The Elemental

The Elemental

A Short Story by C. M. Oguz

***

It was a rainy Monday afternoon as Nathan sat with his backside parked squarely on his hard, cold desk-chair preparing to listen to the ever-lasting boredom that would no doubt be that day’s literature lecture. But something happened that day which interfered with the usual order of things, like a small disturbance in an otherwise bland canvas, a dead pixel yearning for attention. An old woman with a wrinkled-up face, deep-set brown eyes and grayish white hair marched into the classroom and stood at the front, silently. This disruption of the norm piqued Nathan’s interest, he felt his usual attitude of boredom replaced by genuine intrigue for the first time in a while. He gazed at this new figure with morbid curiosity, scanning her every movement.

“Mr. Smith is sick today and won’t make it, I will be serving as your substitute teacher. You may call me White… Mrs. White.” Having said this the woman sat down and analyzed the students, stopping for a brief moment on Nathan. When their eyes met he felt a faint, almost ethereal wave of coldness traverse his body.

“You, boy, get over here and read this passage for the class.”

Nathan got up, nervously, and headed over to where Mrs. White appeared to be holding out a tattered book opened to a page which looked to be around its mid-point. He took it, a section was clearly marked in pencil. In the brief moment before he began reciting this passage, he noticed the first word: his name. It had to be a coincidence, after all it was a fairly common name, Nathan thought, trying to get a grip on himself.

“You planning on starting any time today Nathan?” Her voice cut through his thoughts.

“Read that marked section.”

“Yes, sorry.” Nathan said, timidly. His mind was racing. How the hell does she know my name, he thought, before he proceeded to read aloud the following few sentences:

“Nathan was driving through the snowy forest as the smell of pine and fresh ice combined into a delightful yet bitter winter scent. His wife was asleep next to him, lulled by the soft, bumpy passage as they slowly caroused home. Unfortunately, Nathan did not notice the massive snow-laden branch that was about to fall onto the car, and when it did, the force of the collision caused him to jerk the steering wheel left, sending the car tumbling down into a deep wooded ravine. A large log pierced the windshield plunging his world into darkness.”

“Okay thank you, you can sit down now.” Mrs. White said before stretching her arm out to take the book from Nathan’s hands. Just before she grabbed it back, he noticed, to his utmost horror, that the remaining half of the book seemed to just be pages of incoherent scribbles interspersed amongst other pages that were completely black. What is this book, Nathan mused, as he headed obediently back to his desk.

His eyes met Cora’s as he marched back to his seat. She gave him an encouraging and evanescent semi-smile as if trying to silently compliment his reading-skills with her eyes. Jack began smiling too, but he had already passed Cora and now found himself grinning at the rear wall of the classroom, the realization of which quickly wiped it away. He sat down and parked his chin inside the safety of his right palm.

“Story-telling is a form of mind control you see.” Mrs. White exclaimed, scanning the classroom while standing up in preparation of a great oration.

Her voice filled the room completely. Little faces gazed out at her in lingering anticipation.

“How else can you explain the fact that the above writing took your mind, which is your most fundamental identifier, your conscience, on a trip whereby it imagined a snowy forest path with a man driving through icy pine trees before suffering a terrifying accident. You see, story-telling is a form of control so subtle that its power is infinitely potent. The words above took control of your mind for but a brief moment and conjured up an image using your machine. The machine being your collective being, your past and present. You imagined a snowy forest in your own image, but the idea of a forest was implanted by this text. The feeling of fear you felt or the smell of pinecone you discerned was this text reaching into fragments of your past and laying them before you one more time. I do not control the narrative, I merely created it, unleashed it onto the world. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, I have no way of retrograding, containing, or stopping it. Story-telling is an unstoppable monster. It is an emotional thief, a being of pure stealth. You cannot un-hear a story. Once it has been delivered, its power cannot be stopped. It will reach into the deepest, darkest recesses of your mind, your life, your very existence, and present things to you. It has unfiltered, unchecked access to your mind. Once heard or read, there is no stopping its infiltration. It will root out things you may have locked away for years. You cannot hide anything from a narrative. Because it is you. The story-teller, the author, is merely holding a mirror with but a few markings on it.”

Having said all that, Mrs. White stopped speaking almost as suddenly as she had begun. Her energy now siphoned out, she collapsed gently into the chair behind her. The classroom was so silent that Nathan could hear each individual drop of rain smacking against the grated metal roof above them.

The rain slowly turned to sleet, and that turned to snow. Nathan realized he had just been gazing out the window for the past ten minutes or so, daydreaming about everything and nothing simultaneously. But mostly about Mrs. White’s oration. That’s when Nathan finally saw it. A severely disfigured person – an old woman it seemed from the dishevelled white hair – was crouched outside, in the corner of the dark cold courtyard, barely visible. A very thin layer of snow had blanketed the dark silhouette, making it just barely visible. It seemed to be looking directly at him. Nathan tried to hide his shock, fear, and all emotions lest he give away his awareness to this thing. He gulped down his terror and tried to avoid looking in the corner of the courtyard, where under normal circumstances one’s eyes would never come to rest, but only pass over while looking across the general area towards either the entrance to the school on the left, or the horizon slightly above. At that moment the window-pane between himself and the outside, which never properly insulated the classroom from the cold, seemed even more fragile and futile than it usually did. His body felt frozen, he tried to calm down, meaningless though it was.

A few minutes later, after having feigned looking out the window while keeping a watchful peripheral eye on this horrifying figure, suddenly, an amazing feeling of sadness began filling Nathan. He could not quite place this sorrowful feeling. The ghastly figure, he thought, she is in great pain. He looked at her again, bloodshot eyes, crouched down in a buckled-up position. It almost looked like massive branch, or something had pierced her torso. Her mouth was wide open. Was she screaming or crying? Nathan could not hear, though, because of the double-glazed classroom window between them, he surmised. Feeling sick, Nathan turned away from the window, but to his horror the classroom was dark and empty. Where the hell was everyone, Nathan thought, panicking. Why was he even here? Could merely turning the lights off make the room so dark when it was still fairly light outside? It made no sense.

He finally saw Mrs. White, at the front of the room, yet she did not have a face. Nathan began spiralling. He rubbed his eyes a few times, feeling the rush of panic boiling just below the surface. He lifted his head one more time, blinking frantically. That’s when the cord finally snapped. Mrs. White exploded into a kaleidoscope of colors brighter than the very core of the sun, while crystalline strips of pure neon invaded Nathan’s vision from all angles and the combined scent of lilac, jasmine and honey infiltrated his olfactory core like a floral bulldozer. Strands of starlight collided with and ignited subatomic detonators, multiform fuses that created the very essence of the universe inside that small classroom. Everything of the preceding few hours vanished in a wave of flames.

Nathan woke up in his bed and noticed that it was bright sunlight outside, it must have been around late-morning from what he could tell.

Soon after, a young man entered, energetic and well-mannered. He looked like a nurse.

“Good morning, Nathan, how are you doing today?”

Nathan felt spent. He did not respond. A bittersweet feeling of dread haunted him, as if something he was just barely unaware of lingered in the room.

“Here take your medicine and let’s get you out of bed.” The young man beamed, almost too joyously, while handing Nathan a set of about twelve pills of varying sizes and colors.

Nathan obliged, and slowly got out of bed. His body ached. He went to wash his face, but before bending down he caught sight of a strange reflection in the mirror. Not a subatomic explosion nor a ghastly apparition, but a sad old man. A man with a wrinkled rug of a face, bald with numerous moles covering his scalp, and lacking any teeth stared back at him. He did not like this person. What is happening, Nathan thought, feeling extremely frustrated.

“Look, I placed your favourite picture in a new frame since the last one broke.” The young nurse exclaimed.

Nathan turned around to see what he meant. His spine hurt as he rotated. He held out his bony, shaking right hand to grasp the frame as he could not see from afar. Holding the image up to his face he saw the same man. The same shell of a man he had just seen in the mirror was now in the image, he was sure of it, even the moles on the scalp matched the pattern he had just seen. Nathan’s heart began accelerating. He noticed that next to the man was a woman, with deep-set blue eyes, beautiful hair seemingly whitened by the passage of time, holding onto the man’s forearm, with a gorgeous small smile complementing her dimpled cheeks.

“What a lovely photograph.” The nurse said, quietly, as he placed it back onto the bedside table where Nathan had just been laying. “Let’s hope the frame lasts longer this time!”

“Would you like to visit your wife as usual Mr. White?”

Nathan nodded. He began crying, softly, imperceptibly. Once again, as had happened each morning, Nathan had confronted his narrative, digested it, and become one with it. He remembered the accident, how he had watched the death of his wife, helplessly. They had both just turned thirty, life had seemed so bright back then. But then… that accident. Oh, if only he had been paying a molecule more attention to the road conditions or perhaps if he had been driving a sliver slower… if only. Her blood-shot eyes and curled up dying position were now forever engrained in his mind. These memories coiled around him like layers and layers of cellophane, wrapping him up in an eternal cocoon.

Too weak to take his own life – though he had tried – Nathan had just given up. Besides, that was now an impossible task in this “facility” he had been forced into. He watched the world through the shadows left behind by his wife, by the cataracts of a premature death that he blamed himself for. For over half his life he had been sleepwalking through incoherent pages. His narrative had effectively paused itself on that fateful winter’s night, what remained was a static storm of ineligible darkness. He had never got to read the rest of it, nor dream beyond it.

As he walked out towards the graveyard, accompanied by his young caregiver, Nathan felt a brief sense of calmness. He sat by his wife’s grave for a few hours while the sun massaged his back. He loved spending time with the small flowers that dotted the base of her gravestone. They magically diffused in and out of existence over the weeks and months. Evening eventually fell and daylight was vacuumed out of the sky by forces that Nathan never understood. For his mind was numb; dizzy from frolicking under starless skies, disoriented and deadened.

As he was escorted back to his room, Nathan was aware that tomorrow would likely contain the same harrowing sequence of events. Sighing, he pressed the photo of his wife close to his chest, careful not to break the frame this time, and crawled back into bed.

His eyelids drifted shut, enclosing the universe once more. Though the world had stopped spinning at its very core, like an ever-unfolding lattice of pain still he wore, the darkest night and the longest winter, forevermore.

**

Cover Image: Chiaroscuro illustration by M. G. Kellermeyer