Original: Look Into the Mirror
Injustice of injustices - I got a ticket! Just outside my house, what the fuck, traffic officers never come this way! ;____;
Weeell I hadn't written something this twisted in a long time. o_O It was nice, though. Also, I like this dude. He's got quite a lot of potential as Stock Creepy Character. Hmm.
Look Into the Mirror
Original - 1600 words
It basically is about a very twisted kid that travels on time and makes out with himself. Yeah.
Everything starts when he brings his cat back to life.
It’s March, and the wind throws dirt against the basement’s window, but he barely notices. The cat meows, the tips of his paws still lightly greenish, and Christian puts the electrodes back on the table and smiles, slow, enjoying the moment. His arms are stained with blood up to his elbows, product of the rat experiments that didn’t work. The bodies, or what’s left of them, are piled on the room’s corner. The cat is trying to release himself from the cables surrounding it and he ends up getting tangled up. Christian frees him before he can break the machine.
One of the cat’s eyes is red, as if all the capillaries had exploded at the same time, a little hint of decomposition the machine hadn’t been able to fix. The cat is white with black spots on his flanks, his name is Cow and there’s a hole in the garden beneath a wooden cross. There’s no way to pass the cat as a different one than the one that has been dead for three months.
Christian’s parents are horrified, they yell and throw the cat out of the house with a broom and then they sit on the living room still shaking and stare at Christian sitting in front of them, bloody hands crossed over the knees and back straight. His mother takes her hand to her mouth, his father hides his face with his hands. Christian is ten years, four months and twenty-five days old.
He doesn’t get dessert that day.
The cat sleeps on his bed that night, just as he used to before he died, and if he smells a bit like wet earth, Christian doesn’t mind that much. The next day the machine is missing some parts, and the pile of rat bodies is gone from the lab, but he just shrugs and starts working on something else. The machine has already done what it was built for, anyway.
The cat purrs on his lap.
----
He finishes the time machine when he’s seventeen.
He takes a step back, stares at it in silence, the two meter high box covered in colorful wires that twist and coil around each other, form patterns and tell a story. The little lights that mark the levels of energy turn on and off intermittently at the same rhythm of his heart’s beating. That wasn’t included in the plan, but Christian guesses he put too much of himself into the machine. The cat meows on the table, and Christian pats him on the head before going out of the lab, out of his house and his block until he gets to the old abandoned church.
He sits on the church’s stairs, his coat’s collar popped up and smoking cigarette after cigarette because he can, because there’s nothing better to do, no other way to celebrate. The cat followed him, and is lying next to him, his ears moving every time a car passes by them. No one has called the cat Cow for seven years. The kids in the neighborhood started calling him Zombie, and the name stuck. Christian doesn’t mind it. The cat doesn’t, either.
He sits there for three hours, and when he finally stands up he leaves a trail of cigarette butts, a modern crumb path that the cat steps on as he walks behind Christian, tail on the air and his paws still lightly green even after seven years. Christian stares at the time machine for three days, not daring to touch it, and on the fourth day, he sees himself going out of the machine, shaking his head to get out the sand that almost paints it white.
“You’re here from the tropic, I assume,” he tells the other Christian, and neither of them seem surprised to see each other.
“Almost. I was in Egypt, Tenth Dynasty,” says Christian from the future, and he scratches Zombie’s ears for a moment before adding, “I’m hungry.”
Christian nods, and both of them go up to the kitchen and make nutella sandwiches. They both clean their mouths with a cloth napkin every time they take a bite off the sandwich, and they don’t speak with their mouths full. They’re sitting in front of each other, and it’s like staring into a mirror, the same movements at the same time, only on the opposite side. They’re both wearing the same black tie and the impeccable white shirt with a high neckline.
“This is just my third trip,” says his future, and Christian finishes his sandwich, wipes his fingers clean methodically with his napkin. It’s got his initials sewn on it. His parents use paper napkins.
“Where have you been already?”
“Our lab, the day we brought Zombie back to life. I cleaned the dead rats from the corner and watched when Dad started destroying the machine. Then I went to Egypt. That urban legend of the Great Pyramid being a landing site for aliens? Bullshit. But they weren’t tombs either.”
Christian doesn’t ask anymore, because he knows it’s only a matter of time before he sees it for himself.
His double stays for a week. Christian skips school and has long conversations with himself in the lab, refuting theories and doing silly competences - who can build a particle accelerator in the least time, who can make the toaster speak and toast bread in the shape of a fish and say the time in three different languages. It always ends in a tie.
They sit on the stairs of the abandoned church and share cigarettes, trembling under their coats and with their fingers stained with nicotine. They sleep on the same bed, the cat between them, and their breathings match just before going to sleep, inhale and exhale and again and it doesn’t feel like having a stranger next to him.
Christian kisses himself for the first time to take the burn away from the smell of blood.
They build back the machine they used to bring the cat back, piece by piece until it’s nearly unrecognizable from the amateur prototype they built when they were ten. They steal a body from the medicine faculty, and even with a dead man in the trunk they still let old ladies with grocery bags cross before them, and they stop on yellow lights.
Two hours later the body comes back to life, gasping for breath, eyes wide open and his hands trying to grab onto something, anything. He tries talking, but he just chokes, and then he notices the Y incision on his chest, how he’s missing skin tissue on his arms. He doesn’t even have all of his organs; he’s been study material for at least a year. He tries screaming, but Christian removed his vocal chords before resuscitating him, and nothing comes out.
Both Christian and his double take notes, nod a lot and take his vitals, lab tests. Then the experiment is over, and each one of them takes a scalpel and slit the man’s throat, one in each side of the table and in just one movement towards themselves, and the arterial blood splashes on their face, their white shirt, their black tie.
It’s only then that the adrenaline kicks in, and Christian pulls his double close over the table, over the body that is still bleeding. When he kisses him, it tastes like triumph. They go together into the shower, after they get rid of the body, and they wash the blood away and bite each other’s lips under the water spray, eyes open, and when they come, their hands on each other’s skin, it feels like they’re alone. They smoke together, after, their heads outside their room’s window, hair still wet.
They do it again that night, in their bed, while their parents are sleeping on the other room, and they look straight into each other’s eyes but don’t let out a single sound. The next day they clean the dry blood out of their work table while they argue over the possibility of stopping time. Their mother finds their blood-stained shirts and scolds them, says that as if it wasn’t enough with not being able to distinguish them. Their father reads the paper and tells them they left a part of a finger behind in the lab after they threw away the rest of the body, and then he asks just when is Christian from the future going back, that having both of them under the same roof is too much. It’s been years since anything Christian does surprise them.
They go back to the church’s stairs, they pet the cat and kiss until their lips hurt because they can, because there’s nothing better to do. His future wakes Christian up early in the morning, when it’s sill dark outside the window, and just mutters a goodbye into his ear before leaving. Christian goes back to sleep, and when he wakes up again he has cereal for breakfast, chews slowly and doesn’t spill a single drop of milk.
He sits in front of the time machine again, staring at it with his head cocked slightly to the left. Ten minutes later he stands up and finally goes into the machine. He sees himself, ten years old and forty centimeters less than his current height. He watches as the cat comes back to life. Then he goes to Egypt, gets sand in his hair.
Then he goes out of the machine again, and he sees himself sitting there.
Neither of them seem surprised to see each other.
Weeell I hadn't written something this twisted in a long time. o_O It was nice, though. Also, I like this dude. He's got quite a lot of potential as Stock Creepy Character. Hmm.
Look Into the Mirror
Original - 1600 words
It basically is about a very twisted kid that travels on time and makes out with himself. Yeah.
Everything starts when he brings his cat back to life.
It’s March, and the wind throws dirt against the basement’s window, but he barely notices. The cat meows, the tips of his paws still lightly greenish, and Christian puts the electrodes back on the table and smiles, slow, enjoying the moment. His arms are stained with blood up to his elbows, product of the rat experiments that didn’t work. The bodies, or what’s left of them, are piled on the room’s corner. The cat is trying to release himself from the cables surrounding it and he ends up getting tangled up. Christian frees him before he can break the machine.
One of the cat’s eyes is red, as if all the capillaries had exploded at the same time, a little hint of decomposition the machine hadn’t been able to fix. The cat is white with black spots on his flanks, his name is Cow and there’s a hole in the garden beneath a wooden cross. There’s no way to pass the cat as a different one than the one that has been dead for three months.
Christian’s parents are horrified, they yell and throw the cat out of the house with a broom and then they sit on the living room still shaking and stare at Christian sitting in front of them, bloody hands crossed over the knees and back straight. His mother takes her hand to her mouth, his father hides his face with his hands. Christian is ten years, four months and twenty-five days old.
He doesn’t get dessert that day.
The cat sleeps on his bed that night, just as he used to before he died, and if he smells a bit like wet earth, Christian doesn’t mind that much. The next day the machine is missing some parts, and the pile of rat bodies is gone from the lab, but he just shrugs and starts working on something else. The machine has already done what it was built for, anyway.
The cat purrs on his lap.
----
He finishes the time machine when he’s seventeen.
He takes a step back, stares at it in silence, the two meter high box covered in colorful wires that twist and coil around each other, form patterns and tell a story. The little lights that mark the levels of energy turn on and off intermittently at the same rhythm of his heart’s beating. That wasn’t included in the plan, but Christian guesses he put too much of himself into the machine. The cat meows on the table, and Christian pats him on the head before going out of the lab, out of his house and his block until he gets to the old abandoned church.
He sits on the church’s stairs, his coat’s collar popped up and smoking cigarette after cigarette because he can, because there’s nothing better to do, no other way to celebrate. The cat followed him, and is lying next to him, his ears moving every time a car passes by them. No one has called the cat Cow for seven years. The kids in the neighborhood started calling him Zombie, and the name stuck. Christian doesn’t mind it. The cat doesn’t, either.
He sits there for three hours, and when he finally stands up he leaves a trail of cigarette butts, a modern crumb path that the cat steps on as he walks behind Christian, tail on the air and his paws still lightly green even after seven years. Christian stares at the time machine for three days, not daring to touch it, and on the fourth day, he sees himself going out of the machine, shaking his head to get out the sand that almost paints it white.
“You’re here from the tropic, I assume,” he tells the other Christian, and neither of them seem surprised to see each other.
“Almost. I was in Egypt, Tenth Dynasty,” says Christian from the future, and he scratches Zombie’s ears for a moment before adding, “I’m hungry.”
Christian nods, and both of them go up to the kitchen and make nutella sandwiches. They both clean their mouths with a cloth napkin every time they take a bite off the sandwich, and they don’t speak with their mouths full. They’re sitting in front of each other, and it’s like staring into a mirror, the same movements at the same time, only on the opposite side. They’re both wearing the same black tie and the impeccable white shirt with a high neckline.
“This is just my third trip,” says his future, and Christian finishes his sandwich, wipes his fingers clean methodically with his napkin. It’s got his initials sewn on it. His parents use paper napkins.
“Where have you been already?”
“Our lab, the day we brought Zombie back to life. I cleaned the dead rats from the corner and watched when Dad started destroying the machine. Then I went to Egypt. That urban legend of the Great Pyramid being a landing site for aliens? Bullshit. But they weren’t tombs either.”
Christian doesn’t ask anymore, because he knows it’s only a matter of time before he sees it for himself.
His double stays for a week. Christian skips school and has long conversations with himself in the lab, refuting theories and doing silly competences - who can build a particle accelerator in the least time, who can make the toaster speak and toast bread in the shape of a fish and say the time in three different languages. It always ends in a tie.
They sit on the stairs of the abandoned church and share cigarettes, trembling under their coats and with their fingers stained with nicotine. They sleep on the same bed, the cat between them, and their breathings match just before going to sleep, inhale and exhale and again and it doesn’t feel like having a stranger next to him.
Christian kisses himself for the first time to take the burn away from the smell of blood.
They build back the machine they used to bring the cat back, piece by piece until it’s nearly unrecognizable from the amateur prototype they built when they were ten. They steal a body from the medicine faculty, and even with a dead man in the trunk they still let old ladies with grocery bags cross before them, and they stop on yellow lights.
Two hours later the body comes back to life, gasping for breath, eyes wide open and his hands trying to grab onto something, anything. He tries talking, but he just chokes, and then he notices the Y incision on his chest, how he’s missing skin tissue on his arms. He doesn’t even have all of his organs; he’s been study material for at least a year. He tries screaming, but Christian removed his vocal chords before resuscitating him, and nothing comes out.
Both Christian and his double take notes, nod a lot and take his vitals, lab tests. Then the experiment is over, and each one of them takes a scalpel and slit the man’s throat, one in each side of the table and in just one movement towards themselves, and the arterial blood splashes on their face, their white shirt, their black tie.
It’s only then that the adrenaline kicks in, and Christian pulls his double close over the table, over the body that is still bleeding. When he kisses him, it tastes like triumph. They go together into the shower, after they get rid of the body, and they wash the blood away and bite each other’s lips under the water spray, eyes open, and when they come, their hands on each other’s skin, it feels like they’re alone. They smoke together, after, their heads outside their room’s window, hair still wet.
They do it again that night, in their bed, while their parents are sleeping on the other room, and they look straight into each other’s eyes but don’t let out a single sound. The next day they clean the dry blood out of their work table while they argue over the possibility of stopping time. Their mother finds their blood-stained shirts and scolds them, says that as if it wasn’t enough with not being able to distinguish them. Their father reads the paper and tells them they left a part of a finger behind in the lab after they threw away the rest of the body, and then he asks just when is Christian from the future going back, that having both of them under the same roof is too much. It’s been years since anything Christian does surprise them.
They go back to the church’s stairs, they pet the cat and kiss until their lips hurt because they can, because there’s nothing better to do. His future wakes Christian up early in the morning, when it’s sill dark outside the window, and just mutters a goodbye into his ear before leaving. Christian goes back to sleep, and when he wakes up again he has cereal for breakfast, chews slowly and doesn’t spill a single drop of milk.
He sits in front of the time machine again, staring at it with his head cocked slightly to the left. Ten minutes later he stands up and finally goes into the machine. He sees himself, ten years old and forty centimeters less than his current height. He watches as the cat comes back to life. Then he goes to Egypt, gets sand in his hair.
Then he goes out of the machine again, and he sees himself sitting there.
Neither of them seem surprised to see each other.