Out of the Ashes

Contest entry for

SURVEY

What a Character! : Official WDC Contest  (E) Create a memorable character using the given prompt for huge prizes! #1679316 by Writing.Com Support

Out of the Ashes


“I know. For now, this’ll be off the record. Got to say,” his younger brother, a reporter for The Mackinac Island Town Crier said, “to finally have my questions answered after all these years, it’s about time and I’m glad you are ready. You said you had some sort of quasi-religious’ experience that helped change your perspective. Just talk and I will not interrupt.”

“So, you want me to tell you about my great epiphany. Or, as grandpop used to call it, my ‘Come to Jesus moment.’ A monologue, if you will.” He took a deep breath. “Makes sense, I suppose, as great monologues always occur when a character comes to some momentous realization. It was quite a while after I moved to the island. Still longer, after the studio conceded to my wishes and let the entire world think I died in the accident.

“But, you see, there was no way I would let my finance get caught up in my dilemma. Me, the big-time heart-throb movie star, horribly disfigured by a fire after the freak accident in the hot air balloon. No one would have expected that strong updraft that sent us careening into the cliffs, or the sharp outcropping of rock to puncture the propane tanks causing them to explode in a fireball. Or that the basket would catch fire, the ropes burning through so that we crashed a hundred feet below on the sand. Jimmy, the handler, was badly injured as well. Burned over sixty percent of my body, including half my face, with a shattered leg and hip, there was nothing I could do, except try to pull myself out of the burning basket.

“The studio used its power (and in those days, they were like gods, controlling our destiny) to put out the word that I had died. Never again would I be on screen. No one would ever want to look at me and certainly, not in the romantic ‘leading man’ roles that were my forte. And Annabelle, my Annie-love, the very spotlight of my life, she would have stayed by my side, giving up everything for me: her career, her life, her dreams. I love her far too much to let her do that, to even let her have the choice between me and her life.

“Back when it first happened and I woke up, covered in bandages, with half my body in a cast, with the doctors telling me that there was little they could do to fix the horrible scarring that would occur, with their not being sure if I’d ever walk again; it was all I could do to control the helpless screaming that reverberated in my head. I just wanted to run away and hide from everyone, including myself.

“Helpless. I felt helpless and useless. I watched my funeral on the television. I saw Annie, her grief etched into the features I so love, saw her collapse by my closed coffin, saw her tears streaming. Yet, I knew I was doing the right thing by her, for her. I needed her so much. She needed to go on with her life, and, eventually, she did.

“I returned, here, to my island, my safe haven. I took grandmother’s maiden name and the only one who’s known any of this was you, and you were sworn to absolute secrecy. I bought a small house overlooking the Straights of Mackinaw. I focused on my writing. There’s an active theatre troupe here and they liked my scribblings. Long before the Phantom debuted his famous face mask, I wore one similar. No one ever made the connection to who I used to be.

“Christopher Reeve and I met and became something akin to friends while he was filming Somewhere in Time. He’d stay occasionally in one of the B&Bs nearby. We’d see each other while out walking and he would slow down to match my hobbled gait: my leg, as you know, never did heal correctly. He may have had an idea about me, but was far too much of a gentleman to ever even comment. When he was injured in 1995, I was devastated: Superman couldn’t be paralyzed. My mind warped back to my accident and I was despondent for a long while afterwards. He had it so much worse than I, and he handled it far better than I ever could. I was not superman. Once again, I basically gave up.

“I began drinking, wrapping my brain in a safe, gauzy blur of alcohol and pain medications. I would walk, with my cane supporting my leg, along the cliffs and contemplate just completing the fall this time around. One day, when the vision of just ending it all was forcibly pulling me to the cliff’s edge, a young woman asked me to sit and talk with her a while. Her name, she said, was Jinn.“

“’How could you just give up when there is still much you need to do?’ she asked me. I just looked at her. What possibly was there left for me to do? I wear a mask so that I can hide the monster I’ve become. I hide under an assumed name to stay in character, to keep the illusion that I have something of a life.”

“Do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘Frenchie, you need to come back from the dead. You need to find Annabelle and you need to write the play you were born to write.’”

“I couldn’t believe it. ‘How do you know who I am?’ I asked her. She smiled a bemused little smile and said that she knew everything about me.“

“‘How can you be so selfish?’ she asked. Selfish? Me? I’d given up everything! She merely shook her head at me. ‘You never even gave Annabelle a chance to be there and still be herself. You killed a vital part of her. What right did you have to do that to her?’

“I walked away from the edge that day. Yet any time I went in that direction, there she was. ‘Have you thought about what I said?’ she’d ask me. Did I want to know more about Annabelle’s life? Did I have any interest in knowing what she was going through? Of course I did. How could I not?”

“I’d go outside and Jinn would be waiting for me. She was wherever I was. She was even in my dreams, for God’s sake."

“I wrote this, during that time:

A fractal of who I was,
a splintered shard from the mirror
I refused to look into. Shattered
heart and mind, forgetting
it was Annabelle
who was my glue.

My ever-present muse insists
it is I who am Annabelle’s glue,
that we need to stick together
to make the pieces fit.

I was never any good at puzzles.

“Never finished the poem, was afraid to perhaps. How could I fix anyone? ‘Not fix,’ Jinn insisted, ‘just be there.’ Come back to life? I couldn’t. That wasn’t me anymore. Not my life. I was so angry at Jinn. She’d made me think, want, desire all that was forbidden me now. Made me want everything I’d lost that day. No one could want me. I didn’t want me. Annabelle certainly didn’t need me. I didn’t think I could bear to see the pity or the anger I’d see in her eyes. Assuming, that is, that she could even look at me. The people here, they don’t know me any other way. They simply see a scarred old man.

“One night, after the season was over, when all the tourists were gone, when the island had closed its shutters and faded, like Brigadoon, into another winter, I decided that if I couldn’t go near the cliffs, then me and Johnnie Walker would go screaming into the night with all the pills I had left. You’ll think me crazy, that I’m an old coot who’s off his rocker, but Jinn simply appeared. That was when I learned that she wasn’t just a girl on the island. but that she’d died in a parachute accident, but wasn’t yet ‘totally free to go beyond the pale,’ as she put it.

“She, in my dream, or alcoholic haze, asked me if I even believed in Heaven or God or anything. ‘Don’t you realize you survived for a reason?’ she asked me. Who was I to take God’s gift and throw it away? I remember screaming at her, ‘What gift? Living like this is a gift?’”

“Jinn screamed right back at me that I was squandering everything, that I’d never even tried to figure out why I lived and that it was about damned time I did. ‘God has a purpose for you,’ she told me, adding that I’d only been half alive the past thirty years, that Annabelle, too, was only half alive. That the man Annabelle knew and loved had more guts than that. I didn’t believe her. I told her that she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.”

Standing, the elderly man grasped his cane in gnarled fingers and thumped it on the worn wooden floor. “This is where it gets crazy. She took my hand and suddenly, I was wearing the tux I’d worn that day in the hot air balloon. The ring I’d planned to give Annie was there, in the vest pocket. We were in Annie’s living room. Annabelle was passed out in her chair, with her little dog frantically trying to awaken her. That same embroidered Queen Anne chair we’d bought from an antique store together all those years ago. Then Jinn and I were on a street watching as Annabelle’s car careened out of control and went into a ditch. It was like a series of freeze-frame camera shots. A moment later, as I tried to get to her car, we were in a room, and Annabelle was talking to a small group of people, telling them she was seventeen days sober.

“She was talking about me, how she, all these years later, loved me, missed me, needed me, but that I was dead and she couldn’t accept that. She’d never seen me dead and never felt that I was dead, that she was certain that she’d have felt me dying, and she hadn’t. She’d never been the same since. Even though she’d gone on and acted in numerous roles and been quite the critical success. Or she had been until her drinking had cost her a few roles and the studios lost interest in her. She said she still missed me every day, and she missed her dog and was looking forward to going home, even though she knew staying sober would be the hardest thing she ever did.”

“Then I was home and Jinn was telling me that I needed to sober up, and stay that way. For me and for Annabelle. Then, after I was sober for three years, I should go and find Annabelle.

“When I awakened the next morning, I was awake in more ways than one. I was wearing the tux; it hadn’t been some alcohol-induced figment of my imagination. Ring and all, it’s in the closet in my room. Someway, somehow, it actually happened. Scared the crap out of me, I tell you. Haven’t had a drink since. I wanted to, God knows I wanted to over and over again, but I haven’t. Strangest part is, what I saw with Annabelle? That only happened about thirteen months ago. Now I need to figure out how to come back from the dead without her hating me for it. I’m not sure how to go about that yet. But, with God’s help, I will come up with a plan.”

“Thanks for finally sharing this. I’ll never forget the look on your face when you received your three-year coin. I’m so proud of you. Maybe I can help you with Annabelle. Perhaps I’ll write an article about her…?”


1999 words