not sure what this place is, but I’ve been here for twenty years. I wonder when they’ll let me go home…

 So, bit morbid. But the week before I wrote a comedic sci-fi piece, hence the polar difference. I'll put that one on soon! 

Thanks for reading! Laura 

                                 xoxoxoxox