Fervor and Pitch: An Unfolding

She emits a signal. A lone voice in a sea of millions, an anomaly in the chaos. He heard it only faintly at first and didn’t pay it much mind. Something about it though, it stuck in his head and he could not un-hear it.

She glimmers and cascades across the sky, seemingly out of control. She draws him in but he can’t see her clearly. He looks closer.

At first glance she appears to be in distress. She is not herself, but she is not weak. She is hard to see but he hears her calling, distant and relentless. He can’t focus his eyes but he can’t look away.

She stirs up his instincts. He wants to help, he wants to teach her to swim. He desperately wants to ease her distress because he shares in it. He looks for a starting place but there is no beginning. She is plain but oddly alluring. She causes him tension. He lays in bed at night and tries to make sense of her.

“I am changing”, she tells him, “and you are here for a reason”. “You are here for a reason”, he says back, “and I am changing.”

He wants to help but he wants more. Behind her distress is a doorway to somewhere else. He hears her in the darkness of his room. He wants to be inside her, oh god, he wants to be inside her. He wants to know where she goes in the corridors of her mind.

“What are you doing to me?”, he asks. “What do you mean?”, she replied. She acted only in accordance with her nature.

While he speaks to her, she screams for him and without a thought he leaves his body. She is slender and naked. She is unmasked and even though his gaze never falters, she is still so hard to see. He is in a strange land but she welcomes him.

“You are like me”, he says. “You are like me“, she says back and it meant something he never considered.

He tries to sleep but she overwhelms his senses. He is in his world but cannot clear her from his mind. She visits him like a haunting and he rolls over to face the wall. Something is coiled on the window sill, he can barely make out it’s unblinking eyes in the moonlight. It means me no harm, he thought, before finally drifting off.

Author: d. Nelle Vincent

I write stories about wine and the human condition because the devil, as they say, is in the details. View all posts by d. Nelle Vincent