“Interwoven: Side B”

From the moment I awoke, there lingered a suspicion that something had changed from the night before. The covers of the nearby guest bed were full of wrinkles as though someone had been sleeping there, though it was empty now. Had someone been there? As I looked carefully around the walls of my cabin, I found myself struggling to get my thoughts in order.

On my desk sat two drinking glasses, a bottle of wine, and a bottle of cranberry juice. The bottles ranged from a quarter to a half full, and the glasses were stained with remnants of liquids they had once contained. I noticed upon closer examination that one smelled quite heavily of alcohol; the other, meanwhile, held but a mere trace. I doubted it was enough to get anyone even remotely tipsy, yet its presence in the glass unnerved me slightly.

I then walked over to the front window and took a look outside. The ATV was still in its familiar spot, so I didn’t think it likely that someone had left the mountain in the middle of the night. Whoever took possession of the second glass had to be somewhere, but where indeed?

With a sigh of irritation, I brought the glasses into the kitchen, washed them, and filled one with fresh water. The aching in my temple began to subside, and images of the night before finally began to surface. There had been a girl, around college-age if memory served. She was studying… botany? – no, she had said it was botanical magic, and that her college major… had something to do with music, though that was all I remembered. I was already two glasses deep when the subject had come up.

From there, she had brought up a few questions of her own. I explained that I worked from home mostly, that I had in the past been intimate with both sexes, and that only a select few had ever known of my abilities as a witch. She seemed to empathize with that last sentiment, and the others she embraced with a fervent curiosity. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to become like me or to simply become me through a kind of osmosis.

Just where in the hell did she run off to? I wondered. There was no sign of her in the bathroom either, though as I stepped back through the door, I experienced another flash of memory. I could recall excusing myself once or twice as the night wore on. Each time I returned, it seemed as the girl was becoming increasingly more comfortable around me. Suddenly, the scent of the second glass was beginning to make a lot more sense.

“Snatched”

The first thing you notice upon awakening was the thick cloth tied securely over your eyes, its knotted ends pulling ever so slightly against your hair. The cloth sits just behind your ears, allowing you to hear the room around you without obstruction. You tilt your head to the left and to the right, until you hear a series of footsteps approaching from behind you.

A set of arms then drapes around your shoulders, their fingers caressing tenderly over your bare chest. The realization of being naked causes you to thrash around, yet it’s impossible to fully escape the nylon cords securing you to your chair. In spite of the room’s unusual warmth, the embarrassment of being so exposed causes you to shiver. The caressing hands detect your apprehension and move teasingly down your waist. A pair of lips softly presses itself to your neck.

“W-What’s going on? Who are you?”

“Medium”

Nestled within the rural mountains, Ostrom Community College prided itself on being a sanctuary of the Arts. Many regarded it as the “Stonecutter’s Library” due to the wide range of techniques passed down through a variety of creative disciplines. Students whose applications were approved became jewels of the Stonecutter, their minds and bodies thoroughly sharpened until they could surpass even the greatest of greats. Yet on a moonlit December evening, one such jewel found herself distorted in the anguish of a mental haze, her body hunched over a desk at the frustration of a seemingly insurmountable endeavor.

Geraldine Satyr was a second year literature student. One of her autumn exams was a take-home prompt in which she was to convey the emotions of something abstract, something nonhuman. Crucial were the conveyances of sensory awareness and object-environment interactions; but to actually pass the course, she would also need to correlate the abstraction with some deep-seated truth about the human condition.

She had been given the assignment over a week ago, yet with three days to the deadline, she had yet to find a suitable object to write about. Perhaps a part of her simply found the idea itself ridiculous and beyond her. Did that make her a failure as a writer? Geraldine traced her fingers lazily along the mess of papers which littered her desk. She was about to close her eyes when a sudden knocking caused her to bolt upright, some of the papers sliding through the air toward the floor.

“Memoir of a Rubbergirl”

Throughout the whole of my time spent on this Earth, from place to place and generation to generation, there has been but one mantra which has transcended my vast array of experiences. The deep-rooted spiritual ideal of a soul bound by the skin has encapsulated the core of my being, and it has allowed me to reach pinnacles that no human ever could.

It is our skin which determines our shape; its many creases and contours are what grant us freedom to adapt to the shapes of the natural world. It is our skin which invokes our touch, but through that touch we can with our mind’s eye also taste and smell far more than with just a nose or a mouth.

Ergo, if we were to take on properties of a shape which was not human, we would continue to orient ourselves in perfect fluidity, undeterred by whatever we had become. As I settle into the shape which will become my eternal prison – a seemingly ordinary pair of shoes – I revel in the freedom of being eternally able to smell and taste by touch alone.

In this penultimate moment, the absolute submission of my will and surrender of my soul to euphoria is both terrifying and erotic. As my consciousness ascends to a point of true clarity, I cannot help but reminisce on where my journey first began.