Flag Girl

Flag Girl -(unfinished)
9/26/03

There once was a girl, or maybe, she has not yet come to be. Whatever the truth is, a girl is part of it. This girl has flags, two to be precise. One made up of a black rod with a white rectangular piece of cloth. The other flag, made up of a white rod with a black rectangular piece of cloth. With a flag in each hand, she would dance.

Crystal shards of light penetrated the rectangular glass windows that encircled the room. Besides the Hickory wooden benches that hugged the walls surrounding the area, there were no other stationary objects present. The greased hard-wood floors made it easy for the girl’s sock-covered feet to glide from side to side. A soft music filled the air. She thought to herself of its origin, an opera perhaps, or maybe one of Beethoven’s lesser known pieces. Whatever it was, she found it remarkably easy to move to. Her body flowed like a river across the barren floor. Her moves were unrehearsed, and no dance of hers was ever repeated. As the white flag flew before her face, it transformed into a large white sheet, billowing in the fall wind atop a grassy hill. It stood alone on the clothesline, five days had passed since it had fully dried, yet it remained. The bright sun flared and all she could see was white. The world froze as she was shot backwards into the air, landing on the wooden boards with a crack. Her fingers curled around the twig-thin rods of the flags just as she slipped into a coma.
A pulsating siren was sent shrieking down the street. Luminaries of red and blue could be seen flashing against the outer walls of the lifeless city apartments. Countless cars parted to the side as the ambulance breezed by them, as if carried on the wings of the wind. They funneled back into position after the commotion had subsided. The girl lay on her back, encased inside the large hulking body of steel. The walls were plastered with medicinal necessities. There were no windows. Two men in blue hovered above her face. Countless amounts of tubes slithered up her body like vines and were inserted into various openings among her body. As the screaming vehicle pulled into the hospital’s emergency wing, the girl’s coma changed to a state of visionary proportions once again. The white as light sheet fluttered up and down with the breeze once more while a woman’s scream could be heard from nowhere. As if it was trapped behind the flaps of the cloth itself. Two rods which held the string supporting the sheet were hastily rocking back and forth. The twine snapped on one end and whipped itself forward against the wind. The screaming stopped as the sun began to turn black. The hill on which the clothesline was held sank into the ground as the darkened circle of power centered itself in the girl’s view. Twisted metal wires began to take form among its center as the light began to flicker behind a globe of glass which was now surrounding it. When the sky had completely faded, the only other source of brightness was the black light bulb which was the only remnants of the previous sun. Even that seemed to be dissipating into the darkness now, as it flickered on and off until only nothing remained.
She arose to the smell of sweet flowers. The exuberant colors exerted from the flora that dotted the room stole away what was left of the grim walls that were too large to be physically covered by the plants. Seeping out from the cracks that lined the cinderblock walls was the idea of the room not being apart of a hospital at all. Her hands emerged from the sea of off-white blankets and pushed them from the top of her body to the edge of the rectangular mattress. She dangled her legs off the side of the bed and rubbed her eyes until they were beginning to make contact with her brain. She let herself gently slip off the bed and onto the floor. However, there was no floor. Her body gave in to the will of gravity as she fell hundreds and hundreds of feet downward into nowhere. All that surrounded her was blackness until she landed with a thud into the same room she had occupied moments earlier. This room; however, did not contain flowers, and it did have a floor. Tiny white tiles perfectly aligned with one another were what was holding her feet up from making the same fall twice. She was propelled to go and open the door which she did. Black was all that greeted her.
She took a step out, and instead of falling down, she fell straight forward. Her body flew at speeds strong enough to press the clothes she wore tightly against her chest until she was suddenly left floating in the middle of nothing. She was given a moment to gaze upon the entire layout of the scene. A large maze of similar rooms greeted her. In between each were large spaces of darkness. The individual rooms all had some tiny change that was just large enough to be noticed. There had to have been about twenty of these rooms stacked on top of each other, creating four columns and five rows.
A moment later she fell straight down again. After a few seconds the blackness started to grow streaks of light. It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t light, but that she was passing by material objects which were floating among the dark. She was moving too fast for them to be anything more than a couple of white lines to her eyes. A loud music began playing from nowhere. It was the same song she had danced to earlier that morning. Booming voices sang words in Latin. The female poetic voices orchestrated the path of her fall. Zips and whooshes filled her ears as the wind between her body and the rest of the world ricocheted off each other and developed into sound waves. The objects started appearing more and more until all the black had gone and she was in the real world again, still falling. When a loud scream came from the singing woman everything slid into an easy pause. The music was stopped and the girl was standing in the middle of a crowded New York street. Thousands of people either walked, biked, or drove past her. There was complete silence. She tried to utter a word, but nothing was released, not even air. It was then she realized she couldn’t breath. Tiny bubbles started coming from within her nostrils and her mouth. She looked around and everything started to tint a deep blue. She felt creatures slither around her feet as she tried to step forward. The pressure from the water surrounding her made it difficult to do so. She swam up to an office window high atop one of the buildings. She peered inside and saw a man working diligently at his desk. He looked up and saw her floating there and gave her a smile and a wave. He then returned to his work. The water then quickly began to part. The zillions of fused droplets flowed down the side streets that lined the domino buildings until there was none left. The ground was as it would be after a long night’s rain. The girl’s two flags were both sticking out from the doused cement road. Whenever a car or person would get within a few feet of them, he, she, or it would get tossed back into the air and either slam into a building, or join the continuously growing pile of cars and people. She walked elegantly into the middle of traffic. The cars seemed to wrap around her as she passed by them. When she reached the two flags she placed a hand on each one. She tore them from the ground, and with an extraordinarily explosive crash, all sounds were rightfully returned to their owners and the world was restored. The piles of metal and flesh were liquefied. The girl began to dance once more as the rushing water ran past her gliding feet.

“I’m actually not suicidal, nor are my tendencies so. If you cannot comprehend my meaning, I trust you can find the door,” spoke she with wilted arms that collapsed from the edge of her mattress.