Dreamspiel
(Before you read: 'I' is androgenous/male.)
It's a sunny day. Awesome. I look around as I approach the building. There's people milling around, people who look like school students. They're all wearing the same exercise uniform, white T-shirt and red shorts with white stripes down the sides. I'm wearing one of these outfits too. We're at a rival school for a running competition. I enter the big glass-paneled building, going through the heavy glass doors. Upon entering I see a grand spiraling staircase to my left, and an extending foyer ahead of me. The ceiling rises so high above me. I also see rival runners walk past in a small group up ahead. Even further ahead, a coach comes along towards me.
In a flash I take off and am upstairs, looking down over the railing in one second. I didn't even take the stairs; I shot straight up along them, jumped the corner over a 25-foot fall, and hurdled the railing.
"Hey," he calls up to me.
I don't wait for more, and turn to walk along the balcony. I take a left into a narrower passage, but another coach heads me off. What do coaches from this school want from me? I wonder. I backtrack and exit through a door, taking outdoor cement steps down. Where are my fellow runners? I find them still hanging out outside the building, chatting. I catch up to them, shouting a greeting, and suggest going for a run before the competition starts. A couple agree and come with me. We take the cement steps I had just gone down, we take them in less than a second, and follow the outdoor cement path until it stops and turns a corner, bordering a roofed parking lot. All in 2 seconds. I had slowed before nearing the corner, becoming second last, and now peer over the small cement wall down into the parking lot lit with orangey lights.
Find the fastest subject.
A sleek car drives into my view and parks. Two men wearing sunglasses, one in a suit the other in a trenchcoat, step out of the car and head for the stairs that I am beside. I quickly crouch behind the wall, signalling to the others to do the same. We wait, a little anxious, for the men to reach the top of the stairs, somehow foolishly hoping we won't be seen. The first reaches the top and notices me. He looks down at me, I wonder what he's thinking behind those sunglasses, we look at each other for five seconds.
They're the ones.
It's unheard, unexpressed, uncommunicated, but together we go back the way we came, leaving the two men at the stairs. It's confusing, it's suspicious, it's dangerous, it's unnoticed. What is it?
Away.
We speed down the stairs, still taking them one step at a time, I am in front. At the bottom of the steps I let go and run even faster. My hands claw at the grass, pulling the ground towards me and letting go and grabbing the next clawful of grass and pulling the ground to me. Again and again. I am a blur low to the ground, running as fast as I can, as fast as no one can see except for a blur streaking across the field. I turn left. There are women in big long dresses ahead of me, I make a quiet growl and go right through them. Their shreaks blow past my ears as I execute a quick turn right and streak past them, taking in more fistfuls of grass. As I reach the building I just ran like crazy from, I slow down and look into the adjoined building beside it.
A giant square opening in the wall meets my eyes. It has to be about fourty feet high and fourty feet wide. Like a hangar. In fact, this adjoined building is like a hangar. It is a hangar? I walk inside. The walls are thick giant sheets of wavey metal. Steel? Aluminim...guilded? There are some people, and large tables, and supporting pillars made of tall tall square trees with no branches or leaves or bark, but otherwise the place is empty.
Someone one of the men behind.
I'm sitting on a table in a small space. The man in the suit hands me a gun. Your friend is dead, he says. Because they know. It is the one that was used to kill him. My fate depends on what I do. I examine the gun. It's like a block of black metal with smooth wavy sides and a tiny handle, and a button for a trigger. I tip it this way and that, watching the light glide around on the surface.