Rewrite I should have done earlier

Inside Michael Davenant’s brain his synapses fizzed and clicked. Cells formed and reformed and sashayed to the edges to dissolve into a tributary artery. The 500,000 cells that contained his knowledge of the secret buzzed deafeningly.

Michael was uneasy. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t see; every once in a while the synapses from mind to eyes misfired, catapulting him into a world of acidic blues, greens and fluorescent reflections of dying retina platelets. This was different.

Something here had already spooned its way into his memories, coupling vicariously in archaic shapes. It juiced pain. It didn’t want to stay forgotten.

She was here.

The bulbous group of cells that knew he had to lose to save his life were drowned in a wave of adrenalin.

Michael opened his eyes to see the greasy, incessant floor. He peered up. Behind a glimpse of her inert, Flemish face were rows of watchers – and rows of silent air. There wasn’t a large turn-out for their meeting. Good. Less people to hear whatever was said, even if it was something he didn’t want anyone to hear.

He fixed his eyes on her face.

“Aphra,” he gasped. “I didn’t see you there – you know, my eyes…”

He was lying; she knew but he didn’t care.

“I understand. Unfortunate.” She expelled the words as if dissecting specimens on the bio-lab table. He’d watched her do it so many times that her precise speech seemed a necessary extension of her scientific career.

Not that she needed a career – everyone knew who her father was. She was practically royal. She was the child of privilege. For someone like him, she was untouchable.

For a moment, Michael’s heart drummed out three extra beats and his pupils dilated.

Impulses juiced memories, popping open the stitches keeping wounds together. Cells span, unleashed, in well-trodden arcs. Their relationship venn-diagrammed his hippocampus and for an unnamed unit of time she was close to him again; her body imprinted on his very atoms.

He stopped thinking about how her eyelids caught the light like a weeping Flemish Madonna. Her chin and lips were stumpily sculpted; in relief, they resembled a velocerapter’s insouciance. He stared at her lips. It wasn’t helping.

“I think you know what I’m expecting the outcome to be,” she intoned. He understood that he would have to let her win. Migraine ricocheted across his forehead.

The hand begging release from his knife shuddered as delicate currents pirouetted down his arteries. He leapt back. The bell tolled 12pm. The crowd observed half-heartedly – speaking of the day’s news, the sunlight as it left, their selves and the tiny revisions in self that they make each day.

Aphra retreated twelve paces of clipped steps. The bell chimed an indolent 12:01pm. It began with an ungainly arc of her knife, shelving Michael’s face. It caught at the temple – a scratch – and blood fountained. He stayed unmoving, awaiting his punishment.

The fibrous stumplings circling his heart contracted. His brain cells floated freely through the red.

He heaved to the floor, and lay down, arms outstretched. The knife shuddered from his hand. The skylight opalled luminescent above. He wasn’t going to fight. He didn’t care anymore.

Aphra gazed down at him.

“What used to be worth a shekel of silver is worth a shekel of gold,” shouted the voices his atoms were constructing inside his brain. The light from the ceiling grew yellow and began to be streaked with tart, acid colours.

His memories tsunamied his senses in random order. Serotonin was shuffling out of its hiding place and surging excitedly along veins. He couldn’t care anymore. It wasn’t even a possibility.

Aphra’s pupils contracted. She grasped her blade tighter and loomed over Michael’s face. There, she daintily etched a grid in blood across his left cheek, opposite his wounded temple. She chequered it, filling in half of the squares with raw flesh.

Then she stopped. The handle of her weapon had pressed the initials M.D. and a pattern of diamonds into her palm.

People were hustling out of the stadium. This wasn’t in the rule book. The bell clanged and the match was over.

And a moment later she was kissing his wounds – or was she sucking at them, vampirific, he couldn’t tell – and he was out of sight of the crowd.

The clump of cells carrying the secret started to turn tubular and harden. The phantoms in the human brain fricasseed the memories in sombre rebellion.

Madeleine Beresford : 14 Oct 2008 21:07 |  Tags: Icw20089 Rewriting Secret Story |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem