/ThePen_spring2011

Andrew Poff Marion (an excerpt) He awoke facing a fluorescent pool of his own vomit swirling against a brilliant white backdrop.

-‘What did I eat that was that color pink?’There was a crackling in his mind, like dying embers. Where was he? Who was he?

There was a flash, a scratch, an image. It always came first. The worst of it always came first. Marion awoke in the morning, every morning, thinking October, feeling the grit on his skin, beneath his nails, all down his windpipe and to his very soul. October. October. October. With this memory as a solitary reference point, floating forever in stasis, Marion could reconstruct his reality.

-‘Caroline’From experience, he knew that at most, he was out three to five minutes. His throat burned, and he saw a stain on the sleeve of his brown suede jacket, but he could clean up in no time. He went to the mirror.

III Caroline turned around in her seat to face him as he walked into the auditorium, now slowly creeping its way toward darkness. Years had passed. Marion emerged from a wormhole to a world just awakening from a centuries’ long nap, sloughing off a forest of thorns and the bones of a once fearsome dragon. He tried desperately again to latch onto something, grabbing at every thought he could find, but the cobwebs of darkness crept in on him and softened existence.

His head filled with cotton stuffing and time slowed down, 50