Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
• Recollections of an Alternate Past •

Book One

An Introduction To Dodgeball
OR
Conception and Induction
OR
How To Begin An Apocalypse

A Novel by
Teel McClanahan III

Modern Evil Press
Phoenix

ISBN: 978-1-934516-43-0

eBook Edition

Copyright © 2004 by Teel McClanahan III

Some Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by Modern Evil Press, Phoenix, AZ

ISBN: 978-1-934516-31-7 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-934516-43-0 (E-Book)

• for love, lost •

Sweat beaded on his brow, his eyes were closed in concentration, and his mind was far away from the rhythmic sound of the rustling of the sheets and the immediacy of the reality of his own fingertips on his skin. In his mind’s eye she is hot against him, above him, her sweat dripping between them almost melodically with the tandem thrusting of their bodies. Apart and together, cyclically thrusting the proof of their intimacy into hard reality, their bodies rocked each other.

He loved to look at her, to examine the curves of her face as she pulled the arc of her lower lip behind her front teeth, the corners of her mouth just turning upward. Her eyes stayed closed in concentration but he could imagine they were focused hard behind her eyelids, visualizing that sweet spot within her she was driving him against again and again. Tiny creases at the corners of her eyes and the rapid flaring and relaxing of her nostrils belied an intensity that was growing within her even as the motion of her body was coming slower, deeper, more like the gentle rolling of the ocean than the chop of the sea in a storm.

While she was working her way to a personal heaven above him, using him to reach her own particular ends without even looking at him once since her sweat first surfaced on her skin, he was working in his own way beneath her. His hands and eyes roaming, sliding, slipping wet across all the beautiful parts of her that were not already wrapped tight around him. Discovering the gentle nodes of bone distending the slick skin of her back as they protected her spine was glory, and following that line with both hands until he was cupping the rising and falling globes of her smooth, bare ass against his open palms brought every detail of her ribs and the narrow of her waist as it met the width of her ravenous hips concretely into his mind.

His hands continued down and the tightening and shifting of the near-trembling muscles just under the taut skin of her hard-working thighs was like a tactile diagram of her passion for him being worked out calorie by calorie in her reverie as he himself reveled in the beauty of her form and marveled that she could be so happy here with him. He held his hands there on the sides of her thighs as she continued to spell out her feelings for him with every thrust and examined her also with his eyes.

Tanned brown skin crept up from the tips of her fingers which now clenched the sheets at either side of his shoulders, all the way up her arms until as it approached her shoulders the brown of her tan began to give way to something somewhat paler spreading out across her shoulders and down her chest. The giant teardrops of her young, poised breasts were splashing up and back and up and back seeming almost intentionally to imply a meditation on the crests of a hundred waves breaking in synchronicity and harmony before his eyes, and they further brought the foaming excited tips of waves to mind in their intense paleness beside her relatively stationary arms. The very whiteness of the flesh reaching out towards them, veined blue and imperfect in their own little ways but a blur before him, made more extreme the contrast of the roses that were her nipples, floating as though ready to drown in that sea of heavy cream under heavy storm.

His eyes marched a steady line down the valley between those twin orbs of beauty, across the surface of her abdomen, and paused on every bead of sweat making its way down a similar course across and underneath her, pooling briefly at her navel before continuing inexorably towards the mingling with his own sweat. That mingling of sweat was somehow focused in his mind’s eye despite the juxtaposition of a mingling of his flesh literally with hers barely beyond it, but it did remind him of another fluid seeking a mingling between them which brought his attention back to that most intense point of shifting contact between them. It was nearly too much for him. He nearly let go just then.

But he could see she was not quite there yet, and he did everything he could to keep that most intense of sensations from usurping the place at the front of his mind and sending him over the edge. His eyes closed, his hands drew casually up over her back and pulled her into him, still moving and sliding above and around him, and he tried to latch onto every detail. He was safe for a moment in the sensation of her hair falling delicately around her face and brushing softly against his face, his neck, and his chest. A thousand points of contact so brief and gentle each that they might go unnoticed but for their quantity and randomness. Not a tickling anymore, as much of her hair was now dripping wet with her sweat, but so light that it was as though hundreds of soft, tiny brushes were painting him with warm rain or sea water or tears. He moved his focus quickly to the friction of her whole body moving across his, no longer a few mere points of contact, but vast curved surfaces gliding in constant connection one body to another. Swaths of nerves used only casually during most of his life were awakened suddenly by the subtle ripples of her ribcage playing out a tune of harmonic sensorial bliss across the undulating surface of his chest beneath her. Their legs were intertwining like the dozens of limber tentacles wielded by two squid locked in deathmatch or lovemaking under the sea, and were nearly as wet with the combined fluids of their exertions. Not like walking or running or a foot fallen asleep, this passionate wrestling of their legs was a wholly unique sensation to him; less a study or a map as some sensations had seemed, this was more a poem or an action statement declaring something brief but beautiful to his nervous system.

The sheets beneath him, the pillow under his head, the single sock the only stitch of clothing worn by either of them, his mind tried to grasp onto these things but could not find purchase. The darkness of the room’s lights long off, the silence from the CD player he had forgotten to put on repeat, the mingled twin scents of their bodies conjoined and heady in the air, sensations too much like nothing, too much like something so known it is overlooked, sensations that could not distract him long from her toes beginning to curl at the ends of her legs and her voice reaching a crescendo.

Long enough, it seemed, and his eyes opened and his mind focused like a magnifying glass ready to spark a fire from a single bright point of light, a single intense point of physical sensation and connection, and his own toes began to curl as well. His silence was the perfect contrast to her scream of total satisfaction pealing out into the night air, or at least it would have been – he was silent as his body was rocked with the most powerful explosion of pleasure he had ever known because his parents were sleeping only two doors down the hall and he did not want to be discovered with his “hand in the cookie jar.” Even in this most intensely personal moment of overwhelming sensation and the natural urge to make noise backed up by thousands of years of sexual evolution, his self-control and will power overcame, and he made not even the smallest peep or sigh.

The over-stimulated nerves of his fingers and palm pressed hard against another hardness and could feel his body become a sort of pump with a steady whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of fluid climbing up the back or underside of the stiff hose held within his grasp. At the same time another part of his body became a pump as well, pushing drop after drop of endorphins and hormones into his blood stream and all over his body. The muscles curling his toes and clenching his calves and thighs and ass as tight as steel cables in support of some massive structure began to relax into a jellied state. The same crushed tightness began to leave his abs and back and neck and shoulders and arms all the way down to his fingers loosening their grip and their fist and all of his body was that much closer to a blissful state of perfect relaxation.

Just one more thing and he could roll over and go to sleep in his empty bed. He grabbed the sock he had pulled off for this very purpose and moved to wipe up the inevitable mess created by his ‘extracurricular activities.’ There was nothing to clean up.

He was sure he’d reached orgasm, more sure than he’d ever been before. He was even sure he had felt his body ejaculating, fluid moving steadily up his urethra with the pulsing of his heart, longer and harder than usual. He was expecting quite a mess. He hadn’t been squeezing too hard; he knew that could be painful. There was just … nothing. He switched on his bedside lamp. He looked around to see if there was something on his sheets or his pillow or headboard somehow, but there was nothing. No sign of any fluid but sweat. He tossed the unneeded sock towards the dirty clothes hamper in the corner, pulled off the other one and tossed it to follow the first, then switched the light back off.

That amazing relaxation was diminished by his search for what turned out to be nothing, but he had no trouble finding a restful and immediate sleep that night.

<> <> <>

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can get you? A glass of warm milk, maybe?”

“No, mom, really. I’m fine. It was just a bad dream, like I said.”

“Alright honey, but if you need anything just let us know. That was quite a shock you know, waking up to hear our only daughter screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night. I thought someone had broken into the house!”

“I’m sorry dad. I’m sure it’s just the stress of the new school year and my first big test tomorrow. You know I’m prone to nightmares.”

“I sure do. But I’ve never heard you scream like that before…”

“Don’t worry about it. Just go back to bed, you two.”

“Alright, alright. Goodnight.”

“And no more nightmares. You need your sleep.”

Her mother switched off the light as they left the room, closing the bedroom door behind them as they went, and she finally began to relax again. She had been sure they would see right through her, know she’d had another sex dream about that new kid in her math class somehow, and they’d ground her or yell at her or something. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be having sex and she wasn’t – it was a sin. But she also knew that Jesus said that to think about having sex was as much a sin as having it, so dreaming about that boy must be a sin, too. And tonight’s dream was so real, and went so much farther than her earlier dreams had, that she was sure she was in trouble.

She pulled her legs up into her chest and rocked back and forth on her back, balled up as tight as she could get, and she prayed for forgiveness while she tried to get back to sleep. She prayed for forgiveness, and prayed that the Lord would save her from the visions and temptations the devil kept putting into her head. She prayed for his help to make it through another day without throwing that new boy to the ground and living out her naughty dreams. She prayed and she prayed and just before the first rays of dawn were breaking across the horizon, she finally fell asleep, curling relaxed onto her right side in a fetal position.

<> <> <>

Trevor woke up refreshed. The morning often represented a sort of battle for him, wherein he fought to stay under the covers, to stay out of the light and not have to face the day. Today the challenger, the part of him that wanted to get out into the world and get something done for a change swung out to try to pre-empt his lethargic, apathetic, and usually dominant mode for taking on the world but met no resistance. Trevor literally fell out of bed, he got out of it so quickly. He suspected that he would have a few sore spots before he got very far today, but he didn’t let that slow him down.

Underwear, socks, jeans, t-shirt, he dressed in seconds. Comb through his long hair, bottom to top, carefully working out any knots but otherwise ignoring it as usual. Filling his pockets quickly; wallet, black pen, blue pen, red pen, spiral-bound pocket notepad, flat, round stone he’d been carrying with him for years without knowing why, pocket watch, a piece of string and a second rock – to wind the piece of string around. Then he slipped his trench coat on. Its pockets were already occupied. He set down and put on his shoes, tying them carefully. He looked up at his alarm clock, which had yet to go off that morning, and noted as he switched off the alarm that he had got ready in less than three minutes. He moved towards the door.

At this early hour, Trevor was the only one awake in his household. His sister would be rousing in about an hour to get ready for school, and his parents not long afterward to begin their days, but for now the house was silent and empty. The first rays of sunlight broke assuredly through the windows in the front room and journeyed with deliberate reflection into neighboring rooms and down the hallways and behind and across the furniture, providing a fleeting purity of light that seemed to reveal the truth of color in every thing it coated and enlivened with its presence. Trevor loved the feeling that walking around the house just before the dawn afforded him, that feeling that everything could be renewed and that there was infinite hope for positive change in the world.

The stains on the upholstery, the dirt embedded too deep in the carpet to be vacuumed up, the layered grime of thousands of hands touching and brushing and pushing and pulling on the doors and the doorways and certain places on the walls that may have given the entire house character and made it feel truly lived in but which also made everything feel a little less than perfect were simply not highlighted in this dim yet penetrating light. The light that is so eager to make things appear that it races ahead of the sun and over the horizon before that burning globe of intensity has a chance to show its blazing face, showing only the best and most gentle side of everything it touched as it lit his way to the kitchen for breakfast.

He liked to keep his breakfasts simple – appropriate nutrition and calories to get his body started in the morning, but nothing too elaborate or convoluted. In part this was out of respect for the sleeping members of his family – anything that required multiple plates and pots and pans, griddles and fryers and grills and the oven and the toaster and the blender and the microwave all going at once to produce a sensational delight of colors, textures, temperatures, aromas and flavours to splash across his senses awakening them to the infinity of experience that each new day had the potential to contain would create a virtual cacophony of clatter in planning, preparation and the post-culinary cleanup that it would simply be too much for so early an hour. Especially this close to the shift from summer sleep schedules to school-year hours – no one else in the house was used to or happy with their adjusted early schedules, and being woken to find a gorgeous gourmet meal made for one would not be a beautiful start to their day. Consequently, Trevor pulled a cereal bowl, a spoon, and a box of store-brand corn flakes from the cupboard and combined them with adequate skim milk to make every upcoming bite a moist one. Simple.

As he slowly and deliberately spooned his breakfast bite by bite into his mouth, Trevor took in the contrast of the crunching that seemed so loud inside his head with the silence around him so empty it seemed to press in on him, comforting him in the same way as an old familiar blanket wrapped all around him. He thought about the day ahead of him, of what he would need with him when he left for school. Normality, mostly, and already packed into his backpack left untouched from the previous day.

Paper, pencils, pens, folders organizing everything by subject and already holding his completed homework for the day ahead. Books for class and books to read for fun and books to write in and books to sketch in. His towel. Breath mints, a toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, hair ties, a comb, two clean handkerchiefs. Trevor went over the inventory of his backpack mentally and couldn’t think of anything he might need that wasn’t already there. Trevor emptied his mind, thinking of nothing else as his hand automatically continued lifting spoonful after spoonful of cereal into his masticating mouth, and he was able to begin the day in a state of peace and relaxation.

Not thinking another thought, Trevor stood and carried his cereal bowl to the sink, rinsed it, and put it into the dishwasher. He strolled to the bathroom, flossed, brushed his teeth, and washed his mouth out with Listerine. He double-checked his pockets, put on his backpack, and walked out the front door, locking it behind him and beginning the walk to school.

Due to certain geographic peculiarities of his neighborhood and some form of what he assumed was gerrymandering of school districts, Trevor attended a school to which the most direct route was a five mile walk, uphill most of the time, walking directly by another high school much closer to his home. Trevor had to leave for his own school so early and returned home so late that he hadn’t actually seen who attended the school, nor found out what set them apart that made it worth his time and energy to go so much further to get an education. After the first week of walking by the empty campus twice a day, Trevor didn’t give it much thought – it was just another quiet building to meander past on his way one way or the other, hardly more interesting from the outside than any residence or church he passed on the same route. Walking at a casual pace it took nearly ninety minutes for Trevor to reach his own high school from his home. He liked to leave early enough that if he was interrupted or injured or otherwise running late he would still be able to reach the school in time for his first hour, and so as he moved through the growing rays of early morning light towards his destination he did so with the calm and contentment that comes with knowing he will arrive nearly forty-five minutes before he needs to do anything or be anywhere or even begin really to think if he doesn’t want to. It was still warm out in the early morning – Trevor lived in a hot enough climate that the heat from the day could not dissipate fast enough to transform into a chill or brisk morning, and it was something he appreciated because it gave him a few more weeks of environmental warmth before he had to button the insulating liner into his trench coat thereby tripling or quadrupling its weight on his shoulders.

Trevor wore his trench coat year-round, and not merely to get attention or to separate himself socially as one might expect – he was intelligent enough and friendly enough that he would get positive attention without the coat, and in the first couple of weeks as a freshman at a new school on the other end of a sprawling metropolis his family had recently moved across, Trevor already counted his friends in the dozens with representation from every major clique and from all four years among them – he mostly liked the multiple deep and mysterious pockets it provided and the unexpected and practically unbelievable way it seemed to actually keep him cool in the summer heat. Through some combination of luck and good planning with perhaps a dappling of careful influence over the people and events that surrounded him, Trevor seemed never to fail to be able to produce whatever he wanted from the pockets of his coat and his backpack during the course of each day. After a few months of owning the coat, Trevor had simply come to understand and anticipate the sort of items people would want or need during the day, and even the most likely items for people to challenge him to produce on a moment’s notice – he even had a simple and often satisfying response to anyone who asked for something he could not pull instantly out when he implied to them that he was able to have anything he wanted from out his pockets: “I don’t really want that right now.”

As he proceeded methodically and with steady pace, Trevor did not detect the precise moment his mind moved from an empty trancelike state to the freeform wandering and daydreaming it was so prone to do, but it was as welcome as the absence of thought had been, not giving conscious ground to the exhaustion his legs might be trying to communicate or the stress his school life might be trying to beat him down with or any other thing that might want to take hold of his conscious mind. Instead of practicalities and realities, Trevor found himself transported to worlds of imagination that were so far-flung that were he ever to try to think of them being conceived by anyone else’s mind he would almost surely have come to the conclusion that there was something uniquely foreign about him, totally incompatible with the residents of the world around him in ways he would doubt could be expressed in any language they could understand. Luckily for his sense of belonging, it never once occurred to Trevor that his thoughts might ever escape his own mind, it never entered his frame of thought the idea that his ideas were anything the average person might not have on their own, and because of something he had always considered coincidence, many of his ideas – his best ideas, the ones that could somehow be understood within the frame of reference of modern scientific or philosophical thought – somehow managed to find their way into the world very quickly at the hands of the most qualified to carry them out or disseminate them. An idea for a video game here, in his hands in months, for a new gardening tool, in his neighbor’s shed in no time, for a movie or a book or a comic or a web site, it was in his face before he even made the time to write the idea down. All these little instances of serendipity he simply considered coincidences of “great minds think alike” and he didn’t spend much time philosophizing about them; it was all just as normal to him as the visions in his head that morning of a rocky mountainside crawling with buffalo-sized chocolate-covered beetles scuttling in complex patterns to create half-toned images visible only from miles away by people wearing heat-vision goggles.

Except that in his mind’s eye, the three stranger-looking figures observing the intricate dance on the mountainside miles away were not wearing anything even remotely resembling heat-vision goggles. Trevor knew somehow that they were seeing heat in that red is hot, yellow is warm, green is cool, purple is cold way that modern heat-vision created, but they seemed to be seeing the effect directly with their eyes – eyes bare except for the single pair of coke-bottle-thick glasses that the lankiest of the trio was wearing on his hawk-like beak of a nose, but which Trevor assumed was simply to clear up vision the same way glasses did outside of the impossible realm of his wandering thoughts. He turned back to face the mountain with them – his real body walking as though on some automatic control scheme – and found that he too could see the giant beetles’ complex dance as the men did, in intense contrasting reds and yellows and blues, forming images of surprisingly full-color, video-like quality from what should have been a random noise of large and small dots on a dark background.

As his focus moved from the wonder of the improbability of what he was envisioning, the content of the presentation became suddenly clear and surrealistically shocking – it appeared to be a live video image of a young man with long hair and a trench coat walking in morning light with residential housing moving by in the background – it appeared that the beetles in his mind were dancing in such a manner that it allowed the three unknown men he was imagining along with the beetles to watch him as he walked to school. He had never imagined anything quite as mirror-in-a-mirror as this that he could recall, but gladly played along. He turned his real head in the direction of what would have been the camera had the images created in his imagination been real video really being filmed, and as he expected to, Trevor did not see anything there to capture his visage. He did however see his head turn in the beetles’ image to face the men directly, and that was such an unexpected yet wholly predictable thing for him to imagine that his physical body nearly missed a step as it came to a stop and turned to face entirely towards the unseen, imagined watchers. As his real body turned, so turned his mind’s eye to see the three observers reacting to his apparent ability to see them through the wall of chocolate-covered beetles.

“Can he see us?”

“He couldn’t! The chocolate prevents reverse-viewing – I didn’t spend weeks hand-painting every scarantula in the forest with chocolate for nothing.”

“But he’s looking right at us! Something’s gone wrong! We’ve got to get out of here!”

The lanky one with the glasses who had not yet spoken, without turning away from the ongoing mountainside presentation, reached out with one hand and stopped the shorter, fleeing man by grasping the collars of his rumpled and strangely patterned shirt and sweater-vest and pulling him up short. “If he could see us it would be too late to run, Sqrat. Remember though that last night was the first time his power set off any of our artifacts and fetishes – even if he had taken conscious notice of his potential, he couldn’t be so skilled with them yet as to see through chocolate. Relax.”

“He’s right, Sqrat. There’s probably just a bird or something taking his notice right behind our vantage. My chocolate is working fine. I’m sure of it.”

“Sure,” the short one turned back and seemed to relax, though his voice was still trembling quite a bit, “h-h-he’s probably just… j-just s-s-standing s-s-s-stock s-still s-s-s-staring at some s-s-small s-sparrow…”

“Sure.” Trevor’s real body began walking again towards his school.

“Alright, alright, if it will put your mind at ease I’ll disband the scarantulas.” The lanky one began muttering of chanting something too quietly to hear as he knelt down to the ground and began collecting small marked stones that Trevor hadn’t previously noticed from an intricate pattern on the ground, putting them into a lumpy glowing satchel he had been holding. He lifted them from the soil in what was clearly a specific order and at a careful pace, and when the last stone was in the satchel he closed its latching cover with a –click– that seemed to bring the scarantulas – or beetles or whatever they were – out of the trance they had been in and scurrying down the mountain and disappearing into the surrounding forest below. The colored spots which had been forming his image not long before now destabilized into a white-noise-like melting of jumbled activity down and down and down, but at the same time the heat-vision-like appearance they’d had slowly faded to true colors and for the first time Trevor could see what he had earlier known instantly to be true – the gigantic creatures’ hard shells were covered completely in another shell of hard, dark chocolate. The lanky one, pulling the strap of his satchel back over his shoulder as he stood up, spoke again to the other two. “Are you satisfied?”

As they both seemed to settle visibly into themselves with apparent relief and thanked him and babbled over each other so that neither could be clearly heard speculating about what might be going on with the young man they had been observing, the lanky one who was clearly the superior of the other two in many ways reached up and pulled his glasses off, moving his eyes’ focus away from them. It might have seemed as though he were looking at some interesting bird or other attraction behind them in the distance or merely relaxing his eyes, but really he looked Trevor directly in his mind’s eye with a steely but somehow unconcerned – or at least unrevealing – gaze that seemed to say “I know you know.”

And as Trevor was about to think about what that might further imply, as his own imagined eyes were locked in an unblinking stare with those that had been hidden behind the too-thick glasses of that strange, angular man, Trevor looked up with his real eyes to find himself standing at his locker at school, and the interesting, engaging, but wholly unbelievable and surreal daydream he’d been having was instantly gone – wiped away by the combination to the lock that momentarily took over Trevor’s conscious mind. He opened his locker as he swung his backpack around in front of him so that he could exchange textbooks from his afternoon classes with textbooks for his morning classes. He rattled his head back and forth to clear it, took a deep breath, and carefully closed and re-locked his locker and continued on to the cafeteria where he would pass the remaining time before his first class by completing as much of the next day’s homework and reading as he could.

Trevor liked to be the first person into the cafeteria in the morning, to sit at a corner table and watch his classmates slowly file in and take their places, alone of with friends, to eat, to chat, to study or try to get homework done in the fleeting moments before it came due, the noise level gradually increasing from echoing silence to a true din of intermingling sounds fighting to be differentiated and understood. His own constantly growing group of friends came in with random timing and often in spurts, sitting at first at the same table as Trevor, then filling adjacent tables as their number expanded evermore the closer it got to first hour.

<> <> <>

The first sound Hannah could recall hearing was not the slamming of the front door, but the rattling of her bedroom window, a startling sound created by a tangible sort of echo in the physical plane that produced sounds of its own rather than simply reproducing sounds the way a traditional echo would. The deepness of her long-awaited sleep had been broken perhaps by the slam itself, so jarring that it was able to tear her from the warm embrace of unconsciousness, but not so quickly that Hannah heard the slam itself - her waking mind seemed to leap directly from fevered prayer to morning light and disturbed panes of glass, not a moment of respite between them. She looked at the clock, finding that she must have unplugged it in a fit related to its persistent reminders that she should already have been sleeping - there was no information to be found in its blank digital face.

Hannah rolled over to the side of her bed, leaning her head and arm over the edge to dig through her purse which had been carelessly thrown to the floor the previous evening. In her state of near-sleep, Hannah nearly forgot what she was searching for before her hand grasped upon it in the cluttered mess that the contents of her purse had become. She had to pull its face to within inches of her own before her sleep-creased eyes granted her the comprehension to see what was blinking out across her mobile phone - school starts in ten minutes. Hannah dropped the phone back into her purse, rolled back onto her bed and began to stretch and yawn, lazily waking and only gradually moving to escape the warm confines of her blankets.

She shot upright suddenly, eyes wide open.

“School starts in ten minutes!” her voice strained and cracked as she shouted out surprised into the empty room.

Suddenly she was on the move, leaping out of bed only to find her legs completely tangled in her bedclothes as she tripped up in them and fell face-first to the floor. Groaning anxiously, Hannah carefully freed her feet and legs from the twisted trap of sheets and duvet that linked her steadfast to her bed, nearly taking her pajamas with it as she finally tossed it back onto her bed. By some miracle she managed to pull her pajamas the rest of the way off without twisting her ankle or pulling a muscle or otherwise injuring herself or slowing down.

With no time to spare, Hannah decided to forego a shower, throwing on the first clothes to fall under her hands as she reached into her drawers. She did not waste time looking into a mirror as she rushed out of her bedroom, purse in one hand, backpack forgotten entirely. If she had paused for just a moment she might have taken more time than she thought she could afford by changing into something a little more presentable than the hot-pink bra under thin white shirt above the torn and stained cutoff jeans that were a little too tight for her but that she kept anyway for laundry day, not to mention the mismatched tennis shoes and even less-matched socks she had pulled on in an apparently blind rush to be something other than naked. Had Hannah so much as glanced in a mirror on her way out the door, she may have realized that her hair was a total wreck, tangled and swept up and stuck with sweat and tears and sleep in a coiffure that definitely had an air of the post-coital to it.

She ran out the door, slamming it behind her, but running so fast away from it that she didn’t hear the echo-like emanation that was her own window rattling in response. Halfway to school as she grasped her own chest in pain was the first she noticed her unwise selection of undergarments. As she stepped onto campus just in time to hear the bell that signaled she was already a full minute late to class, she had to stop to pull her too-tight, too-worn pants from the crack of her ass, realizing for the first time the unsound decision she had made in selecting them, and that she had somehow totally failed to put underwear on under them.

“What is wrong with me today?” She muttered inaudibly as she ran across campus to her class already in session, “This is so unlike me.”

When she reached her classroom, Hannah did her best to slip in relatively unnoticed, but failed rather dramatically. Between failing to tie her shoes in her rush that morning, trying to sneak into the class discreetly to avoid attention instead of just walking normally, and then the unfortunate coincidence of her bag-strap catching on the door-latch catch, Hannah managed to pull off one of those spectacular pratfalls no one expects to see outside of old comedies and vaudevillian stage shows. She flipped around bodily in the air, first half a turn forward as her feet were tripped up under her, then a full turn backwards as her purse’s strap recoiled her back towards the still-open but rapidly closing door while simultaneously ejecting the full contents of her purse like shrapnel from a high explosive, showering the class in the bits and bobs and books from the bottom of her bag.

Anyone who hadn’t turned at the noise of the door opening or of the inhaling-choking noise she made as she was yanked backward by her bag-strap was suddenly made very aware of Hannah by being hit about the head and shoulders by her airborne assault so that as her head finally reached the hard floor just beyond the door jam with a resounding crack, all other heads in the classroom were looking her way. She didn’t move, and neither did anyone else in the room, mouths agape at the unattractively dressed prone body laying apparently unconscious in the entrance to the class - not even the teacher moved from his frozen stance at the front of the room until a few seconds after the automatically-closing door came down hard against the top of Hannah’s head, jarring her whole body in a sickening wave of motion that conjured thoughts of molded gelatins jiggling and dropped caskets’ shaken contents.

When the teacher did move, he ran over in a rush to where Hannah lay but then stopped short of actually touching or moving her in any way. He could see that her arms and legs were sprawled at what seemed to be unnatural angles, one arm even dangling from her purse, still stuck by the strap to the door-latch catch. She was surrounded by the explosively strewn array of her personal belongings which quite surrealistically created the false image that the contents of Hannah’s life had somehow burst out of her own body in physical form and left her lifeless in the process. Makeup here and there, a small Bible and a smaller New Testament which landed closer to her unmoving form, pencils, pens, and a datebook were not further afield, and among the feminine pads, key chains, ticket stubs, knickknacks and a wallet opened to reveal her own smiling face on her ID card, one could get the feeling they really knew all there was to know about Hannah in that single pass of the eyes that each student was slowly making. Time seemed to stand still in the frozen diorama that was Hannah’s life laid bare on the floor around her body for each student then - as they all felt their own place in it clarifying - until a single voice that each one there would later swear was not their own said weakly “she’s still breathing.”

Suddenly the silence and decorum was broken and small conversations broke out all over the room. The teacher managed to prop the door open off Hannah’s head without stepping on or moving her, but ended up out in the hallway as a result, away from the speculating students. He tried to figure out what to do; he didn’t want to leave everyone alone with her unconscious like that, but someone needed to be notified, an ambulance needed to be called. He leaned into the classroom being careful of the girl at his feet who was taking quite shallow breaths and perhaps bleeding internally and he spoke loudly to get everyone’s attention.

“Does anyone have a cellphone?”

“No.”

“No.”

“No.”

Everyone said “no” or shook their heads in dissent and a general murmur rose to the effect of reminding the teacher that having phones on campus was against school rules.

“Come on. You know you’re not all following the rules. Betty, I saw you on the phone at lunch yesterday!”

“Sorry, Mr. Morton.” Betty wouldn’t look him in the eyes.

“She needs help.” He looked from student to student plaintively, but none of them was going to be the one to have their phone confiscated. “Someone.”

There was a long pause before a gentle voice came from the back of the classroom. It was the new student, a boy Mr. Morton had not yet learned the name of, and who rarely participated in class but who had so far turned in all his assignments on time and aced the quizzes. He was moving, but had spoken so slightly he couldn’t have been understood by anyone there. Still, he had something in his hand as he casually approached the door and the injured girl there, not looking down or stepping gingerly but still managing not to set foot on a single strewn item from her purse’s explosion.

“It flew out of her bag,” the new boy in the trench coat said as he handed Hannah’s mobile phone to Mr. Morton.

The flustered teacher didn’t even have the chance to say “Thank you” before the strange, long-haired boy turned and returned to his desk, almost unaware of what was so shocking to everyone else about the girl’s accident. As the teacher began dialing 911 Emergency Services with the phone of the one in need of those services he was too disturbed by all of this happening in his own classroom to notice the boy had simply gone back to work on his homework for some future class, apparently unconcerned with the health or welfare of his injured classmate. Of course, despite the growing chatter about her from everyone else there, one would have been hard pressed to locate more than a whiff of genuine concern coming from any single person left inside the room. Mr. Morton was the only one aware of the situation with any apparent genuine concern for Hannah, and as soon as an ambulance was on the way he called the front office to notify administration, who he hoped would take over for him in a more appropriate and organized way.

As he stood there looking at the ragdoll-like body captured in the doorway, watched the class as their conversations quickly turned from Hannah to more casual and comfortable topics as though Hannah were not still laying there, as he waited for someone, anyone, to show up and do something, anything, he just kept holding the classroom door open and muttering to himself “I’m a math teacher. I’m not trained for this. I’m a math teacher. I’m not trained for this,” and on and on and on for the seeming eternity that passed before he was finally relieved by the paramedics who somehow arrived in advance of anyone from the school’s administrative staff.

“Has she been moved?”

“No. I didn’t know...”

“Not moving her was the right thing to do, sir.”

After that brief exchange, the paramedics practically ignored Mr. Morton. Betty, perhaps feeling bad about lying about having a phone or perhaps because her conscience finally kicked in, had gotten up and begun collecting the former contents of Hannah’s purse. When the paramedics had questions, Betty fielded them, ably describing the accident and handing over Hannah’s ID and wallet for identification, and then making sure that the reassembled contents, placed back in the purse, went with the unconscious girl when she was rolled away on a stretcher in a a neck brace and strapped down securely. Had the paramedics worked a little faster or had a classmate shared their phone so that the call could have been made a little sooner, Hannah’s embarrassment might only have been word-of-mouth from the people who were there. Instead, due to some sort of unending stream of bad luck, Hannah’s ill-dressed, unconscious and bound-up body was rolled through the school’s hallways just after first hour ended and the living contents of every classroom burst forth, surrounding the paramedics and stretcher as they fought their way to the exit. By the end of the day, nine out of ten students would claim to have seen her with their own eyes and half of them were probably telling the truth. By the end of the week the school’s football team had finally won a game against their longtime rival from across town and school spirit seemed to wipe Hannah completely from their memories.

Even Betty was heard to say “How much thought are we expected to give to someone in a coma? Let us know when she wakes up, but until that day, let us enjoy our own, non-comatose, lives.”

<> <> <>

After her accident, Trevor didn’t fantasize about Hannah anymore. He tried, but instead of visualizing her body pressed hot and soft against his own in passion, he could only see her laying tangled and unconscious on the floor of his first hour class with everyone staring on. There was something decidedly anti-erotic about being stared at by thirty pair of uncaring eyes, and for the first couple of nights it was that simple imagery that did him in entirely, stopping any chance of getting himself off. Then, just as the general interest around him dropped off with the knowledge that she was stable and comatose and may not wake up for months or years if at all, Trevor’s interest in putting Hannah at the center of his nightly erotic fantasies also waned, and she was soon replaced with less singular, less immersive visions conglomerate from all the most attractive or erotic sights Trevor saw and remembered during the course of his days. The orgasms were less intense and the experience seemed somehow lacking in realism or a proper timeline, but orgasms still felt good, so he kept it up.

As though compensating for the imaginative loss, his dreams and daydreams became more bizarre and intense. Much of the time Trevor couldn’t decipher what was going on, and the rest of the time it was as though he were somehow invisibly watching, or imagining watching, normal people’s boring everyday activities. It was sortof like the perspective he’d had during the weird beetle-video-thing, where he was an unseen non-participant in his own imagination, but there wasn’t anything nearly as interesting as that going on most of the time. Trevor’s mind seemed to be intent on imagining what other people looked like when they thought no one was watching them; imagining how people behaved when they were by themselves and not putting on a facade of behavior for the people around them. Whether there was any reasonable connection between what he imagined people were like in their privacy and what people were actually like it would be impossible to say, due to the very nature of privacy. Still, it interested him.

He imagined watching people he’d never seen before, simply eating breakfast and reading the morning newspaper. He imagined watching a woman showering, and it was titillating for a while, but then it gradually became tedious watching her utilitarian scrubbing of herself and washing of her hair and shaving of her legs and then it didn’t end there, his mind didn’t wander, and he imagined watching her dry off and get dressed and blow dry and style her hair and apply makeup and eat breakfast and drive most of the way to work before he himself got to school on the morning he found himself imagining it.

He also found himself imagining meetings of dozens of strange people and creatures around a geometrically impossible table in a room he knew somehow was not really a room, all speaking incomprehensibly in sing-song clicks and clucks and gurgles and whistles and some form of complex sign language that invoked images Trevor could never seem to make out from his imagined vantage point.

As his imaginings became alternately more realistically mundane and unbelievably incomprehensible, Trevor began to move himself from his former comfortable role as the observer, the entertained, to a more challenging and complicated role as an active observer and perhaps towards becoming an active participant - hoping to bring his everyday fantasies to the level that his erotic fantasies had so satisfyingly operated on when he’d been imagining Hannah, but which normally was not the case with his daydreams.

This first manifested in more conscious control of his point of view of whatever was going on; he could watch someone commuting slowly to work through near-standstill traffic from the passenger seat, the back seat, the hood of the car looking backward, or even straight above the car looking down directly through the opaque roof of the car as though it weren’t there at all. He could imagine someone shopping at the mall by themselves, going from store to store, trying on clothes and jewelry and he could follow along with them, but it was no trouble at all to move from following one person in his mind to another, imagining a woman trying on sweaters and then shifting focus to a man trying to choose a puppy from the pet store for his girlfriend’s birthday.

Yet still he could usually do nothing more than observe the strange ones from what seemed to be a predetermined vantage. Daydreams of illicit meetings of increasingly unusual people and more and more non-people. The imagined classrooms full of teenagers dressed as oddly as the adults he’d seen, studying subjects he couldn’t identify from ... well, they didn’t seem to be textbooks, but he didn’t know what else to think of them as. The occasionally more mundane look at some lone figure - sometimes someone he’d imagined before at one of the impossible meetings and once it was Sqrat himself - but not doing something really “mundane”; watching an oddly dressed woman build a child-size coffin out of metal with some sort of pen-sized hand-held welder that doubled as some sort of cutting torch when she needed it to be, for example, which she filled with live roaches and then covered with some thick fluid that would have looked like a caramel if it weren’t bubbling continuously and cerulean blue in hue. In none of these visions or daydreams could Trevor seem to be anything but a passive observer. He couldn’t shift his point of view, he couldn’t switch focus from one strange person to another, he couldn’t take control of his own imagination and it was driving him crazy.

Over the next month or so, Trevor became more and more in control of his “normal” imagined scenarios - able to change things like which color blouse a shopper would select or to get a showering woman to drop the soap and bend over, or getting a driver to forget himself and miss his exit and be late for work; things they didn’t have an opinion of their own about, or just removing thought about something automatic - and he simultaneously became more and more aware of the limitations he was kept under in his “strange” imaginings. It was paying attention to these differences that led him to notice that some of his “strange” visions seemed to be staged for him, like there was something there he was supposed to see, and in others the “players” looked directly at him in the same way the lanky stranger had during the dream about the video-beetle-mountain. Remembering which reminded him of the way he had somehow known what had been going on there despite its oddness and which led him to try to find out what he could know without learning about the things he was imagining.

It turned out to be quite a lot.

Effectively, if someone he could see with his mind’s eye knew something, Trevor could know it. The only real limitation on this was in what Trevor could think of trying to know - if it occurred to him to know the color of the car of the spouse of the clerk helping the man he was imagining buying a new drill driver, he knew it immediately as though he had always known that it was dark blue. It was like the recall part of remembering things - anything the people he was imagining could remember if they’d thought to remember it, he could remember it somehow. This was sortof like being in their heads, and it was not long before Trevor tried to shift his point of view directly into the mind of someone in his mind.

A headache and immediate loss of the will or ability to continue his reveries was the result. Trevor did not pursue that option again soon. Instead he tried something a little more aggressive, a move towards taking his daydreams to the level his erotic fantasies had operated at with Hannah. He tried to imagine someone he knew.

At first it was not quite the same as his other daydreams. It was more like remembering the person’s image as in a photograph, still or very brief in time and always from the original point of view he had experienced it from. Not moving forward in time, not like watching a story unfold, just a realistic, nearly three-dimensional but unchanging view of the person he was imagining. It was very much like the erotic fantasies he had relegated himself to having since Hannah’s accident; he had more control of the elements there than in his standard daydreams, he could imagine their clothes changed to some extent or removed entirely, their hair color and style, their face, and even the environment they were being remembered in to some extent, but it never became the “real” immersive imaginings he could otherwise so easily drop himself into. It seemed like a dead end. An interesting dead end, but he couldn’t seem to draw anyone he knew into an active, immersive fantasy in the same way he had with Hannah. In fact, when it occurred to him that he had once been able to do exactly what he couldn’t seem to do now, Trevor couldn’t remember how he’d got Hannah into his fantasies in the first place.

He tried drawing other young women he’d seen into his sexual fantasies on their own, and sometimes it was good and it was always quite erotic, but it was never quite as real as it had been.

Before that revelation made him begin to lose interest in the less-satisfying sexual fantasies he now discovered he was having, Trevor stumbled on another good idea. If he could move from one person as his focus in the mundane but immersive daydreams to another, perhaps he could keep moving from person to person, location to location, until he came across someone he recognized from reality. Trevor didn’t know how long it would take him, so instead of trying it on his morning walk to school he set aside an entire Saturday to spend alone in his room trying to find someone he knew within his imagination. He knew some of the locations in which his day-dreams seemed to take place, such as the local mall and some neighborhoods and stretches of roads and highways he’d seen a hundred times, so he figured that if his mind was populating some version of the real world with people, some of the real people he knew could be found in the parts of that world they corresponded to. That was the theory, anyway, so on that Saturday, nearly two months after Hannah’s accident, Trevor spent the whole day in his own mind.

<> <> <>

“What are you going to tell her parents?”

“What would you say? I don’t even know how to explain it to another doctor.”

“There has to be some explanation. Maybe her parents know something that would make more sense of it.”

“I doubt that. Have you not met them? They never stop praying and they’ve got their 60 year old minister in with them praying over her twice a week. From what I’ve heard there’s no chance they know who the father is - she must have been hiding the relationship entirely.”

“Has there been anyone else come to see her at all? Some boy who might have ... well, you know... “

“On her first week here, her bible study group showed up, but I wasn’t here at the time, so I couldn’t tell you. Since then it’s only been her family and her minister.”

“Is there any chance it was - “

“No. Don’t even say that. Remember the details of the ... the situation? Her hymen is completely intact. Totally unbroken. Your little finger couldn’t have penetrated her without making an impact - she has not had sex.”

“So how did she get pregnant? You think she was fooling around with someone without protection and the healthiest sperm I’ve ever heard of swam all the way beyond her intact hymen, up her birth canal and fertilized an egg?”

“It could happen.”

“Could it really?”

“That’s why we need to find out who her boyfriend was, and why I don’t know what to tell her parents.”

“Why don’t you just tell them the facts, unembellished with theories. She’s about eight weeks pregnant.”

“She also appears to have never had sex. They’ll think it’s some sort of immaculate conception!”

“Mary was the immaculate conception. She was born without original sin so she could bear the Son of Man in a sinless womb. Jesus was a virgin birth, not an immaculate conception.”

“Fine. Whatever. What, are you one of them?”

“One of whom? I was raised Catholic. I went to a Catholic primary school. They make you learn these things.”

“Okay, fine, but how can we tell this girl’s parents she’s going to have a virgin birth?”

“You don’t.”

“Someone has to.”

“Why?”

“She’s pregnant, Earl,” he was nearly shouting now, but kept his voice low enough not to draw attention from outside his office, “in a couple of months we won’t be able to hide it. This can’t be kept secret for long.”

“There is another option.”

“No.”

“An unmarried comatose Christian teenager isn’t exactly a prime candidate for single motherhood.”

“It’s unethical! How can you even be considering that?”

“Most pregnancies in comatose patients do not make it to term. It would be easy to document as a stillbirth.”

“You’re a monster.”

“Fine. What do you propose? You can’t even talk to her parents.”

“I don’t know.”

“You could wait until she starts to show and they start asking questions. I’m sure that would go over well. I can imagine it now: ‘Why didn’t we know about this before?’ - ‘Actually, we did.’ - ‘So why didn’t you tell us?’ - ‘We were hoping you wouldn’t notice.’ And then just blank stares and tears and maybe a lawsuit.”

“A lawsuit?”

“They’re going to claim someone at the hospital did it. Look at her charts - it looks like she conceived the morning of her accident or right after that. No hymen is going to change that.”

“We could make new charts.”

“And forge a dozen signatures and pay off the nurses and lab techs who know the truth?”

“I don’t know. I just... “

“You don’t know. I know that. So what choice do you have? Induce.”

“I can’t.”

“I can.”

“I... “ Earl waited, silently. “I’ll assist.”

“Okay then.”

And they waited until an hour they knew they would not be interrupted and they modified inventory levels on paper so that the equipment they used would not be missed. And late that night they attempted to abort Hannah’s pregnancy. They tried three different standardized methods, each more detectable than the last, but the fetus simply would not budge or otherwise react. After four very stressful hours and some further creative attempts involving non-standard tools, the two doctors had succeeded in doing nothing more than completely destroying Hannah’s previously untouched hymen. She remained pregnant and comatose despite their best attempts to change that fact. In the end they managed to clean up and get their ineffective implements properly put away before the morning shift arrived to check on her. They waited impatiently to be sure nothing out of the ordinary was noticed, then spoke again in the privacy of Earl’s office before retiring home for a couple hours’ sleep.

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ve said that a hundred times tonight. It doesn’t help. I don’t understand either, but you don’t hear me going on and on about it.”

“I’m not sure which is more sane though. Going on about it or remaining silent.”

“Sane? None of this is sane.”

“That, I can agree with.”

“But at least one thing is a little easier now. Her hymen is gone.”

“Don’t remind me. Uhg.”

“I thought you’d consider it good news. It doesn’t look like a virgin birth anymore.”

“Instead it looks like she was repeatedly violated by two fumbling doctors months after she was comatose.”

“Hey. I wasn’t fumbling.”

“Her scar tissue will say otherwise.”

“It will look like she lost her virginity normally to the casual observer. You’re the only one who examined her before this, right?”

“As far as I know.”

“Fine. Then we’re on much firmer ground. We wait a week or two, then just inform her parents about her pregnancy.”

“And just ignore the virginity aspect.”

“Absolutely.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Look, the kid comes out walking on water and curing leprosy and you can tell anyone you want about the truth, but until you see a miracle with your own eyes, this stays quiet, alright? Both of our licenses are on the line if this gets out. You were right about it being an ethical violation. If there had been a stillbirth, that’s one thing, but you saw that thing, it wasn’t budging. But in trying to get it to budge...”

“I understand. You don’t have to tell me. This much I understand.”

“Okay. So. You have a week, maybe two to figure out what you’re going to tell her parents. She should be sufficiently healed by then to bear a second opinion.”

“Alright. Two weeks. I can do this.”

“You’d better hope so. If this doesn’t go right...“

“I know. I just have to be convincing that she must have been sexually active before the accident.”

“You know it must be true, right? People don’t just become pregnant. There must have been sexual contact of some kind, with some teenager with amazingly active sperm. Something.”

“I know, I know, I just... “

“Just nothing. You know what to say.”

“I know. I know what to say. I know.”

<> <> <>

Trevor woke up Saturday morning, ate breakfast and returned to his room. He drew back the curtains so he could see the beautiful blue of the sky as he lay back on his bed and let his mind wander. He was going to try to move within his imagination to someone he knew, to see if his imagination could believably reproduce someone he was familiar with in a way that was recognizably like how they would behave. This was also partially because he was beginning to grow disinterested in