He was happy. Mr. A had spent so much time being miserable that the sensation burned without heat, the proverbial animal sitting at the bottom of a boiling pot. By the time he discovered the change in temperature, he had already been cooked into a well-adjusted individual, and cooked things can never become raw again.
There was nothing unique about living the life of a malcontent. His peers ran around with the same vain desire to make horrid statements, throwing themselves toward destruction to prove something people could never understand. That would be an exaggeration for Mr. A, he never resorted to anything quite so dramatic and the mere thought was repulsive to him.
There had been something once in a fever dream. He could not remember it now, and it made no difference when the world stopped conspiring against him. He came to realize how things did not happen for the worse.
And without complaint, Mr. A returned from work and settled down into his evening routine, a light dinner followed by short hours staring at a colorful screen. He tolerated his job and liked his coworkers, to the point where the next day was not dreaded but anticipated. The larger issues of debt, marriage, and mortgage were concepts tied to a better career in the future. For now he was happy with the security and comfort today offered, able to rest his head and doze off.
He started to dream.
A young girl brandished a paper shiv in her left hand and folded it over once more while she spoke.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to stab you. You’re not like the other boys, you’re nice.”
His second grade mind did not comprehend the situation. And even now he lacked the context to make sense of it. The memory must have had a profound impact on him if he remembered it, or more likely, made no difference whatsoever, just the last dream in the sequence before waking up in the middle of the night.
Mr. A was paralyzed to the bed. A malevolent demon sat atop his chest making it difficult to breathe while his heart beat above a hundred times a minute. His eyes rolled wildly beneath his eyelids as he struggled to raise a single finger despite willing every available unit of energy to the task. Scattered voices rang in his head, discordant whispers and shouts accompanied by imagined bursts of color, spinning around in a fit of vertigo.
All caused by a familiar friend, his old demon.
Mr. A came out of his body to see the lonely figure, a misunderstood creature cursed with an outlandish wish and no means to see it realized. He empathized with this dream and sent it off to look for what he had forgotten, returning function to his body and bringing him back to sleep. Tomorrow would be another busy day and he needed the rest.
This is not a story about Mr. A after all.
—-
The first thing it realized was that he was naked, sitting under a shaded grove with his head laid against the smooth bark of a white birch’s trunk and his lower back rested on the knot of an exposed root. Discomfort led both hands to push down on the ground, pulling his shoulders forward as he lifted himself a few inches away to settle down on a patch of grass. The sudden shift threw him off balance, misjudging both distance and the weight of his body. He looked down in a drowsy nod of the head.
Instead of an unimpressive physique nurtured by more than two decades of sedentary living, a marble statue turned flesh expanded and contracted with his breath. Aside from the finely tuned muscles and sleek form, he noticed two protrusions on the chest that were distinctly feminine.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
An old subconscious reaction came first, not fear nor shame but the simple erotic lust of a voyeur, hungry to discover the dimensions of an alien body. His hands ran down the grooves of her skin drawn by the desire to touch the shape of his obsession, and the warm touch of fingertips lifted her closed-eye face toward the branches, alone in the world of a hopeless narcissist. Only to be broken by a second primal instinct, concern for safety, by which any metric placed a person, naked and alone in the wild, near the bottom.
He sequestered larger questions away and the thought of survival brought a limp body to a standing position whereby the full scope of her body mapped itself in his mind. This person was strong. It was an acknowledgement backed by implicit assurance, beyond any feeling of invincibility youthful ignorance could deliver. Confidence in this form changed his posture.
From this small outcropping of birch trees, he examined the landscape in detail. The round cap of a green hill rose above the skyward reach of a small forest covering no more than a few acres of land, on which either side opened to wide plains stretched over a large territory. His own small hill carried a gentle slope down to the forest and was occupied by little shrubs tapering off at ankle height, interspersed by wild flowers and the tiny hats of light brown mushrooms.
Without abstract references to time, the light tan seeds and dried stems of the long grasses marked the summer season along with strong sunlight and warm air, cause for any movement at all to trickle with sweat.
A small plume of smoke rose from the periphery and sparked movement in her legs, taking off from the summit in a hurry. Both feet tapped the sand strewn dirt in the flickered steps of a prey animal, each step carrying a deft sense for avoiding uneven footing. Waves of underbrush and the decayed claws of dead branches faded around him in a stunning show of dexterity, not dissimilar to travel through a tunnel where a single path presented itself. He leapt over the last bush and onto the open fields of the amber plains, brazen and bare for all to see.
On the hill he could not see the small stream cut across the ground flowing into the dell. It came from across the opposite side and gained strength connecting to the many streams that fed in further along, forming a slow-moving river. He descended down the banks of the river and proceeded to feed his curiosity by looking down at the face he now possessed. He looked and fell in love.
She held the most perfect face in the world. A universal symbol of beauty by which everyone else must be measured and without doubt fall short. Unable to resist his own charm, he became Narcissus once more and longed for her.
Vanity kept him around the water’s edge and he made furtive glances at his own visage, unaccustomed to the face reflected back. His interest did not wear off like it were some novelty but his attention drifted to more pressing issues when he realized the face would not disappear.
Sight of the rising smoke came from the right turn of the river’s intersection. He kept low to the ground and approached his would-be saviors with caution. A gathering of seven women crouched on their knees in the midst of washing their laundry appeared at the river’s edge. They were dressed in dowdy dated attire browned by kicked up dirt and blackened by soot, old world clothes whose homemade quality was apparent in the mixed fabric and colors.
There was a raucous discussion carried along while they flung bedsheets over their shoulder after dousing them in the cold clear water. From his hiding spot, he listened in to their conversation hoping to guess where in the world they were and somehow recognized the words despite having no prior experience with the language. Uninterested in village subjects, he assumed women would be more charitable than men and approached them with an unguarded demeanor.
They dropped their linens in the water after seeing the naked intruder. He spoke first and heard her voice for the first time, clear and sweet sounding to the ear.
“Can I borrow something to wear?”
An older woman answered her, the matriarch of the group.
“Markova, we do not possess any fine fabrics worthy of adorning you.”
She spoke in such an earnest tone it could not be interpreted as sarcasm. The other women averted their eyes from her body and hid behind their head scarves.
“Anything will do.”
The older woman walked back to her basket and removed her finest garment, a cardinal red dress for a young woman, and presented it across her arms to keep the sleeves from drooping down the sides.
He took the dress and tunneled through the bottom until her head popped above the collar. They all waited for her to finish dressing before turning their heads to face the stranger once more.
“May we ask permission to call you by your name?” The older woman asked.
He thought a name at random.
“My name is Artemis. Thank you for the help.”