ihavebeenfloated

This has turned into the longest thing I’ve ever written, now. At 3,779 words, it out numbers my previous longest, I Awake, by well over one thousand words. At it’s current state, I have no idea where it is going, or where it is going to end. Every time I write more of it, I’ll add on to this post. I’ll admit, I started writing this with no planning and no intention of it turning into as long as it’s apparently going to be, so if you have questions about it, don’t ask me, because I have no idea what is going on.

When the story is finally finished and edited, I’ll probably delete this post of it, but I don’t know.

I’ll also point out that this is entirely unedited, so any typos or other weird changes in tone are just temporary… or maybe not, who knows.

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When Nicky was fourteen years old, she had long brown hair that flowed over her shoulders and halfway down her back like a waterfall. All the girls at school were terribly envious of her hair, and the ones who gave up their envy often spent their time sitting behind Nicky in class, brushing it slowly as if it were their own. This didn’t stop her father from beating her, however, and she lived through most of her days lying under her bed whispering a prayer to herself. The springs popping out of the box spring would jab her painfully in the belly, and cut deep lines into her flesh when her father would reach under the bed to grab one of her ankles and pull her out. The beatings would never last long, but any amount of time is too long to be beaten by your father. She never told anyone about her father hitting her, and he was cautious with where he placed his fists, never near anywhere visible when she was clothed.

When Nicky turned sixteen, she caught the eye of a boy named Daniel Nichols. As an attractive senior in high school, Daniel had been burned by many girls his own age, and was at that stage where he felt pompous enough to pretend he was having grown up thoughts, like, “Maybe I should try going for a different kind of girl, someone different, unusual maybe.” He spotted Nicky lurking in the shadows of the Mathematics building when he came out of Wood Shop. She stood in the corner, clutching her book to her chest, kneeling down partly, pressing herself into the crevice, trying to look invisible. Nicky found that this was the most, and the least, vulnerable position you could place yourself in. You could see the people coming for you, so you could mentally prepare for their potential assault, but you were helpless to run from them. Sometimes Nicky thought that this would make a great metaphor for her life up to this point, and she would be right.

When Nicky saw Daniel walking up to her, she didn’t know what to do. She’d never met the guy before, but she’d heard of him. She quickly thought of everything she possibly knew about him, the rumors, the gossip, the dreamy talks a few friends of hers have had about him, but nothing set off any major alarms, besides bringing about the obvious question, “Why is he coming over here to talk to me?”

That is answered easy enough, because anyone could look at Nicky and see that she was slightly attractive. That is to say that she wasn’t exactly as attractive in comparison to Daniel, but she had the potential to be. As it stands, the “I’m slouching in a corner, waiting to die” look isn’t exactly the most becoming for a young lady, and many can’t disagree with that. When you subtract the slouching, the cowering, the long-sleeved green jacket and the jeans two sizes too large, the thick black mascara, and the general sorrowful look in her eyes, Nicky is, quite frankly, gorgeous. Daniel saw this potential from nearly one hundred feet away. He was blessed with his father’s jet pilot eyes.

When Daniel stepped up to Nicky, barely one foot away, he placed his left hand on the wall and leaned slightly against it, a subconscious barrier constructed between her and the outside world away from him. He looked at her, and she raised her eyes and made brief eye contact with him before diverting her stare away and toward his arm, then toward the world below his arm, then back to his eyes, which were so blue that she thought he must wear contacts, then back to the outside world. She realized, then, that he wasn’t going to say anything, assuming that this romantic stare of his was some sort of domination attempt that she wasn’t going to play into.

“What the fuck do you want?” she mutters, and then instantly regrets it.

“I… rrr… uh…,” he stammers, instantly dispelling the rumors she heard about his impeccable confidence, “just… wanted to… say… hi?”

“Well, then. Hi.”

“Hi.”

And that was how Nicky and Daniel first met. That was also how their next six meetings would go as well. Daniel stammering, obviously deeply effected by this tortured goddess in front of him; Nicky, self-assured and terribly suspicious of this attractive senior showing some sort of peculiar interest in her. Finally, however, Daniel would grow the testicles necessary to ask her some questions, or something of the like, resulting in the eventual request of some sort of accompaniment to some sort of event, most likely a movie, or some stupid party somewhere.

Nicky would go with him, thanks to a first floor bedroom window, the wonderful effects of alcohol on her abusive father, and the uncontrollable whim she feels when she becomes her most lucid. Where they eventually went is unimportant, because where they end up is exactly the point. Or, maybe it’s more about what ended up where? Well, that sounds naughty. I suppose the dance that they performed together is something familiar to everyone above the age of sixteen, and maybe a few under it.

His hand, under her shirt, on her stomach. Her hand on his thigh, moving upwards. His hand sliding upwards, on the bra. Her hand running through the small hairs below his belly button, an innie. His hand under the bra, rubbing a nipple. Her hand on his neck, gripping tightly. His mouth on her mouth. Her tongue on his tongue. His tongue on her neck. Her shirt over her head. His shirt over his head. Her hands on his sides. His hands unhooking her bra. Her hands on his pants, rubbing the bulge that’s formed. His hands on her breasts. Her tongue on his neck. His tongue on her nipples. Her hand down his pants, on his erect penis. His hand running down her back.

Her emitting a small, quiet, cry of pain.

Him stopping, looking at her.

Her realizing that her shirt is off.

Him realizing that her body is covered with a large number of black and blue spots.

Her realizing that something horrible has just happened and that now nothing will ever be the same.

“What in the fuck is this?” He asks.

She grabs her shirt and tries to cover herself with it, but it’s too late.

“Who did this to you?”

She sighs, and her eyes fill up with tears.

“Nicky, come on, tell me, whoever it is, I’ll take care of him. Is he some ex-boyfriend of yours, or what?”

The dam breaks and the tears come flowing out of Nicky’s eyes, almost so fast that it seems like natural erosion might cause rivers to form on her cheeks. Daniel wraps his arms around her and holds her close to him. Her head rests on his shoulder, and after a few minutes the crying finally stops. She realizes that she barely knows this guy, has no reason to trust him with any sort of confidential information, but she tells him anyway.

She chokes out, “My father…”

“What?”

“My father has been beating me since I was eight years old, nearly every day of my entire fucking life.”

The tears don’t start again, and a part of her feels like she has just dealt with some evil beast that has been lurking in the shadows of her psyche for the last two years. She’s not sure why she told him he’s been beating her for eight years, but it sounded good at the time, and certainly makes it sound more dramatic. She also realizes that the second part of her sentence conflicts with the first part of it, but that doesn’t matter to her either, and she wonders why that is.

He mumbles, “I’ll kill him, I’ll fucking kill him.”

She pulls back from him and looks at the hate seething in his eyes. She asks, “What?”

He clarifies, “I’ll kill him, tell me to kill him, and I’ll do it.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m serious, I’ll do it, I don’t care.”

“Daniel, you do whatever you like, but I’m not going to encourage you to do it.”

“What the fuck are you even saying? The guy has been beating you for your entire life and you’re just like, ‘Oh, someone wants to kill him for me, oh well, woop de do shit fuck fuck shit.’ What the fuck is that?”

“Christ, can you just go back to fondling my chest and can we drop the subject? I promise not to wince when you poke one of my bruises.”

“Holy shit, Nicky! That is the most absolutely insane thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life, and besides, my erection has totally been killed by this entire fucking conversation and I don’t think anything will bring it back.”

Both Nicky and Daniel will later comment to authorities that the frankness of this entire conversation seemed entirely inappropriate for a sixteen and a seventeen year old to have with each other, only days into a new relationship. In fact, they both specifically stated that it sounded like, “we were this fucking married couple who had been married for ten years or something.”

Daniel would later explain to his lawyer that he was so shaken by the comments made by Nicky about her father, that he felt like there was nothing he could do besides kill him. No other thought occurred to him before the killing was over, either. Not a single rational thought ever crept into his brain.

Daniel would take Nicky home shortly after that fateful, if entirely out of character, conversation between them. He’d watch her go around to the back of the house, disappearing behind the red wooden fence separating the front yard from the back yard. Instead of driving off, however, he would wait nearly four hours, his gazed fixed solidly on the house, for all the lights to go off. It would be five o’clock in the morning when he broke the window on the opposite side of the house from the fence Nicky disappeared behind.

At five minutes after five, Daniel will have slowly moved his way into the kitchen to sort through the knives and various other utensils that could be used for a smoothly executed murder. At seven minutes after five, he will have decided on the toaster in place of any sort of sharp object. He unplugs it and slides his fingers inside of it, as if they were piece of toast themselves, and grips it tightly in his right hand. At eight minutes after five, he will have begun his precarious journey through the house, moving from room to room, exploring each one. At ten minutes after five, he will have found Nicky, sleeping peacefully in her bed. He makes the choice not to wake her, for fear she will try to prevent him from doing what he feels needs to do. At twelve minutes after five, he will discover that every other room in the house is empty, and start walking back to the kitchen to put the toaster away, assuming that Mr. Scholtz left the house during Nicky’s adventure outside of her window.

At thirteen minutes after five, he will stub his toe on the couch in the living room, waking up the surprisingly quiet sleeper that Mr. Scholtz is.

At thirteen minutes and two seconds after five, Mr. Scholtz will emit a grumpy mumble, consisting of, “Nicky, is that you?”

At thirteen minutes and five seconds after five, Daniel will respond, “No, you fucking asshole.”

At thirteen minutes and seven seconds after five, Mr. Scholtz will exclaim, “Wh—”

At thirteen minutes, seven seconds, and six tenths of a second after five, Daniel will have brought the toaster down on the head of Mr. Scholtz for the first time, only to be followed by another thirty-five downward movements, resulting in the near fracture of every single bone in Mr. Scholtz head. By the time Daniel finally stops pounding on Mr. Scholtz’s head with the toaster, his brain will look something like pureed tomato sauce.

When Nicky wakes up in the morning, Daniel, and the toaster, will be gone. Her father, however, will still be there, his brain becoming one with the carpet via the effect of seepage. She’ll find his body in the living room, slowly oozing through the carpet, causing irreparable damage to the carpet pad and the floor underneath. She’ll raise her hand to her mouth to suppress her scream, but her hand is not an adequate barrier, and it’s later revealed that you could have heard Nicky from as far as five miles away.

It is not currently known whether the record breaking response time of the police officers who arrived on scene was due to the scream heard for miles, or due to her call. They acted quickly, putting up their yellow tape, working through their red tape, putting the partial body into a body bag, and sucking up the remains of Mr. Scholtz’s head with a wet/dry vacuum the officers would tell Nicky was specifically created and specialized for their division, despite the painfully obvious Craftsman logo on the side of it. They used a Little Green Machine on the left over remnants, and thankfully, Mr. Scholtz did not leave a stain on his ex-wife’s egg shell carpet.

The former Mrs. Scholtz was contacted, and was quoted as saying, “Well, it’s about time.”

Nicky, however, never said much of anything about it, no matter how many different officers poked and prodded her. As they declared her their primary suspect after they added up the abuse, the alcohol, and the lack of an alibi, she said her first words since her screaming. They were, “Wow, you guys are doing a real bang-up job on this one, aren’t you? Could we piece together the obvious a little better than that?”

When Daniel heard the news that they were keeping her locked up and suspected her, it was as if he snapped out of a coma. He looked around, and found himself locked in his bathroom, covered in his own vomit. He was holding a blood stained toaster in his hand. The news had apparently filtered in through the bathroom door from the television in the living room. The last thing Daniel remembered before waking up in his bathroom is holding on to a pair of the most gorgeous breasts he had ever seen in his entire life. To go from a great pair of breasts to a beat to hell and blood soaked toaster is a bit of a shock, I’d imagine, not even factoring the vomit into it.

His mother knocked on the door, the sound of annoyance ringing in her voice, “Daniel, what the hell are you doing in there? Daniel? You’ve been in there since I woke up, which, by the way, was nearly five hours ago. You’ve missed school. Your new girlfriend is on the news, they say she beat her dad’s head in, probably with some sort of appliance, do you know anything about that?”

“No, mom, I don’t know anything about that. Oh, and, fuck school!” he shouted back through the door at her.

Daniel’s mom, realizing that the bathroom door didn’t have a lock, decided that it was about time she go in there herself, regardless of any sort of privacy violation Daniel might feel has occurred. When she found him, lying there, smothered in vomit, wielding a bloody toaster in his hand, she smiled. He looked up at her, worry filling his eyes, with a touch of confusion at the strangeness of his mother’s expression.

From around the block, Daniel could hear the church bells ringing their toll.

Next door, it sounded like a dog and a cat were involved in an impassioned discussion from opposite sides of a chain-link fence. The dog lets out a small yelp in response to the cat darting its claws through the fence and raking them across his nose. Daniel’s mother remembers that familiar sound from years ago.

“Daniel, honey, you did it again, didn’t you?”

“Mom…”

When Daniel was eleven years old, he blacked out for the first time. He was playing with one of his friends, a boy next door named Manny Fredrickson. Manny had a dog, a chocolate colored Labrador Retriever, and often spent his days playing fetch with it, including the days he spent with Daniel. Daniel had no love for the dog, and would later tell Nicky that he assumes his hatred of dogs comes from his experience with Manny’s lab.

It was a large dog, clumsy and stupid looking. It had a bad habit of jumping on people and knocking them over. It seemed to take a keen interest in doing this to Daniel any time he saw him. His tail would start wagging, he’d break into a frantic pant, and lunge right toward Daniel. Daniel would often end up on his back, arms in the air, trying to push the one hundred and eighty pound Labrador off of him.

One day, Daniel’s arms wouldn’t go up in the air, and he wouldn’t be trying to push the dog off of him. The fall caused by the dog would cause Daniel’s head to connect with the concrete walkway in Manny’s backyard, fracturing his skull, and would be responsible for the eighteen hours of Daniel’s life that he lost that day, buried somewhere in the confines of his brain. The only thing that Daniel remembers from that entire period of time is thinking, “Oh, great. Brace for impact,” as he saw the dog hurtling toward him.

When Daniel would come to his senses, many hours later, his head would be bandaged. There would be a terrible throb deep within the very center of his brain. He’d also find himself covered in a mixture of blood and vomit. The light coming in through the bathroom window would be light and bluish, telling him that it was sometime very early in the morning. He wouldn’t be holding on to anything, no weapon accounting for the amount of blood, but the horrible raw feeling in his throat will tell him that the vomit was, most likely, his own. He would start crying, and his mother would eventually find him this way, huddled in the corner of the bathroom, trying to hide behind the toilet from her.

Daniel’s mother had one good attribute, just one, and that was the fact that she was never, ever, judgmental of her son. Also, she liked to hide Daniel’s mistakes from his father, as well, but that’s sort of the same attribute, so we’re going to stick with the previous count of just one good attribute. This attribute was so good, in fact, that it often caused Daniel to forget about her drug use, her battles with alcoholism, her mood swings, even her ranting and the raving about wishing he was never born. When she would find him in a vulnerable position, all of her bad traits went right out the window and she became a mother, first and foremost.

He didn’t say a word to her as she peeled his soiled clothes off of him. He climbed into the tub and she started the water running, rinsing the residue off of him, scrubbing his back and his sides free of the blood that had soaked through his shirt. She would even tell him what she never usually told him.

“I love you, Daniel,” she would say to him, squeezing water out of the sponge and over his bare shoulders.

“I know, mom,” he’d reply, even though he didn’t really.

When Manny would wake up that morning, about the same time that Daniel’s mother found Daniel lying in the bathroom, he would get the usual breakfast ready for his dog. He would garnish the bowl with Milk Bones around the rim, smiling to himself as he thought of how happy the Labrador would look when he saw his present.

When Manny would go outside, however, he would find his Labrador, lovingly named Mort, lying on his side, the blood drained from him like a long since stuck pig. There would be numerous puncture wounds on Mort, nearly twenty separate holes, appearing in clusters of four, as if he was stabbed repeatedly with a very large fork. It was a fork, in fact, a garden fork with a red rubber grip, and an elegant shaft made out of Ash, lying next to Mort, thoroughly stained with his blood.

The last few things Mort would ever get the chance of committing to memory are as follows: His vision of Daniel coming in to the backyard, his head all bandaged in white, carrying the garden fork that had been leaned up against the house’s garage. His excitement at getting to greet Daniel twice in the same day. His claws digging into the grass, ripping up bits of it as his forceful paws pushed him forward, nearly flying across the grass toward his goal. His back legs folding back, ready to leap through the air at Daniel. The subsequent push forward from them, sending him through the air, and straight into the prongs of the garden fork, so expertly wielded by Daniel.

After that, everything sort of goes black for Mort. He doesn’t get to remember the blood pouring out of him, long after he was gone from his body. He doesn’t get to remember Manny bringing him his breakfast. He doesn’t see Manny drop the bowl and break into a frightening sorrowful scream for his parents. He doesn’t get to feel the inside of the black trash bag his body is place in. He doesn’t get to feel the dirt being slowly packed around him, the first scoop of which was thrown by Manny himself. He doesn’t feel, years later, the worms slowly making their way through his body, breaking it down into its most core elements. Mort would be spared of all these things, and in that way, death was kind to him.

Daniel would look at his mother from the bathtub while Manny was screaming. She would look back down at him. She would whisper to him, “Everything is going to be just fine, Daniel, just fine.”

He would believe her.

Daniel’s mother wasn’t much of a mother. You could even say she was a lousy mother, with all her bad habits, and her complete lack of appreciation for the finer things in life, like doing laundry, or cleaning. But, when she found her son in the bathroom, covered in vomit and blood, her mothering instinct kicked into high gear and she wanted nothing more than for her little boy to be safe.

This is why when Daniel heard the church bells ringing, he knew he was safe.