Thesis ~ The Strangest of all Attractors || Ch. 2, Pages 39-43
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PREVIOUS SCENE (Second flashback scene from Chapter One)
Note: This is the first flashback scene of Chapter 2. The title of the chapter is "An Age of Reason."
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It was August. The skies were yellow, along with the tree leaves. There were crickets chirping and fireflies all about. They could be seen past the old wooden fences, within the thick and tall forests, surrounding this land.
There was a large house here, painted white. A few yards behind the house was an old barn. It was swarming with bugs and spider’s, so it remained mostly off limits. The place to play was in the open fields and up in the tall and weathered oak tree standing in front of the house. There was a tire swing and a tree house hiding within its foliage.
“Chris! Hey, Chris!” a voice called out from the tree house.
A ten-year-old boy popped his head from out the wheat meadow. He started heading towards the tree house.
“What’s going on? What ya doing out there?”
A young girl’s head popped out of the window, peering down at him with a curious expression.
“Nothing,” answered Chris. “What ya doing in there?”
“Looking down on you! I got the higher ground! Come up!”
“Why?”
“Why? That’s a stupid question. I said I got the higher ground! I can see everything up here, like how tiny you are! It’s like I’m in a plane, and I’m looking down at ants!”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
“Makes sense in my mind! That’s all that counts, now come up!”
“I can’t.”
“What? Why not?”
“It’s too high up. I don’t like it.”
“Just don’t look down as you come up, Chris. I promise you it won’t be that scary if you don’t look down.”
Chris hesitated for a while, before rushing himself up the ladder. At the top, he was greeted by the young girl. She was slightly older than Chris, and had the same dark brown hair and dark green eyes as him.
“Alright! You made it up! Way to go!” the girl rejoiced. She took Chris away from the gaping front opening and sat him against the back wall. Chris took note of all the stickie notes and torn pieces of notebook paper, taped on the walls of the tree house. This was where Ashlin’s artwork was stored. They were nothing more than crudely drawn happy faces or strange, offbeat little doodles. It was a thing she did. Chris would always ask where she kept finding these note pads. It wasn’t like there was a store to buy them from! Not around here, miles away from civilization! Ashlin didn’t have answer for him. They would just turn up in random places.
“How come you’re not scared?” Chris asked.
“When I start falling is when I start worrying!”
“Okay. Whatever you say, Ashlin.”
With a lulled sigh, Ashlin sat herself next to her younger brother and glanced out the nearby window.
“Yo. Chris. You’d miss me if I went away for a while?”
“Where would ya go?”
Ashlin shifted uncomfortably. “I mean, I dunno. Nowhere, really. Ya know, it’s just that...”
Chris stared curiously at his sister. For the past few days, Ashlin really had been acting strange. It was as if she was sad about something. That couldn’t have been the case. Ashlin was always cheerful.
“You mean like... go camping? Like Allen did?”
“Yeah,” Ashlin answered. “Something like that.”
“How long?”
“Not sure. Might be longer.”
“Can I come?”
Ashlin laughed out loud. “Don’t know! Maybe! It’d be fun if you came along! I can tell you that! But you know. I love this place, but it’s boring. I’ve always wanted to travel the world!”
“That’s where you’re going? Around the world?”
“No! That’s just always what I wanted to do!”
“Come on! Tell me! Where ya going then?”
Ashlin was hesitant to explain herself. “It’s kinda like this tree house, out of reach of adults. Up in the trees. All the kids are a bunch of monkeys in those trees. Swinging from branch to branch, throwing turds at each other. It’s a jungle, but like a jungle for children.”
“That sounds weird. Why’d you want to go there?”
“Ya gotta be kidding me! You never thought of getting outta here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Ashlin smiled. She put her arm around her younger brother. “Okay. Seriously, How much ya miss me if I did go away like Allen?” she asked as she held him tightly.
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“That all that you ever say! You gonna learn to say anything else whenever I ask you a question?”
“I... don’t know.”
Ashlin shook her head, feeling quite beside herself. “I can hardly ever get a straight answer outta you. That’s what mom would always say to you back in the day. Remember when you stole mom’s purse, hid it under your bed? Mom was so freaked out, swear I thought she was going to explode in a million pieces! I don’t know why you did that!”
Chris silently looked away at the sound of the word ‘mom’, sending Ashlin’s spirits crashing to the ground.
Still too soon, she thought bitterly.
With any such of an utterance, Chris would always seem to shut down, as if the word would suck out any sign of life from him.
Ashlin was mad at herself. She didn’t want to think about it.
“Okay, come on! I’m bored in here!” she said, jumping back up. “I wanna go back out there, play some catch!”
“I just got up here! You want me to go back down?”
“Oh, please! You got up here and nothing happened. I’ll help you back down if it takes the rest of the night. How about that?”
Ashlin quickly climbed down. She then spent the next five minutes trying to talk her brother into coming down. Chris hesitated as much as he could during that time. As soon as he started to climb back down, Ashlin began to joust him on.
“Come on, you can make it! You’re not helpless! I thought boys were the ones who climbed trees and other things they weren’t supposed to! That doesn’t make me more of a boy than you, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t!” cried out Chris. He held on the upper wooden step as if it was his life he was holding onto.
“I’ll go back inside and leave you out here if you don’t get moving!”
Chris froze. His fear of the distant ground below sent chills down his spine with every nervous glance out from the corner of his eye. Eventually, he gained the courage to take another step down.
“Just come down nice and easy! You’re fine!”
With his shaking legs and arms, he continued to lower himself. Every step brought him closer to the ground.
Suddenly, his left foot slipped.
His tight grip on the ladder came undone when his body jerked down. With a frightened cry, he tried to reach back for the ladder.
He was already falling backwards. He was out of reach.
“Got ya!”
Ashlin jumped forward. She caught him in midair. With her forward momentum she was also sent crashing to the ground along with Chris.
The dirt ground in this area was still wet from the rain from yesterday. Now, much to Ashin’s dismay, their clean clothes were marked with dirt and mud.
After loosening her tight grip on Chris, Ashlin looked down at him.
“You alright? Not traumatic for ya?”
Chris didn’t respond. He only looked away, tears swelling in his eyes and his lower lip quivering like he was about to cry.
Ashlin could only laugh.
It was ridiculous, particularly at his age. He was such a crybaby.
It was the sweetest and most innocent thing about him. It was a form of botched youth, as if he was either refusing to grow up or didn’t know what growing up was.
Then again — he was still only nine. But Ashlin wondered about him sometimes.
Maybe I’m growing up too fast, she thought.
That went without saying. Things were moving too fast for her. It was impossible just to keep up.
Meanwhile, Chris was still Chris. Ashlin didn’t know what to do with this fact. It was likely because, for the most part, Chris has it easy. He deserved to have it easy.
With the way the outside world was, it was hard to know how long this life for him would last. But they were still here. They still had each other. That’s all that mattered.
“Alright, you baby! Let’s get cleaned up,” laughed Ashlin as she turned around and began to carry him back inside the house.
“I’m not a baby. It wasn’t that high up,” murmured Chris.
“You were high enough to break something! If I wasn’t around, I think that fall would’ve been painful.”
“We’re not gonna play catch?”
“We will, but you got us all messed up! If dad sees us like this, he’s gonna be mad.”
* * *
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NEXT SCENE (Coming soon)
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