The Wall

The Wall

Her princess day bed sits up against a large white wall, but this isn’t any old plain jane ivory-painted wall. It’s a collection of childhood memories, phases, and ridiculous mistakes. It all started with Matthew Figueroa’s phone number, the cute new Hispanic boy in class, and with only a pencil in hand, those seven digits were quickly scrawled onto the paint. It spiraled from there as she let her friends and family write, draw, and sticker the collage detailing and documenting her life. The wall was special; it was unique and represented her in such a way that she praised it – her visual pride and joy.

As a seven or eight-year-old child, it was much more than just an accident that her mom let get out of control; it was her inspiration. The writings and drawings grew, the effort and detail grew, and so did her imagination. The years of graphite and ink stood over this small bedroom, morphing into a reminder that consumed her thoughts. She was a little girl, curious in her play and built on narratives by filling in the empty spaces and slowly creating a collection of chaos. This chaos was on the wall and in her head, stimulating a repetitive loop between her ears. It followed her; the words and images that were once a figment of all she cared for and felt had become a massive barrier. It wrapped its verses and reflections from ceiling to floor around her small waist and kept her in place. She felt stuck.

The thoughts started creeping into her head about the wall’s demise – painting over the many remembrances or it crashing to the ground from a wrecking ball. Her imagination spiraled into mental images of destruction, as the narratives on the wall nipped at the fears in her mind. As she rests her short brunette hair and closes her big dark honey eyes – It’s there. The wall inches from her sleeping body looms over her shallow breaths and enters her sweet, dreamy state.

Alexa, now ten years old, stands in her doorway, staring at the wall. It’s larger than in reality, and it starts shaking, cracking, and then ripping from its frame. A massive tornado rips through the small Indiana house taking the precious wall with it. Fear and shame rush through Alexa’s petite frame as all she can see in the dark distance outside is a shadowy figure ablaze and running forcefully at her. She tries to scream, but there’s a silence in the exposed room.

Her eight-foot vandalized protector is now debris in the wind. She tries to move but can’t as the heat from the flames come inches to the tip of her nose. Just as the shadowy figure breathes into her ear; she feels free from the stationary obstacle that’s been hiding a whole fantastical world behind drywall. She breaks open the depth of her imagination, and the figure whispers, “it’s nice to finally meet you,” and just as his face begins to form, she wakes up.

Her face is elated, but calm and with the wall still intact behind her and her tiny breathy pants; she smiles. She had just come face to face with her first character. Her head spins and soars imagining the fiery man running, sprinting, and standing in front of her. The visual is fresh projected behind her eyelids, and she has an urge. She grabs a pen and her hand scribbles across pages taking only a few moments to stop and close her eyes.

She watches the fiery man scream in the silent world in her head, the pressure from deadly winds and flames swishing through the missing wall. She begins to speak, out loud, to her character as she writes his story. She comes to the last page of her notebook, looks up, and closes her eyes one last time.

The winds break the silence as the tornado gusts past the hole and reveals the wall spinning away into the abyss. Alexa squints through the spinning rubble and imagines the man again in front of her. His tall and dark shadowy figure bursting with flames to the ceiling shrinks and smooths along with the wind and commotion. He stands, a fragile figure in the blank space of her mind, and she asks, “how should your story end?” His frail frame opens in front of her, and as the pink bleeds into his skin tone, he says, “The truth, with destruction and chaos of the mind and body.” Alexa’s eyes open one last time and she stares at her page. She thinks hard about her encounter with him and writes, “David was the first man to suffer from a rare form of narrative, called Brain Horror.”

The End.