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i am a heron. i haev a long neck and i pick fish out of the water w/ my beak. if you dont repost this comment on 10 other pages i will fly into your kitchen tonight and make a mess of your pots and pans
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(couldn’t quite find anything worth being the halloween pasta, so we’re going to the opposite extreme. hope everyone has a good night!)
I never saw the ocean till I was nineteen, and if I ever see it again it will be too goddamn soon. I was a child, coming out of the train, fresh from Amarillo, into San Diego and all her glory. The sight of it, all that water and the blind crushing power of the surf, filled me with dread. I’d seen water before, lakes, plenty big, but that was nothing like this. I don’t think I can describe what it was like that first time, and further more, I’m not sure I care too.
You can imagine the state I was in when a few weeks later they gave me a rifle and put me on a boat. When I stopped vomiting up everything that I ate, I decided that I might not kill myself after all. Not being able to see the land, and that ceaseless chaotic, rocking of the waves; I remember thinking that the war had to be a step up from this. Kids can be so fucking stupid.
I had such a giddy sense of glee when I saw the island, and it’s solid banks. They transferred us to a smaller boat in the middle of the night, just our undersized company with our rucksacks and rifles and not a word. We just took a ride right into it, just because they asked us to. The lieutenants herded us into our platoons on the decks and briefed us: the island had been lost. That was exactly how he put it. Somehow in the grand plan for the Pacific, this one tiny speck of earth, only recently discovered and unmapped, had gotten lost in the shuffle; a singularly perfect clerical error was all it took. It was extremely unlikely, he stressed, that the Japanese had gotten a hold of it, being so far east and south of their current borders, but a recent fly over reported what looked like an airfield in the central plateau.
We hit the beach in the middle of the night. I’d heard talk of landings before, and I’m not ashamed to tell, I was scared shitless. I don’t know quite what I expected, but it wasn’t we got, that thick, heavy silence. Behind the lapping of the waves and the wind in the trees, there was… nothing, no birds, no insects. Just deathly stillness.
I don’t have much time left. I’m hoping the blood will drain out of my wrists before they can get to me again, but I can’t be certain. Oh god, it’s so cold. I’m losing a lot of blood. But I have to finish. You have to read this. Maybe you can stop them.
It all started about a month ago. I was frantically trying to finish a writing assignment for Social Studies that was due next period, writing so fast I thought I’d snap my pen in two. I think the paper was on World War II. Amazing that I can remember things like that, through all of this, isn’t it? Nevermind. It doesn’t matter. As I wrote this paper, I began to notice something odd. I was making a lot of mistakes. You’ll have to excuse my digression for a moment, but I need to explain something: I never make mistakes when I write. Teachers use words like “impeccable” and “exceptional” to describe my conventions. That’s why I was finding this odd. And what’s more, they were all errors in capitalization, which served only to confuse me more. I hadn’t capitalized the beginnings of sentences, proper nouns anything. But, capitals were cropping up sporadically throughout my writing. I had words like “gErmans” or “alliaNce”, without the faintest clue why. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I quickly corrected my mistakes and finished the paper.
In fact, I didn’t even think of the incident when it happened again. I was commenting my friend’s new MySpace picture. In the middle of typing up some inside joke, I noticed that my capitalization was once again awry. Scanning through it, I noticed something else odd: The word “hello” had been capitalized entirely. Figuring I’d just go back and finish it when I was done typing, I started again. And again, my finger would hit the “shift” key unbidden. When I checked my typing again, I looked closer. My mind began to subconsciously piece together the capital letters. Imagine my surprise when I realized that it formed a message. It read, “GLAD WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION”. What I did then could only be described as a double-take whilst being completely still. Not knowing what had begun then, I signed off and promptly went to sleep, chalking it up to an overactive imagination.
It’s 3AM and you’ve been up all night on a horror binge. You’ve watched your favorite horrors movies, read your favorite scary stories, and even attempted the old “Bloody Mary” trick in your mirror. You stretch and yawn, deciding now is about the time to hit the hay, so you move into your bedroom and lay down to sleep.
After awhile, however, you realize that you can’t get the images of some of the fictional creatures you saw on your TV out of your head. “Meh… I’m going to hate myself for this tomorrow,” You say aloud as you flick on your bedroom lamp, knowing that having a nightlight used to help get rid of your nightmares as a little kid. Within minutes you’re close to sleep, snuggled up comfortably under the blankets with your eyes closed and more pleasant thoughts on your mind.
…That is, until you detect something moving in front of the light, casting a shadow over you. You blink, beginning to turn towards the lamp before a rotting hand grabs hold of your shoulder. “Thanks for turning on the light; I wouldn’t have been able to find you in that darkness.”
Normally you sleep soundly, but the thunderstorm raging outside is stirring you from your sleep. You begin to doze, then another crash jolts you awake. The cycle lasts most of the night. So you lay there, eyes open and outward, looking at your room stretching out before you in oblong shadows. Your eyes move from nameless object, to object, until you reach your mirror, sitting adjacent to you across the room.
Suddenly a flash of lighting, and the mirror flickers in illumination. For a scant second the mirror revels to you dozens of faces, silhouettes within its frame, mouths open and eyes blackened. They stare out at you, their black pupils fixed upon your face.
Then it is done. Are you sure of what you have seen? Unsettled, you don’t sleep for the rest of the evening. The next morning you remove the mirror from your wall and toss it in the trash. It didn’t matter if the vision you had seen was of truth or falsehood, you wanted to be rid of that mirror. In fact, you scrap every mirror in your house.
Weeks pass and the event of that night falls into passive memory. You are spending the day at a friend’s house and it’s time to use the bathroom. While you are in there the faucet starts to run without you prompting it. Taken aback by this, you do not yet act, trying to reason with your paranoia in your mind. The water starts to steam and a skin of moisture covers the mirror up above. You’re watching intently as words form: “Please return the mirrors. We miss watching you sleep at night.”
