so this originally started as a game to make a super unlikeable protagonist and i ended up adoring him. so this is just the first part of that. it gets really weird later on and you don't really get to see that here but trust me lol.
The first time I saw Theodore, I thought the devil had finally come to collect on the curses spat at me by every person I’d ever wronged. It was strange – the way I paused my lecture over a phantom. My eyes were glued to him for no longer than a second, but I felt the entirety of my youth leaking out of my retinas. I don’t think he noticed. I don’t think anyone noticed. It was far too early for any of the students to bother even looking up.
He sat at the very back, a grin hanging from his lips as he spoke to a classmate. I continued my lecture.
We never made eye contact. I’m not sure if he even took notes.
#
“I didn’t get a copy of the syllabus,” Theodore said after class, rubbing the back of his head. Messy brown locks fell over his eyes and a nervous smirk pulled desperately at his lips. I blinked once, considering my words. Maybe he wasn’t a ghost after all.
“I think it’s because you were late, Mr… Hm. What was your name?”
“Oh, sorry, it’s Hart. Theodore Hart.” He stood there for a moment, as if he was expecting me to react. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to react. Instead I nodded and reached for a copy of the syllabus.
“Existentialism and the Human Condition,” Theodore read aloud, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I couldn’t tell if he was uncomfortable with the silence or if he genuinely signed up for a class without even researching what it was. “Sounds fun. Just don’t flunk me, okay? I promise I know all about existentialism.”
“What about the human condition?”
He paused, that seemingly permanent smirk twitching at the corners. “I mean… I’m human if that’s what you mean?”
“A likely story. I think I’ll be the judge of that.”
The confused gaze of his eyes made it evident that my joke didn’t land very well. I just stared back and eventually it dawned on him that I wasn’t actually accusing him of being a Skinwalker or artificial human lifeform.
“You’re funny,” he said, elbowing me playfully before reaching down to pick up his bag. It looked expensive, which made sense. Most students here were far wealthier than I could ever even dream of being. Sometimes it felt like a sort of indentured servitude, working at highly sought after universities such as this. A lifetime of knowledge, research, broken dreams, and spilled guts, all laid bare for the people who, directly or otherwise, were the very reason those dreams never made it past the planning stage.
The smile I gave Theodore as a response seemed good enough for him. In his mind, he’d scored a sliver of emotion from the professor most people were afraid of even making eye contact with. As he left, I wondered if he’d tell his friends. Do students even still talk about their professors that way, or is it more endless beer pong, boobs, and frat parties in the minds of these fine gentlemen? How nauseating.
As the next class started to enter the lecture hall, I gathered my notebooks and laptop and slid them carefully into my bag. From the corner of my eyes, I saw someone lingering. Glancing over, my eyes locked with Professor Jacobs. A polite smile and a nod were just enough civility to make him hesitate. I slipped past him before he could ask me to get coffee with him again. I think I’d likely rather die than sit through another lukewarm cappuccino conversation about grading essays.
It was Friday, which meant there were no more classes for the week. Though, I didn’t actually have any plans in mind for what I’d be doing for the weekend and leaving campus used to be a bit more troublesome. When I’d started teaching, students stopped me constantly to ask follow-up questions on the lectures of the week. They were still trying to pin down my personality; doing their best to decide what my rating would be on the hierarchy of preferred faculty. Was the new professor going to flunk everyone or could a few eyelash bats win him over? Could he be easily put in his place if needed?
Oh, it must have been such a game. When I stopped letting them play it – after Elenor died – it was much easier to get home. Not a single word was uttered to me as I left the campus and, honestly, that’s how I preferred it.
Back when I used to sleepwalk, I’d find chunks of rabbit in the yard the next morning. There was this time Jesse’s pet escaped in the middle of the night, and when I went to find it, the wet pile of organs were splattered neatly in the dewy grass. I remember thinking they looked clean for something that had been inside a body for the entirety of their existence. This would have been their first time seeing the stars. In movies, the organs that come out of people when they’re sliced open by a deranged farmer (or something like that) seem filthy, marinated by the warmth of the body in a soup of blood, yellow fat, and hot gas. The rabbit organs were nothing like that. When I kicked a shallow grave into the damp soil beneath the oak at the far end of our yard, I thought about how long rabbits live and if their entire lives are as unfulfilling as this one’s was.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t something uncommon. At that point in time, I hadn’t connected the dots. The patterns were a humorously frightening chain of events that occurred on the rare nights I was able to stay asleep for longer than two hours at a time. That was ages ago, though, and Jesse had gone through the trouble of forgiving me for not telling her that I found the organs. I just didn’t want you all sad, I’d told her, knowing there was more I should confess to, but I just didn’t feel like doing that right then. Better you think it ran away than know it died three feet from your window.
Back when I was ten, Bobby Holmes taught me how to skin an animal. Older boys were always really swell like that. He’d done a still twitching squirrel with a pocketknife, but told me it’s not that different for other animals. It’s all basically the same.
I never found the rest of Jesse’s rabbit. Bones, skin, fur—it was all missing. It drove me insane for a long time back then, thinking my mother would storm into my room one night, holding the mould-encrusted, rotting flesh of a long-dead animal I had somehow hidden without my own knowledge. Oh dear—what if I’d hidden it in her shoe closet during my sleepwalking escapades? If the heart had been buried under my floorboards, I swear I would have heard its rapid beating.
Before my grandfather died, he gave me a keychain with the foot of a rabbit attached to it. This thing brought me all kinds of luck, he’d told me. My eyes had focused on a spot just below his balding, cancer-bleached skull at the centre of his head. Months later, the chain was looped in my belt buckle as he was lowered into the ground. Jesse cried a lot that day, and I made a mental note about being right in thinking that she wasn’t fit for funerals.
(warmup i can post since i never plan on finishing it)
I stare out the window past the sun that barred down into the hard, much travelled concrete of the sidewalk outside my house. I can’t remember a time when I actually took into consideration the small things in my daily routine. How many times have I stopped to think about the things that I step over on my way to the market. Julien says it’s normal when I mention it to him on the phone later. He laughs and tells me some story about lying down on the warm Oklahoma sand when he was a child. Nostalgia lights up his voice, the tone shifting upward as if he’s regressing back to the kid he used to be back then. I don’t feel nostalgic as I have never been to Oklahoma. “I used to kick up the dirt,” he tells me. I nod slowly as if telling him to continue. He can’t see me, so this is unnecessary – “Yeah, I was always shit at walking. Fuckin’ big floppy feet kicking dirt in every direction. I didn’t even think much of it back then, y’know. Sand is something special. Like dirt. A combination of everything that falls from whatever exists on Earth. Probably had dead people dust in it.” It’s a weird thing to say. I change the subject.
(this is not finished. it may never be, it was a warmup for a specific type of male character i wanted to practice writing at the time)
It’s a few miles to the next jiffy store so I decide it’s all going to be fine. That’s got to make it fine in the end. My mind blends with the humming of the engine, the spinning of the tires, the familiar melodies leaking from the radio. Pause. An ad for dish soap. An ad for used cars. Wouldn’t you like to start over? This time the pause is in me and not the emissions of 107.1 Mermaid FM. I would like to start over, I think. That’s the whole reason I’m driving, yes. I hate my life before. My mother, my stepdad – they don’t matter to me. I’m running away and I think that makes me some kind of martyr in my own right. The jiffy store is in sight and it’s a few seconds between that thought and me pulling up to the gas pump and hopping out. While I wait for the engine to refuel, my foot plays around with some Spanish moss on the ground and I can’t help but wonder why it’s called Spanish moss when this isn’t Spain. There’s a metaphor for colonization and moss but I don’t really have the time to think too much about it because a girl comes storming out of the building, cursing up a storm. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” She’s practically chirping like a dolphin, and I think it’s kind of cute, the way she looks like she could murder me when we make eye contact. I’d think about this later on and I’m pretty sure I would let her, by the way, even now. Her curly mop of hair falls into her face and she mumbles something about me “looking like I took it up the ass” before leaping into an oversized Ford and struggling to turn it on.
“Do you need help?” I ask.
Her eyes narrow and she rolls down her window to get a better look at me. “You don’t know anything about cars,” she decides, reaching down to roll the window back up and pulling her attention back to getting her rust bucket to start.
“You’re right,” I say and she doesn’t hear me. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. “Hey, what if you hit me with your car?”
“What?”
“I said – why don’t you hit me with your car?”
“God damnit, I don't have time for this shit” she says, rolling her window back down with an irritation previously known only to Satan himself. “Come here.”
She motions for me to enter the car and I would never think of doing anything else. When I’m sitting next to her, I hesitate because, at least for a moment, I’m not sure she’s a girl. The jawline, boyish hair, the way she’s the same height as me, the way she carries herself – I think I may have misunderstood the situation. When she speaks again, I’m even more confused. "So where is it? Your hands look empty."
(same characters, different scene)
I float through the space that is supposed to be my dreams for the evening. I know they are dreams. They feel inky like always, the sticky residue molding itself into the soft skin of my arm like a parasite taking over the body of its host. I don’t remember the last time I saw something in this personal little abyss. When Rebecca died, I expected that she would visit me in my dreams because that’s what people say always happens when someone you love dies. I turn my heel in the tar-like ash I am now standing on as gravity fluctuates. I am prepared for the fluctuation. Rebecca didn’t visit me in my dreams. When David said he dreamt of her he mentioned how she told him she missed him. He was asleep, of course. The rational voice inside of my head continues to explain that this was a projection of what he needed to hear in order to heal and move on from the trauma of losing someone he cared about and it’s insane to think that people’s souls can actually visit you in dreams – so silly. I get that. It’s just the bitter little monster inside of my brain that thinks otherwise. A sticky, sickly stomachache-inducing smile. Why do you deserve to be visited in your dream but not me? I hope you die. I hope you never have a real dream again. The ooze leaks down from my nose and my tongue flicks out to meet it. It tastes sweet like rat poison.
(same characters, different scene)
Rebecca watches me from across the room for the third time today. I never understand the look on her face when she does that, but I hope she still loves me. There’s not really anyone else who does. My parents, bodies rotting in a shallow grave somewhere in central Alabama. My sister, face hastily printed on various missing person posters all throughout our hometown. I hold on to Rebecca like she’s a raft in the middle of the ocean. In response, she holds me at a safe distance, you’re my best friend and have you eaten today? I don’t mention anything when her boyfriend comes over. How could I? They disappear into each other when they’re in the same room and I can’t help but question if I actually exist in that moment. I’ve been on the run for four years; I know what it’s like to not exist. Even so, I can’t help but feel something close to pain when she doesn’t notice when I wander away from the couch we all shared. I don’t think any of us were concerned with how Inception ended, anyway.