Kyle (partial. rough draft)

KYLE

“So,” she asks me, “how did that make you feel?”

I stare behind her head and imagine a black, swirling void. It is a black hole and everything it touches is reduced to nothing. It remains fixed above her head, tendrils of darkness lashing out like an enraged squid. Everything it strikes disintegrates into a cloud of specks and then, nothing. And then the arms of the void destroy the wall behind her and the world floods into this space in a manner so overwhelming I can finally feel my eyes widening in surprise. An ocean of noise and torrents of color erupt from the tears in reality that this black hole has opened and I remain seated, gripped in a rising panic that threatens to end everything. A seagull, one wing melting as it flies overhead, barks like a dog and splatters like a spent raindrop as it collides with the wall I’m seated in front of. Large, yellow eyes glower from the black hole that has now grown to the size of three moving vans and-

“Kyle?”

I blink. The world is whole. I am seated in her office of muted blues and grays. Her various diplomas and certificates of accomplishments hang on the wall behind her. A computer rests on the desk of tempered glass she would sit behind when she was between patients. Now she’s seated in a simple armchair, one bare leg crossed over the other. A pair of thin, black-framed glasses rest on the bridge of her nose. She is plain, uninteresting.

“What was that?”

She straightens in her chair; jots something down in her legal pad.

“I asked how that makes you feel. We were talking about your friend, Jenny.”

“She’s dead,” I say, simply and without feeling. This is the most basic truth I can tell her.

Earlier, before coming into her office, when I was sitting in the lobby, I went into the bathroom. In the stall someone had scratched “Jenny likes rough sex” and “She sucks cock in Hell”. A wave of complete and utter sadness overtook me. With tears streaming down my face and snot dripping in ropes out of my nose, I scratched into the lines underneath them: “JENNY WAS A FRIEND OF MINE”. And then, unable to handle the whole affair, I popped a Firefly. And then fifteen minutes later I’m back out in the lobby, staring at my feet, which were by then glowing like two elongated suns.

“Yes, she is.”

She says this, tilting her head to one side. She looks at me with some concern.

“While it is perfectly normal to express an outward appearance of apathy, you must be feeling something underneath it.”

She pauses for a moment and continues speaking when she realizes that I have nothing to add.

“Think of it as your mind taking all those bad, nasty feelings you might have and wrapping them up in a giant cocoon. WHOOSH!”

She makes a wide, flamboyant gesture with her hands that is, I guess, supposed to resemble a cocoon being spun.

“All those bad feelings are kept prisoner, allowing you to go about life seemingly close to normal as possible. The problem, Kyle, is that while you go about your life, those feelings and emotions keep getting collected in this cocoon. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it just BOOM!”

She claps her hands together.

“Now Kyle, what I’m here to do, what we’re here to do, is to slowly unravel that cocoon of negative emotions and let them seep out gradually. If you let them fill until it bursts, well, it greatens the risk of harm you can do to yourself and others. So, tell me, how does that make you feel?”

Somewhere between her first mention of the word “cocoon” and her grand slap, small moths began to spew from her gaping maw. Their wings were a pale blue, with bright, white quarter moons emblazoned on them. They flew in a swarm around her head, buzzing and moaning as she spoke.

“I know this must be hard. Having to come face-to-face

----

It's funny how I can type that out in a quick ten minutes and then, just as quickly as the dance was going along, I go and trip over my own feet. I have this grand vision in my head about how all this is going to play out. I mean, who doesn't want to read a murder mystery ripe with disillusioned, spoiled, super dramatic, self-absorbed, drug-taking, alcoholic, sex-craved, idiotic children? And maybe I'll even throw in a little Lovecraft into the mix. I mean, a story isn't complete without a little reference to the Cthulhu?

I'll finish this tomorrow. I've got the soundtrack down.