Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 1

Chapter One

I am an island. I am chaos in the stillness of a second. I am shelter in the storm. I am alive, I am dead, I am Easton.

            I am lost, that much I know. Hopelessly lost and scared beyond comprehension. All I can see is the blur of colour; the memory of pain, the ferocity of the blaring horns, and the rain on my icy cheeks.

But I am slipping. My seventeen years are all together, spinning, wild and sickening.

My fourth birthday, the candles on a race-car cake.

My first kiss, played again and again: a sofa, a nervous hand, a girl I try to forget.

The wedding dress of my mother, spinning and spinning and spinning, a wooden dance floor and shiny shoes.

These memories are mine, but they are so far away, like grains of sand in my fingers on happy days at Weymouth beach.

I try to close my eyes but they don’t obey me. My body is not my own, it’s stuck fast in a river of cement. Every thought, every sight, every book, every film, every snippet of mindless speech that escaped my lips is my here and now. This is how I know I am dead.

The crushing silence of my never-lived days stretches out in a line before me. The shadows that never were reach back to me, dragging me towards them. I soar through them, seeing everything and nothing. Children, loves, losses and life I do not recognize, lost on the road beneath me feet.

My feet on solid ground. I am there and then gone, swept away with the tide. Dashed against the rocks of my life, never to be found again. Drowning in everything that is me and never to be saved.

It is a drumbeat, a million miles ago that stops me in my tracks. I hear it and I am still, I am calm. The comfort is like falling on a cloud, on a quilt of the softest feathers, and my chaos screams to a stop.

The darkness sings me to sleep.

When I wake I’m on a road I don’t know the name of. The twisted wreck of my Triumph.

My legs are my own and I use them, like I’m a child again. Like these are my first steps in a body made just for me.

One –

Then the other –

They move in front of me and I gaze from high above, like I’m staring at my reflection in the hall of mirrors that visits Hyde Park every year at Christmas.

            I raise an impossibly long hand to my neck and feel the moisture on my fingertips. The rain that still falls, blustering and blowing. The flashing lights, the yellow jackets. The sights and sounds of the place of my death. But I smile, tears in my eyes knowing I can feel the rain on my skin. And every moment of rain I've ever experienced floods to me, falling on me like they’re raindrops themselves. 

            I remember the song on the old radio as we crashed; the cassette that took me months to complete.

Is that it? Underneath the layers of noise? Our favourite song to drive to?

            What had been next? It had been a surprise.

And that is the second. The moment when I wish I could die all over again. I’ve killed her. Penny. My hand on the wheel, her life in my hands. I’ve taken her with me.
 But she is not beside me anymore. I have abandoned the earth and her absence scares me more than anything else.