The Losers: The Small Town Streets of Hillsdale, Indiana

A short chapter from the Losers, written in the present tense. I like writing in the present tense, but most people are used to novels being written in the past tense. Still, it's nice to shake things up a bit. Silica is going to be a real challenge. She's an alien that's transitioning into becoming human. There's a lot a writer can do with that, but it'll take some skill and thought. I'll try my best to pull it off.

The Small Town Streets of Hillsdale, Indiana

Main Street, lamp-lit, quiet other than a car passing on Walnut, heading for the highway. The sidewalks are nice and in fine condition. The buildings are vintage, home to little shops selling knickknacks to no one. There’s a harp store, a diner, a coffee shop that will go out of business. The street goes down to a pavilion from which one can stare at the muddy polluted waters of the Ohio river. At this moment the moon is shining distorted on the waters, painting a spectral image, ghost lights that beckon and call to the mutated fish swimming in the depths. A little park extends past the pavilion, and underneath the playground equipment a teenager is dabbling in some hard drugs. The humidity has set in, carrying with it the sticky sweats of summer, mosquitoes hatching in stagnant pools. Nobody sees the woman darting in between the lights, hiding in the shadows like a vampire. She sees things and tries to understand them but it is a nightmare to her, a world that makes sense until it doesn’t. In the glass windows of the coffee shop she sees herself and stares at this new body she’s created, this identity she’s inhabited, and wonders how she can fill this flesh and make a person from the fantastical reaches of a perverted mind. How many people know how to make a person? Most of us stumble into who we are through happenstance and genetics. Silica doesn’t have any genes; her genetic history is as fresh as her identity. She can’t look back at her father and see the same nose, the same quick temper. What she has is true freedom and it is terrifying. Bemoan the deterministic circumstances of life at your own risk. Evolution has given something to you which may prove useful.

   She finally makes it to the pavilion, where she pauses and stares at the moonglow. The teenager in the playground coughs loudly, causing her to duck down and huddle beneath the railings. Every once in a while she gets an image in her mind’s eye so terrible that she almost freezes in place like a deer caught in the headlights, staring in amazement at its own approaching doom. A mosquito lands on her arm and sticks its proboscis into her flesh to extract the life-giving blood within. Have a drink, she thinks. Where she comes from, there are no insects. The brilliant ecological web that humanity takes for granted does not exist elsewhere. Wraiths pass through matter while dead oceans bubble up steaming into the sky, the searing heat unimaginable to a terrestrial creature. To walk and to fill one’s lungs with air, to taste and feel and hear, it is all a marvel to Silica.

   There is Kentucky across the water, its shores verdant and sparsely inhabited. The vastness of the power plant is a grand disfigurement, but people have done worse things with the land. A fish jumps out of the water to swallow a dragonfly. It is unimaginable how much suffering is occurring in the natural world at any given moment. The kid coughs again, the smoke burning his lungs, and through his haze he sees Silica looking over the railing, her eyes like two moons. He has a vision of himself as a child running through his grandmother’s backyard with two sticks in each hand, a brown-headed little boy playing swords, swinging through the air at imaginary enemies. Those enemies have strange names, like depression, anxiety, anger, disappointment. They crawl out of the darkness and walk in the broad daylight, sucking at his soul, devouring any promise he had. What is left when all the happiness and hope have been drained from your body? He sees her eyes and thinks that she understand, but she doesn’t. All Silica sees is a juvenile male hiding underneath a playset cradling a smoking object in his hands.

  She rises and takes a tentative step into the light of Main. The blood pumping through her veins has resumed its normal velocity; a wave of calm has materialized, for no other reason than fatigue. It is exhausting to run always, and sometimes the will to survive dissolves suddenly, without warning. In those terrible moments, death often comes, by way of jaws on the throat or claws in the back, but Silica remains unharmed. She stretches out a hand, raises it open palmed, because the voice in her head has told her that this is a human greeting, a gesture of welcome and peace. The teenager does likewise. They stand that way for a long time, contemplating the silence between them, the tenuous connection that neither wants to break. And then she’s off, back into the night, looking for another place to hide. The teenager wonders whether he witnessed a ghost or a hallucination, or even a sign from God.