ten. spaces and shadows
Byron had appeared in my dreams long before he ever appeared in my waking hours, a boy my age with dark messy hair and sharp aristocratic features like none I'd seen in our area before. He was striking enough in his dress and mannerisms, at once both snobbish and rebellious, but what clung to me most when I awoke were his eyes.
They were large and grey, so pale as to approach white. Completely unseeing. A puckered pink seam ran horizontally through them from one temple, over the bridge of his nose, and then disappeared into his hair. It was the type of scar to make one wince with empathy just on sight, the type to make you avert your eyes and think of pleasant things as a coping mechanism. The scar was frightening on the most immediate, basic level of nightmares, a reminder that you are human, that there are things that take it upon themselves to make you hurt, bleed, and die.
It never occured to me, in my dreams, to ask where the scar had come from, and when he came to be real, the scar wasn't there, and so faded from my mind except to lurk in nightmares of elemental horrors: burning or drowning or being buried alive, bound helpless as Byron and his terrible scar watched and did nothing.
Summer was when I first met him, excluding his presence in my subconscious. It was a June evening, the type when the air crackles with distant lightening and and hums with fireflies.
They were large and grey, so pale as to approach white. Completely unseeing. A puckered pink seam ran horizontally through them from one temple, over the bridge of his nose, and then disappeared into his hair. It was the type of scar to make one wince with empathy just on sight, the type to make you avert your eyes and think of pleasant things as a coping mechanism. The scar was frightening on the most immediate, basic level of nightmares, a reminder that you are human, that there are things that take it upon themselves to make you hurt, bleed, and die.
It never occured to me, in my dreams, to ask where the scar had come from, and when he came to be real, the scar wasn't there, and so faded from my mind except to lurk in nightmares of elemental horrors: burning or drowning or being buried alive, bound helpless as Byron and his terrible scar watched and did nothing.
Summer was when I first met him, excluding his presence in my subconscious. It was a June evening, the type when the air crackles with distant lightening and and hums with fireflies.