Parker Thomas - Part II

Part II - The Anima

     “Not Heaven?”

     “Not Heaven,” she confirmed bluntly, looking up to meet his stare.

     “Then… where the hell are we?” Parker Thomas whined. He could feel an odd, seemingly unfounded terror welling up inside him. She just smiled at him again; this time it began to shake his nerves.

     “Why have you got wings on your back?” he ventured.

     “Because people in heaven are supposed to have wings on their back, right?”

     “But we aren’t in heaven.”

     “No.”

     “So why wings?”

     “Because you thought you were in heaven”

     Her hair changed back to a dull golden hue.

     “Well, I’m beginning to think you’re right, we aren’t in heaven.” he admitted, finally getting to his feet and gazing around at the landscape. The world surrounding him seemed almost more out of place than the twin stars which lit it. In the distance there stretched patches of just about every topographical feature anyone could dream of, and in the most radical forms. Deserts lay in the middle of entire forests, mountains jutted out of the ground at impossibly acute angles for their height, and lakes were formed of a most unnatural bright red color. In the distance, he could have sworn a waterfall off one of the mountain peaks was flowing upwards.

     He shook his head at the absurdity of it all, rubbed his tired eyes, and turned back to Sadie. He started and realized instantly that her wings were gone. She simply sat there on her rock and waited for him to speak, grinning yet more mischievously.

     “Where’d your wings go?”

     “Away.”

     “Because we’re not in heaven?”

     “Now you’re catching on.” she said playfully.

     He raised an eyebrow. “So, I take it you aren’t still mad at me?”

     “I’m not who you think I am.” She said simply, and gazed into his eyes, expecting him to complete the thought.

     He didn’t even know where the idea came from, but he blurted it out all the same. If he was right, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing he’d seen that night, not by a long shot. If he was wrong, he figured it would be understandable, given the circumstances.

     “You’re me. A part of me. I read about this, I know this… College, psychology class, the guy with the mustache… Freud?”

     “Jung.” She corrected.

     “You’re one of them. The archetypes. Like in his dreams.” He stammered, his eyes growing wide with realization.

     “Very good!” she clapped her hands loudly in front of her and sprang to her feet, her hair changing back to its original fiery red. She put one hand on her hip, raised the other over her head in a flamboyant arc, and proclaimed dramatically, “I am the woman, the mother, the feminine side,” and bowed low, as if she had expected applause.

     A moment later she looked back up at him from her bow, “And I guess in your case, the girlfriend,” She added with a giggle, straightening back up. Her eyes shot toward the sky, and she cocked her head a little to the side in thought, jostling her hair and giving it a momentary appearance of being multicolored in the unrelenting sunlight. She shrugged and smiled, meeting his gaze again,“Gives the whole thing a Freudian twist though, eh? But, so long as we’re agreed we’re going off Jung’s book, you can call me ‘the Anima’.”

     His head spun for a moment, and he could feel his jaw dropping slightly. As parts of his more rational accountant mind began to cry “Bullshit!!”, he looked around at the strange world with two Suns and decided this might not be wholly impossible. He resigned to assuming it was true.

     “So where are we?”

     “That, I don’t know,” she said, looking over her shoulder out toward the two glowing Suns. Her hair turned a shade of verdant green, and then faded back to blue. She sighed.

     “How do you not know?” he asked, sidling up beside her.

     “To be blunt, I don’t know because you don’t know. Not yet. I feel like you’re on the cusp of that one, though,” she crooned, turning to face him, not even a foot away. She wrapped her arms around his waist and looked up into his eyes like a child. The whole thing made Parker Thomas uncomfortable.

     “What do you mean?”

     Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, he heard it.

     Ba-thump.

     A distant rumble, and yet he could feel the vibrations in his chest, like the beat of a massive drum. He froze, and looked around wildly after a moment. He saw nothing but serene, mountainous landscape.  

     “What the…”

     Before he could finish, he felt a blow to his chest so hard he thought for a split second that the Anima had somehow punched through his body. Before he could utter a cry of surprise, he was being dragged forward by his breastbone though the air toward the two Suns, which narrowed together and shrank as he hurtled into them. The lights blinded him, until he suddenly felt as though he couldn’t breathe and gasped for air.

     When he opened his eyes, he was back in his car. He could feel the cold embrace of metal all over him, mixed nauseatingly with the feeling of warm fluid passing over his skin. His eyes darted around frantically, and he began to panic. He could feel his heart doing summersaults in his chest.

     There were other sets of headlights, he could hear sirens, and he could barely make out sobbing next to him over the ringing in his ears. He looked to his right. Sadie was less than a foot from his face, her fist on his chest right where he’d been struck not a moment before. She began screaming something when she saw his eyes, but he couldn’t hear her. The gymnastics in his chest stopped, and darkness encroached on his vision once again.

     He saw the two orbs once more, and they slipped away from his eyes as though he’d just been dropped out of a mask. He fell until he felt his momentum disappear without any impact. He opened his eyes and realized he was lying on the hill again, this time in the spotlight cast by the orbs, surrounded by blackness.

     The Anima was sitting on her rock, somber and silent, elbow on her knee, palm under her chin. She and the hilltop seemed to have been drained of all color; it made Parker Thomas feel as though he’d landed in an old movie. She said nothing, and just stared at him gravely through locks of black hair, her eyes searing into the back of his.

     Ba-thump.

     The beat of the drum came again, shaking him to his core. He looked around frantically, expecting to see jagged mountains shadowed against the background. He saw nothing. It was just him, his grassy hilltop, and the Anima, without the company of so much as a single hint of color to mingle in with the shades of grey and white and black.

     “Am I... dead?” he asked meekly.

     The corner of her mouth seemed to quiver for a moment behind her hand, and then plunged into a pitiful frown. She looked as though she would cry for a moment, when the rumble came back.

     Ba---

     And then nothing. Parker Thomas felt cold sweat break out all over his body. 

     He noticed the Anima's eyes were glassy, shining in the harsh, white light. She squeezed them shut, but a tear escaped, rolling down her pallid cheek; it was as red as blood. 

     “You are now.”

     And then the ground dropped out.