Monochrome
Authors: H.M. Jones
“Hauntingly Beautiful. […] Jones takes a dark subject and imbues it with light. This is an excellent book which serves two purposes […] First, as a form of entertainment. Not in a light and fluffy kind of way, but in a gritty, glue you to your seat, can’t look away kind of way. Second, I think it serves as a kind of window to what the world might look like through the eyes of someone who struggles with PPD. In that way, it has a weight, an importance
.
”
—
Elle Jacklee, author of
The Tree of Mindala
“Ms. Jones has written a dark, Alice in Wonderland styled story that will touch your heart with the character’s plight and perhaps, if you’re like me, have you start your own journey of introspection. Once I began this unique exploration I could not stop, reading the book in only a couple of sittings. I believe any reader would find it difficult to do otherwise
.
”
—
Dennis Larsen, Author of
The Raven Falconer Chronicles
“What takes us to, and sometimes keeps us in dark places? What comfort is there in thoughts and actions that take joy from our lives like night drains the sky of light? Why do we so easily remember bad events but struggle to recall the good? Those are just a few of the questions that came to mind as I read
Monochrome,
not lightweight reading to be sure. This is a well-crafted story that makes an unlikely journey believable and thought provoking. Cheers to H.M. Jones for unique and satisfying storytelling!”
—Jean Sheldon, Author of
Nic and Nora Mystery Series
H.M. Jones
Seattle WA 2015
Copyright 2013, 2015 H.M. Jones
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Attribution
— You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial
— You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works
— You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Inquiries about additional permissions should be directed to:
[email protected]
Cover Design by Yosbe Design
Edited by Carolyn Ridder
Previously self-published as
Monochrome
, 2013
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
Print ISBN 978-1-5137-0074-8
EPUB ISBN 978-1-5137-0095-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015911922
Written in memory of David S. Root.
I miss you, Daddy.
1:
Postpartum
Blues
AS THE
CRYING
got louder, Abigail’s fury rose. She sensed her pulse in her ears and felt adrenaline shoot hot anger through her veins. She stared down at her red-faced child and wanted to quiet her in any way she could—a pillow, maybe.
She reached towards her baby and thought about shaking her, hard, to make her stop crying, even for a second. Her insides burned.
How could I think that? What is wrong with me?
But even as rational thoughts forced their way through her anger, her hands shook with rage. She placed pillows in a circle on the floor around the screaming infant, periodically screaming into them when the crying flushed fury through her system.
Thinking the baby better off on the floor, surrounded by pillows, than near a mother who thought of shaking her, she ran from her helpless baby into her bedroom, and locked the door, wanting to block out the screaming and terrible thoughts. It didn’t work. She still heard Ruby’s cries, and now she couldn’t see if she was okay.
What if she rolls over and cannot get back up? She will suffocate, while I sit here, unable to touch her.
Worry, fear and anger took turns running through Abigail’s system. She longed to release some of the raging emotions away from her baby.
She would be better without me. Jason would take care of her. I shouldn’t be around her. I’ll hurt her. I don’t deserve to live, anyway, thinking of hurting a helpless baby. I should take some pills or drown myself. Neither would be too messy…They’d be better off if I were dead.
Fear pricked at the edges of her brain. She wondered if dying hurt, and if Jason would be relieved to not have her around anymore. Ruby’s cries became more panicked and shrill. Abigail’s arms trembled like leaves in the wind. An ache settled upon her shoulders and seeped down to her fingertips. Her head swam in a confusing array of fury, fear and worry. She screamed so loud her voice cracked and landed a clean punch through the drywall of her room.
Her knuckles dripped scarlet from hitting a stud in the wall, but she didn’t feel the pain normally accompanying bleeding. Thankfully, her anger subsided from the momentary release. She paced the floor of her room, trying to block Ruby’s screams from her mind, pushing them down to the place she always stored her frustration.
But that place must have been overfull from the trials of new motherhood, work, and life. The boiling emotions pierced her stomach. Her head swam and her eyes soon lost focus. Black rings rimmed her vision. She blinked her eyes, trying to clear the fuzz from her vision. Her arms pulsed with pins and needles, as if they’d fallen asleep. How
strange,
she thought as she massaged her arms and hands to wake them.
Suddenly, a heavy pain settled into her chest and doubled her over.
Oh, shit! I’m having a heart attack! I’m going to die and Ruby will be all alone.
Her breathing came hard and fast. Her vision swam in a cotton fog. A heavy weight pressed against her lungs making her gasp in quick, uneven breaths. Her throat was closing in, unseen hands choking her. Nausea swept over her in a wave.
She dropped her hands to her knees, trying not to vomit or pass out. But the dark circles were consuming her vision. She blinked to stop the darkness from taking over.
This is it. This is how I am going to die. I know it. Take care of my baby, Lord. Oh, God, whatever happens to me, take care of her.
She still heard the frantic screams of her baby as her vision went blank.
2:
Monochrome
“ANOTHER YOUNG
ONE.”
A careful tenor voice murmured above her head. Abigail forced her eyes open, but her vision was still fuzzy.
“Waking up, are you?” The voice belonged to a dark blur hovering over her body. “It’s fine. The trip here does this to everyone. Take your time,” the blur advised her.
She was able to rub her eyes with heavy, still tingling hands. She blinked leaden lids, as her eyes gradually focused. The dark blur became a man wearing a black wool hat and a charcoal pea-coat with a large, impressive collar.
Panic bubbled like acid in her stomach.
How did this man get into my house? Is my baby okay? Why can’t I hear her?
With a start, Abigail tried to shoot up from the ground, only to bang her head against a hard, jagged object behind her.
“Ow! What the…,” she started.
“Slow down. It’s a rough trip, lady.”
Abigail grasped around for something to defend herself with. Her fingernails scrapped across what felt like Easter basket grass made of aluminum foil. Confusion overcame her fear. She held her hands up. They were covered in a shimmering, powdery dust. She was not in her room, not at home, not in the city, in fact. All around her were tall, navy colored trees, and silver-blue grass. Somewhere in the distance she heard the flow of a body of water.
The nature around her was covered in a blue-tinted twilight.
He must have taken me to the woods. But where? I didn’t think there were woods anywhere near where we live.
Everything could not be blue. It was the mixture of her blurred vision and shock of waking to nature at night.
It must be.
She searched for the glowing moon in the sullen cerulean sky, but was unable to spot it. A mysterious silver light settled on the midnight scene, coming from nowhere and everywhere.
“Where am I? Why have you brought me here? Where’s my baby!” Abigail shot questions at the dark stranger, who calmly took a seat on the trunk of a tall, thin, fallen tree.
The stranger fiddled around in his jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Look, I’ll explain to you the situation as best as I can, but you have to promise not to freak out on me. I hate when they freak out. I mean, it’s part of the job, but it gets tiring.”
He paused, watched her from under his wool hat, put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. Abigail was stunned into silence.
What the hell is this guy talking about? He brought me here on a job? What kind of job?
She shuddered to think of what this meant for her.
She stood and backed slowly away from the stranger, who noticed but made no move to stop her, except to say, “Please don’t run. I’m here to help and it would be very counterproductive since there’s nowhere you can run where I can’t find you.”
He inhaled deeply from his cigarette and looked askance at her. “Shit, sorry, lady. I guess that sounded like a threat.” Smoke billowed out from between his lips as he spoke. “It wasn’t.”
He blew the remainder of the drag through his lips. “You smoke?” He lifted the pack of cigarettes towards Abigail in offering. She ignored the gesture, took a deep breath and another step back. She was still shocked at the turn of events and worried about her baby, but first she needed to find out where she was, so she could get home.
She gathered her courage. “I won’t turn my back on you to run. Plus,” she added, hoping her voice sounded firm even with fear racing through her veins, “I’m not afraid of you. If you come near me, I will kill you.” She was proud of herself. Her voice was icy and composed. She even managed to keep her hands from shaking by making fists.
The dark stranger removed his wool hat, ran his hand through shoulder-length, dark blonde hair and grunted in amusement. “So…you don’t smoke? Hope you don’t mind if I do because I will regardless.” He took another drag of his cigarette and tilted his head towards her. “You can sit. I promise to give you no reason to kill me, and from the sound of your voice, you are confident you could.”
He shook his head and offered a tired smile. “I don’t want to rush you, but perhaps you want to know where you are and why you’re here?”
Abigail relaxed her fists. She didn’t know the man in front of her but she understood without knowing him he meant her no harm. His was the air of someone who went out of his way to do as little as possible. She moved closer to the stranger. “I want to know my baby is okay. The rest can wait.”
She leaned towards the dark stranger, hopeful.
“Your baby?” The man’s eyebrows drew down in confusion.
“Yes. My
baby
, asshole! The baby screaming in my house when you took me away.” She her stomach twist into knots, again.
“Okay.” The stranger held his hands up in front of him, one still holding a lit cigarette. “First,
I
didn’t bring you here.
You
did.” Abigail made to interrupt him but he continued. “Second, your baby is
where
you left it. In the same
state
you left it. In the same
time
you left it.”
Abigail raised a baffled eyebrow at the man in front of her. He didn’t give her the chance to ask another question. He calmly put his hat back on his head. “I mean, your baby is fine as long as it was fine when you left it. Time moves more slowly here.”
He took a drag from his cigarette and sat back in a relaxed position, as if he’d just answered everything. She couldn’t remember a time when she was more confounded, but her anger subsided. She couldn’t be too angry with an insane person. “Okay. Fine. I just want to know how to get back home to my baby, so if you have a car or directions or something…”
She hoped to reason with the lunatic who, for some reason, abducted her. “You’re obviously not interested in hurting me. I don’t know why you brought me here or what…”
The stranger exhaled, interrupting her. “Look, you’re not listening. You aren’t the first person I’ve led who thinks I’m crazy,” he said, reading her tone correctly. “And you won’t be the last.”
He took a final drag of his cigarette, flicked it away and crushed the butt under a black, buckled boot. “Again, I didn’t bring you here and ‘here’ is not the place you were before. This place is called Monochrome and you’re here because you didn’t want to be where you were.”
Her tolerance quota was full. This man’s crazy talk was holding her up. She stalked toward him, grabbed his coat collar between clenched fists and shook him.
“Listen, asshole, tell me how to get home or, so help me God, I’ll make you wish you’d never met me.” She didn’t raise her voice. She knew the rage distorting her face was proof enough to convince him to stop playing with her.
The stranger tilted his hat up and peered into her light green eyes with eyes the color of tar.
No, not tar. Tar doesn’t glimmer.
Abigail thought this man must’ve swallowed a universe full of stars, so that it would sparkle, deadly, in his eyes. His gaze unnerved her and made her dizzy. She dropped her hands from his collar, her arms shaking and her knees weak.
“Thank you,” he stated, unmoved, as he returned to his seat on the fallen tree. Abigail stumbled as she backed away, tripping over the same cold, hard rock she’d hit her head on upon first waking. She fell backwards and landed on her side.
“I hope you’re okay?” The man asked, without a hint of sympathy.
“Fine. Just a scrape on my hand and maybe a bruise on the side of my leg. But don’t get up…” She sarcastically shot at the stranger, who went back to his relaxed position on the fallen tree and was now carelessly lighting another cigarette. His face was lit behind the flash of the match, a sulfur tang stinging the air.
He’s handsome, for an asshole.
She sat up from her fall and examined the damage, only to stop short. She remembered putting on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt this morning. She brushed dust from her side and gasped. Instead of the coarse tightness of denim, her hands slid effortlessly across a length of cashmere-soft fabric.
She stood and patted her person, looking down in shock at the indigo velvet dress that fell from her hips. The dress bustled in the back. Black buttons dotted her from torso to neck, and black lace cuffs accented the paleness of her skin. The dress was more appropriate for a Victorian romance novel than the twenty-first century.
“Um, what
am
I wearing and where are my old clothes?” Abigail started. “Did you…” she flushed, “change me?”
The man guffawed, offended. “Do I really look that creepy?”
“Well, I didn’t change myself and you’re the only one I see,” she answered. “And, yes, you are a bit creepy, so…”
The stranger pursed his lips, amused. “You’re funny. No, I didn’t change you.”
He played with his cigarette to avoid her glare. “What you wear
can
reflect what you feel on the inside in this place, though most people here are cognizant enough to go through changes very often. You must feel…”
He scrutinized her dress with his black eyes. Abigail got the impression if he examined her closely with those eyes, he could see every dark secret she bore. She shivered. “Caged. You feel caged. Lonely. Like I said, most people’s wardrobe doesn’t really change much, except for color. And it usually derives from something they owned or wore in their other life. But that dress says repressed.”
She’d worn a dress like this to a tea party her friend put on. It was a rental. She almost forgot about that day.
Surprising herself, she retorted, “And you feel bored and apathetic.”
She was referring to his black and grey tones, the careless, worn wool hat over slightly disheveled, mussed hair, the charcoal pea-coat over torn jeans. Every piece of fabric, every leisurely gesture, gave the impression he tried very hard to look like he didn’t care about how others saw him.
He raised a quizzical eye. “Not exactly. So, are you ready to hear about this place or not, lady?”
“Abigail. Abigail Benet,” she insisted.
The man exhaled smoke from his cigarette and nodded in greeting. “Ishmael Dubois.”
She shook her head in astonishment. “Perfect. Shall I call you Ishmael, then?”
Ishmael rolled his eyes playfully. “Yes. Call me Ishmael, and I’ve heard that before. Do you want to know why you’re here, Abby?”
She bristled. “Abigail. And I want to know why I am here and when I can go home to my baby and my husband.”
Ishmael took another cigarette from his pack and winked at her. “That’s the kind of attitude that’ll get you out of here fast, Abby.”
Abigail moved to sit down on the other end of the fallen tree. She was still dizzy from her fainting spell. Her legs felt like cooked noodles. She placed her hands on the trunk and shivered at its cold, metallic texture.
Weird
. She shook her head to focus and laid her hands on her lap.
“Don’t call me Abby. Only friends call me Abby.”
Ishmael turned his head to blow smoke away from her and shrugged. “I hope we can be friends.”
She took a chance to examine Ishmael’s face, something she’d avoided because of the effect his strange eyes held on her. She was surprised to find herself staring at a young face, maybe younger than her own, with only dark circles under his black eyes and a few newly formed wrinkles at their corners to show the age of early trauma.
“You can’t be any more than twenty-four.” She stated with certainty. “I’m twenty-four and you are not older than me.”
Ishmael flicked his cigarette away from him. “You’re good at guessing. Twenty-two or twenty-three, I think.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You
think
?”
“Yeah, like I said, time moves more slowly here. I was twenty-one when I came, and I know it’s probably been a while…”
Sadness tinged his voice, and his eyes momentarily lost their shine. He shook himself back to the present. “But we’re not here to figure out how old I am. We’re here to help
you
decide whether you want to return home or not.”
“Of course I want to return home. Now. If possible.”
He nodded knowingly. “That’s what I said too, but this place can overwhelm. It has its own kind of bleak appeal. It accepts those Reality does not.” His eyes scanned the blue nature around him.
Abigail followed his gaze and noticed he was right. It was as if the place looked how she felt inside: Gloomy, drooping navy trees, the midnight sky and strange silver light frosting the tips of the blue grass. It reminded her of the beauty of the clear November day just after her father passed—lovely, but tauntingly so, like it knew that it should be as ugly as her broken heart but defied her with its frosty brilliance.
Ishmael shook his head slowly. “Anyway, I think you’re right to be so positive. Positive is the best way to get you out of here quickly, so keep it up if you can. I’ll try not to be a detriment, but I can’t help my attitude sometimes.”
She nodded. She knew what he meant. She’d been unable to control her moods lately.
He glanced sideways at her nod and smirked. “Okay. Here’s the deal, Abby.” She ignored his impertinence and listened to every carefully pronounced word that followed.
“You know my name, but you don’t know what I do. I’m a Guide. My job as a Guide is to help you figure your way out of Monochrome, if that’s what you end up wishing to do. If at any point you wish to stay, you just need to say so and I will leave you, letting you get by as you so choose. Even helping you find employment, if need you stay.”
Did others actually choose to stay? Just thinking about it gave her goose bumps.
Ishmael took off his wool hat and ran his fingers over it, nervously. The mysterious silver light made his dark blonde hair appear grey. “As I said, you’re here because you desired to be here.”
She made to argue, but he held up a patient hand and met her hazel eyes with his black ones. She cringed, but didn’t look away. “You must’ve been serious about wanting to die, or you wouldn’t be here.”
Abigail noticed a change come over Ishmael’s eyes. The black irises expanded into the whites, creating reflective black pools. An image moved across the screen of his eyes. She jumped back.
