Nathan put his hand on Ella’s shoulder and spun her body around towards his. “Ella, you have to calm down. What’s wrong? Just tell me what’s…”
Their eyes met and now he realized what seemed so strange about them on the couch. Ella’s gaze was fixed on his face, but her pupils were completed dilated – huge black discs with just a tiny ring of hazel around the outside. Nathan recoiled slightly at the sight. Both her hands were clenched tightly into fists, pressed close to her chest, knuckles white.
“Mom knew, Nathan, and now you know and he’s going to come. But I see now that you find her. You find her, you find her, but I can’t see…” She paused, gasping for air, as if she had ran down and back up her twisting stairwell.
“Ella, your eyes…” Nathan faltered for words. “Please, I don’t understand. Did you…did you do some kind of drugs? Just slow down and talk to me.”
He awkwardly held her, not knowing how close he should be. It was their first hug.
“You finally find her,” she breathed into his chest. He looked down at her face to see her pupils begin to contract, the hazel of her eyes expanding until the black was just a pin point in the middle of a sea of gray and green. She looked down at her hands as if they didn’t belong to her, still clenched tightly against her chest between them, still heaving as if she had ran a mile.
Krisis, Book 1
Issue #1: Girl Disappearing
Chapter Two: Unintended
“And you let her stay there by herself?”
Danny regarded Nathan incredulously and sunk his teeth deep into the skin of a bright red apple, snapping another crunchy mouthful out of the fruit.
“You don’t know how Ella gets. She’s so stubborn.” Nathan felt exasperated just thinking about it. “She insisted she was just freaking out about me saying Martina’s name, and the potatoes, and the potatoes maybe not being as good as Martina’s potatoes, or possibly being better than Martina’s potatoes, and not knowing which would be worse.”
Danny spoke through his mouthful of apple, “v’at es ucked up, ‘an.”
Nathan sat across an orange Formica-topped table from Danny in the bustling cafeteria at Khep Right Industrial’s Philadelphia campus.
The cafeteria was located in Nathan’s building, the taller of the two on campus. It was a cavernous, multi-level space furnished in an unfortunate pastiche of kitschy retro diner and corporate industrial. The result was something like eating dinner in a subway car – lots of cheerful, brightly colored plastic surfaces complemented by stainless steel. Utterly cacophonous and all very easy to hose down.
That was Khep Right Industrial to a tee: efficient, functional, and maybe slightly discomforting.
Danny finished chewing his bite of apple and set the fruit down on his plastic tray, reaching for a carton of milk. “Do you believe her?” Danny asked before taking a chug of his milk. “About the potato business, I mean.”
“I don’t know, Danny. It was scary. She was scary. It didn’t seem like she was in control of what she was doing or saying. One minute she was speaking gibberish, the next minute she was fine, munching on pizza.”
“And you don’t think she’s on drugs?” Danny asked, before taking another chug from his milk carton.
Nathan sighed. “I did think that, at first. Now I’m not sure. I mean, I went to college, I’ve seen people on just about everything. Nutmeg, even. But the whole episode only lasted for a minute or two, and I had been with her for a little while at that point. I guess she could have taken something before I got there…”
Nathan’s rambling was interrupted by Danny tossing his now-empty milk carton onto the table.
“You know what I think?”
“No, but I’m about to.” [Read more…] about Krisis, Issue #1, Chapter Two: Unintended