NoNoNanette

Alrighty. This is a short story I wrote for my Creative Writing class. I got a good grade on it, and I'd like to think it's good, but I'd like a little more input on it. To explain a little bit, one of the main characters, Oredalay, is actually an imaginary friend I had when I was little so...I thought that added an interesting twist there. Lemme know



When asked to recite a story, I only spoke of dreams. Dreams of people and places that have never existed outside of my own subconscious. Dreams of a time that never was and never will be. When asked to recite a story, I spoke of hopes beyond the grip of the conscious mind; ones that have forever altered my way of thinking and shall perhaps do the same for others or no one at all. And as I begin to spin my tale, I can feel each character burning and twisting to get out:
Not long ago, on a night such as this, I awoke with a start to find myself only laying in the comforts of my own room. None of the speckled walls had changed; pictures still hung in uniform lines like soldiers of the imagination, but I suddenly felt naked. An uncomfortable nudity that seemed to stem from the inside and radiate out. Clothing was still binding my skin, but something within was amiss. Stagnant air held my breath captive as I began to clutch for anything solid. My very essence had been drained out of me, and suddenly, I felt like pulp-less orange juice: no substance. To test my theory, I began to think of the wildest creature my tempered imagination could concoct. As I did, I felt a presence in the room with me. A second set of lungs and eyes met mine as I glanced about.
“Oredalay is here now. He knows not where here is, but this is where he finds himself.” The strange man spoke with the whisper of the soft bristles of a finely made brush.
“How are you here if you don’t know where you are?” I inquire.
“Oredalay knows not. One moment he was enjoying the delightful banter of good company, and the next, he is standing before a strange woman.” He cocked his head to one side, as if altering his view would help him to better grasp the situation at hand.
This was not the creature my conscious had envisioned, but rather a great frightened giant. His bright eyes are the only things upon the span of his body that stand out; the rest fades away into a night of skin, as though lacquered on. The faint glimmer of pearly teeth is apparent when words escape him, but his lips are soon lost to the empty nothing after. His willowy fingers inch their way over one of the spindles of my bed frame, and it becomes apparent that he too is attempting to understand me. Me, with my rat’s nest hair and sleeping face.
“Well now that you’re here, there’s no point in your leaving now is there?” I beam. He emulates the gesture.
“Oredalay has never seen a creature such as this before. May he grace you?” His hand reached for my face. I became stone so as not to frighten him.
Print-less digits sowed their way across my epidermis, his expression responding with each movement. Charcoal flesh met ashen in a waltz of fascination. I watch those auroral azure eyes of his as he finishes his examination. They are shaking with excitement and wonder.
“Oredalay likes this lady. She has a favorable disposition. Come with Oredalay and help him find his way.” I nod in agreement, and thus we set off into the mist in search of Oredalay’s home.
As I pause to lock the front door, Oredalay raises an eyebrow in interest. I quickly explain to him that it is to keep intruders out. This only continues to confuse him more, and thusly I link my arm in his and stroll onwards instead. Down the pebbled walkway to my weathered mailbox, I notice a small dirt path veering into a dense wood. It hadn’t been there this morning, but rather than agonize over this small fact, I simply head in its direction.
A field of dreams lay out above us; a thousand twinkling eyes blink in succession. They begin to twitch and move as if alive somehow, a faint laughter carries in the wind. As we wander down a small dirt path leading from my stately front door, the sky above seems to come closer and closer, the trees disappearing behind us altogether at one point. The giggling gets louder until we are faced with them: the children of the night, the starchildren. Oredalay smiles to himself, as if the situation is completely familiar to him. Never once does he look down at me from his position two feet up.
“Who is she?” A faint hum on a breeze asks.
“I’ve seen her before,” another answers.
I am taken with their innocence. As I gaze about at their flaming faces, I’m stricken with how little the rest of the world has affected them. They are but impartial observers to the land below, unmoving, untainted, and beaming with liveliness.
“Oredalay loves the starchildren. He often sits and talks to them.” His eyes set upwards towards the heavens.
“Where did they come from?”
“Oredalay believes they have been here since time was born. They may look like children, but they are older than you or Oredalay.”
“If only we could all be like them.”
“Oredalay does not understand. You are not?” One of his onyx eyebrows rises in astonishment.
“I am, but the people around me are not. They’re very stubborn and selfish, and above all, destructive.”
“Oredalay supposes that he will never understand. It is impossible to teach a fish to fly or to even understand the wind.” He lovingly admires the stars for one last time.
The starchilden wave as we travel onwards towards Oredalay’s home. I haven’t a clue where we are going, but somehow Oredalay seems to have an innate sense of direction, as if the way is buried deep within the recesses of his heart.
We come to a fork in our path. Mr. Frost addressed this problem once. On the one side there was a well-lit path with streams of smiling earth beckoning us forth with promises of an easy and safe passage. Through the other lay dissolution and the repugnant scent of death in the air; bomb shells could be seen detonating from our distance, screams of pain following. Like Mr. Frost, Oredalay and I turned ourselves towards that road less traveled, and once started, I felt my heart sink in my chest. I glanced upwards at him for the millionth time in our journey, seeing not his cheery face glowing down at me, but rather one replaced with fear. He reaches for my hand and I didn’t shy away. Everything along this parched path was deceased or in the process; it was as if all the flora and fauna were born already dead. The sky rains down metal and destruction.
“Where’s my baby?” A desperate woman clutched at my side, appearing out of nowhere.
“I…I don’t know.” I manage to stutter.
“Tell me! Tell me where he is!” Her wan face was contorted with worry. “They got him didn’t they? They…they killed my baby…didn’t they?”
Her hands are frail and shaking like paper in the wind. Her dark complexion is spotted with moisture from hours of crying out to no one. My entire body wants to help this woman in any way that it can, to lend a hand, a shoulder, or perhaps just a few words, but alas, nothing comes to me. I stand motionless, stunned with the gravity of the situation, like a deer in headlights. Black, soul-less eyes turn upward, projecting nothing to me but their struggle for understanding.
“Was it you? Were…were you the one who killed him?” The empty portals glowed red with rage.
“No! I didn’t kill anyone!” I cry, seeing the impending violence that was about to ensue.
Oredalay reaches a hand down to her and lightly touches the wind-whipped hair atop her beleaguered head. Her fears are temporarily calmed as she tilts back into a sitting position in the dirt below.
“I just want my baby…” She kept repeating over and over until finally she once more faded away into the nothing.
My body refuses to budge from its spot on that blood-rich ground. I can still see the woman’s nothing eyes burned into the back of my eyelids, her memory forever engrained in me. Oredalay once again clasps my hand, this time soothing a digit over the clammy length of my palm.
“Oredalay does not know of such pain. He wishes that he never had to, but he knows this to be the only way home.” I could hear my own fright immerging through his voice. For him I would be strong and stay the course.

Great mountains lined the horizon with brilliant colors of red and blue, white speckles interlaced between where the light would hit them just right. As we approach them, I observe that they were not mountains of a natural formation, but rather the abandoned bodies of soldiers who died for a seemingly meaningless cause, their corpses left to rot by their comrades. The heavy stench of decaying flesh filled the early morning sky with a sense of doubt. Where were we going? Why bother at all? Oredalay pulls me towards the Purgatory that lay below at our feet. One spindled finger points to the truth: the woman from the clearing lay before us, her face soaked in blood, and yet it was not her. A masculine nose meets her whispering lips in an embrace of familiar flesh, and suddenly I realized who this was: her son. The Unknown Soldier. Oredalay and I paused for a moment to mourn his passing. Our tears form a river that begins to twist down the side of this manmade mountain of sorrow and loathing; the blood from the dead men’s bodies soon washes away, leaving them clean and innocent, as if they had only been sleeping
Throughout the course of my life, I have been witness to a great many limbering ape, but none would compare with the one that Oredalay and I were about to encounter. He sat atop a throne of limbs, torn from the bodies of unidentifiable creatures, the fingers of which were all formed into perfect fists. He hunches over his realm, half asleep, half waiting. His crimson stained fur clings to his figure like a child to its mother’s breast, hoping perchance the sun might someday grace it once again. Untrimmed claws grow into grooves and angles unimaginable by the human mind. A pool of foamy saliva found itself at the corner of his gaping mouth, oozed from the dark reaches of his foul mouth. He stirs as Oredalay and I approach.
“Have you come to join my forces?” He enquires, wiping the spit from his leathery lips.
“Are these your forces that lay behind us in mounds of ruin?” I shout.
“They died heroes. Martyrs for their cause,” he hisses. “They fought the enemy with great valor, and have sadly been stricken down.”
“What cause is great enough to account for such great loss of life?” I probe for reason in this nonsensical ape’s logic.
“Why…mine of course; my war against the enemy. There will be others willing to die for me.”
“What do you wish to gain, and from whom?”
“Freedom, my dear girl, is what I wish to gain.” He soothes a few cow licked hairs down around his face.
“There are thousands of men back there, all of them dead, and left to rot. You’re saying they died for your freedom?”
“No, no, no. Not just my freedom, everyone’s!” He raises his arms to the heavens and lets out a victorious roar.
“How can it be everyone’s freedom if everyone else is dead?”
The great ape didn’t seem to mind this fact, and thus kept right on with his fictitious promises of a better tomorrow. Oredalay stood silent, clenching my hand tight. I could feel his anguish blistering within. His hand grew to a boil. I urged him forward along the path, past this power-mad humanoid.
“Come now, Oredalay. There’s nothing we can do. If we hurt him, we’re only as bad as he is.”
“Oredalay has never felt this…this anger before. This is a foreign feeling for him,” he managed to say through gritted teeth.
“There aren’t people like him where you’re from?” The thought intrigues me.
“Oredalay does not believe so. Where he is from, everyone lives in harmony and peace. No one kills. No one hates. They just co-exist.”
“I’d like to see that.” I grin to myself as my own imagination tries to grasp the idea.
“Oredalay will show you, then.” His grip loosens around my knuckles, and I can see his facial features relax, though it is apparent this scene will forever scar him.With that, we leave the disillusioned monkey to reign over his army of bloodless subordinates. He is still muttering to himself as he finally falls out of sight.
The sun is finally up, waken from a sound rest. It shakes itself to life and dusts the sleep from its eyes. It greets us as we reach the top of the hill leading to Oredalay’s valley. Water can be heard in some far off corner, trickling away the seconds in the lucid daylight hours. We walk into the horizon and over the grassy knoll beyond which lay Oredalay’s home.
Painted bodies laced between tree and bush, talking, smiling, living. Children chased after one another in a game of tag. Even nature itself seemed at peace as bunches of flowers grow in thick clusters about the land. The air seems purer here; my lungs immediately take to it.
“Oredalay missed his home. He missed his friends and family.” A tear forms in the corner of his eye. “He thanks you for helping him.”
One elongated index finger floats up from its position at Oredalay’s side. A single lithe phalange presses itself against my forehead leaving a small indigo mark in its wake.
“Oredalay hopes you won’t forget him.”
“No worries,” I say as I gape up at him for the last time.
He loosens his grip on my hand, and walks downwards towards a womanly figure engulfed in shadow. His world started to fade away, the sounds of Eden still ringing in my ears. I soon find myself back in my own room, devoid now of any life outside of my own. And yet I still feel Oredalay’s presence; he was somewhere deep within me, replacing the once empty feeling I had experienced at the beginning of our journey, for he had been my own heart all along.
When asked to recite a story, I spoke of dreams. I spoke of a wish for tomorrow; I spoke of a tranquility that hopefully shall come to fruition, but for now, it is only a dream…

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~You are the hippest of cats~
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