Wednesday, June 24, 2009

I thought I knew who I was

I thought I knew who I was, but then I opened the door and saw his dark face in the rain. It wasn’t the jagged scar that ran from his forehead, over his left eye to the bottom of his earlobe that brought me up short; it was the fierceness of his whisky colored eyes.

The heavy, fat drops fell audibly against the leather of his coat, splashing his cheeks with their shattered selves before running long his jaw to drip from the point of his chin. His crudely chopped hair lay plastered against his head like a black skull cap, and his chest rose and fell with his rapid breathing; he was in a hurry.

I frowned at him, my fight or flight instincts kicking into high gear as I stared into this stranger’s face, and yet I seemed rooted to the spot.

“Can I help you?” I asked, hoping forced civility would keep me from panicking.

He pushed past me in response, striding confidently down the hall and into the living room, his thick soled boots leaving muddy tracks on my cream colored carpet.

“Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I slammed the door and trotted after him, my annoyance with his ballsy actions over-riding my compulsion to flee.

He stopped in the middle of my kitchen and cocked his head, listening for… what? I opened my mouth to speak and he held up one finger, effectively shushing me without making a sound, and to my own surprise I actually complied.

His gaze moved toward the ceiling, slowly following a sound that apparently only he could hear from the kitchen to the living room. In the span of two heartbeats he reached out and grabbed me by the arm, turning and running back toward the front door, throwing it open and dragging me out into the sheeting rain.

All my words of protest were lost under the sizzling cracks of lightening, deafening claps of thunder and the steady stomps of his heavy boots against the pavement. We ran two blocks before he ducked into a narrow alley, no light penetrating more than two feet into the blackness, and even the blue bursts of lightening didn’t reach us.

He pressed his back to the tall brick wall, holding me back beside him with one outstretched arm; he needn’t have worried about my running off, I was too out of breath to make a break for it.

The sound of footsteps filtered their way through the rain, their approach slow and steady, but the man to my left kept his gaze focused upward, straining his eyes into the night sky. When I finally heard what he had heard, my heart rate tripled and I didn’t know how to split my focus between the footfalls and the sound of huge leathery wings beating overhead.

A small squeak escaped my lips when he grabbed my wrist and ran further down the alley. Despite the utter blackness he moved like a cat, as if he knew every obstacle that would impede his progress, and he managed to avoid all the scattered garbage, dumpsters and sleeping homeless. I wasn’t as lithe. More than once I tripped and fell to the wet asphalt, scraping unknown amounts of skin off my bare knees before he could drag me to my feet and continue on his way.

By the time he stopped again I was completely exhausted, bruised and bloody. My Transformers sleep shirt and matching boxers were soaked and clung to me everywhere; I’d have been annoyed about it if I wasn’t so tired and cold.

He pushed me back against the wall, and in an impossibly low voice he directed me to stand there and not move. Was he kidding? I was doing good to stay upright. The loud grinding of metal on metal assaulted my ears, but I found I was too tired to be startled; I simply stood there waiting and trying to slow my breathing down.

His hands gripped my shoulders and pulled me away from the wall, lifting my arms and wrapping my fingers around the sides of a ladder before urging me to climb. The metal rungs were slick with rain, the rough metal digging painfully into the arches of my feet, and still he pushed from below.

It felt like hours had passed by the time I reached the roof, climbing over the edge of the brick wall and tumbling down onto the roughly textured roof, scraping more skin off my knees and opening up the heels of my hands to match. He dropped down beside me in a crouch, his leather coat fanning out to lie over my back, giving me a temporary reprieve from the ongoing downpour.

Rising to his feet he grabbed my arm and dragged me up with him, striding to the opposite side of the roof and peering over the edge.

“Listen, I think you have the wrong person,” I said, even my voice weary, “I don’t know who you think I am, but…”

In a brief flash of blue lightening I saw him smile. Climbing up onto the edge of the wall he hauled me up beside him and wrapped both arms securely around my waist, lifting me off my feet. For one frozen moment he held me there, my panicked heart out pacing his own steady pulse, and just before he turned and leapt off the edge into a glowing green light that had suddenly appeared, he said, “You’re the one who will save our world.”

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