All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 9: The Invisible Collar (Part One) ~ Carrie Cutforth

TRACKLIST:

DAVID’S POV:

The channel flipped, faded, changed to snow, images flew by while sensations and emotions assaulted me from all sides, all the while my soul clung to the devouring sensation burning on my lips.

One moment, I was at the foot of a hospital bed holding a baby’s bootie in between my fingers. It was crocheted and blue, and as I became conscious of the woman’s form under the sheets before me, the beeping of some machine that’s primary purpose was to beep, and an overwhelming wall of sadness that crushed me with a tense force in my chest…the static took over again and the next moment, I was driving a car on a long black paved road beside a desert landscape while sweat poured down my nutsack. I thought I heard a vulture overhead or was I just being delusional from this heat?… And then I closed my eyes for a moment only to open them inside a well-conditioned restaurant seated across from a pretty red-haired woman…and then…

I no longer know who I am…where I am, why I’m here. Do I exist? And if so…

The Channel changes again.

I was flipping through vinyl records in a milk crate before me as my vision began to crystalize, almost as if I’d finally gotten a good signal.

Must be the tinfoil hat! I mused to myself and resisted reaching up to my skull to feel for an aluminum cap.

Everything began to feel more and more tangible about me: the sensation of the plastic sleeves against my thumb…the warm air on my knuckles…the summer smell of roasted nuts, the juicy images of the covers of the albums flipping at my touch: Préliminaires, Touch Me, The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo De Silos…

Even my body felt a surge of energy, the human kind. I felt suddenly blood and flesh again and all those lovely tangible elements. And this body felt…more nourished than the last one I had fully resided in. It was almost as if I could feel the protein from my most recent meal coursing through my veins. But that hunger, burning on my lips…what was that fleeting feeling.  Where had I been last…? Why did I feel such a longing for...

My eye wandered from the cover of Dark Side of the Moon and cast a gaze on the small cartons of nuts and strawberries stacked beside. With a sign: “These fruity records will drive you nuts!”

I glanced back at the album cover in my hand. The colour spectrum refracting from the glass prism on a black background.

This constant jiggering between all these worlds, these realities, and seeing people who are people you know, but aren’t really the people you really know…well, what I’m saying is: déjà vu had recently felt like a default setting for me wherever I did wander.

But this was different. Have you ever felt a powerful sudden feeling of déjà vu? Like not in a “this feels familiar because is similar” but I feel this has happened before: this strange moment I’ve stumbled across that seems of the past and of the present at the same time?

Did I just ask that?

Again?

I looked around me…and here I was. The farmers market.

But that is silly. I always go to the farmers market around my house. This must be a reality close to my own, if not my own. I had been fooled before. And even in my own reality: a farmers market always feels like a farmers market. I’ve probably thumbed through this crate of records a dozen times. How many times had I held this vinyl before finally shelling out the $5 to pay for it?

But this one felt queer in its exactitude. This didn’t feel just like a similar reality.

More like...a similar moment in time to…