Soul Therapy Excerpt

            She shed her clothes in the hallways, after making sure that no one else was home.  Steam from the hot water of the bath slowly circled, filling the room.  She eased her breathing and pressed down on her legs.  They were still shaking furiously from the dream.  The icy feeling had stayed with her, even though the images of the thunderous sky overhead had long since disappeared.  A layer of ice formed on the window, cracked and spreading outward in fingerlike spindles.  Jess rested her fingertips on it as she waited.  It didn’t feel cold, but she did.  Her bones ached, her muscles were strained from the intense walk that she had felt.  It wasn’t real, but she felt it.  It was impossible, but it had happened.

            Her fingers ruffled through her hair one more time.  Jess tried to convince herself that she wasn’t soaking wet, that it was all a dream.  The hollow feeling that had carved itself inside of her seemed unwilling to let go.  She tested the water with her toes, then slowly lowered herself in.  The heat prickled on her skin, almost scalding hot at first.  Jess curled up in the water, feeling it floating across her skin.  Her breathing steadied further as warmth spread through the rest of her body. 

            She closed her eyes, but for a moment too long and was back in the field, staring up at an angry, darkened sky.  She pried her eyes open and gasped.  The force of her breath knocked her back into reality.  Jess stared at the running water, her hazel eyes intense, wide.  She tested her eyes, blinking for moments too long and felt herself falling into the other reality, into the dream.  Jess stretched out her legs in front of her and turned the water off.  How long could she go without sleep?  

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Slowly, I am getting better at editing.  I start to see the patterns in my own writing, and I try to pry them back.  Forcing my words, my sentences to be more open, fluid, and less repetitive.  This excites me, actually.  For once, I think the prospect of editing my work is fantastic.  Being able to recreate the flow, craft each sentence into being full and complete.  This particular descriptive passage I liked the first time around, but with one sweep of editing, I like it even more.  I still remain enthusiastic over this piece, and I hope I can find an agent out there that feels the same.

To sleep, perchance to dream

If you have a queasy stomach, you probably should not read this...

Perchance to mess with reality.  But what if reality starts messing with you?

After coming home from a late day at work, I started to notice something wrong about our kitchen.  Ants, again, had crawled into our pretzels, over our crackers, found the little, tiny hole in the saltines container.  They were small, a light tan brown, that almost look like little moving crumbs.  If they weren't so easily multiplied, and if they didn't desire the same things I like (salty, savory food) maybe, just maybe, I'd be more entitled to let them live.  But when all is said and done, you have to bust out the can of ant killer, forget your morals, and protect your property from this seemingly small infestation.

What I found last night baffled me - it wasn't a seemingly small infestation anymore.  They had made homes in between the boards of our cupboards, nested on the roofs of our cabinets, and made little happy and trails all along each seam in our kitchen.  One area looked like a New York subway system.  I couldn't help but be fascinated by them for just one moment - how did they move around each other with such fluidity?  They look like such awkward creatures, but they never hit each other, even if there's 10 of them in a square centimeter.  They pass each other by with different lanes of traffic, and they know, without anyone painting down lines, how to keep their distance from each other.  So, I blasted them with ant killer and called it a day.

My dreams that night almost seemed so real, and I swear they were.  I woke up at one point wearing my necklace, and another having it off.  I take off my necklace every night, so I realized that I had awoken into a dream, but much too late.  My reality came bearing down on me - ants poured out of our cupboards, eating our food like a flock of locusts before moving onto me.  They crawled on my toes, around my ankles, and I felt itchy as they pierced and pinched my body.  The dream shifted into an even worse nightmare and I woke up again, without my necklace, and realized that I wasn't dead.  My husband was still asleep next to me, I hadn't just gotten eaten by ants and thrown off a cliff (how the cliff came into play, I could never tell you).

I walked into the bathroom, tired, sleepy, feeling a little off.  There was something pinching my eye.  It felt like I had been wearing contacts that got a little sliver of dirt pressed underneath them.  I looked into the mirror, staring into my red, puffy right eye.  A few veins were prominently heading towards my cornea, the red part of my eye was huge, inflamed.  And at the center of it all, on the farthest possible right hand side, was a little crumb.  No, not a crumb.  An ant, coiled around itself, dead.  I flushed my eye with water, doused it with saline solution, I put re-wetting drops in it, and not a thing dislodged this crumb.  I have to be dreaming, I told myself, this has to be a dream.  I used a cotton swab and swiped at it, my eye stung more and the coiled little sugar ant didn't move.  Finally, I washed my fingertips in saline solution and used my fingernails on my eye.  I scratched lightly at the surface.  The ant, in his last effort to stay alive, had attached himself to my eyeball in a little, piercing bite.  Was this my punishment for killing their colony?  For massive ant genocide?  Was there really even karma for that?  Did ants have karma?  Hot, frustrated tears rolled down my face - I pleaded with the ant inside my head, please, please just come out...

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Yes, this actually happened to me last night - yes, it was horrible.  I went into a hysterical panic, started crying, woke up my poor, sleep-deprived husband, and it finally came out on its own - mostly because of all the frustrated tears.  It was the smallest, little thing I've seen before - but anyone that wears contacts knows what it feels like to have something underneath them - and yes, it hurts.