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A quick note: This started out as a writing exercise to help me overcome a great deal of writer's block but ended up become all I could think about. It's far from perfect, but I fell in love with at the very least the idea of what I'm trying to accomplish the way an artist falls in love with a doodle from 7 odd years ago he left on a Chili's napkin that he threw out. This is the story of the insignificant, inconsequential, and indivisible nobodies of nowhere living in constant fear of the tragically mundane world waiting at a childhood's end. The world will forget their names, but at least they won't forget each other.
[T] Language
Chapter 1: Declan Ewald Wants to be Real
Declan Ewald’s greatest fear was that if he were to never get out of bed, nobody would miss him. Not a word would be spoken of him, not a blade of grass would take notice of his absence, and not a sound in the entire small town Stantlerfield would conjure, even by accident, any recognition of the existence of Declan Ewald. The thought alone was enough to make him pull the covers over his face to hide it from the daylight slipping through the cracks in the rafters.
He didn’t know what disembodied force pulled him out of the sheets. Perhaps something akin to hope; maybe it was the fear of doing anything other than what he had done the day before, and the day before that, and the day before the day before that. Getting out of bed and not starving we’re two of the three things he knew in this world.
He made no glance at his surroundings, their allure eroded by time and familiarity. It was the inside of a shed, spacious enough to make one feel lonely under the right conditions, but stood wall to wall with pages whose contents he would not dare let see the light of day. Each paper had its own black ink scrawlings on it, some indecipherable to the eyes of many. Fears, aches, and personal hells all put to paper in the form of poetry or the closest things to it.
He didn’t dream. Declan never dreamed. He did his best to not let it bother him. Maybe he just forgot them as soon as he woke up, or maybe some people just don’t dream. Late nights spent entertaining the latter pushed him to the edge of panic and robbed him of another chance to test his theory for better or worse.
After finding his feet he rubbed another dreamless night out of his eyes. His hand found the door to the shed and he gently pushed it open bracing his eyes for the brightness on the other side. His heart shriveled in the sunlight as the rays rested lazily on Stantlerfield, a town that knew barely of his name. In its best light, Stantlerfield was the sameness of suburbia mixed with the bleak nothingness of small townsville, but it was all Declan knew, and it was the only future he spent his lifetime trying to reconcile with.
He walked across the yard into the house opposite of the shed. The house was pin-drop silent and not a note in sight as per usual. He would not be hearing from either of them again. He only came for whatever he could find in the fridge and his backpack.
School had the uncanny ability to make Declan feel more lonely than he could ever possibly make himself feel on his own. With Stantlerfield High creeping into view Declan’s heart sank a little further each day, at this rate it would reach his feet by next week. Stantlerfield High was two story rectangular stack of once clay red bricks older than a dome fossil with a road paved long ago parallel to the front entrance along the length of the building until it hooked left into a parking lot. He observed the building with disillusionment from the other side of the road and prepared to cross. A low growling engine in the distance caught him in the middle of the street. The front grill of a Chople berry red Raichu GR11 sports car barreled down the stretch and blew past him missing him by a hair leaving the sound of some douchebag teenager yelling “Didn’t see ya, dickhead!” in its wake chuckling as though he had concocted the pinnacle of comedic original insults from the driver’s seat. Chad Stantlerfield, however, was not just some douchebag. He was the most important douchebag in town.
In the hallways, everyone had something to say to someone except Declan. To him, it was all noise. Overwhelming. Isolating. Empty. Terrifying.
His first class was Speech and Debate because of course it was. The poster outside the classroom was enough to fill him with sopping dread. It was a picture of a screaming Loudred captioned, “Speak your mind! Always make yourself heard!” A podium at the front of the room loomed over the rows of desks as Declan sat in one against the wall. He felt Butterfree in his stomach, their flutters drowned out by the intense pounding of his heart. The bell rang and the seats filled with twenty-some-odd students. Dr. Clark entered the room, scanning the desks on her way to the podium. Her sharp diction penetrated the class’s indifference.
“Okay, your assignment last night was to prepare a speech about something you want to experience before you die. Today each of you will present to the class and you will be graded on the quality of your writing and your ability to make yourself not only heard but understood.”
The butterfree in Declan’s stomach laid eggs. Dr. Clark’s eyes hovered over the seating chart.
“Eileen, you’ll go first,” she called.
On the other side of the room a short brunette sprung to life.
Eileen Andrews was, at least from a high school boy’s point of view, perfect. Always full of life and radiant with positive energy. Just the act of her stepping to the podium was enough to pry Declan’s attention off his own anxiety if only for a moment.
Like herself, her speech was perfect. She talked about wanting to see the Butterfree migration in Kanto just so she would know that there was such beauty to be seen in the world by taking it in with her own eyes. But Declan felt too far away to be moved. She spoke of a fulfillment that he didn’t quite understand. She sounded as though she knew what she wanted out of life, and was determined to get it. Declan Ewald was lost.
The rest of the presentations came and went in the shadow of Eileen’s. Wannabe poke professors, nurses, and Pokemon masters, but at the very least they all knew what they wanted out of life.
It wasn’t too long before the students in Declan’s row began presenting. Before he knew it the seat in front of him was empty. His heart thrashed around the inside of his chest desperate for a way out, his lungs expanded and contracted rapidly trying to keep up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some note cards flipping through them anxiously. The sweat of his palms rubbed off on them, causing the cards to wilt beneath their own weight.
The boy presenting finished and those who weren’t asleep gave a half ass applause. Dr. Clark scanned the seating chart seated at her desk in the corner of the room.
“Up next, Declan Ewald,” she called.
The room remained motionless. The teacher gave an indifferent shrug and searched the seating chart for the next student. There was no murmur of intrigue as to his whereabouts or a turn of any head, only stillborn silence and five notecards at an empty desk, worn and blank. Declan Ewald did not exist today.
The bathroom door hinges squealed as they closed behind him. Declan, hyperventilating, scrambled into the first stall locking it behind him. The sight of the checkered tiles made him nauseous as he staggered face first towards the toilet, caught himself on the seat, and stared into the bowl, eyes watering. He stood there for a moment arched over the toilet seat. His heartbeat throbbing in his ears, breathing heavily. A gag took his breath away and heaved the contents of his stomach into the toilet bowl. His legs were ramshackle stilts beneath him. He tried to straighten himself up. Lightheaded he fell back against the stall door, closed his eyes, and sank into the floor. He just sat there. Breathing. It was only Wednesday and Declan was 0 for 3 this week, and found himself here more often as each one passed. But tomorrow was another day. He raised his head. The fluorescent lights gave him a splitting headache. The buzzing rattling cages in his headspace. His forehead fell on his knees. Breathe in and breathe out. Forever just words he could never make heads or tails of. Every day got a little bit worse, the air thickening more into a heavy paste bloating his lungs over the course of several years, the town Stantlerfield slowly choking the life out of him.
Still a little lightheaded he leaned against the stall as he raised himself out of the floor. The door opened steadily, and he staggered out of the stall. Three more classes to go, but he was going to make it through today if it killed him.
Declan spent lunch the way any modern high school youth spends his time, alone in a corner eating stale potato chips doing homework while the well adjusted members of society make meaningful memories, or so he told himself as he labeled diagrams for his normal type physiology class. He looked up from his work and for a moment his eyes fell on Eileen across the room surrounded by laughing friends and pure positive energy and probably unaware of the fact that her hair was spilling into her tater tots. She was wearing with a t-shirt rowlet tucked in a ball captioned “On a rowl.” It was the kind of shirt that was funny when you were six but now could only be pulled off ironically. She pulled it off though. His thoughts were cut short however when for the briefest of moments, her eyes met his. They were both frozen for either an eternity or two seconds, Declan couldn’t tell which. His head jerked down to break contact, his chest thudding with another a flutter of butterfree in his stomach. His face burned like a charmander tail with embarrassment that she saw him…
She saw him.
He couldn’t focus for the rest of the day as he tried to recreate the moment in his head to the last detail to bring back the feeling. Even though it was probably by pure accident, it was something. He felt something. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it; it was unlike anything locked inside the four walls he slept between. He thought about talking to her. He thought about what he would say, wondered if he had anything to say, if anything would come out if he opened his mouth, or if he was even worth the ti- a delicate snap pulled him back into reality. He looked down and saw he had been transcribing his thoughts before the lead in his pencil broke instead of copying down the symbolic significance ice types used in postmodern Hoenn literature written on the board at the front of the classroom. He looked up. There she was, three rows up and to the right. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted her to see him again and say something that would blow these miserable years into the past.
The bell rang and the class stood up and erupted in conversation, and suddenly it was all too loud for Declan. He tried to tune it out. He didn’t want to lose it here, not now, not when he was this close. He focused on her from across the room. The more he did the more the noise seemed to fade. Her face was content, always smiling about nothing in particular. He had to say something to her. Something that would convey the way he felt being seen today. He took a step in her direction. Something that told her he existed. She was gathering her books into her bag. He took another step. Something that said he was someone to remember, someone she might want to see again. Something that would make this town feel like anything other than what he made it. He was a few feet from her now. His stomach was doing backflips. She hadn’t seen him yet, still preoccupied with her bag. He opened his mouth and… nothing. He just stood there mouth agape waiting for the words that seemed lodged in his throat. He tried to cough them up but he didn’t know what they were. She noticed him now for better or worse. She stood up and studied him from the opposite side of the desk.
“Who are you?” she asked with genuine curiosity.
He searched for an answer, but the words he was looking for did not exist. His name evaporated in headspace if he ever had one. Squeezing for a syllable he managed the following:
“I-...”
It was quite the introduction but not the one he was going for. He searched his head again looking through every nook and cranny in the vacuum for a name, turning over all the nothing in search of something, looking for some string of sounds between himself and all the empty space. Stumbling over another nonexistent obstacle he fell face first on his own. Declan! That was it! It almost surprised him. But it was all he had to say. He could hear himself say it in his head, preparing for the real thing. He opened his mouth and:
“I’m-”
“Nobody,” said a voice from behind him.
Chad Stantlerfield waltzed over and clapped a hand on each of their shoulders with a smile like someone who enjoyed a good trainwreck when he saw one.
“What’s going on over here? Hm?” he prodded.
Neither of them answered. Declan was pralyzed and couldn’t move.
“Oh come on! I bet Scraggy over here was about to hike up his shorts and ask you out on a hot date and you two would ride off into the sunset.”
“Grow up, Chad,” Eileen sighed just under her breath looking away.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Chad said, putting his hand to his ear.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing? Oh! You mean this guy over here,” he said shaking Declan’s shoulder.
Declan felt sick. Chad’s head swiveled to face him turning his hand into vice grip on Declan’s shoulder.
“Why don’t you ask her? Go on, I know that’s what you’re here for. Do it. C’mon we don’t have all day!”
Declan stared at the floor.
“Going once,” Chad called
Eileen tried to shake faintly to shake him off.
“Chad don’t-”
“No, no, don’t worry about it. Any second now he’s gonna say something,” Chad jeered not breaking his stare making a wobbly paste of Declan’s thirty seconds of bravado.
“Going once! Going twice- really you’re just going to let this happen? Aaaaannd,” he leaned a little closer, lowering his ear to Declan’s mouth, like he was watching his favorite movie waiting for the lead to say his favorite line. Nothing.
“Gone,” he whispered.
Declan kept studying the ground.
“Don’t sweat it kid. If she said yes, it would only be because she felt sorry for you. Amaright?” he chuckled looking at Eileen.
Declan raised his eyes slightly. She said nothing, guiltily turned away, and left the room.
The room was now empty save the two of them.
Chad’s expression hardened.
“You see, when you’re nothing, there’s no reason for people to ever want to be around you. The best thing you could ever hope for is that you’re pathetic enough to lure in someone else and they’re stuck with you forever. I’m gonna run this town one day, and I’ll be the only thing that matters. I’ll be everything. Someday you’ll probably remember this as the day you met the most important man in town. But I’m going to forget about you before I even get home. So for what it’s worth, have a nice life; it won’t amount to much anyway.”
He left the room in a bitter storm. Declan stood alone. The motion detector killed the lights. He stayed anchored to the floor waiting to sink into the tiles and disappear… nothing.
Daylight was growing scarce by the time Declan got home, his eyes red and face still a bit damp. Everything felt heavy. His head ached. His eyes stung. His spirit in pieces. His mother’s car was in the driveway when he opened the front door. His mother’s voice was berating some poor soul on the other end of a business call. He didn’t bother shutting the door quietly. She wouldn’t notice anyway. His dad wouldn’t be back from Kanto for another two weeks, and if he came back tonight he would be wearing that same blank, tired expression he left with, heave himself upstairs and go to sleep.
He watched his mom leaning against the kitchen counter phone in her right hand and a pen in her left writing on a stack of papers.
Her being ambidextrous probably made it easier to burn both ends of the candle. He thought about saying something, but she just looked so tired. It was like watching a shadow without a person attached to it. It was hard to look at, but he saw some honesty in it. The kind of honesty that people sweep under some tired cliche that you respect people for once they give up the ghost and strip the covering away. Tired, honest, and holding out to the bitter end with one foot in the abyss and the other rooted in Stantlerfield. That was the Ewald spirit if there ever was such a thing.
Declan was tired. Tired enough to feel the dark circles hanging under his eyes. Tired enough to feel a physical emptiness where the weak light used to be. Tired enough to let Stantlerfield choke him to death without putting up a fight. The Ewalds were never a fighting people. They were the ones to settle in a storm to be weathered. Not wasting energy shaking their fists at the clouds or sparing the breath to scream at the sky. Only battening down the hatches and holding out for better in the pouring rain, but the rain never seemed to end in Stantlerfield.
He locked himself in his shed. His own words glared at him from the walls as he crashed into the sheets and rolled onto his side filling his withdrawn gaze with the picture of his writing desk littered with pens and half inked papers and the sheets on the floor that would forever stay unfinished. He felt a lump in his throat so tight he gagged. He thought about his mother, about Chad, about Eileen, and about the fact that none of them were thinking of him. His eyes eased closed. Tiredness welcomed the familiar darkness. He thought about the fact that his tongue couldn’t string together a single sentence, that he was probably going to fail his speech and debate class, that he couldn't breathe a word in front of twenty something teenagers who probably weren’t listening anyway, and now he could feel his words breathing on him. He rolled to his other side observing the writing on the walls on his way, crafting a picture in his mind of the nights they were written. Each word the product of some shitshow of a day compounded with the effect of the one before that and before that and so on. He was sick of feeling sick, tired of being tired. He wasn’t looking for a miracle. Just a break.
Then the walls started to breathing. Declan sat up and looked around. The papers uprooted from their tacks and rolled through the empty space of the shed with some vague sense of purpose. There seemed to be something deliberate in the chaos as they snaked through the air. Declan felt himself stand up. Every movement he made felt strange, as if he was watching himself. He couldn’t pick a point between terrified and hypnotized. The papers started gathering in a swirling sphere in the center of the room. Works finished and unfinished wrapped, coiled, and folded on each other into the shape of a person. It had a soft, but supernaturally familiar profile, its face accented by cursive ink lettering like shadows giving the impression of deep set eyes, shallow lips, and large protruding ears.
Declan walked towards it. He felt compelled to reach out to it. The sound of crinkling paper accompanied the turning of its head; it looked at him without expression. His hand drew closer to its face, but just before his hand made contact with its cheek the walls of the shed exploded in different directions, the ceiling launched upward, and the floor tumbled as it fell beneath him. He was floating in space. Emptiness as far as the eye could see. He wanted to panic, but he couldn't seem to flail his arms or legs. Everything felt loose and stiff at the same time, detached and weightless. All he could do was freefall through the void unable to tell the difference between flying and falling. He opened his mouth to scream but stopped when a hand touched his shoulder stopping his tumble. The paper human pulled him closer. He examined the lettering in its eyes. “I will never see stars” read from its left eye, across the bridge of his nose, to its right. Below that “I will never burn” ran the length of its cheekbones. “I will never run” tucked itself in the shadow under its nose. He began to read under its lower lip “I will never be-” but the words vanished like shadows in the immediate presence of light.
Declan gazed anxiously at its now blank eyes. There was a light in their papery center, a weak yellow pinprick. A blackened ring ate away at its edges and slowly crept outward. The fire spread with the wilting of the blackened paper until it consumed where its head used to be. It reached out and placed a hand against his forehead, it’s body turning to soot. As the flame crawled to the crease of its elbow, it pushed his head backwards launching him into a cosmic tumble, and as his head reeled back he saw it. The empty space was full of stars. Every direction held an eyeful of distant white sparks stippled on swirling cloudy nebulas passionate red and smokey emerald green tumbled in and out of view as he rolled through the cosmos. It was somehow calming. He released the tension in each of his muscles along with any desire to control his path and let himself coast through depths of nowhere. As he closed his eyes, couldn’t quite pin down the feeling between surrounded and isolated, easing up to the idea of nowhere.
And then he was somewhere. At the front of Dr. Clarks classroom to be exact. Babbling high schoolers filled the rows of seats that extended indefinitely into a distant mist, not a single one facing him. Convulsing, he looked at the notecards in his hand. They were blank. He flipped through all of them just to make sure. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He peeked at his audience. In the front row was Eileen, eyes cast down on her desk disappointed. Declan could tell she was trying not to look at him. Something crumbled inside of him, a sinkhole opening in his stomach that just kept sinking, creating even more empty space. Her sweater said “Gyradon’t even try.” It wasn’t even funny, but someone was laughing. It was Chad reeling hysterically in the seat next to her, his greasy cackled overpowering the sound of a thousand voices partaking in a conversation he wasn’t a part of. The noise was overwhelming. Declan staggered backward bracing himself against the wall as he was assaulted by every word in the room. He looked to Eileen, to the crowd, and then to Chad who hadn’t stopped laughing. No one would hear to him. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and surrendered to the noise. He began to sink into the floor tiles, the desks, the room, Chad, all of Stantlerfield dwarfing him, ignoring him out of existence and into impenetrable darkness.
…
…
…
No Declan thought.
He saw his mother’s tired figure desperate for a way out, his father’s lifeless walk through the door every time he came home. He wasn’t going to be like them. He couldn’t be like them.
He rose out of floor bracing himself again against the wall. The crowd still made no notice. He wanted them to look at him, to see him. He filled his lungs with a chestful of fresh air, tensed his shoulders, and opened his mouth.
“My name is Dec-,”
He was sitting up in his bed, his heart still pounding trying to make sense of what had just happened. Was that a dream he thought. He glanced at the walls. His papers still clung to the walls except for one hanging limp over his desk holding on by its bottom left corner. He rolled out of bed and reached out for it, holding it by the opposite corner.
I am surrounded
And yet I am Alone
I see people I don’t understand
I hear words I can’t spell
I can’t breathe
I am Nobody of Nowhere
And I can’t escape.
He ripped the page off the wall, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it onto the bed. Every broken little piece of him knew he couldn’t go on like this. He had to get out. He opened the shed door and looked outside. Stantlerfield was in darkness, and the isolated street lights were litwicks in an abyss. He slipped in the front door of his house and felt his way through the halls not even bothering with a light. He knew these empty spaces like he knew himself: only enough to know where he shouldn’t be. Closing his eyes made no difference in clarity as he glided past each threshold. He stopped halfway in front of one such gaping hole in the darkness. On the other side was his old bedroom. Hesitantly, he stepped in the doorway and felt for an object with his right hand. It was still there. After a few metallic clicks later a weak light just barely reached the corners of the room; its source was a battery powered cyndaquil night light resting in Declan’s hands. He took a long look at it. The light came from a bulb under the translucent fire quills, and a silver knob jutted out the side of its body.
So many nights were spent staring at it for hours when he was younger. Those sleepless nights it sat on his nightstand like a sad excuse for a beacon of hope. He would lay on his side and gaze longingly at the timid yellow glow from his bed as he waited for some comfort to wash over him. Maybe he could hold out hope that his mother or father would think to check on him, find him wide awake, and say something that would make the waking nightmares go away. Nothing. Holding the light out to the room he surveyed the bare beige walls, the oak night stand up to his hip, and the space between it and the right wall where the bed used to be, the fallout of a fight that never happened.
He followed the light outstretched before him across the room to a door in the corner. The knob gave a soft squeal and the hinges sighed as the door opened to a small closet with a rack half beset with t-shirts and a couple wadded up jackets on the floor. Dropping to his knees, he set down the light and threw a hoodie over his shoulder and sifted through the hanging shirts before knocking his head on a shelf. On it was a tan canvas backpack that may have been white at some point with the letters FDE stitched in red over the cover of the main pouch between two cyan straps that ran the length of it. Declan pulled it off the shelf and studied it in the light with the intrigue of something unfamiliar. Four patches of a pokeball, a leaf, a flame and a water droplet were nestled into the left strap. He lifted the cover to the main pouch and began stuffing it with anything he thought would be useful.
It was still dark out by the time Declan pulled the navy hood over his head, threw the stuffed canvas bag over his shoulder, and stepped back into the hallway. He took a final look at the bleak empty space that separated his room from his parents’ and there was a bright orange dot glowing through the window to the back porch. Against the starless sky he could make out a vague outline of his mother leaning against the back porch railing with a lit cigarette fixed in her left hand. He read the shadow of a deep sigh as her shoulders sank and the glowing end of her cigarette disappearing into her silhouette as she raised it to her lips and a white ghostly wisp took its place.
He thought of saying something, but he wouldn’t know where to begin. Neither of them would, but on some level they both would know why he was doing what he was. He just wished one of them had the courage to say it. He wished for some sign that they at least understood each other, some flash of eye contact that told him they saw the same darkness but it was going to be okay. No such comfort was found in those tired powder eyes in all fifteen years of being her son.
It was time to go.
He carried himself to the front porch and eased the front door closed behind him. Turning to face the yard an icy breeze caught him on the chin he felt the ambient coldness seize his bare hands.
He wasn’t going back for gloves, not for anything. He took a step into the yard. His heart was racing, but for once he was sure of himself. The first step was excruciating. The second step was anxious. The third step was intriguing, the fourth engaging, the fifth fascinating, the sixth a statement. He found himself in the middle of the street shivering with both a chill and a tingle in his spine that sent him flying into the night. Straight ahead he charged down the streets of Stantlerfield, the wind screaming in his ears the names of people and places that would forget him entirely, and he found it in himself for that fleeting moment the strength to not care. He could go for miles. Inside him was a combustion reaction of exploding euphoria powering every press of his foot against the asphalt. He wanted to feel Stantlerfield disappear behind him, to see his house, his shed, his school, and his memories turn into specs on the horizon before melting into the past. The dying glow of street lights lit his way to the edge of town where he felt the road beneath him turn to dirt.
He sped up.
He could feel Stantlerfield catching up to him. He could hear Chad’s violent cackle closing in. He could see his father's lifeless eyes creeping into his peripheral vision. He forced his eyes closed and kept pushing.
There had to be a way out.
There had to be a way out.
There had to be some way out of Stantlerfield!
A jutting rock wrenched his ankled back and stole his footing, and Declan was sent face first into what was now little more than a narrow beaten path flanked by tallgrass up to his knees. His momentum sent him tumbling a solid twenty feet over what had to be every stray stone and root in existence before cutting his ride short against a lone tree stump in the center of a small clearing with an audible thunk.
He could only lay there, shivering.
Everything hurt.
Inside and out.
Who was he kidding? He was a Ewald. Stantlerfield would haunt him no matter where he went. It was planted inside of him. Its roots were anchored in his lungs siphoning the oxygen from every breath. Their dark tendrils coiled around his heart as it pumped the curse of his kin through his veins. His own blood was a slow acting venom that poisoned every living cell that dared dream for something better. He knew better than to hold out hope.
Declan Ewald was alone in the dark, cold, unforgiving universe, and nobody would know any different if he wasn’t.
Then something moved in the brush. Something large enough to make Declan want to collapse into himself was skulking through the tallgrass. He stirred and winced trying to sit up feeling a sharp pain shoot through his arm. He was helpless, and it knew. As the heavy rustling came closer he held himself into a tighter and tighter ball as if he could fold in on himself enough to disappear. His pulsating heart threatened to crack his ribs if he crunched any tighter, beads of cold sweat perforated the skin around the back of his neck, his stomach imploded into a vacuum.
But he didn’t dare breathe.
A gurgling growl crawled into earshot and crescendoed into a grueling snarl that sent shockwaves through the tallgrass and forced Declan’s back against the tree stump. Closer lurked the sound of scores of brush being stamped into the earth by a devastating weight. Then out of the veil of the high thicket peered two beaming red eyes fixed on him, their piercing glare alone made him feel half the boy he was. A pair of hidden nostrils heaved two columns of smokey vapors as the creature exhaled.
He held himself tighter.
He never imagined it would end like this. He always pictured something horrifyingly mundane. A heart attack in a cubicle perhaps or a quiet slip into the other side in his sleep, but never like somebody who actually lived a life.
The creature slinked out of the brake and revealed the hulking frame of a fully grown mightyena that even on four legs towered over its diminutive prey like a great wall of matted ash and soot fur. Only a few feet now from him now, the mightyena flattened its body, its back legs compressed with mechanical precision, and it let out another deep growl like a revving engine. Declan hid his face behind his knees and waited for the creature’s gleaming jaws to bury themselves in his flesh.
With an almost audible click the mightyena’s hind legs exploded behind it and the body extended twice its length as it lunged at its prey. Declan drew a final terrified breath before a stray ball of fur shot out of the brush and plunged into the side of the beast knocking the predator missile just off course of its target. The mightyena careened towards the edge of the clearing. The creature rolled once and caught itself sinking its claws into the ground for grip. In its original place was its saboteur, an eevee that by most liberal of estimates couldn’t be considered a fraction of its opponent’s size. But all the same it stared back at its adversary with a futile determination.
Declan raised his head to find the two sizing each other up. The mightyena grumbled and crouched into another menacing tableau now fixed on its interloper. The eevee held its ground standing between it and Declan as if it were protecting him. He watched in disbelief and mute apprehension. With another silent click the beast launched itself across the clearing swallowing up the eevee in sheer mass and sending the two tumbling across the ground. The mightyena threw its head up from the scrap and righted itself raising the poor creature clasped between its jaws like a war prize. The sight of those gnashing teeth digging in its body and knowing they were meant for him made his heart drop to his stomach. As the eevee cried and squirmed its captor jerked its head to either side, gnarring and grunting as it tried to shake the fight out of what was left of his hero. He knew he had to do something, but fear kept his back pressed against the stump. Tossing its head once again, the mightyena flung the eevee from its mouth, sending it through the air like a discarded rag doll before it slammed into the earth and rolled several feet. The normal type laid in a pathetic heap in the dirt barely able to open its eyes to see Declan’s panicked stare. He looked at the mightyena. The monstrous dark type was preparing its final pounce. He looked back at the eevee.
It stared back at him as it lay on its side too weak to get up. In its wide hazel eyes he could make out a familiar dread and a sobering expression of guilt and shame. Declan could feel every ounce of it and then some as he looked down at the only creature he ever understood and felt his stomach churn at the idea that it followed by himself would be no more. The mightyena’s hind legs tightened underneath it.
He couldn’t let it happen like this, not with him watching and waiting for a way out like he always did. He swallowed his fright if just for a flash of a moment and dove on top of the eevee exposing his back as he did his best to tuck his head and arms around the creature in a tight ball of uncertainty. He felt the shock sent through the ground when the mightyena launched itself at them. He tightened his hold around the eevee, forced his eyes shut, and braced himself. The full weight of his assailant crashed into his back like a sentient freight train. Frustrated the mightyena began clawing and snapping at his back. He felt claws slashing clean through his hoodie and breaking skin. Serrated teeth and fangs buried themselves into his shoulders and neck accompanied by frustrated snarls. Frantic paws ending in sharp points tried to dig themselves into the bunker he created around his fellow victim. His only hope for survival was the animal giving up and losing interest before his body gave out. So Declan Ewald tightened himself up more, grit his teeth, and held out hope. The growling, snapping, and slashing continued getting more desperate. Declan could feel warm streams of blood seeping out of the gashes in his back. Another set of teeth sank into his arm trying to pry it out from underneath him. He held on tighter. A pair of two inch long fangs dug deeper beneath his skin scraping bone and tried to jerk his arm back with even greater force. Declan convulsed from the pain feeling himself on the verge of passing out. He could make out the distant sensation of a comforting numbness that would bring all this pain to pass if he just surrendered to the darkness encroaching on his vision. It was so simple. So clear. So… familiar. All he had to do was just let go.
Then he felt a heartbeat. Not his. It was buried underneath as though it could be inside him. He knew what it was now, and he couldn't bring himself to let it stop; he couldn’t let the darkness take him over, not without a fight. With every crumbling fiber of focus he could muster he held on. He held onto the only other soul that cared enough to protect him and let the sensation of its beating heart hold him in reality. He refused to let this life or his own slip away after coming this far. The tugging force grew weaker and the occasional swipes grew more haphazard and tired. After several minutes of declining ferocity the jaws uprooted themselves from Declan’ skin for the last time, and he heard the creature disappear into the brush. It was finally over.
He didn’t move for a while. He remained huddled in a shivering ball fearing the mightyena might come back. When he was close enough to certain that he was no longer being watched, his body deflated and he rolled onto his side and looked at the eevee still tucked in his arm, the other shocked with a violent throbbing that pained him too much to move. It’s eyes were closed, but it was still breathing. He ran a shaky hand through its matted coat feeling for its barely beating heart. Still there. He gathered the pokemon back into his arms and struggled to his feet staggering on his own two legs before finding his footing once more. He felt lighter than before. Perhaps it was just lightheadedness from the blood loss, or maybe the lingering effects of adrenaline working their way out of his system, or maybe it was his missing backpack.
It was the last one.
Declan panicked and jolted his head around. It must have come off when he tumbled into the clearing. He stumbled through every square inch of the clearing and then trekked back up the slope he fell down off the path. The canvas bag finally turned up again hanging on a thorn bush he must have rolled through. Holding the eevee in his good arm he reached out and yanked the bag out of the bush. The sudden movement combined with the unexpected weight sent a visceral pulse through his arm so painful his whole body jerked. Reaching down he nearly blacked out from the effort of lifting the one intact strap over his shoulder. It felt heavier than before. He hunched over to prevent himself from falling back. He glanced in the direction he came. Stantlerfield was nowhere in sight.
It was almost relieving.
He looked down the path. There had to be a pokemon center somewhere down the road. No going back, he thought to himself. A thunderous grumble rolled through the starless night sky.
Sure, why not.
He heaved a deep sigh and wrapped the eevee in both arms holding it close to his chest and began dragging himself down the beaten path.
Declan Ewald was finally going somewhere.
[T] Language
Chapter 1: Declan Ewald Wants to be Real
Declan Ewald’s greatest fear was that if he were to never get out of bed, nobody would miss him. Not a word would be spoken of him, not a blade of grass would take notice of his absence, and not a sound in the entire small town Stantlerfield would conjure, even by accident, any recognition of the existence of Declan Ewald. The thought alone was enough to make him pull the covers over his face to hide it from the daylight slipping through the cracks in the rafters.
He didn’t know what disembodied force pulled him out of the sheets. Perhaps something akin to hope; maybe it was the fear of doing anything other than what he had done the day before, and the day before that, and the day before the day before that. Getting out of bed and not starving we’re two of the three things he knew in this world.
He made no glance at his surroundings, their allure eroded by time and familiarity. It was the inside of a shed, spacious enough to make one feel lonely under the right conditions, but stood wall to wall with pages whose contents he would not dare let see the light of day. Each paper had its own black ink scrawlings on it, some indecipherable to the eyes of many. Fears, aches, and personal hells all put to paper in the form of poetry or the closest things to it.
He didn’t dream. Declan never dreamed. He did his best to not let it bother him. Maybe he just forgot them as soon as he woke up, or maybe some people just don’t dream. Late nights spent entertaining the latter pushed him to the edge of panic and robbed him of another chance to test his theory for better or worse.
After finding his feet he rubbed another dreamless night out of his eyes. His hand found the door to the shed and he gently pushed it open bracing his eyes for the brightness on the other side. His heart shriveled in the sunlight as the rays rested lazily on Stantlerfield, a town that knew barely of his name. In its best light, Stantlerfield was the sameness of suburbia mixed with the bleak nothingness of small townsville, but it was all Declan knew, and it was the only future he spent his lifetime trying to reconcile with.
He walked across the yard into the house opposite of the shed. The house was pin-drop silent and not a note in sight as per usual. He would not be hearing from either of them again. He only came for whatever he could find in the fridge and his backpack.
School had the uncanny ability to make Declan feel more lonely than he could ever possibly make himself feel on his own. With Stantlerfield High creeping into view Declan’s heart sank a little further each day, at this rate it would reach his feet by next week. Stantlerfield High was two story rectangular stack of once clay red bricks older than a dome fossil with a road paved long ago parallel to the front entrance along the length of the building until it hooked left into a parking lot. He observed the building with disillusionment from the other side of the road and prepared to cross. A low growling engine in the distance caught him in the middle of the street. The front grill of a Chople berry red Raichu GR11 sports car barreled down the stretch and blew past him missing him by a hair leaving the sound of some douchebag teenager yelling “Didn’t see ya, dickhead!” in its wake chuckling as though he had concocted the pinnacle of comedic original insults from the driver’s seat. Chad Stantlerfield, however, was not just some douchebag. He was the most important douchebag in town.
In the hallways, everyone had something to say to someone except Declan. To him, it was all noise. Overwhelming. Isolating. Empty. Terrifying.
His first class was Speech and Debate because of course it was. The poster outside the classroom was enough to fill him with sopping dread. It was a picture of a screaming Loudred captioned, “Speak your mind! Always make yourself heard!” A podium at the front of the room loomed over the rows of desks as Declan sat in one against the wall. He felt Butterfree in his stomach, their flutters drowned out by the intense pounding of his heart. The bell rang and the seats filled with twenty-some-odd students. Dr. Clark entered the room, scanning the desks on her way to the podium. Her sharp diction penetrated the class’s indifference.
“Okay, your assignment last night was to prepare a speech about something you want to experience before you die. Today each of you will present to the class and you will be graded on the quality of your writing and your ability to make yourself not only heard but understood.”
The butterfree in Declan’s stomach laid eggs. Dr. Clark’s eyes hovered over the seating chart.
“Eileen, you’ll go first,” she called.
On the other side of the room a short brunette sprung to life.
Eileen Andrews was, at least from a high school boy’s point of view, perfect. Always full of life and radiant with positive energy. Just the act of her stepping to the podium was enough to pry Declan’s attention off his own anxiety if only for a moment.
Like herself, her speech was perfect. She talked about wanting to see the Butterfree migration in Kanto just so she would know that there was such beauty to be seen in the world by taking it in with her own eyes. But Declan felt too far away to be moved. She spoke of a fulfillment that he didn’t quite understand. She sounded as though she knew what she wanted out of life, and was determined to get it. Declan Ewald was lost.
The rest of the presentations came and went in the shadow of Eileen’s. Wannabe poke professors, nurses, and Pokemon masters, but at the very least they all knew what they wanted out of life.
It wasn’t too long before the students in Declan’s row began presenting. Before he knew it the seat in front of him was empty. His heart thrashed around the inside of his chest desperate for a way out, his lungs expanded and contracted rapidly trying to keep up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some note cards flipping through them anxiously. The sweat of his palms rubbed off on them, causing the cards to wilt beneath their own weight.
The boy presenting finished and those who weren’t asleep gave a half ass applause. Dr. Clark scanned the seating chart seated at her desk in the corner of the room.
“Up next, Declan Ewald,” she called.
The room remained motionless. The teacher gave an indifferent shrug and searched the seating chart for the next student. There was no murmur of intrigue as to his whereabouts or a turn of any head, only stillborn silence and five notecards at an empty desk, worn and blank. Declan Ewald did not exist today.
The bathroom door hinges squealed as they closed behind him. Declan, hyperventilating, scrambled into the first stall locking it behind him. The sight of the checkered tiles made him nauseous as he staggered face first towards the toilet, caught himself on the seat, and stared into the bowl, eyes watering. He stood there for a moment arched over the toilet seat. His heartbeat throbbing in his ears, breathing heavily. A gag took his breath away and heaved the contents of his stomach into the toilet bowl. His legs were ramshackle stilts beneath him. He tried to straighten himself up. Lightheaded he fell back against the stall door, closed his eyes, and sank into the floor. He just sat there. Breathing. It was only Wednesday and Declan was 0 for 3 this week, and found himself here more often as each one passed. But tomorrow was another day. He raised his head. The fluorescent lights gave him a splitting headache. The buzzing rattling cages in his headspace. His forehead fell on his knees. Breathe in and breathe out. Forever just words he could never make heads or tails of. Every day got a little bit worse, the air thickening more into a heavy paste bloating his lungs over the course of several years, the town Stantlerfield slowly choking the life out of him.
Still a little lightheaded he leaned against the stall as he raised himself out of the floor. The door opened steadily, and he staggered out of the stall. Three more classes to go, but he was going to make it through today if it killed him.
Declan spent lunch the way any modern high school youth spends his time, alone in a corner eating stale potato chips doing homework while the well adjusted members of society make meaningful memories, or so he told himself as he labeled diagrams for his normal type physiology class. He looked up from his work and for a moment his eyes fell on Eileen across the room surrounded by laughing friends and pure positive energy and probably unaware of the fact that her hair was spilling into her tater tots. She was wearing with a t-shirt rowlet tucked in a ball captioned “On a rowl.” It was the kind of shirt that was funny when you were six but now could only be pulled off ironically. She pulled it off though. His thoughts were cut short however when for the briefest of moments, her eyes met his. They were both frozen for either an eternity or two seconds, Declan couldn’t tell which. His head jerked down to break contact, his chest thudding with another a flutter of butterfree in his stomach. His face burned like a charmander tail with embarrassment that she saw him…
She saw him.
He couldn’t focus for the rest of the day as he tried to recreate the moment in his head to the last detail to bring back the feeling. Even though it was probably by pure accident, it was something. He felt something. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it; it was unlike anything locked inside the four walls he slept between. He thought about talking to her. He thought about what he would say, wondered if he had anything to say, if anything would come out if he opened his mouth, or if he was even worth the ti- a delicate snap pulled him back into reality. He looked down and saw he had been transcribing his thoughts before the lead in his pencil broke instead of copying down the symbolic significance ice types used in postmodern Hoenn literature written on the board at the front of the classroom. He looked up. There she was, three rows up and to the right. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted her to see him again and say something that would blow these miserable years into the past.
The bell rang and the class stood up and erupted in conversation, and suddenly it was all too loud for Declan. He tried to tune it out. He didn’t want to lose it here, not now, not when he was this close. He focused on her from across the room. The more he did the more the noise seemed to fade. Her face was content, always smiling about nothing in particular. He had to say something to her. Something that would convey the way he felt being seen today. He took a step in her direction. Something that told her he existed. She was gathering her books into her bag. He took another step. Something that said he was someone to remember, someone she might want to see again. Something that would make this town feel like anything other than what he made it. He was a few feet from her now. His stomach was doing backflips. She hadn’t seen him yet, still preoccupied with her bag. He opened his mouth and… nothing. He just stood there mouth agape waiting for the words that seemed lodged in his throat. He tried to cough them up but he didn’t know what they were. She noticed him now for better or worse. She stood up and studied him from the opposite side of the desk.
“Who are you?” she asked with genuine curiosity.
He searched for an answer, but the words he was looking for did not exist. His name evaporated in headspace if he ever had one. Squeezing for a syllable he managed the following:
“I-...”
It was quite the introduction but not the one he was going for. He searched his head again looking through every nook and cranny in the vacuum for a name, turning over all the nothing in search of something, looking for some string of sounds between himself and all the empty space. Stumbling over another nonexistent obstacle he fell face first on his own. Declan! That was it! It almost surprised him. But it was all he had to say. He could hear himself say it in his head, preparing for the real thing. He opened his mouth and:
“I’m-”
“Nobody,” said a voice from behind him.
Chad Stantlerfield waltzed over and clapped a hand on each of their shoulders with a smile like someone who enjoyed a good trainwreck when he saw one.
“What’s going on over here? Hm?” he prodded.
Neither of them answered. Declan was pralyzed and couldn’t move.
“Oh come on! I bet Scraggy over here was about to hike up his shorts and ask you out on a hot date and you two would ride off into the sunset.”
“Grow up, Chad,” Eileen sighed just under her breath looking away.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Chad said, putting his hand to his ear.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing? Oh! You mean this guy over here,” he said shaking Declan’s shoulder.
Declan felt sick. Chad’s head swiveled to face him turning his hand into vice grip on Declan’s shoulder.
“Why don’t you ask her? Go on, I know that’s what you’re here for. Do it. C’mon we don’t have all day!”
Declan stared at the floor.
“Going once,” Chad called
Eileen tried to shake faintly to shake him off.
“Chad don’t-”
“No, no, don’t worry about it. Any second now he’s gonna say something,” Chad jeered not breaking his stare making a wobbly paste of Declan’s thirty seconds of bravado.
“Going once! Going twice- really you’re just going to let this happen? Aaaaannd,” he leaned a little closer, lowering his ear to Declan’s mouth, like he was watching his favorite movie waiting for the lead to say his favorite line. Nothing.
“Gone,” he whispered.
Declan kept studying the ground.
“Don’t sweat it kid. If she said yes, it would only be because she felt sorry for you. Amaright?” he chuckled looking at Eileen.
Declan raised his eyes slightly. She said nothing, guiltily turned away, and left the room.
The room was now empty save the two of them.
Chad’s expression hardened.
“You see, when you’re nothing, there’s no reason for people to ever want to be around you. The best thing you could ever hope for is that you’re pathetic enough to lure in someone else and they’re stuck with you forever. I’m gonna run this town one day, and I’ll be the only thing that matters. I’ll be everything. Someday you’ll probably remember this as the day you met the most important man in town. But I’m going to forget about you before I even get home. So for what it’s worth, have a nice life; it won’t amount to much anyway.”
He left the room in a bitter storm. Declan stood alone. The motion detector killed the lights. He stayed anchored to the floor waiting to sink into the tiles and disappear… nothing.
Daylight was growing scarce by the time Declan got home, his eyes red and face still a bit damp. Everything felt heavy. His head ached. His eyes stung. His spirit in pieces. His mother’s car was in the driveway when he opened the front door. His mother’s voice was berating some poor soul on the other end of a business call. He didn’t bother shutting the door quietly. She wouldn’t notice anyway. His dad wouldn’t be back from Kanto for another two weeks, and if he came back tonight he would be wearing that same blank, tired expression he left with, heave himself upstairs and go to sleep.
He watched his mom leaning against the kitchen counter phone in her right hand and a pen in her left writing on a stack of papers.
Her being ambidextrous probably made it easier to burn both ends of the candle. He thought about saying something, but she just looked so tired. It was like watching a shadow without a person attached to it. It was hard to look at, but he saw some honesty in it. The kind of honesty that people sweep under some tired cliche that you respect people for once they give up the ghost and strip the covering away. Tired, honest, and holding out to the bitter end with one foot in the abyss and the other rooted in Stantlerfield. That was the Ewald spirit if there ever was such a thing.
Declan was tired. Tired enough to feel the dark circles hanging under his eyes. Tired enough to feel a physical emptiness where the weak light used to be. Tired enough to let Stantlerfield choke him to death without putting up a fight. The Ewalds were never a fighting people. They were the ones to settle in a storm to be weathered. Not wasting energy shaking their fists at the clouds or sparing the breath to scream at the sky. Only battening down the hatches and holding out for better in the pouring rain, but the rain never seemed to end in Stantlerfield.
He locked himself in his shed. His own words glared at him from the walls as he crashed into the sheets and rolled onto his side filling his withdrawn gaze with the picture of his writing desk littered with pens and half inked papers and the sheets on the floor that would forever stay unfinished. He felt a lump in his throat so tight he gagged. He thought about his mother, about Chad, about Eileen, and about the fact that none of them were thinking of him. His eyes eased closed. Tiredness welcomed the familiar darkness. He thought about the fact that his tongue couldn’t string together a single sentence, that he was probably going to fail his speech and debate class, that he couldn't breathe a word in front of twenty something teenagers who probably weren’t listening anyway, and now he could feel his words breathing on him. He rolled to his other side observing the writing on the walls on his way, crafting a picture in his mind of the nights they were written. Each word the product of some shitshow of a day compounded with the effect of the one before that and before that and so on. He was sick of feeling sick, tired of being tired. He wasn’t looking for a miracle. Just a break.
Then the walls started to breathing. Declan sat up and looked around. The papers uprooted from their tacks and rolled through the empty space of the shed with some vague sense of purpose. There seemed to be something deliberate in the chaos as they snaked through the air. Declan felt himself stand up. Every movement he made felt strange, as if he was watching himself. He couldn’t pick a point between terrified and hypnotized. The papers started gathering in a swirling sphere in the center of the room. Works finished and unfinished wrapped, coiled, and folded on each other into the shape of a person. It had a soft, but supernaturally familiar profile, its face accented by cursive ink lettering like shadows giving the impression of deep set eyes, shallow lips, and large protruding ears.
Declan walked towards it. He felt compelled to reach out to it. The sound of crinkling paper accompanied the turning of its head; it looked at him without expression. His hand drew closer to its face, but just before his hand made contact with its cheek the walls of the shed exploded in different directions, the ceiling launched upward, and the floor tumbled as it fell beneath him. He was floating in space. Emptiness as far as the eye could see. He wanted to panic, but he couldn't seem to flail his arms or legs. Everything felt loose and stiff at the same time, detached and weightless. All he could do was freefall through the void unable to tell the difference between flying and falling. He opened his mouth to scream but stopped when a hand touched his shoulder stopping his tumble. The paper human pulled him closer. He examined the lettering in its eyes. “I will never see stars” read from its left eye, across the bridge of his nose, to its right. Below that “I will never burn” ran the length of its cheekbones. “I will never run” tucked itself in the shadow under its nose. He began to read under its lower lip “I will never be-” but the words vanished like shadows in the immediate presence of light.
Declan gazed anxiously at its now blank eyes. There was a light in their papery center, a weak yellow pinprick. A blackened ring ate away at its edges and slowly crept outward. The fire spread with the wilting of the blackened paper until it consumed where its head used to be. It reached out and placed a hand against his forehead, it’s body turning to soot. As the flame crawled to the crease of its elbow, it pushed his head backwards launching him into a cosmic tumble, and as his head reeled back he saw it. The empty space was full of stars. Every direction held an eyeful of distant white sparks stippled on swirling cloudy nebulas passionate red and smokey emerald green tumbled in and out of view as he rolled through the cosmos. It was somehow calming. He released the tension in each of his muscles along with any desire to control his path and let himself coast through depths of nowhere. As he closed his eyes, couldn’t quite pin down the feeling between surrounded and isolated, easing up to the idea of nowhere.
And then he was somewhere. At the front of Dr. Clarks classroom to be exact. Babbling high schoolers filled the rows of seats that extended indefinitely into a distant mist, not a single one facing him. Convulsing, he looked at the notecards in his hand. They were blank. He flipped through all of them just to make sure. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He peeked at his audience. In the front row was Eileen, eyes cast down on her desk disappointed. Declan could tell she was trying not to look at him. Something crumbled inside of him, a sinkhole opening in his stomach that just kept sinking, creating even more empty space. Her sweater said “Gyradon’t even try.” It wasn’t even funny, but someone was laughing. It was Chad reeling hysterically in the seat next to her, his greasy cackled overpowering the sound of a thousand voices partaking in a conversation he wasn’t a part of. The noise was overwhelming. Declan staggered backward bracing himself against the wall as he was assaulted by every word in the room. He looked to Eileen, to the crowd, and then to Chad who hadn’t stopped laughing. No one would hear to him. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and surrendered to the noise. He began to sink into the floor tiles, the desks, the room, Chad, all of Stantlerfield dwarfing him, ignoring him out of existence and into impenetrable darkness.
…
…
…
No Declan thought.
He saw his mother’s tired figure desperate for a way out, his father’s lifeless walk through the door every time he came home. He wasn’t going to be like them. He couldn’t be like them.
He rose out of floor bracing himself again against the wall. The crowd still made no notice. He wanted them to look at him, to see him. He filled his lungs with a chestful of fresh air, tensed his shoulders, and opened his mouth.
“My name is Dec-,”
He was sitting up in his bed, his heart still pounding trying to make sense of what had just happened. Was that a dream he thought. He glanced at the walls. His papers still clung to the walls except for one hanging limp over his desk holding on by its bottom left corner. He rolled out of bed and reached out for it, holding it by the opposite corner.
I am surrounded
And yet I am Alone
I see people I don’t understand
I hear words I can’t spell
I can’t breathe
I am Nobody of Nowhere
And I can’t escape.
He ripped the page off the wall, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it onto the bed. Every broken little piece of him knew he couldn’t go on like this. He had to get out. He opened the shed door and looked outside. Stantlerfield was in darkness, and the isolated street lights were litwicks in an abyss. He slipped in the front door of his house and felt his way through the halls not even bothering with a light. He knew these empty spaces like he knew himself: only enough to know where he shouldn’t be. Closing his eyes made no difference in clarity as he glided past each threshold. He stopped halfway in front of one such gaping hole in the darkness. On the other side was his old bedroom. Hesitantly, he stepped in the doorway and felt for an object with his right hand. It was still there. After a few metallic clicks later a weak light just barely reached the corners of the room; its source was a battery powered cyndaquil night light resting in Declan’s hands. He took a long look at it. The light came from a bulb under the translucent fire quills, and a silver knob jutted out the side of its body.
So many nights were spent staring at it for hours when he was younger. Those sleepless nights it sat on his nightstand like a sad excuse for a beacon of hope. He would lay on his side and gaze longingly at the timid yellow glow from his bed as he waited for some comfort to wash over him. Maybe he could hold out hope that his mother or father would think to check on him, find him wide awake, and say something that would make the waking nightmares go away. Nothing. Holding the light out to the room he surveyed the bare beige walls, the oak night stand up to his hip, and the space between it and the right wall where the bed used to be, the fallout of a fight that never happened.
He followed the light outstretched before him across the room to a door in the corner. The knob gave a soft squeal and the hinges sighed as the door opened to a small closet with a rack half beset with t-shirts and a couple wadded up jackets on the floor. Dropping to his knees, he set down the light and threw a hoodie over his shoulder and sifted through the hanging shirts before knocking his head on a shelf. On it was a tan canvas backpack that may have been white at some point with the letters FDE stitched in red over the cover of the main pouch between two cyan straps that ran the length of it. Declan pulled it off the shelf and studied it in the light with the intrigue of something unfamiliar. Four patches of a pokeball, a leaf, a flame and a water droplet were nestled into the left strap. He lifted the cover to the main pouch and began stuffing it with anything he thought would be useful.
It was still dark out by the time Declan pulled the navy hood over his head, threw the stuffed canvas bag over his shoulder, and stepped back into the hallway. He took a final look at the bleak empty space that separated his room from his parents’ and there was a bright orange dot glowing through the window to the back porch. Against the starless sky he could make out a vague outline of his mother leaning against the back porch railing with a lit cigarette fixed in her left hand. He read the shadow of a deep sigh as her shoulders sank and the glowing end of her cigarette disappearing into her silhouette as she raised it to her lips and a white ghostly wisp took its place.
He thought of saying something, but he wouldn’t know where to begin. Neither of them would, but on some level they both would know why he was doing what he was. He just wished one of them had the courage to say it. He wished for some sign that they at least understood each other, some flash of eye contact that told him they saw the same darkness but it was going to be okay. No such comfort was found in those tired powder eyes in all fifteen years of being her son.
It was time to go.
He carried himself to the front porch and eased the front door closed behind him. Turning to face the yard an icy breeze caught him on the chin he felt the ambient coldness seize his bare hands.
He wasn’t going back for gloves, not for anything. He took a step into the yard. His heart was racing, but for once he was sure of himself. The first step was excruciating. The second step was anxious. The third step was intriguing, the fourth engaging, the fifth fascinating, the sixth a statement. He found himself in the middle of the street shivering with both a chill and a tingle in his spine that sent him flying into the night. Straight ahead he charged down the streets of Stantlerfield, the wind screaming in his ears the names of people and places that would forget him entirely, and he found it in himself for that fleeting moment the strength to not care. He could go for miles. Inside him was a combustion reaction of exploding euphoria powering every press of his foot against the asphalt. He wanted to feel Stantlerfield disappear behind him, to see his house, his shed, his school, and his memories turn into specs on the horizon before melting into the past. The dying glow of street lights lit his way to the edge of town where he felt the road beneath him turn to dirt.
He sped up.
He could feel Stantlerfield catching up to him. He could hear Chad’s violent cackle closing in. He could see his father's lifeless eyes creeping into his peripheral vision. He forced his eyes closed and kept pushing.
There had to be a way out.
There had to be a way out.
There had to be some way out of Stantlerfield!
A jutting rock wrenched his ankled back and stole his footing, and Declan was sent face first into what was now little more than a narrow beaten path flanked by tallgrass up to his knees. His momentum sent him tumbling a solid twenty feet over what had to be every stray stone and root in existence before cutting his ride short against a lone tree stump in the center of a small clearing with an audible thunk.
He could only lay there, shivering.
Everything hurt.
Inside and out.
Who was he kidding? He was a Ewald. Stantlerfield would haunt him no matter where he went. It was planted inside of him. Its roots were anchored in his lungs siphoning the oxygen from every breath. Their dark tendrils coiled around his heart as it pumped the curse of his kin through his veins. His own blood was a slow acting venom that poisoned every living cell that dared dream for something better. He knew better than to hold out hope.
Declan Ewald was alone in the dark, cold, unforgiving universe, and nobody would know any different if he wasn’t.
Then something moved in the brush. Something large enough to make Declan want to collapse into himself was skulking through the tallgrass. He stirred and winced trying to sit up feeling a sharp pain shoot through his arm. He was helpless, and it knew. As the heavy rustling came closer he held himself into a tighter and tighter ball as if he could fold in on himself enough to disappear. His pulsating heart threatened to crack his ribs if he crunched any tighter, beads of cold sweat perforated the skin around the back of his neck, his stomach imploded into a vacuum.
But he didn’t dare breathe.
A gurgling growl crawled into earshot and crescendoed into a grueling snarl that sent shockwaves through the tallgrass and forced Declan’s back against the tree stump. Closer lurked the sound of scores of brush being stamped into the earth by a devastating weight. Then out of the veil of the high thicket peered two beaming red eyes fixed on him, their piercing glare alone made him feel half the boy he was. A pair of hidden nostrils heaved two columns of smokey vapors as the creature exhaled.
He held himself tighter.
He never imagined it would end like this. He always pictured something horrifyingly mundane. A heart attack in a cubicle perhaps or a quiet slip into the other side in his sleep, but never like somebody who actually lived a life.
The creature slinked out of the brake and revealed the hulking frame of a fully grown mightyena that even on four legs towered over its diminutive prey like a great wall of matted ash and soot fur. Only a few feet now from him now, the mightyena flattened its body, its back legs compressed with mechanical precision, and it let out another deep growl like a revving engine. Declan hid his face behind his knees and waited for the creature’s gleaming jaws to bury themselves in his flesh.
With an almost audible click the mightyena’s hind legs exploded behind it and the body extended twice its length as it lunged at its prey. Declan drew a final terrified breath before a stray ball of fur shot out of the brush and plunged into the side of the beast knocking the predator missile just off course of its target. The mightyena careened towards the edge of the clearing. The creature rolled once and caught itself sinking its claws into the ground for grip. In its original place was its saboteur, an eevee that by most liberal of estimates couldn’t be considered a fraction of its opponent’s size. But all the same it stared back at its adversary with a futile determination.
Declan raised his head to find the two sizing each other up. The mightyena grumbled and crouched into another menacing tableau now fixed on its interloper. The eevee held its ground standing between it and Declan as if it were protecting him. He watched in disbelief and mute apprehension. With another silent click the beast launched itself across the clearing swallowing up the eevee in sheer mass and sending the two tumbling across the ground. The mightyena threw its head up from the scrap and righted itself raising the poor creature clasped between its jaws like a war prize. The sight of those gnashing teeth digging in its body and knowing they were meant for him made his heart drop to his stomach. As the eevee cried and squirmed its captor jerked its head to either side, gnarring and grunting as it tried to shake the fight out of what was left of his hero. He knew he had to do something, but fear kept his back pressed against the stump. Tossing its head once again, the mightyena flung the eevee from its mouth, sending it through the air like a discarded rag doll before it slammed into the earth and rolled several feet. The normal type laid in a pathetic heap in the dirt barely able to open its eyes to see Declan’s panicked stare. He looked at the mightyena. The monstrous dark type was preparing its final pounce. He looked back at the eevee.
It stared back at him as it lay on its side too weak to get up. In its wide hazel eyes he could make out a familiar dread and a sobering expression of guilt and shame. Declan could feel every ounce of it and then some as he looked down at the only creature he ever understood and felt his stomach churn at the idea that it followed by himself would be no more. The mightyena’s hind legs tightened underneath it.
He couldn’t let it happen like this, not with him watching and waiting for a way out like he always did. He swallowed his fright if just for a flash of a moment and dove on top of the eevee exposing his back as he did his best to tuck his head and arms around the creature in a tight ball of uncertainty. He felt the shock sent through the ground when the mightyena launched itself at them. He tightened his hold around the eevee, forced his eyes shut, and braced himself. The full weight of his assailant crashed into his back like a sentient freight train. Frustrated the mightyena began clawing and snapping at his back. He felt claws slashing clean through his hoodie and breaking skin. Serrated teeth and fangs buried themselves into his shoulders and neck accompanied by frustrated snarls. Frantic paws ending in sharp points tried to dig themselves into the bunker he created around his fellow victim. His only hope for survival was the animal giving up and losing interest before his body gave out. So Declan Ewald tightened himself up more, grit his teeth, and held out hope. The growling, snapping, and slashing continued getting more desperate. Declan could feel warm streams of blood seeping out of the gashes in his back. Another set of teeth sank into his arm trying to pry it out from underneath him. He held on tighter. A pair of two inch long fangs dug deeper beneath his skin scraping bone and tried to jerk his arm back with even greater force. Declan convulsed from the pain feeling himself on the verge of passing out. He could make out the distant sensation of a comforting numbness that would bring all this pain to pass if he just surrendered to the darkness encroaching on his vision. It was so simple. So clear. So… familiar. All he had to do was just let go.
Then he felt a heartbeat. Not his. It was buried underneath as though it could be inside him. He knew what it was now, and he couldn't bring himself to let it stop; he couldn’t let the darkness take him over, not without a fight. With every crumbling fiber of focus he could muster he held on. He held onto the only other soul that cared enough to protect him and let the sensation of its beating heart hold him in reality. He refused to let this life or his own slip away after coming this far. The tugging force grew weaker and the occasional swipes grew more haphazard and tired. After several minutes of declining ferocity the jaws uprooted themselves from Declan’ skin for the last time, and he heard the creature disappear into the brush. It was finally over.
He didn’t move for a while. He remained huddled in a shivering ball fearing the mightyena might come back. When he was close enough to certain that he was no longer being watched, his body deflated and he rolled onto his side and looked at the eevee still tucked in his arm, the other shocked with a violent throbbing that pained him too much to move. It’s eyes were closed, but it was still breathing. He ran a shaky hand through its matted coat feeling for its barely beating heart. Still there. He gathered the pokemon back into his arms and struggled to his feet staggering on his own two legs before finding his footing once more. He felt lighter than before. Perhaps it was just lightheadedness from the blood loss, or maybe the lingering effects of adrenaline working their way out of his system, or maybe it was his missing backpack.
It was the last one.
Declan panicked and jolted his head around. It must have come off when he tumbled into the clearing. He stumbled through every square inch of the clearing and then trekked back up the slope he fell down off the path. The canvas bag finally turned up again hanging on a thorn bush he must have rolled through. Holding the eevee in his good arm he reached out and yanked the bag out of the bush. The sudden movement combined with the unexpected weight sent a visceral pulse through his arm so painful his whole body jerked. Reaching down he nearly blacked out from the effort of lifting the one intact strap over his shoulder. It felt heavier than before. He hunched over to prevent himself from falling back. He glanced in the direction he came. Stantlerfield was nowhere in sight.
It was almost relieving.
He looked down the path. There had to be a pokemon center somewhere down the road. No going back, he thought to himself. A thunderous grumble rolled through the starless night sky.
Sure, why not.
He heaved a deep sigh and wrapped the eevee in both arms holding it close to his chest and began dragging himself down the beaten path.
Declan Ewald was finally going somewhere.
