Audio churned through my headphones like static in a washing machine. An ever-increasing banshee wail of unidentifiable nonsense, my hearing faced a sonic assault. I tapped one earpiece, then the other; an electronic scream for me to stop.
Logic dictated a loose wire, so I shook the headband, fiddled like you do, patted it again, then harder and harder still. A coalition of strung together snippets raged and my pain became a whirling tempest. Waves of sound shot through my mind like megaphones pressed to each ear turned up to full. One’s reaction to adversity defines one’s mental state: I panicked. People watched: some pointed; some flipped the finger; others pitied me, they were the worst. I saw it in their eyes – he’s got something wrong with him. I had, but I hadn’t a minute earlier.
Someone in a cab shook their fist, an angry gesture from an angry person inhabiting an angry city. I couldn’t hear them. Good job too.
An old woman caught me by the elbow, a good Samaritan, and tried to walk me across the intersection. But I resisted, the pins and needles in my brain expanding down my neck and spine like highways of synaptic nerves gone mad. She urged; I recoiled. She insisted; I snapped. I wrenched my arm free, tore the headphones from my skull and flung them across the street.
My phone might have gone with them; I didn’t care. Run away, a primal action, an effort to escape the hunter. That had to be the thing to do. But I wasn’t hunted; I was terrorized. Yet, without the intent to kill could one say they were prey to another? I couldn’t think!
The pain intensified, the volume a direct link to insanity. I stooped over and wretched as the sound morphed from a violent something to someone. Maybe they, no, she, did want to kill me? I wanted to kill her, stop the pain, get revenge.
The labyrinthine alleyways twisted and turned like the wrinkles on my face, the furrows that crisscrossed my tired brow. I rattled off mildewed walls, careered off rusting, metal fire escapes, tripped over trash cans and burst out into the open like a bull elephant in heat. Instinct drove me. Instinct guided me. Instinct would provide for the man I once was. And, where others would have crumpled, I persevered, for I had purpose: home.
Home would make everything right. Home always made things right. Rain fell in globules of disinterested angel’s tears. They cried for me as I cried for myself. A grown man wept in a store window. I didn’t recognize the man but I recognized the store.
It belonged to a couple, a nice couple, that always winked whenever they handed over my grocery bag. I’d stolen that trait and used it to excess. And though everything blurred and spat from view, I felt insurmountable grief at having not told them. I’d thieved what made a corporeal shell a someone. I’d become a someone other than myself if even for the time it took to open and close an eye.
That wasn’t me. I was me. I’d become another, when in truth I sought to be unique. People would remember me as the jigsaw man, he comprised of the best of others. I didn’t want that, who would?
The rain grew heavier as the static-woman screamed stop. I would not stop, not for the woman in my head, not for anyone. Three stairwells later and my apartment beckoned. By reflex I rooted the front door key out of my Lycra shorts, the pocket closing with a snap that made the pain subside: pain equaled relief. No sooner had the key turned in the lock than the agony returned: noise, the massacre of my mind.
Pain equaled relief. I remembered that from somewhere and punched the wall. It helped but not much. I butted the door closed, then kicked the kitchen units. I ran from wall to wall, room to room, a human tsunami wrecking everything in my path. The woman knew my game and screamed all the louder. I didn’t go in her room, I couldn’t. Even in the midst of madness, I remembered not to enter there.
Primal instincts, they hadn’t helped me run away from the demoness within and without, but that was on level ground. I surged from kitchen to living room to bedroom, and then bedroom window. In a crash of shattered nightmares, of a city hated, an existence governed by whether I’d run whilst listening to music – what kind of existence was that – I exploded out of my third floor home. Our home.
The man laid on the floor looked like me, but not. He looked happy. That man, that jigsaw, that amalgam of what a person should be looked relieved; I never looked happy or relieved so he mustn’t have been me. I was happy once though when she wasn’t lying on the bed with a fake smile and bleeding eyes. One might have said I even looked relieved. I envied the glass man his reflected world. He appeared content in his escape as a nice couple approached and winked.
Richard is a former authonomy.com gold medalist. He has featured in Third Flatiron Publishing’s ‘The Time It Happened’ anthology, Nonlocal Science Fiction, and Leap Books’ ‘Fright Before Christmas’ anthology. Richard also writes daily for his own self-titled website. A lover of running, reading and nature, Richard enjoys nothing better than a mountainous view and a quiet place to write.