Chapter Text
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died
Snowstorms weren’t that much of a singularity in Colorado.
There wasn’t a year of his life in which Finn couldn’t recall the memory of his porch whitened by a cold blanket.
Wind rammed and roared, snowflakes cut skin like blades and breathing alone could cost you an unsustainable amount of endurance.
But there were also cancelled school days, hot cocoa full of lumps, because Gwen always refused to use the sieve for the store-bought mix.
And, at times, since Rocky Flats™ wasn’t that much concerned about its workers’ safety, unlimited tv time and all-night talks.
The little kid he once was loved to cold-burn his fingers while making snowmen with the eager help of an even smaller Gwen.
He could have confidentially said it was his second favorite activity ever – first was, obviously, stargazing.
When was the last time I did that?
When was the last time he had relished something?
When was the last time something did not bother him to the guts?
When was the last time he and Gwen had a moment together?
A torpid drag out of his joint and the rampant voice of his sister echoed in his hazy head.
Their mother had talked to her.
Finn had been the one to witness her worst episodes, the one to whom she had confessed, tears-burned cheeks and mouth quivering, that the voices were starting to be louder, crueler, graver.
Finn had been the last to held her hand, a ‘you too, mommy’ mumbled sleepily and her vacant blue eyes as the last image of the kind spirit she was.
Finn had been harassed by fucking electro-mechanical bells for four years, with murdered wives and children crying for help, spouting shards of lives Finn had failed to catch.
Finn had been the one to-
Yet, their mother had decided that Gwen was the one worthy of the call.
Not really that surprising, an ugly voice viperously spat in his head.
It’s not like you didn’t know Gwen has always been their favorite.
Gwen has always been everyone’s favorite.
She is strong.
She is pure.
She is anything you will never be.
Finn filled his lungs with another puff, the darkness blurring into the edgeless shape of unreality.
Snowstorms weren’t that much of a singularity in Colorado.
This snowstorm, however, felt pretty much anomalous.
He wasn’t new to smoking weed right in the middle of bad weather: he was very much aware of both the factual danger of hypothermia and how much of a pathetic junkie he looked.
But he couldn’t help it.
Really.
He had tried, unremittingly.
For years, now.
But every try had always resulted in a tragic, deeper relapse.
Sometimes it was due to a nightmare – a memory –, sometimes a kid at school who couldn't help but run his mouth and asking, assuming, belittling…
Most of the time though, darkness alone was enough.
In the darkness, sounds and splinters of memories pulsated heavier.
He could see every moment, hear every throaty gasp.
Clenched in his hands, a black chord he pulled and pulled again.
And heavy on his shoulder, embers of a live were being doused.
The last, endeavored breaths he himself had stemmed.
‘Describe it with your words kid: you won’t be charged for it. You were defending yourself’.
Lies.
It didn’t help that he kept hearing phones ringing either.
Whether they were the unsolvable plea of a stranger or the memories of a life he didn’t felt his anymore, the shrilling trill corroded him like seawater with copper.
He often found himself seeking a shield in his Walkman.
He kept his ears covered with the soft pads of the headphones fundamentally every time he wasn’t showering – untrue: sometimes, he did shower with the Walkman blasting some Steve Miller Band hit – and, since last July, he had consumed the ludicrous amount fourteen tapes.
On his brightest days, he was so stoned out he couldn’t even set apart the songs from one another: every tune, every melody sank into the next, overpowering the hammered bells of the phones’ ringtones.
Just like that, the days had been slipping away, with his ears whistling because of the constant noise, with his brain slowing down with every drag of his funny cigs, with the whole school creepered out by his new form.
With Gwen and his father-his now non-drinker father, reassuring him that it was all fine, all normal – and fucking Christ, how much he hated that word – and that-
That Johnathan Finney Blake definitely didn’t die in that fucking basement the very same day he found himself on that filthy, rotting mattress.
With strained smiles and pitched voices, with pitiful glares and whispered words of compassion, any person around him had tried to lullaby him into a distorted reality of edulcorate bullshits and empty reassurances.
As if Finn couldn’t read them.
As if he was just a poor kid scared of the monster in the closet, not the one who had to face it and kill it.
As if he was a normal, scared kid.
That Walkman really had been the greatest gift he was ever given.
‘Oh, what’s there, Funny Finney? Seems like NASA had a spare rocket to share!’
Smoke slithered in his throat once again.
The branches of the tress were arched, wooden arms forced in a twist.
No howls above the wind’s, the storm had yet to set its rhythm.
A muted hum, shallow as the trembling membrane of a radio’s speaker cone, heaved shivers all over his skin.
The snowstorm wasn’t right.
Finn locked his gaze on the pitch black uncertain, not even sure he could distinguish sky from earth, so interchangeable they were in shade and dispersion.
On the other side, the lights outside the cabins were unable to beam more than a couple of feet of pure, white, frozen soil.
A single spotlight shone higher, flickering a feeble amber in the dark of the night.
The cross pierced on the church’s roof seemed close to be extirpated from its steady, tiled nest.
The wooden insides of the chapel were probably reverberating with wind’s whistles, just like the cabin he was supposed to be resting in.
Finn caught a single snowflake alight on his annular finger.
The little, wet path it left while melting sparkled in the fashion of a comet’s tail.
Like a chrysalis, the night was still, yet shifting.
It’s the seventh J today, you fucktard: soon, you’ll hear colors!
Of course, it could all have been just the sorry work of his paranoid, weed-fucked brain.
It probably was.
Most certainly.
It was always his brain, wasn’t it?
The steps behind him.
The breaths warming his ears.
The feather touches.
Him.
Nothing of that was more than a shadow show.
Finn moistened his lips with his tongue.
Tightly held in his fingers, the joint was now burnt past its half.
He let his eyes rest on the orange, flamed tip.
Then, it happened.
The old telephone booth, totemic in its immobility in the midst of the storm, from a mere play of refraction in the darkness, suddenly vibrated with a white, neon light.
The broken phone was ringing.
Clangorous, louder than the wind, scarier than the dark.
Fuck!
Fuck!
Fuck!
FUCK!
No anomaly was inherence of the snowstorm: it just happened to be the unnerving accompaniment to one of those spaces he often fell – and felt – intertwined with.
Somewhere right on the line.
A liminal lapse.
Just like the-
It grew louder, spikier:
It couldn’t have been just Finn’s befogged brain.
He barely registered the half consumed joint muffled near his feet, as he ambulated towards that nightmarish booth.
The wind grew heavier with each step, the ringing tone was deafening him.
It was like some…thing was pushing him away, while, simultaneously, pied-pipering him forward.
A treat and a scare.
A handsome smile and a foxish grin.
Fuck it!
Whatever was waiting for him to pick up, Finn was prepared to face it.
He truly was.
He needed to be.
But just when he was a few steps away from the booth, everything went shut.
His eyes widened, as he stopped his parody of a fierce walk.
The worn soles of his boots got entrapped the snow.
The night was still again.
The interstitial gap apparently closed.
What the fuck?
Finn heaved a deep, throaty sigh.
In his mouth, sudden as a bolt, the pasty taste of loam grew heavier and setter.
The smoke of his abandoned joint was still running to reach his lungs.
That fucking weed couldn’t have been that powerful, no: he had eaten cherry pies far more befuddling than that sort of…what? Dried oregano?
The doubt, however, rose, half smitten half relived.
Could he really have crushed his own brain to the point of hallucinating the very same things he was trying to drub away?
If so, I’m truly fucked!
Christ, I’m truly fucked!
Finn awaited, arms flexed in front of him, hands squeezed into fists.
Laughable he was.
Standing still on stance, in the deep dark of a snowstorm.
Guarding up like he could’ve truly defended himself with fists and kicks.
The despicable ersatz of fearlessness pumping his blood.
Dark and ringing-less, the night posed heedless of him.
His eyes were starting to hurt from staring so strenuously at the booth, strained in a failed attempt to see if there was something or someone else.
But the booth remained enveloped in the stormy night, lightless and soundless.
Something still wasn’t fucking right.
But the phone dwelled dead.
It was broken, after all.
Finn gulped a burning lump.
His eyes were stinging.
A well-known sentiment snapped in.
I’m a stupid, fucked out dopehead!
Stupid, stupid fag!
Of all the lurid places in this shitty bible thumpers’ camp, did I really need to park my spastic ass right in front of that fucking booth?
What the hell am I even doing out there?!
He didn’t reach that shithole of a camp just so he could break every surviving rule he imposed himself, fuck no.
He was there to check on Gwen, for fuck’s sake!
To look after her.
To look after her and to make sure Ernesto Arellano kept his pants up and closed.
He would have done better to remember it from the beginning.
To pretend – at least – that he still was his older brother.
That he was still able to look after his little Gwennie.
Gwennie.
Sweet, zesty, pixie cut Gwennie.
The brightest person Finn had ever met.
The most courageous, the most intelligent.
One had to be truly rotten to his core to think ill of her, to burden her with a guilt that wasn’t hers.
And, maybe, Finn was.
Maybe, he was a spoiled one.
Some pest that would have been better to put down.
That’s what scare you the most, no?
That, maybe, the line didn’t end where phones’ ring could be heard.
That, maybe, it started right from there.
His body tensed.
A whistle in his ears alarmed him: his thoughts had been left unguarded, his mind free to run wild.
He shouldn't have let that happen.
Fuck, he had to actively prevent it from happening!
Abruptly, the awareness of a choice to be made became clear.
There was nothing out there.
Nothing to see.
Nothing to hear.
Either he stayed out, burning his eighth joint of the day, pathetically trying to obliviate his brain, or he tried to be a halfway decent brother and go make sure everything was okay with Gwen.
That the hours seated in the car were not that bad for her neck.
That being in the place she had dreamed of was not as unsetting as Finn imagined it to be.
I should really check on her.
What’re they gon’ do? I’m her damn brother!
He turned his back to the booth.
The strange force that had tried to move him, like a lodestone with a compass, seemed to have run out.
Nothing was holding him.
Nothing was calling him.
One step.
Two steps.
Three steps.
The black phone, as broken as it was, clattered once again.
Are you fucking kidding me?
This time, Finn run.
He reached for the glass door with a heartfelt rush, crushing it open so roughly he half expected them to shatter.
The force was back again, fiercer in its grip, harsher in its shove.
Finn tried to battle it.
As he stretched his right palm open, he felt his hand going through the wall of hyper compressed matter, millions of strings clenched all over his phalanges.
But he didn’t back up.
A quivering sensation on his fingertips soared, as the saffron light of dial reflected on his nails.
He was close, oh-so-close to answer it.
But he never got to pick up receiver.
Finn had grown quite accustomed to nightmares.
They were the closest thing to a staple point he ever got.
Not in a safe-haven-lighthouse-in-the-night type of way, but rather in a circumstantial-normalcy way, an ordinary aspect of his rather unusual existence.
Even before, nightmares were all that awaited him in his sleep.
He had envisioned whatever was goreish, grotesques, rancid.
To be buried alive or to be burned alive.
To be dismembered by savage dogs, by his bullies, by his father.
To be chased by lions, by clowns, by those men down the street that were so eager to hit any man that was far too feminine for his own good.
To be trapped on a dentist’s chair, to be cursed with a never-ending roller coaster ride.
To fall.
Fall from a bridge, from a ceiling, from places he only ever saw through inked paper.
Those, somehow, were always the most merciful.
He never felt pain, when his body was free falling.
Maybe, it was because he never had experienced something that his own, twisted, devilish brain could have sampled to recreate the feel, unlike the other burns and burdens.
The falling sensation was liberating, somehow.
Sublime in its terrorizing release.
An end that seemed awfully more lenient than whatever could have been awaiting Finn outside his comforters.
In the vein of how it happened in those nightmares, he felt his body weightlessly cut through the nothingness, like an acorn in the last notes of autumn.
The booth’s pavement faded in the blink of an eye.
The neon light went out.
The ringing still persisted in his ears.
Finn fell down.