Dark
Component
By
Ross Dale Kelly
Chapter
I.
I pulled the Skylark father into
the depths of the open highway, light deflecting off the center divider line
and bits of water spraying over the edge of my headlights. That’s when I noticed a peculiar turn in the
road around a large empty crater teaming with life or light in prisms, which I
could not detect right away. Am I down there? I wondered. So pulling off to the side of the road I made my way down this
Dark Component. It felt like much of the
previous version of reality stored in past, but it was today’s people that
filled each shrouded box, as I peered at the interconnecting lines of life
between them.
Indecipherable. I thought.
Whoever made this must have been one hell of an old man. I saw my own life up around the other side of
the crater and walked the walkway for about two nights until I got to it. I guess my life was just as peculiar for a
first lifer, I thought as I noded my way past other boxes.
I decided to pick mine out of its
canister. I rotated to the left, then
put it in my left hand and rotated it again about 90◦ and found it gleaming in
the darkness and replaced it back as it went.
I then turned left and started to walk back to the car. I could feel the difference in the way I had
changed my fate, but no new lines were running through it yet.
Experience is what I live for.
I am a failing writer, and though
published, I did not make any means of a living and was not anytime moving out
of the house which my parents left me in.
I pace the large deck in the large enclave in the back of the house and
contemplate my escape.
Although I will take any advice I
can, I still like to make my own decisions at the end. I postulated how the second lifers became
real again. Passing through the
afterlife? Staying alive through it? Both were plausible.
Chapter II.
Friendless chasm
Chapter III.
Bitter weaponry
Chapter IV.
Blade attempt
END.
Rewrite
Time told me as I went down city
streets, slowly making my way back and forth nightly toward New York walking
briskly, smoking a cigarette who was in danger as I looked and who was not, as
I looked around street corners and perspective shifted perceptively over the
valleys of Manhattan back to the Coast.
I didn’t know what excited me so much about the lawlessness of the
people’s choice.
I found it
rather enlightening how little people suffered even such huge crimes. Nobody cared anymore. I saw police patrolling left and right but
never stopping to act dutifully on crime.
Now this is a mistake I thought.
How can one person play hero in a place where
the innocent cannot make themselves worth value?
So buried underwater, I went
back to sleeping the nights and forgetting what I had ever intended to do. Yet was still full of excitement.
Rewrite
