Writing Session: "Heirs of the Abyss"
Please keep in mind that you're about to read an excerpt of a very early draft, complete with spelling & grammatical errors. The final draft will be rewritten & corrected.
HEIRS OF THE ABYSS
william pauley III
Dreams won’t eat you. At least that’s what I’ve always been told.
“Oh, Rita,” my mother would say, “Calm your head, child. It’s just a dream and dreams won’t eat you.” As a child, I often leapt out of bed in the middle of the night, sprinted across that great unknown darkness [that hung like a shroud] in the space between my room and my mother’s, and in all my cold and clammy panic, I dove into the gray vagueness of her room until I at last was nestled inside the warm pocket of her bed sheets. I was haunted by my dreams in those days. It felt like everything, including my own mind, was out to get me. Thinking of it now, I suppose things haven’t really changed all that much.
“Except in Eighth Block,” she’d add, and she always turned away from me as she said it, as if lamenting some once-buried secret she’d thought would never resurface. “In Eighth Block, dreams…they eat you alive.”
She didn’t talk much about Eighth Block, but every time she did, I was all ears. Like many folk in the neighborhood, especially the children, I was fascinated by the Eighth Block Tower. It stood like a monolith and loomed over our part of the city, like a scream made of concrete, as if the damn thing was demanding our attention. I could tell what time of day it was just by looking out the window and seeing what house the tower’s shadow was covering. My house was 5:30. My friend Barcy’s was 2:45. Old Lady Barker’s was closer to 1. Because of that great sliding shadow, every last one of us living in the surrounding city block thought about that building at least once a day. Who lived there? Were they all as insane as everyone made them out to be? Could the stories actually be true?
I never discovered the connection between my mother and the tower. Never had the guts to ask [or perhaps never had the guts to find out]. I’m not too sure there really ever was a connection to begin with, I just know it came up sometimes and when it did, things got weird. Something stirred inside her in those moments, prodding, hitting her where it hurt. She was always left frozen, for several seconds at least, snagged on some memory.
I thought of her when I first met Tony. Tony was the first resident of Eighth Block I ever met. He borrowed a quarter from me at the Five Star Laundromat, then struck up a conversation that lasted the entire hour those machines were churning. I found him irresistibly charming. Back then, we were new adults, technically still teenagers, but I found him different from the other boys I knew. He was sophisticated, intelligent, and confident—but not in that asshole-ish entitled way that’s often mistaken for true confidence. As fate would have it, Tony liked me too. From that moment on, we were smitten.
Our first few dates, I felt as if we were swimming in clouds. Even our walks in the park felt otherworldly to me. Tony just had a way about him, like he was radiating electricity. I suppose it was in the way he paid attention to the little things, the things most of us took for granted. For example, sometimes he'd pause mid-conversation just to stare into the web of my eyes, and every time he did electricity moved through me in waves. It felt as if my insides were melting, but, you know, in a good way. I'd often think if he could make me feel that way with only a look, how incredible would it be to be touched by him? Well…soon enough, I'd find out.
And that's when the problems began.