By Cybertron1986
In the summer of 1987, U2's number one song, "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," was bumped down by Madonna's "Who's That Girl," on the pop charts.
Coincidentally, these two songs complemented one boy's fate to a confusing soon-to-be journey with a pre-selected soundtrack to a movie nobody would ever see. The mystery of the Universe already took hold of him, leading him down a path few could ever explain with clarity.
Quite possibly, the Universe conspired to communicate with him through one specific event: a haunting, which only the unique mind of Eu El not only accepted but also understood in a way that "normal" people would have difficulty holding their lunch in if they knew what was waiting for them after their time on earth expired.
Throughout centuries the mystery of life and death have left many unanswered questions. Yet, unknowingly, the truth subtly reveals itself in some form or another. Sometimes, these "signs" would appear clearer when, as the saying goes, "we stop to smell the flowers."
And, Eu El loved the smell of flowers.
Many forgettable and unforgettable childhood memories constantly ran through Eu El's thoughts. However, no memory would be as defining as one particular event which he would soon face. In fact, even then, if anyone understood what the Universe was trying to tell him, no living soul with a conscience would see this as a blessing nor opportunity for any child.
If, however, there were to be a young adolescent capable of competing with the supernatural, then fate could not have chosen a more suitable warrior than Eu El, a boy with a name his father unintentionally gave him, and nobody could pronounce correctly the first time.
Unscripted, the second syllable is similar to a fictional super hero, whose "El" stood for hope in a faraway planet destroyed by a solar explosion.
Evoked by a simple question that had yet to be asked, this boy's life would soon be faced with an uncontrollable, frightful anomaly that would haunt him behind almost every dark corner for the remainder of his life, lingering from a faraway place that few ever visited. More so, both the believers and non-believers alike would not be willing to accept what they discovered in those dark corners which stood out in clear sight. Even when whatever was discovered there stared back with glowing red eyes, the truth of their existence was hidden well behind the walls of denial.
Their presence would never be as convincing as this story; true to every aspect written from a mind conditioned by nature than by imagination.
In one such dark corner, Eu El patiently stays out of his father's sight. Quietly, he waits for that moment he could get his father's attention without interrupting his evening watching the latest releases on HBO.
Too young to understand the life of a lifelong laborer, a life his father has known since the 1950s working in a bakery somewhere in Manila, Philippines, Eu El secretly longed for a time that would never come in which he could play catch with his Dad.
He had no idea the hours of his dad's overtime working at the Post Office were funding the dreams of El's immigrant relatives rather than his aspirations of one day becoming an athlete, or owning a comic book business.
"Dad, can I play baseball? My friends are all on a team," El recalls asking his father in the fifth grade.
His Dad's response usually went something like this...
"No! You're going to fail! Don't waste my time!"
El's respect to his father was as relevant as his existence: both went unnoticed.
At the finale of each T.V. show, his dad committed to either these two things:
He either took a bathroom break, or he grabbed a chilled drink from the poorly lighted, outdated refrigerator before returning to dabble with the channel changer for the remainder of the evening, before falling asleep on his new Lazy Boy chair.
The good news was satellite t.v. had yet to be available to the public for another five years. Any sooner, the distraction of advancing technology may had convinced El's dad that he never had a middle born child.
The thought of beginning freshman year in high school made El's last summer as a kid feel as if it was doomed to end like some kind of disastrous movie without resolution, a struggling disappointment in which his bond with his father hardly was weakly developing since his birth. He prepared a list of questions for his dad that sounded more like a bucket list written in question form.
Can you take me fishing, Dad? (And, I don't mean to literally take me to the lake in the morning, and dump me there alone until you finish watching the NBA playoff game against the Lakers).
Mom said you played catcher in high school. Can you teach me how to throw a baseball?
Dad, the last movie we watched together was "Raiders of the Lost Ark." I was in the second grade. Will we ever watch a movie together again?
But, there seemed to be more pressing questions. These questions, harbored from worry, distracted him from all his other listed questions. If no effort was made to seek answers for himself, then these questions would linger like an invisible phantom weighing down his soul until his sanity broke.
Like a candle that was moments away from burning the last length of its wick, the exhaustion of his quest for his father's acknowledgement simmered down to whatever radiance of innocence Eu El had left in his thirteen year old spirit.
"Dad, why'd you give the Christmas present mom bought me in the first grade to my cousin?"
"Dad, why don't you ever celebrate my birthday?"
"Why did you break all of mom's plants the other week?"
His mom's voice coincidently interrupts from inside her room, "It's late! Go to bed!"
Maybe it wasn't coincidence. Instead, it was a mother's way of avoiding trouble inside the home. El's father was sensitive to insults, which clearly showed when he lost control of his emotions.
"Okay, mom!" El shouts back.
El's swell of anxiousness was enough for him to conjure up a mutter of a single word which, from many years ago, drowned from his father's neglect, indicating the incomplete distillation of doubt that remained within his voice.
"D-D-Dad?"
He waits as he did many nights before for his reply. However, much like every night, the re-runs dominated over El's presence.
Repositioning himself between his father and the television, El discovers his dad to be sound asleep. The consistency of his father's habits lead him to hypothesize the possibility of television having a direct impact in the flat lining of brain activity.
"Dad?" El attempts again.
"Wha...What?" his father finally responds as if the sound of his son's voice resuscitated him from a near death experience.
"Eu El! Go to sleep!" his mother, again on cue, interrupts from her room.
"I'm just asking Dad something!"
Perhaps, it was the annoyance of being hurried by his mother. Or, maybe, it was the innate nature of a son's eagerness to connect with his father that was to blame for having El speak before thinking. Instead of asking any of his prepared questions, El decides on a different topic: the relatives.
El knew this topic would energize his father with the enthusiasm needed to talk until dawn; but he also knew the slightest mention of the relatives would be like opening Pandora's box.
To El, however, after all the trouble his father put him through, releasing unimaginable evil into the world seemed like a fair trade.
As innocent as his question began, El unknowingly opened the door to a familiar but unspoken, dark reality camouflaged by the world's denial with just six words:
"Dad, did Grandpa and I ever meet?"
"Huh...?" his dad replies, half awake. "Grandpa? Your grandpa was a gambler; he was never home. Always playing *mahjong."
"Did I ever meet him?"
"Sorta...Why?"
"What do you mean 'sorta,' Dad?'"
"What?" his father responds, bewildered that a conversation between him and his second born was transpiring. "You were two years old when he sorta visited us in Novato."
Confused, but content with where the direction of their conversation was heading, El continues, slightly bolder and not overthinking.
"I don't get it, Dad. I thought you said Grandpa never came to visit us here in America."
His deduction was enough for his father to take a confused glance at El's curious eyes before reconnecting back to the television. "You weren't old enough to remember when he visited."
"I don't get it."
Never looking down at the buttons of the channel changer, El's father turns the television off with the grace of a blind man reading a braille sheet. In a continuous motion, El's father straightens his posture on the recliner and begins the story his son already lived, but was too young to remember. Even with much effort, his father could not get comfortable.
"Well," he repeats, straightening his back, "you were still wearing diapers, and playing with your brother in the room when you met him. Your brother ran outside yelling somebody had walked into the room. You were too young to talk, but I found you babbling to someone who wasn't there."
Eu El's gaze turns into the lost look of a child placed in a calculus course.
There was something to fear when El's father mentioned about "someone who wasn't there." This phrase was enough for fear to burrow deep into El's mind, and later seep out through his pores in the form of goosebumps that had formed on his arm.
"I saw you pushing your trucks as if you were playing with someone in front of you," his dad continued.
"Then what?" El asks, clearly spooked. "Was it...grandpa?"
"I didn't know at the time. I mean, I didn't know until after you rolled your toy trucks in front of you."
"Then, what?"
"I," his father clears his throat. "I saw how every time you rolled your trucks, the trucks kept rolling back to you."
"On their own?" El asks.
"Yeah," his father unsettlingly validates. "They rolled back to you by themselves. One...
by...
one."
"You wouldn't remember any of this," his dad reminds him, noticing the denial in his son's eyes. "But, I know what I saw."
El struggles to ask, "What happened afterwards?"
"The telephone rang. And, that's when I understood."
"Understood what?"
"The call was from your relatives living overseas. They call for a couple of reasons. First, if they need money. Or, if someone died. It wasn't coincidence how, on the night they called, something strange happened."
His father pauses, noticing the light of acceptance beginning to shine inside El's eyes.
Whatever was inside Pandora's box seemed to had found El's soul with just a few words from his father that summer evening back in 1987.
"Before our relatives said anything, I told them, 'Don't say it. I already know. My dad is dead, isn't he?'"
| Author Notes |
* Mahjong is a tile based game that originated from China. It is played similarly to rummy. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
The comfort of the bed was not enough. The story El's father shared gave the feeling he was about to fall over a deep cliff, where its darkness could never reveal the depth, nor hint to whatever awaited below.
Everything that was now El's world, supplemented with the confusion of adolescence, had transformed into an unfathomable, perplexing equation.
His present circumstance was not of choice. It was more like arriving at that stage of his life in which the powers of the universe decided he was ready to face his destiny on his own. This challenge arrived like the beginning of a long, perilous journey made for the movies. However, ready or not, he had no choice but to accept this challenge, and the shadows welcomed him as the sun began to disappear behind the horizon.
Some would call his gift an opportunity. Others, ironically, would see it as a tragedy waiting to happen. There was no telling which of the two he had. It didn't matter. Nobody, not even El, knew he possessed something special. His own parents could never accept the fact that his older brother once bit off a piece of his right shoulder during an argument over dinner when he was six years old. Eventually, when the time arrived, his gift and the powers that came with it would assist El in a world meant for the darkness to thrive.
But, there would be no victory for the darkness this night.
Somehow, moments ago, this gift transported him into a different reality, blurry with no tangible references existing beyond the outline of his hallway, where the darkness swallows every crevice, every angle of perception and truth behind the familiar; a place where only few are able to visit. One could relate this scene to be a poorly transmitted fuzziness of a late night television signal barely materializing into a perceivable picture.
Invited or not, he arrived to the other side of the shadows, a world ruled by depression, hunger and darkness,
"H-How'd I get here?" El wonders, realizing moments ago under the warmth of his bedsheets he was staring at the ceiling.
"I fell asleep! I'm dreaming...
Awwwsum."
The texture of the soft, thick carpet hugging his bare feet is the only evidence of what familiarity existed in the emptiness of what is becoming the prelude to a nightmare, the kind that no one, not even his family, would believe is real unless they saw it for themselves.
He was all alone.
Logic, his only companion in a place where his own shadows abandoned him, reminds El how dreams normally do not involve tangible sensations. Yet, the eerie cold touch of the steel doorknob to his parent's room, where his newborn sister slept, was the entrance to a pitfall of evil which he never thought he would encounter.
Walking to the door, El hears the pounding of his rapid heartbeat suggesting caution to the realization that his mother's lamp, which usually illuminated from inside, was now gone.
Deep within the convincing illusion of his parent's room, an unfamiliar figure echoes across the hollowness that steers his thoughts toward a direction of confusion. He pauses before bringing himself to look between the door's gap, hoping that whatever he could understand would somehow be excused as a creation of his imagination.
He begins reasoning with his fear, wishing that soon he would wake to the familiarity of eating the pancakes his mother prepared every school morning; or watching the Saturday morning cartoons while enjoying the sugary pleasantness of a bowl of Honey Smacks, and later setting time aside for reading his Spider-Man comics during the rainy nights with his 'Green Lantern' lantern under his bed.
Squinting into the dark, his eyes makes out a vague shadowy outline of a broken woman floating in the middle of a vast emptiness like an astronaut drifting within the mercy of space. El blinks before concluding, with wide and convinced eyes, the woman is not an illusion.
Standing besides a hot, bubbling cauldron with no fire, the shadow, heavily breathing, glances over to her side where, inside a crib, cries his infant sister.
The logic inside El screams a warning to run away, but the lessons he took to heart from superhero stories conditioned a rare principle that convince him from retreating to the light at the end of the hallway.
Unexpectedly, a frightening, hungry cackle welcomes El.
"I can hear the fear in your heart, boy."
There is silence between him and the shadowy figure that seemingly is afloat in his parents' room. Again, the mysterious shadow glances over to the crib where she places a pale, crooked hand to the forehead of his sister, who is crying at the discomforting touch of the woman's ice-cold fingers.
The shadow hisses.
"What a delicious sound."
| Author Notes | Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
El waits cautiously behind the door, unsure of how to separate the perception of realism and the deception of what he feels is a dream.
The moment confronts him like the illusion of a convincing horror movie.
What feels less and less the house he grew up in, deepens like another complicated equation which he cannot solve.
He presses his back against the wall and wishes the shadow, its cold and crooked hand caressing his baby sister's forehead, would simply vanish as all nightmares should when it becomes unbearably frightening. Yet, for some reason, even with much effort, he cannot wake from this nightmare.
The dark shadow's piercing cackle acknowledges the chilling reality for the boy, who chooses to bury its deep, chilling laughter in the hum of a Belinda Carlisle song, "Heaven is a Place on Earth," unaware of how the mysterious shadow's potential for destruction is equally as fatal as El's denial of her existence.
"Your heartbeat, boy. It teases me," the shadow hisses.
El muffles his hum with shaking palms, unwilling to gasp for the air that could disclose his location.
"This isn't...real," he tells himself, afraid to inhale.
"Your fear has been worth the wait, boy."
The shadow's voice, more frightful than the wheezing of a rabid animal, extinguishes any light of hope El needs to find his way home.
He expects a miracle.
Instead, he sees the sun retreating behind the wake of an inevitable storm fast approaching from across the horizon.
He continues humming the song, but this time in his mind. The lyrics rekindles a pleasant memory of the time he first heard the song from his father's broken portable radio cassette player that he fixed.
("In this world we're just beginning...
To understand the miracle of living.")
Along with the words are the emotions that remind him of what he aspires to be: Clark Kent.
Fatherhood weighed heavily on El's boyish, skinny shoulders. At the same time he struggled to complete a single pull-up in his middle school gym class, he was already carrying the weight of soiled diapers, long grocery lists and a narcissistic brother.
Yet, he accepted the responsibility with the equal grace of his childhood superheroes in the name of justice, love and honor.
Whether this boy, who was no stranger to the uncertainty inside him, was prepared or not he would make the choice that would decide the fate of both his future, and the future of the world armed with only the lessons learned from his collection of Spider-Man, and Transformers comic books.
"Are you scared...boy?" The shadow continues hissing.
Its voice changes to the familiar sound of his angry brother. "You are NOTHING, loser! You can't save her! You fail at EVERYTHING!"
The echo alters into the other familiar, narcissistic voice in his life. "Give up, son. Listen to your older brother. You're just going to embarrass me. Shame on you for trying!"
Trembling, El continues humming the song.
("Maybe I was afraid before...
I'm not afraid anymore!")
Another voice, recognizable only from the boy's mental library of after school cartoons, interrupts the shiver of his humming with a question.
It is the kind of question which challenges all character:
"What would Superman do?" the voice asks.
It is the question El has been waiting for all his life.
| Author Notes | Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
"I'm not Superman," El tells himself.
"Correction, El. You aren't 'Superman.' But everyone, including you, has a power."
The voice is familiar now. El closes his eyes, but a throbbing headache distracts his focus of escaping the darkness that engulfs him. The discomforting pulsation is momentarily diverted by a childhood memory of his first Transformers action figure: Windcharger, the heroic robot warrior El received on his eleventh birthday. It is now the voice that guides him.
"Freedom, Eu El, is the right of all sentient beings."
"That's what Optimus Prime would say," El answers with inspiration.
"El," Windcharger says, "your sister is in trouble."
The boy sulks back into a quiet depression, defeated by the reminder of what is awaiting on the other side of the door.
"Hey, keep your chin up," the familiar voice continues. "I'm your alter-ego, remember? Like me, you're fast. It says so on the back of my tech spec. 'Fastest Autobot over short distances.' Remember?"
A spark of enlightment fuels El's young spirit. "W-w-we're... alike!"
"We're not just fast, Eu El. We can do what only a few are capable of."
"What's that?"
"Eu El," Windcharger whispers, "in times of darkness, look toward the light of YOUR matrix; there, you will find your answer."
Eu El peers back into the dark emptiness of the room, his baby sister's giggling turns into cries of pain. The shadow, a frightening sight from afar, lifts its frozen touch from his sister's forehead. El sees the shadow reach into a cupboard that seemed to materialize behind her.
Though his fear grows, he is able to whisper a familiar battle cry that he softly breathes to himself.
"Transform and roll out."
With childlike uncertainty, naive to whatever consequences awaits him from behind the door, El takes a step into the infinite darkness. He walks toward the shadow as it continues searching through the cupboard.
El moves, but the room and everything inside stretches away in a convincing illusion that almost teases his sister's crib in front of him like a light at the end of a tunnel that never gets closer.
Quickening into a full sprint, El again hears Windcharger's encouragement, "Remember my motto, Eu El!"
"'Quick action equals quick victory!" El reminds himself.
Eu El, his nature innately calculating the degree of acceleration, realizes that running at superhuman speed is the only way he can reach his sister.
Like a calculator, he factors into the equation the variable of the moving crib that is distancing itself at a faster, increasing rate.
He knows what must be done, but he does not know how to achieve the physical impossibility of superhuman speed.
He searches for a strength that could transform his doubts into the miracle his sister needs; something beyond the average that no dark supernatural power could compete with, nor defeat. Whether or not he was capable to run that extra step, or two, between each rest of his frightened heartbeat, Eu El knows for his sister's sake that he must try.
In his hesitation, a second of peace passes as he discovers the answer which hid dormant in his young, distracted mind all this time. A solution which he could believe in:
Making a choice.
He forces an effort of speed fueled by belief, where belief was almost unspoken of in his reality. And, in his acceptance, he becomes that something he never imagined he could become.
Within the darkness, he lights the way with a glowing streak of a blurred blue bolt of lightning trailing behind him.
| Author Notes | Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
The song continues in El's head, its lyrics rerouting his thoughts from the distractions that could slow his sprint to less than what is needed to escape the darkness that engulfs him.
El calculates that any pace slower than what he is already achieving could be fatal.
He finds inspiration in a world which he was not ready to face as the guitar solo fades into an angelic verse projecting a simple lyric with a message:
("Ooo, baby, do you know what that's worth?!
Ooo, Heaven is a place on earth!")
As every visible property within the darkness slows around him like a view from inside a speeding car that exits a freeway, El reaches into his sister's crib. He is desperate for a breath of air he knows he cannot take.
Close by, the eerie shadow gently closes a cupboard door, ready to place El's sister into the bubbling cauldron.
He peers cautiously over the crib's side, relieved to see his sister's smile. She extends a delicate acknowledgment with the uncoordinated motion of her infant hand.
Placing his finger over his lips, El motions to her to remain silent. Gently, he touches her fingertip with his own to assure her she is safe. His heart, expecting a rare victory, beats rapidly with the anticipation of failure, a familiar feeling he has carried since the day his brother stabbed him with the sharp end of a geometric compass for being just that...
a failure.
The erratic pounding alerts the shadow, its growl more fierce than a lion's. "Your heartbeat, boy. There is doubt and fear inside each beat... it tempts me."
The shadow looks away into the emptiness, waiting for the perfect moment to express itself with a message powerful enough to paralyze a thousand souls with each phonetic sound.
"So much talent, boy. Yet, doubt controls you, boy. It is a savoring and delicious tragedy that is not ready to enjoy. If I could choose one heart, I would want yours!"
Within that moment of desire, the shadow becomes distracted.
"I want it!"
Windcharger screams to El, "Grab your sister! Run!"
The shadow turns her attention to a sudden moving object that appears as an electric blue bolt swiftly moving with vicious grace toward a light. Inside the bolt is an infant, El's sister, tightly grasped within the blur of its skinny arms.
Noticing the empty crib, the shadow lets out a deafening wail that reaches every crevice inside the darkness.
*Approaching the light behind the door, El hears another voice which he has not heard since he was nine years old; it is the taunting voice of his fourth grade teacher:
"Get YULIE BURGER! He's hot like a patty on a grill! Yuuuuuulie Buuuuurger!"
As if a stop button had depressed inside of him, El's sprint slows with the weight of sadness; the light of salvation rapidly stretches farther and farther away from him.
From El's conscience, Windcharger re-gathers his friend's focus with a simple but relevant memory.
"Your cassette tape...side B. You recorded that new song last week. Play it!"
"La Bamba?!"
"No! The one after 'Wake Me Up Before You Go! Go!"
A stream of notes from a synthesized piano plays in his mind. It is followed by a new set of lyrics that recalibrate his concentration and transforms him into a sight faster than the sound of his own blurred legs sprinting toward the light.
("Out of the Blue!
Out of the Blue!
Like a dream come true!
Like a dream come true!")
"Of all the races you are to run," Windcharger advises El, "this is the one you cannot lose. However, if you win, you won't have anything left to succeed in your world. Is your sister worth it?"
Maintaining his glowing streak, El gazes at his sister's innocent smile. He has no thoughts of yesterday, or any consideration for his tomorrow. Within that simple moment he smiles back at his sister, while the gap of the light behind a door slowly closes, the width nearing half the height of his body.
The song continues:
("Suddenly, I see you there...
And everything's ok.")
El, accelerating faster than the pauses of his heartbeat, squeezes past the narrowing gap before the door closes with thunderous slam.
Stumbling outside, El carefully checks his sister, who is cradled safely in his arms.
He observes the blackness around him dissipating like a fog before the rising sun. The dark hall brightens into a welcoming glow that assures him they are both safe. His sister looks back at him with wide eyes.
"Well done, hero. From here on, the fight will be your own," echoes Windcharger. "Thirty years from now, when you hear those words again, you will know this wasn't a dream."
Puzzled, but victorious, El makes a comfortable sigh as the delicate giggles of his sister begin to calm his shaking hands. The moment diverts his attention, but not ours, to the door soundlessly opening behind him.
Unnoticed, a blackness in the form of a crooked arm oozes from below the door to El's feet like blood pooling from a fresh slaughter. With the quickness of a bear trap, the hand, cold and sharp, clenches around his ankle.
Echoing deep inside the darkness behind the door, the voice of the shadow curses at El.
"Heroic and selfless you are, boy! You will accomplish great things with your gift. Yet, no one in YOUR world will notice. The innocence you cherish in your sister will be your demise! The day your sister loses her innocence, I will return to feast on YOUR heart!"
As if on cue, a sudden light flashes to wake El, who finds himself sitting upright on his bed.
Sweating and breathing heavily, El reevaluates his understanding of what reality he may have lost and what fantasy he may had just survived.
A digital clock clicks 3 a.m. from across his room.
Beneath the moonlight, he looks downward at his collection of G.I. Joe and Transformers action figures that are sprawled across the carpet like the aftermath of a futuristic battle between man and technology. Each action figure lays either face down, or on their backs...
defeated.
Like a silent survivor, a lone Transformers figure, Windcharger, stands perfectly upright staring back at El.
Looking beyond the crescent moon through his window, El gazes up to the heavens promising to himself, "I'll never watch another Freddy Krueger movie without permission. Cross my heart."
Slowly, he falls asleep unaware the doors of darkness had just opened, and his journey back into the light was just beginning.
| Author Notes |
Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
--1996, San Francisco State University, Mary Park Dormitory--
A light breeze touches the Fall leaves of a tree just enough to scatter them onto a concrete path that leads to a long, rectangular hand drawn sign which reads, "Welcome Fall '96 Students!"
The bland color of the dormitories gives off an old, but not yet ancient impression of simple architecture from decades past. Behind the dorms is the shore to the Pacific Ocean, a walking distance to the west under the fading sunlight, where a thick overcast sweeps across a crowd of eager students anticipating the start of a new semester.
Three floors above Mary Park's lobby, a Tupac song, "Changes," blares from a window in attempt to liven the campus' mood marred only by the comments of disapproving parents claiming, "That's not music."
Gamers, without delay, unhesitatingly furnish their dorm room with the latest in video game entertainment: a Super Nintendo console. Inside the lobby, a small crowd gathers in front of a bulletin board searching for their room assignments.
Two young girls struggling to carry a bed-sized home gym to the next floor go unnoticed by the many incoming residents. Yet, a different pair seem to attract more attention with their 48 inch television screen.
There is a streching line of homesick students waiting to use one of four phone booths aligned side-by-side against the lobby wall.
It is there that we turn our attention to the second booth from the left, where a young girl is casually seated. She is dressed in a black business outfit. Her straight black hair, just touching her shoulders, is softly pressed against the phone's speaker where her ear is slightly covered. Her exotic eyes conceal many untold stories of a faraway place where many claim they know well through television, but few have ever visited. She exhibits motions that are more mature and sophisticated as compared to the other girls her age; every moment of her laughter is conservatively covered by her free hand. From behind the clear booth door, her conversation is inaudible.
For now, her presence is insignificant. However, without anyone's awareness, her being has sparked an emotion of interest from across the lobby.
The body language of her soft giggle, supplemented with the calm joy in her almond shaped eyes, naturally ignite the dormant senses of an individual exhibiting a familiar, unchanged and boyish character who is now more physically mature than we last recall.
If we carefully tune into his head with a cautious adjustment of a television's antennae, we would be entertained to notice how the world around him has gradually slowed down. Every sound is mute except the beating of his heart that pulsates like a wild bird.
In his mind, at the moment his eyes gaze upon her, the blaring rap music above transforms into a forgotten recording of, "There She Goes," by the La's.
Suddenly, an abrupt echo of his father's voice disrupts the moment like an old record player scratching across the middle of the song.
"I did NOT send you to school to gawk at girls! You are here to study! No dating! NO looking!"
Placing his index finger at the center of his round large glasses, the young man slides his frame closer to his eyes as if to regain his focus. He brings to attention the girl's high class attire as compared to his worn jeans and old t-shirt with the phrase "Baseball is Life" printed in color shifting material on the front. It's a style straight from an 1980s fashion line.
His logic, conditioned from the relationship between him and an older sibling whose ego is more fragile than the narcissism of a bad boss, reminds him of the advice he received from him while entering high school as a freshman.
"You will never be worthy of any girl...EVER.
If I can't be happy, then so can't YOU!."
The young man walks away, his presence still unnoticed by the girl; neither of them realizing how the their chapters of fate will overlap in the future.
Approaching his new room, the last one to the right at the end of the all-boys floor just before the emergency exit, he notices, from the corner of his eye, his new neighbors residing from across. They are all huddled around a big television screen, congratulating one another with high fives as they complete another level of "Super Mario Kart."
Entering his room, he meets his new roommate, Daniel, a much older student from Taiwan. He introduces himself to El as one who has paid his way to University by working as a palm reader in the streets of Taipei.
"By the way," Daniel says pointing to the empty bed on the right. "I'm giving you this side of our room. Hope you don't mind. Your side gives off negative vibes."
"No worries," El replies, holding back feelings of cynicism.
El convinces himself, after listening to Daniel's psychic introduction, "It's going to be one entertaining school year."
He decorates the corner of his desk with Windcharger, the Transformers action figure he received on his eleventh birthday, and the only childhood toy he was able to save after his entire collection of Transformers and G.I. Joe figures was sold by a close "friend," Jules, who kept all the profits.
Above his bed, on the empty spaces on the wall, El carefully tacks a comic book, "Web of Spider-Man," issue number 31. He repeatedly cleans and centers the comic in order to achieve a satisfying alignment that complements both his senses, and the laws of symmetry and balance according to the Universe.
Outside the building, rental vans begin slowly dispersing. The atmosphere suggests the conclusion of a rather active day; families and students exchange their final wishes for a successful semester before saying their "good-byes" to one another.
Unnoticed, a slight wind continues to scatter more dry leaves onto the ground.
A black bird perched within a tree branch stares from outside and into a window of a deliberately vacant room on the first floor of the all-boys floor, where a shadow of what appears to be a person stands idly.
The mysterious shadow, who has surveyed this "Welcome Day" since the start, inanimately continues standing behind the window as if time has no relevance to its questionable presence.
Coincidentally, just like El's room, this shadow is also on the first floor of the all-boys hall, just a few doors closer to the entrance of the hall.
Neither the shadow, nor El realize that the chapters of their fate will soon also...
overlap.
| Author Notes |
Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL)
It has been a little over nine years since Eu El's first encounter with the entities which exist on the other side of the shadows. In college now, he moves into his new and temporary home: the dormitories of San Francisco State University, where the chapters of his life will soon become darker than what he is prepared to accept. |
By Cybertron1986
A calmness in Mary Park's lobby settles awkwardly, emitting the feel of a quiet, cheap hotel just before midnight as the dormitories, once crowded with undergrad students during move-in day, are now silent as a library after hours.
Bulletin boards, still tacked with last week's lists of room assignments, face an elevator that spills out a group of rowdy students onto the lobby. Their spontaneous conversations alter the silence into laughter about the possibilities of an unrestricted Saturday evening.
"You know the rules, guys," one proclaims.
In unison, the group yells out, "There ARE NO RULES!"
However, on this night, another student decides to be the exception to the rule of youthful freedom. His shirt brandishes an out-of-date fashion statement printed on the front, "CHOOSE LIFE." The bold caps attract more attention then the moment he almost drops his clean laundry onto the lobby floor. His shirt with cut-off sleeves implies an unlikely crossover between a mid-80's music video and a trending rap song from Tupac Shakur.
El, his body language appearing bolder than from a decade ago, seems oblivious to the two girls laughing at his direction.
Unsure as to why his social status has yet to improve, he continues unembarrased with a basket of freshly dried clothes that emit a strong aroma of spring flowers as a result of an overuse of fabric softener.
The group whispers comments about El's noticeable smell of laundry and his eighties fashion. Together, they sing, "Wake me up before you GO GO! I'm not planning on going solo!"
A girl giggles, "Nowadays, even nerds can look buff."
Still unaware to the passive insults, El slows his walk down to half speed as his attention focuses toward the second phone booth from the left where, once again, the young Asian girl is seated behind the clear doors. She appears tenser than before. However, her ability to remain elegant in her state of anxiety triggers the song, "There She Goes," to re-play inside El's mind. Her fingers carelessly entangle around the phone cord as wrinkles of concern feverishly form around her forehead. In every odd moment, she exerts a soft giggle, but this time she withholds from concealing her smile behind her hand. On top of the phone, a cheap disposal lighter and a pack of cigarettes lay flat with an open cover that reveals more than half the contents missing from inside. For the past week, El has yet to know who she is, where she is from or where she is staying. His only knowledge of her is that she occupies the same booth at the same time of the day, everyday, since moving in.
Before the girl notices the weight of his stare, El casually returns to a normal walking pace.
Observing from behind a snack dispenser, Daniel, El's roommate, comes out from hiding, laughing as he catches up to him. "Hey, Wu El! You're doing laundry?!"
"It's EU El," he corrects, confused to the logic of the question regarding his laundry. "Of course I'm doing laundry. How else would one prepare for the coming school week?"
"There's plenty of time; it's Saturday."
"Yeah," El begins, "but if I don't wash today, then how do you think I will have time to iron tomorrow?"
"*Ai-yah, who irons clothes in college? Besides, on SATUR...," Daniel gives up mid-sentence as he notices El's puzzlement augmenting into an obvious confusion.
"Forget it," Daniel decides to not even try.
Keeping a curious gaze towards his roommate, Daniel breaks the silence as they continue down the empty halls of the all-boys floor with a bold observation.
"I saw you!" Daniel exclaims.
"Saw me? What are you talking about?"
"I saw you!" Daniel chuckles. "That girl in the booth! You were staring at her!"
"So?"
"I'm just relieved is all," Daniel snickers.
Tightly grasping the laundry basket in one hand, El unlocks their room with his free hand. He is thinking of a reply while trying not to drop his clean clothes a second time. "Relieved? About what?"
"Wo yi zhu dou zhi dao wo shi yi ge mei nan, bu guo xing hao ni mei you kan shang wo. Ni hai suan zheng chang," Daniel responds in Chinese Mandarin.
"What?"
Daniel shakes his head. His eyes stare becomes a tragic expression suitable for funerals. "Sorry, I forgot. Sadly, you do not speak Chinese."
"I grew up in Stockton...CALIFORNIA."
"Which is WHY I'm not surprised you don't speak Mandarin."
With one eyebrow raised, Daniel provides a concise translation. "Let me say, though I'm attractive, I'm relieved to know you find that girl more attractive than...myself."
Disgusted, El begins to fold his laundry using the same meticulous, rhythmic technique that produces surprisingly symmetrical results. After some thought, he glares back at Daniel, who is disappointedly shaking his head.
El replies back, "I don't get it."
Daniel attempts an explanation. "You, cutting off your shirt sleeves, and smelling like flowers doesn't give off a 'straight' impression, El."
El takes a longer pause. He has difficulty understanding the relationship between being, "straight" and his sense of fashion.
"At least you have good taste... in women," Daniel compliments, while thinking of other positive things to say.
Still ignoring Daniel, El continues folding his laundry as if with the urgency to pass a military inspection.
"You never been in a relationship before, have you?" Daniel boldly inquires.
Unsure if his roommate is leading him toward a punch line of a bad joke, El ignores him.
"C'mon, I'm serious, El. I'm six years older than anyone here. I'm more experienced in the art of dating."
"What're you suggesting?"
"Listen, El, before you go stalking girls again," Daniel snickers, "We're going to Chinatown together. I know this barber and where to eat the best dumplings in San Francisco."
"What are dumplings?"
"Ai-yah. Seriously? Do you even know how to use chopsticks?" Daniel questions, sounding more disappointed as the shortcomings of his roommate are slowly revealed with each passing minute of conversation.
El nods without confirming either a "yes,"or a "no." He nods because he is solely satisfied with the workmanship of his neatly folded laundry.
"Never mind," Daniel frowns as he searches for his car keys amongst the clutter on his desk. "Maybe, it's better you don't let anyone know your handicap with chopsticks. Presently, you're like last week's losing lottery ticket: you wouldn't stand a chance winning anything; let alone women."
El, a competitor, is visibly triggered.
"She's Asian," Daniel justifies. "Though you're Asian on the outside, on the inside you're a visitor from another planet."
A glow of praise emanates inside El's smile as he asks Daniel to validate an assumption he has held since childhood.
"You mean, like I'm from Krypton?"
Daniel strains a smile back to hide the disappointment he has with his new friend. He is careful to not damage the dormant potential he sees in him.
"What? Ai-yah, El. You're more like a fortune cookie than a superhero."
| Author Notes |
This is a developing novel. For those just reading this specific chapter, please note that there are previous chapters prior to this. Yes, there are paranormal intrigue involved that will later be presented. However, if you would like to know what Eu El is facing, then please read chapter six.
*Ai-yah is a Chinese phrase, or Chinglish that expresses dismay, shock, or fear. Thank you, Google for the classic George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, WHAM! picture circa 1984. |
By Cybertron1986
Slowly, the sun fades in-between the Pacific's edge where the horizon ends, its grip lets go to the end of day. The lights of a bridge turn on, illuminating into a majestic glow which places an exclamation of hope to inevitable darkness.
Like an orchestra, the metropolis sitting against the edge of the estuary combusts into a symphony of small lights upon the blanketing caress of a night swallowing slowly everything in its path. The sight reassures that life goes on even when the the warmth of light is absent from the senses.
From afar, each moving headlight rhythmically mimics the motions of a mechanical system of arteries fused into an opened chest of a concrete robot whose gaze is set to the overcast of clouds above.
Looking deeper into one of the thousand moving lights on Interstate 280, is a red, two door Civic. By all standards it is the perfect fuel efficient, commuter car for frugal University students.
Inside, the cassette stereo plays the Phil Collins' song, "In the Air Tonight." Without stopping, the song mixes into Tupac's "Rearview Mirror."
Abruptly, the tune ends as Daniel parks inside a garage on the outskirts of San Francisco's Chinatown.
A brief walk leads Daniel and Eu El into a nearby restaurant, where a lively atmosphere of customers are surrounded with the aroma of freshly steamed dumplings and roasted pork.
With each passing second, measured by the ticking hand of a dusty wall clock, a continuous chatter of Mandarin brings Daniel back to the comforting feel of Taipei's nightlife.
However, El sits with his back hunched. He feels out of place as his newly highlighted hair breaks the traditional, natural black style that his parents are accustomed to. However, without his realization, El draws more attention of nearby diners with his favorite sweater, a blue ESPIRIT sweater meant for girls.
"El," Daniel, suppresses his laughter from across the table. "Before I ask, I want to tell you..."
Struggling to grasp a single steamed shrimp dumpling with chopsticks, El glances back at Daniel, who skillfully snatches his dumpling as it falls mid-air almost splashing into the small plate of soy sauce below.
"Out of all the Asians I met, you're the only one who has the worst chopstick skills. Not to mention," Daniel continues, "you're the only guy in the human race who carries a picture of *Andrew Ridgeley in his wallet."
"Why wouldn't I carry a picture of Andrew Ridgeley? Imagine where the world would be without him?"
"Seriously, El. Andrew Ridgeley himself wouldn't carry an old picture like that. Other than his driver's license, he wouldn't be found dead with that picture."
El gradually becomes irritated. He defends his perception of normalcy with an unexpected fact that could only be known in the thoughts of a child who grew up in the eighties.
"If it wasn't for Andrew Ridgeley, 'Last Christmas' would never had been written, and the world would had succumbed to the replay of cheesy Christmas songs."
Daniel laughs louder, "That song is almost as old as eight-track players."
A sour note subtly plays in their conversation.
"I find that equally insulting as comparing me to a fortune cookie," El confesses.
"Insulting?!" Daniel looks confused. "Dude, I just finished translating how to cut your hair into a style from 1982, to a non-English speaking Chinese barber! THAT was embarrassing!"
"That picture came in handy, didn't it?! She had no clue how to EXACTLY highlight my bangs the way Andrew Ridgeley would without my picture."
"Of course she wouldn't have known. Nowadays, barbers aren't supposed to cut hairstyles from FIFTEEN years ago! You should have told me beforehand you had that picture. I sounded stupid translating something that CAN'T be explained in Mandarin!"
"It was fourteen years. Not fifteen," El corrects, oblivious to Daniel's embarrassment.
"Anyways, it was interesting to hear you describe how to highlight hair in the style of band member from WHAM! while speaking Chinese. It sounded like a whining grandmother singing a rap song," El adds, giving up on the chopsticks.
El finds a fork. In one motion, he stabs into two shrimp dumplings at the same time.
"El! Slow down!" Daniel shouts loud enough to turn a few customer heads their direction. "These aren't chicken nuggets, okay?"
Using chopsticks, Daniel effortlessly steals one of the dumpling from El's fork as if to mock his lack of skill. "Anyways, embrace it, El. It's your destiny. You are THE 'Fortune Cookie.'"
"Why do say that?"
Daniel's question seems to be presented with the intention to deliver a subtle insult toward El and his unique background.
El continues, "What does that even mean?"
"Where do you think fortune cookies come from, El?"
"They're from Panda Express," El confidently answers.
Daniel loses his patience. "There's no mistake. You ARE American as the fortune cookie!"
| Author Notes |
This is a developing novel. For those just reading this specific chapter, please note that there are previous chapters prior to this. Yes, there are paranormal intrigue involved that will later be presented. However, if you would like to know what Eu El is facing, then please read chapter six. *Andrew Ridgeley was the co-member of the popular '80s band, "WHAM!" He partnered with George Michael and co-wrote one of the most unforgettable pop songs for Christmas entitled, "Last Christmas" in 1984. |
By Cybertron1986
"Don't you get it?" Daniel laughs.
"It's an analogy, right?" El replies, unamused. But, it's kinda ironic how you're a palm reader, and you're claiming that I'm the fortune cookie."
"What I mean, El, is that in Asia you are not considered Asian because you grew up in America."
The enlightening statement opens El's mind in a way that allows the smoke of confusion of who he was, a lingering question since grade school, to finally blow away.
"In America," he adds, "you are not American because, on the outside, you are Asian. Just like a fortune cookie!"
Daniel laughs as if to place emphasis on the awkward insight which is slowly accepted by El, who risks to clarify his disappointment with his natural perception of his place in the world. "So, what you are saying is people aren't ready for an Asian Superman?"
"El," Daniel empathetically begins, "I didn't say that. What I mean is that when you understand the history of the fortune cookie, then you may arrive to a truth your parents were not capable of explaining to you."
"Where is the fortune cookie from?"
Daniel lays his chopsticks on top of the dipping dish that has only a residue of soy sauce remaining. Taking a sip of his hot green tea, he sighs with hesitation to share what he considers common knowledge. But, for El this is a revelation.
"The Japanese will say they invented the fortune cookie. The Chinese, however, argue that a Chinese entrepreneur who immigrated to San Francisco invented it to promote local businesses in the early years of Chinatown."
"So, in a way," Daniel continues, "the fortune cookie was 'born' in San Francisco, and are seen by the Chinese as an American creation. What foreigners don't understand is the fortune cookies does not exist in China. Yet, many westerners, including Asian Americans, assume they are Asian because that is what a fortune cookie appears on the outside-- Asian! In reality, they are very much American...like you!" Daniel laughs.
Even after Daniel's laughter fades into a broken chortling of breaths, El remains silently stunned.
El picks up his fortune cookie sitting next to the check. "If I'm a fortune cookie, then what are you? You're the one who reads palms."
"Fortune cookies don't tell the future," Daniel replies, taking another sip of tea. He decides to leave his fortune cookie unopened. "But I can, El. You want me to read your palm?"
"Really?! I never had my palm read."
"Yeah? And, I never read the palm of a person as strange as you before," Daniel jokes, watching El remove the paper fortune from inside the cookie. "What does the fortune cookie tell you, El?"
El unfolds the small, rectangular strip that reveals three letters printed from the fading, cheap ink.
"It says...
'run.'"
By Cybertron1986
Daniel repeats the ominous message pinched between El's fingers.
"Run?"
"See?" El reveals the paper fortune. The word clearly stands out against the white background. "It knows me!"
Daniel interprets the word as some coincidental, inconclusive warning.
"Maybe, I can tell you something you don't know."
El stares at the top of the table where Daniel's hands rest in a way that El mimics, as a stutter of doubt resounds in his reply.
"Y-y-you're going to read my future? Isn't palm reading like voo-doo? I saw this movie once..."
"No. Voo-doo is for movies," Daniel interrupts, sounding insulted. "C'mon. Aren't you interested to know about your chances with that girl in the phone booth?"
El recalls the hour spent arguing with his mother on the phone about changing his hairstyle to look like his fashion idol, Andrew Ridgele and decides there is nothing to lose.
Daniel reassures him. "Come Monday, El, whether I read your palm or not, you're going to find out if that girl is a fan of the '80s. Hopefully, she likes ESPIRIT sweaters, too. You do know that is a girl's brand that you're wearing, right?"
El looks at the ESPIRIT logo printed across in large rainbow colors.
"My mom said this sweater looks good on me."
Out of pity, Daniel decides not to make a humorous comment.
"I'm a complete loser," El slowly admits to himself.
"Let me see your palm, El."
Though curious to know about his future, El feels strongly about his future involving baseball and the freedom to enjoy episodes of 'The Simpsons.' However, his hesitance to accept Daniel's invitation suggests doubt.
"Women aren't shallow," El states, "My mom told me it takes more than fashion to find the right person."
El continues rambling in hopes he may discover one comforting reason to justify his naive optimism in meeting the girl in the phone booth. "My little sister did a book report in the sixth grade about a Japanese girl, Sadako, who tried folding a thousand paper origami cranes."
"Why?" Daniel asks perplexed at the random statement.
"Because, the book report was part of my sister's weekly homework assignment."
Daniel eyes roll to his roommate's cluelessness. "I mean WHY would the girl fold a thousand paper cranes?"
"She wanted a wish. She figured she could get cured of cancer if she folded a thousand," he explains. "A hundred, I guess, is too small a number to appease the Gods of love."
"You're saying," Daniel pauses, as he has many times before to give time for the pressure of laughter to alleviate from inside.
"You're saying," he repeats, "that you plan to ask this girl out with a haircut of the guy responsible for the song, 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go!' while sporting a girl's ESPIRIT sweater, AND giving her a bunch of paper cranes?!"
El's optimism remains visible, though the tears from Daniel's laughter imply a comical, but ominous outcome to El's plan.
"Yup," El replies confidently, the naivety becoming more and more apparent with each word.
Still laughing, Daniel struggles to ask, "What do you hope she sees in that?!"
"That my patience, actions and love for her are equally as superhuman as the attributes of Superman, the greatest superhero in the comic universe."
Daniel catches his breath. El's response was enough to light a flame of inspiration within Daniel's doubts.
"Show me your hand, El," Daniel, again, requests.
Daniel, his curiosity outweighing any amount of pessimism, insists to El, "Instead of telling your future, I'll prove to you how palm reading is legit. I'll reveal something only you would know."
"You're going to tell me about my past? You can convince me more if you tell me what will happen in the next hour."
"It doesn't work like that."
Convinced, and equally as curious, El places his hands on top of the table. Using small random motions, he adjusts his palms like a person overcomed with OCD until it becomes an exact reflection of Daniel's hands that are directly placed across from his.
"Dummy!" Daniel shouts, slapping El's hand. "The right hand is for girls! I only need your left!"
Taking his left hand, he presses El's palm. He closely examines each unique line that, according to Chinese palm reading, defines each person's past, present and future. With each release, El's circulation returns the natural glow in his skin's tone.
"Your blood flow is good. You never smoked?"
"That's something Super-man would never do," El proudly admits.
Arriving at a notable discovery in one of the many lines, Daniel changes his focus to El's eyes. He looks more concerned than before.
"Running is in your nature. It's been with you before you could walk. But, according to your palm," Daniel points at a specific line. "There is an imperfection."
"This line here," Daniel says, pointing, "It tells a very interesting story."
| Author Notes | Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
In attempt to convince El to the credibility of palm reading, Daniel presents the story already within El's palm...
-1991, Stockton, California-
Laughter from a television audience mixes with the clamour of metal inside a garage, where two teenage boys trade their final week of high school repairing a rusted, broken ten-speed bicycle.
On cue, the defining phrase, "Did I do thaaat?" from the latest episode of 'Family Matters,' broadcasts from a television sitting on top of a dryer as El clumsily drops a small wrench in attempt to tighten a large bolt on the rear wheel.
Simultaneously, the boys laugh at the coincidence with comical, "nerdy" snorts.
"Duc, Can you find me a larger wrench?" El asks, examining the fresh abrasion to his index finger.
Duc, the theraputic sidekick during El's high school years, understood his friend better than his older brother. Together, though neither acknowledged it, they survived their separate experiences as that invisible kid in school; the guy who was always turned down by every girl he asked to a school dance; the boy who got stuffed into the locker between classes; the one whose pants is pulled down in the lunch line; the kid whose father spent their salary on material things that upgraded his status amongst the relatives rather than invest in their children's future.
They are both sons of immigrants. Though, to a degree, they shared these similar experiences, there were many differences between them that were equally unique as the cultures that defined their backgrounds. One being El's passion to compete in sports.
"Dude, El. I thought my Dad was bad. But, your Dad bites. He's turned you into a nut case."
Hopelessly, they stare at the broken bicycle with a tire that makes a hissing sound with each pump. El looks at Duc with a sense of urgency, hoping he can provide him a solution.
There is only silence.
"I have no idea how I'm going to do this," El admits.
"Don't look at me. I'm already lending you my bike. Sorry. This is all I got. It's a hand-me-down from my dad. I swear, the last time it actually raced was when 'The Flock of Seagulls' sung their last hit."
Again, simultaneously, despite their circumstance, they react to the reference with laughter and another "nerdy" snort.
"Seriously, El. My dad wouldn't let me go to the prom either. But, when you asked him to help you with this triathlon and he said 'No!' that's a Darth Vader altering his deal with Lando Calrissian kinda low."
El makes a sigh that augments their shared hopelessness. It was the kind of sigh that a person makes when it suddenly rains, but realizes they forgot to bring an umbrella.
"The difference between you and me is that I went to the prom even though my dad was upset," Duc adds.
"But," El argues, "you went with your cousin!"
"Correction. I went with my THIRD cousin."
El makes an awkward smile to Duc's statement.
"At least I went," Duc whispers. "Why didn't you go? Scared? I thought you were taking the only Chinese girl on campus to the prom? What happened with *Mo Chou?"
"I wasn't scared. She wanted to go with that wrestler who looks like Johnny from 'The Karate Kid.' Besides, my dad needed me home to babysit."
"How do you do it, El? You go from smelling like burgers and fries, to dirty diapers four days a week."
"I don't consider taking care of my sister as a job. My parents don't pay me for that," he answers as his patience begins to diminish with each futile turn of the wrench.
"Why is your dad against you competing, El?"
El makes another familiar sigh that adds to the frustration. "He said I'd fail and it'd be a waste of his money and time."
"I get it!" Duc proclaims. "You're competing in the triathlon because, you want validation!"
"What?" El looks confused. "What does that mean?"
"I learned this in psych class. This is more than just a triathlon to you. This is THE First Annual Tokay High triathlon; meaning you want to make up for missing prom by replacing it with something else that you feel is equally special. By competing, you cancel out missing prom. AND, at the same time, you prove to your dad you're a winner. It's a two-for-one win for you!"
El refuses to admit the relevancy behind Duc's analysis.
"Okay, Sigmund Freud. Maybe, you're right. But, don't you think it would had been easier had I went to the prom?"
"Correction," Duc replies, "It would had been easier had you asked her out before the blond and blue-eyed jock did."
El agrees with a head nod as Duc attempts to comfort him in the best way he knows.
"I respect you, El. At least you're trying to make things right. Even if I was athletic as you, I would not have that same motivation. Tomorrow, in the race, don't do it for *Mo Chou, or your dad. Do it for yourself, and ALL the fans of the Transformers! Your future is riding on this race, El."
"Riding?" El responds. "Is that a pun?"
As they did before, the two simultaneously laugh with a snort before continuing on with the near impossibility of repairing a bicycle meant for the junkyard.
--3:47 p.m., the following day after the triathlon--
Sitting in a recliner, El's father watches a blow-out baseball game between the A's and the Red Sox on a newly purchased forty inch television.
His father's attention is flatlined to the sound of the garage door closing.
In between innings, a McDonald's commercial reminds El as he enters the house that he has an hour to get to work.
The fast food commercial snaps his father's concentration enough from the comfort of his recliner. El's father is eager to validate the anticipation of his son's failure.
"How'd you do?" he asks, his eyes never leaving the television.
El, his hands cut and darkened with bicycle grease, walks pass him. His feet drag in defeat across the carpet, his head hangs low as if he lost not just a battle, but the entire war.
"I..." El could not utter his next word as his father interrupts him.
"See!" his father shouts, "I knew you'd lose! Good thing I did not buy you that bicycle. What a waste of money that could have been! If you had listened to me, then you wouldn't be soo grumpy!"
--Present moment, 1996, back at the Taiwanese restaurant--
Completing the reading of El's palm, Daniel stares back in amazement to the disturbing story he just revealed. El rubs his palm against his shirt, as a feeling of pity emanates from Daniel. El, however, reacts with childlike forgiveness to the event he's never spoken of since high school.
Daniel grabs El's palm again, hoping to clarify another detail.
"There is something else," Daniel tells him, pointing to the small jaded line on El's palm. "There is something you did not mention to your dad."
"Yeah. I never told him."
"What?" Daniel asks.
"During the triathlon, I never mentioned I was in the top three throughout the race. All I needed was to complete was the bike race. I would had won a medal; maybe even first place."
"'Would have won?'" Daniel repeats.
"The bicycle chain snapped halfway into the race," El admits.
"How many competitors?" Daniel asks.
"There were 370, maybe 400 students and teachers who competed.
I went from top three in the first two events to finishing dead last because of the chain.
I carried that rusty, old broken bike on my shoulders...
like a crucifix...
all the way back to school, while people laughed and threw rocks at me.
I never told anyone I didn't cross the finish line, or how different that day could have been if my dad had just believed in me."
"My attempt at erasing the prom," El adds, "ended up giving me more misery than I started out with."
| Author Notes |
*Mo Chou is a Chinese name, that, when literally translated, means, "free of sadness." In real life, Mo Chou's American name was Mary.
Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
September, 13, 1996, Friday. (05:45:32)
Again, he passes the empty phone booth, the second one from the right, as thoughts of the girl and his future run pass like a film on fast forward. He rewinds to where he recalls her smile, the one that made his heart beat inside him like a wild bird.*
Lost in imagination, his emotions calculate the possibilities.
Amongst the products and sums, he decides on a wish that the girl would, in some way, become intertwined with his uncertainty and the doubts fabricated by his past.
Consciously, or unconsciously, his desires persuade him to challenge the higher powers he cannot see nor understand, for an opportunity he may not be prepared for.
"One chance," he proposes to himself, "to touch that feeling of belonging. Give me a chance; I'll do the impossible. I'll fold TEN THOUSAND paper cranes. That's ten times more than Sadako wanted. Give me a sign, and it's a deal."
El looks above the elevator, where the numbers indicating the floors above periodically light-up as it makes the descent to the lobby. For a time, the elevator pauses before continuing.
Behind El, a group of undergrads enter the lobby. They are engaged in a rambling, but entertaining conversation filled with rambunctious laughter. The hall monitor, sitting behind the lobby desk, reminds one couple of the rules regarding smoking inside the building. The commotion does not avert El's thoughts of the girl.
Engrossed in his imagination, El fails to notice from within the noisy group the girl he is thinking of emerges.
Unseen, she stands behind El. She ignores his untimely chuckles that, quite possibly, were triggered by a discreet thought of her.
The elevator arrives, spilling another rowdy group of undergrads onto the lobby's lively atmosphere. Both El and the girl, still unseen, filter through the crowd and enter into the elevator.
As the doors close, El hears her voice for the first time. Her youthful tone implies a genuine, respectful intention. They are alone together in the elevator.
"Could you push number four, please?"
Her voice sends him into a nervous state. His hand pushes the elevator button with tense motion.
"Thanks," she gently replies.
He stores every note of her voice like one of his many favorite songs from the '80s, but he finds himself paralyzed to the realization that his knowledge of girls is still under some overdue development.
The unexpected occurs as the doors open. In that moment of their chance encounter, she steps onto the floor, her attention glowing with curiosity; her head, looking over her shoulder, attaches her eyes to his. Their stares connect like two opposite ends of a pair of magnets.
Unintentionally, El fails to quickly identify the signs of her emanating approval that shine from her eyes.
She waits for his acknowledgement.
Instead, she is received with an awkward response of one whose life is a tragic reminder of consistent rejection from his hometown, where he grew up equally unnoticed and acknowledged as he did in his own home.
Overcome with doubt, he resembles a shy schoolboy whose eyes are focused on the floor below.
The inner voice of his father reminds him, "No looking! No gawking! No talking with girls!"
Before the door closes between them, the girl risks a brief, delicate wave of her hand towards his direction just in time for him to notice.
Wondering who the lucky recipient could be, El naively turns to the emptiness behind him.
Ascending with the elevator that immediately malfunctions half a floor above, El fails to notice the girl's fragile smile which was meant for him.
September 13, 1996, Friday, (02:15:46)
A cafeteria jukebox plays George Michael's latest song, "Fast Love." The seductive rhythm is drowned by the chatter of students eating dinner.
This particular setting paints a perfect portrait of social conversation before the dominance of instant messaging and status updating.
Many seats are taken except for the chair across Daniel, who expects El to arrive soon. He tastes his meal, a bland fillet of baked fish, and yesterday's leftover vegetables that has been mixed into a watery base labeled "tomato soup." Minutes later, El arrives carrying a meticulously arrangement of food on his tray.
"Anyone here can tell if you entered the cafeteria!" Daniel exclaims.
"How?" El smiles, flattered by the attention.
"Because, you're the only person who selects George Michael songs on the jukebox."
Daniel notices El's dinner tray: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a large serving of spaghetti, and a bowl of the tomato soup that are perfectly presented in a way that suggests it will be photographed for a brochure.
The look their faces suggest a desire for more dim-sum from the night before, but they realize neither posses the monetary freedom to regularly eat out.
"The elevator malfunctioned," El says as he reveals a set of chopsticks he purchased from their visit to Chinatown.
"Chopsticks?" Daniel comments, his stare, confused, is more concerned about El's utensils than the fact the elevator broke. "For spaghetti?!"
"I'm practicing."
Daniel can't help stare uncomfortably as the combination of chopsticks and spaghetti give off the same impression as would adding soy sauce to a taco. "Practicing? For what?!"
"At being Asian," El replies. "Didn't you hear what I said? The elevator broke."
Daniel rolls his eyes in disgust while taking a drink of water. He points with his pinky finger to the table behind them.
"Don't look," he says very casually, "But, your girl is sitting a couple of tables away."
El glances over.
"Don't be obvious!" Daniel buffers his disappointment as best as he can.
Retracting his head, El thinks of another approach before daring another attempt to see the older man, dressed in a suit and tie, sitting with the girl; her smile reminds him of the first time he saw her inside the phone booth.
"Here's your chance! Ask her if she likes your haircut," Daniel laughs, tauntingly pointing towards El's the hairstyle he helped to resemble from a 1982 picture of Andrew Ridgeley, the famous pop band member of WHAM!
"Is that her uncle?" El asks.
"I doubt it, Einstein."
"Older brother?"
Taking another sip, Daniel again points using his pinky finger. "Look closer."
El takes a cautious glance. His observation is long enough to notice the man intimately holding her free hand. Moments later, the girl drops her napkin, the one she wiped her lips with and pulls the man's head towards her for a kiss. They exchange a few words before leaving, unaware of the watchful eyes of the two roommates.
"Is the dinner that bad?" El assumes, sensing the urgency of their departure.
"For a guy whose tie is probably worth more than your wardrobe, I doubt this place was good enough for that romantic moment," Daniel deduces.
"This brings me to you," Daniel says, turning to face El.
"Me?"
"Think about it," Daniel begins to explain. "The guy is refined; he wears expensive suits; and you're wearing the same jeans and sneakers since day one. Your shirts have comic book themes. AND, your new hairstyle suggests you're going on tour with New Kids on the Block."
"It's a style...from WHAM!," El corrects. He stops to think of a solution. "So, I need a tie?"
Out of frustration, Daniel changes the subject to where they last left off at the restaurant when he read El's palm.**
"What do you think about my palm reading?"
El shrugs his shoulders. Though impressed at the accuracy, he makes no acknowledgment of acceptance. Noticing El's skepticism, Daniel takes a chance at an obvious insight that does not require any fortune telling to reveal.
"You never clicked with the cool kids, huh?"
"No," El answers, "the cool kids would beat me up because, I read a lot of books. What else would a kid be doing in the library?"
"Maybe, they bullied you because you checked out books instead of girls?" Daniel laughs.
"My own cousin," El continues, "the homecoming queen of my high school, ignored me between classes. When I waved to her, she'd hide. She thought I'd damage her image if anyone knew we were related. But my dad still asked I watch out for her."
Daniel apologizes to El for another laugh he could not control.
"What do you do for fun, El?"
"Sports, but no team wants me. Growing up, I split my time playing with Transformers and babysitting my sister. I was into Transformers that..."
El pauses, giggling to a memory.
"I spent days with my collection," he repeats, "that I discovered the reason behind the name, 'Optimus Prime.' Wanna know?"
"I'm afraid to ask."
El holds up seven fingers.
"'Optimus' has seven letters. Seven is a PRIME number. Get it? 'Optimus PRIME?'" El laughs at the pleasantry of this childhood discovery.
"How did you survive high school?" Daniel asks with curious intent.
A more deeper and noble tone emits from El's voice that sounds like a teenage Captain America struggling to survive puberty.
"It's a good thing I once read 'Web of Spider-Man' issue #31."
September 13, 1996, Friday, (00:33:13)
Outside, two young freshman dressed in pajamas sit on a bench. Together, they share a cigarette underneath the soft buzz of patio lights that illuminate the confining mist of a late Friday evening.
Meanwhile, behind the counter of a completely empty lobby, waiting to check I.D. cards, a hall monitor sits as he wearily reads a text book regarding film history.
As the temperature drops, the mist eerily thickens around the couple like an uncontrolled hemorrhage in a body of water. There is movement inside the misty particles, but there is no breeze that can be felt stirring the foggy haze. The couple, rubbing their arms across their chests, prematurely retire from the cold.
Simultaneously, they reveal their I.D. cards to the half-awake monitor as they wait for the elevator. The monitor relays a nod of approval before a sudden chill persuades him to put on his leather jacket that is a replica from the movie 'Indiana Jones.'
Neither the couple, nor the monitor are aware of the coldness that has stepped inside. It moves to the right toward the slightly opened door that leads into the all-boys floor of Mary Park Hall.
Inside the hall, a loosely taped flyer advertising an upcoming floor meeting falls to the ground. It goes unseen as the lights flicker like a broken camera that flashes uncontrollably. In between the flashes of light and dark, a vague shadow materializes against the wall, but there is no owner. In two heartbeats, the figure fades by the door only to reappear eight rooms down at the opposite end of the hallway in front of the emergency exit.
Two more heartbeats of time passes. In between more flashes, as if with purpose, the shadow turns to face the closed door of the last room to the right.
Just as the lights return to normal, a resident from the middle of the hall steps out to investigate the activity. However, the entity continues unseen.
"Stop playing around!" he yells into the emptiness. "Geez, I hate it when my anime is interrupted."
Our attention is now on the other side of the room at the end of the hallway, where a large glass cookie jar sits on top of a desk with a handful of delicately folded origami paper cranes the size of a thimbles are inside. Each are meticulously placed at the bottom. The emptiness of the jar suggests a lifetime before it can be filled to the top.
Laying alongside a book entitled, "Reality Therapy," by Dr. William Glasser, is a pack of colorful origami paper that have yet to be folded. Each sheet is cut into smaller squares that are sixteen equal, separate parts.
Unknowingly, gliding towards El, asleep as a barely audible song repeats in his headphones that loosely cover his ears, is the shadowy figure.
Uninvited, the shadow seems to intently observe the creative display of colorful paper cranes inside the jar. Uncommon as it is to encounter origami activitiy on a Friday evening inside a dormitory that is known more for risky pleasures, the scene becomes stranger as the shadow moves toward the cookie jar.
Observing from afar, one would have an urge to warn El he is not alone. From the same viewpoint, others would scream witnessing what El cannot see as he drifts away into what is slowly becoming a nightmare:
A dark outline of a faceless observer dressed in a dirty white robe begins creeping towards him.
(00:00:00)
| Author Notes |
*As told in chapter 6, Welcome Day
**From the previous chapter, Weight of the World Picture from Google. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
The darkness approached. The calm chill felt different and familiar as would an unexpected grab from a hand could still startle a quiet nerve.
And that terrified El.
The temperature, dropping sharply, woke him from his sleep like a scream; as if the universe was warning him for the coming of an ominous presence. However, for El, he had a unique way to deal with disturbing and uncomfortable situations with calm acceptance.
Intimate with both the darkness and the random thoughts of a traumatic past, El sits wondering how to make sense of the frightful vision of a girl wearing a white robe floating at the end of his bed.
He stares long into the emptiness of her silence, hoping the erratic snoring of his roommate and the hum of a digital clock would convince him he is safe within the familiarity of his own reality.
A muffled laughter comes from across the hallway, where his neighbors are viewing a VHS tape they purchased from an adult store from the outskirts of Chinatown earlier in the day. A sudden knock on the door seems to immediately dissipate the entity like a vapor dissolving into the air.
As El opens the door, he finds his neighbor, Tai, his height much shorter than the peep hole of the door.
"Hey, we're watching some movies in my room. Wanna join us?" Tai asks, eager to know the neighbor from across his room.
"Uh, I'm kinda waiting for my mom to call," El replies.
His stubborn refusal stirs questions among the neighbors, who cannot connect with the moral code of conduct influenced from the pages of his favorite comic book.
In El's mind, there is no question between seeking entertainment from an adult video and the gratification of adhering to the character of a fictional role model in a mask. Even if his chances to make new friends ended with social exile, El, his nature defined by the phrase, "With great power comes great responsibility," could never imagine himself giving into the villainy of peer pressure.
Possibly his stubborn faith is the reason why he was chosen for this night and many other nights that will follow.
As the night approaches closer past three in the morning, the deeper chill returns to his room.
An arm's length away, a thick sweater with a lightning bolt logo is neatly folded on top of a dresser. El considers to put it on. Instead, he chooses a different comfort from the cold in the form a CD, a song by 'Savage Garden,' which he had yet to try.
Attached to the CD cover is a post-it note that reads, "You MUST listen to this! XOXOXO, Insignificant Little Sister #3."
He ponders between the choices of listening to "The Best of WHAM!" or the newly released CD single, "Truly, Madly, Deeply," while his lack of knowledge to the language of social acronyms has El wondering about the meaning behind the letters, "XOXOXO."
The very thought of switching CDs in his stereo, a device that has played nothing but WHAM! songs in both cassette and CD for many years, has created a feeling of treason against his favorite musical pop idols, Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael.
For El, this get like a chaotic break within the fabric of his universe.
He had been comfortable in his routine until this night in which, moments ago during the first two verses of the new CD single, he hesitantly accepts a melody not sung by George Michael.
Above him, a spider crawls from behind his comic, "Web of Spider-Man" issue #31.
As the song repeats, the spider appears to mimic a page from the storyline which influences him to spare the small nocturnal predator from a crushing fate in the same fashion as his childhood superhero did on page 13, panel number seven of "Web of Spider-Man," issue number 31, his fingers touching his chin.
Then, as depicted in panel number eight, he, too, switches off a bed lamp as the digital clock strikes three minutes pass three in the morning.
Yet, El does not own a bed lamp.
Eyes closed, his imagination reverts to the girl from the phone booth whom he encountered in the elevator earlier.
He recalls her hand waving at his direction before the elevator malfunctioned.
His calculative nature concludes the odds of her acknowledging his existence was highly favorable. This very thought, in which he considered every variable of doubt, transforms into a picture drawn from the raw mind of a rare breed of fan boys affiliated with the comic books.
Now, with headphones firmly embracing each ear, the slow beat of a new song, "Truly, Madly, Deeply," transports his soul into a familiar place he had not visited in a long while.
Below, he sees the lights of the metropolis co-existing with the neighboring Bay.
Above, a full moon is slightly covered behind the delicate transparency of a cloudy mist. The girl, whose name he has yet to know, is holding his hand, smiling the way she did when he first saw her.
She is wearing the same outfit she wore inside the phone booth, the second one from the right, during move-in day. For El, he is wearing the tight Superman outfit as seen in the original movies.
The stars above seem to complement the romantic song that plays. Every emotion is precisely captured with a word sung from the melody which he cannot describe, nor relate to; but he finds intriguing.
The song gradually fades into end. He gently leaves her on the top of a building, gliding with the gracefulness of a hummingbird approaching the stigma of a flower.
He flies off with a wave of his hand, floating deeper into the night and never looking at the direction to where he is going. Instead, his gaze is fixed onto her as she fades into the distance that grows between them.
A rush of emotions fuels him, burning like a raging, desperate inner fire.
He pauses.
Realizing he has flown too far, El enters another place he cannot recognize, but feels he is no stranger to. The song's rhythm transforms into a desperate shaking of the doorknob from a darker side of a place that appears to be a disturbing reflection of his room, where he finds himself once again...
in bed.
The door slowly opens with a noticeable creak. From behind, a pair of pale feet emerges. Covered in a dirty white dress ending above its pale ankles, each foot begins forward; floating just above the carpet with a deathly pace until freezing in mid-air. It hovers just a breath's distance away from his bedside. The carpet saturates with water dripping from ash-like toes that have slowly turned toward El's direction.
El tries to wake, but feels more like an insect trapped in a web.
In his motionless but conscious state, he accepts two frightening absolutes:
One, he knows he is being observed.
Lastly, the feet begin to move...
towards him.
| Author Notes |
Picture from Google. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
"I'm not sure which question is more ridiculous," Daniel rebukes, feeling his roommate has lost his touch with reality. "You're asking if I wore a dress while watching you sleep?!"
"It's a simple question," El stubbornly persists; clueless to the emotions behind Daniel's comically confused reaction.
"First of all, unlike you," Daniel takes a breath to calm down, "real Chinese don't shower in the morning. We shower at night."
"I didn't know that."
"You know what your problem is, El?"
Unknowing to Daniel, the Chinese language spoken by El's great-grandparents is foreign to him as the traditional routines he never practiced. Daniel makes an impulsive comment that leaves El, a first generation Asian American, to again struggle with an identity in which he is still searching for.
"You are more American than you think, El."
El's posture slopes down like the sun setting for the last time; there's a sense of shame Daniel cannot relate to.
"Dude, you're alright," Daniel laughs. "But, not in a way that I'd wear a dress next to your bed."
A girl suddenly approaches their lunch table with gold highlights in her black hair that bounces with each step.
In one motion, she removes a folded note with rigid edges from inside her overcoat. Without slowing her stride, she places the note next to El's lunch tray. She turns her eyes to wink at El, who does not reciprocate with any amount of interest.
Her magnetic features emit a static disruption revealed by Daniel's stuttered reaction.
Frozen between shock and the scent of her perfume, Daniel points to the note. "W-w-what just happened? What is that?"
"It's a piece of paper," El replies, his eyes rolling upward. "Duh!"
Daniel snaps out of his trance. "Well?"
"Well, what?"
"Aren't you going to read it?!"
El conveys a much deeper interest toward another topic.
"Not until I know more about this 'Chinese' thing of taking showers in the evening. Just to clarify, it's ONLY in the evenings? No exceptions? I never heard that before, and I'm half-Chinese."
Daniel's eyes open wide, still attached to the unfolded note moving in El's hands. He is shocked to see El crumbling the note into a dry spit-wad. Uncaringly, El places the wad of paper inside his jean's pocket like a gum wrapper waiting to be disposed of.
"Dude, El. You ARE weird."
"Being half-Chinese doesn't make me weird."
The reply is misdirected, but Daniel develops a feeling of nausea progressively getting worst from his gut.
Daniel coughs out his water as another pair of girls begin acting strangely behind El; their giggling make it hard for Daniel to drink.
"Are you alright?" El asks.
"The girls behind you are talking...about you!"
"Really?"
"One keeps pointing at you, El. They're laughing every time you lick your ice-cream. Do you know them?"
El glances casually over his shoulder. Noticing his attention, the girls look away.
"I've seen the girl with the long hair before," El answers uninterested.
"That's the one talking how 'cute' you are... over and over."
El continues eating, clearly unconcerned to the transpiring attention behind him.
Daniel, not surprised to El's lack of interest, attempts to motivate his roommate as the girl continues pointing at El, his back still turned away. "She really is into you. Where'd you see her before?"
"She followed me to the bookstore at the start of the semester."
Daniel struggles to admit what appears to be the obvious. "Wait. Does this mean your WHAM! haircut is..."
"...actually working? Honestly, I think it's my ESPIRIT sweater," El smiles.
"I...
can't...
believe this!" Daniel exclaims with shock.
"But..." El begins.
"'But' what? There are no 'but's,' El."
"Okay," El redirects his thoughts, trying to avoid the word 'but.'
"...that's not the girl from the phone booth."
A portion of ham dangles from Daniel's mouth.
"Who cares, El! THAT girl LIKES you! Maybe the phone booth girl is..."
"But," El interrupts Daniel as he catches himself using the word 'but' again; he stops to find another word.
"She...is...not the girl from the phone booth."
Daniel coughs out a larger portion of ham. "I can't believe I'm hearing this!"
His mind walking into what feels like a world of insanity, Daniel hastily considers his roommate's options. El does not recognize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that many would die for.
El appears concerned to Daniel's silence.
Startlingly, Daniel pounds his fist onto the table. His chair falling backwards as he stands up.
"I can't take this anymore!"
"Sit down!" El pleads. "Where are you going?"
Madness in his eyes, Daniel insists, "When I come back you are going to have a date!"
"No! Don't!"
Straightening his collar and brushing the crumbs from his mouth, Daniel walks toward the girls, who uncomfortably accept his request to sit with them.
Ignoring his roommate's interaction, El pretends to enjoy his melting ice cream.
With each laughter from across the table, El sulks behind his ice cream cone.
A few more words exchange between Daniel and the girls before he returns with a look of satisfaction emanating from his smile.
"Okay! It's set!" Daniel declares happily.
"What did you just do?"
"I just hooked you up! You can thank me later."
"What DID you say to them?" El repeats.
Daniel chuckles, "I mentioned how shy you are and that you had something to tell the girl you saw at the bookstore. But, since you have sensitive bowel syndrome, you rushed to the restroom before you could tell her how you feel about her."
A sigh of relief escapes El. "Oh, thank goodness. I thought you told her I liked her."
"Her name is Kaoru!"
Daniel claps his hands once in excitement. "And, you got a date tonight!"
| Author Notes | This is a continuation from my novel that I have been working on. Parts may be muisunderstood. Please understand that this is a developing story, and not a one time short story. Previous chapters are available by clicking onto my portfolio. Thank you in advance for any insights and comments. |
By Cybertron1986
"What is that?" Daniel asks, watching El remove a shoebox from underneath his bed. He removes the thick rubber band secured around it, adds a crumbled paper inside the box and returns it underneath the bed.
He sits behind his desk never answering Daniel's question. Instead, he tensely engages reading his textbook.
"Can I take a look inside?" Daniel asks, taking hold of the shoebox without permission. Eager, he almost snaps the box's rubber band.
"Go ahead," El replies, his eyes never seem to leave his textbook.
Daniel, bewildered, finds more crumpled notes that would fill two front pockets of a pants.
"There's got to be three...maybe, four dozen phone numbers inside!" Daniel frantically exclaims. His hands shake as if he had won the state lottery.
El, still invested in his reading, appears in responsive as a child lost in a daydream.
"Dude!" Daniel shouts. "Have you called any of these girls?!"
"Nope."
El's calm reply chisels away at Daniel's rationality, as he turns to him in dismay.
"You mean to tell me you've received phone numbers from random girls and you don't intend to return ANY of them?!"
"Yup."
"WHY?!"
Daniel waits for a reply, but it doesn't arrive as urgently as he expects.
"Haven't you ever read a Spider-Man comic?" El asks.
"Wha-- What?!"
"Haven't you read Spider-Man...?" he repeats.
"I know what you said. But, what do comics have to do with girls' phone numbers?"
"If you are familiar with Spider-Man," El begins, "then you probably heard of the phrase, 'With great power comes great responsibility.'"
Daniel's eye twitches. "Dude, El. If I was you, then I'd be the 'Mack-Daddy' of this entire campus!"
"That's why you are not me."
Confused, Daniel stares into the obliviousness of El's eyes that fail to emit any reasoning. Daniel pleads for an explanation while clawing his cheeks with irritation, his patience nearly spent.
"El, I'm afraid to ask, but what does that supposed to mean?"
"Don't you get it? I have this 'great' power, and I'm being responsible with it. If you had this power, then you'd probably misuse it. It's a good thing you're not me. You could end up hurting someone, or yourself."
Daniel makes a comical gesture by stabbing his heart with an imaginary knife.
"I'm going to pick a note and call for you!"
The remark successfully detaches El from his book. Immediately, he stands up, his book falling to the carpet.
"How can I talk with other girls when you already set me up with that girl from the cafeteria?"
"El, remember rule number one! When dating..."
"Let my mom know when I'll be home?" El interrupts his sentence.
Daniel sighs, almost defeated. However, the chance at El taking the right step toward breaking his shell of social awkwardness gives Daniel hope, despite the possibility that everything could end in failure.
"No, Einstein," Daniel corrects. "Always have a 'Plan B,' in case 'Plan A' doesn't work."
"At the very least," Daniel thinks to himself, "I may get a good laugh out of this."
"So, Romeo, what's your game plan for tonight?"
El, picking up his textbook from the carpet, feels the dampness in the book's cover from the moisture of the carpet, where the mysterious presence of water had yet to completely evaporate.
El ignores it, accepting the mysterious vision of the girl dripping water from her ankles to be nothing more than a hallucinogenic result of a burrito supreme he ate for dinner very late into the night.
"Maybe, she'll want to try origami?"
"Really, El? She's from Japan. That's like taking her to eat ramen noodles when she came here for the burger and fries."
"So, Panda Express?" El suggests.
"Didn't I just say she came here for the burger and fries? She's had plenty of noodle recipes from where she came."
"But," El argues, "Panda Express makes Chinese food, not Japanese."
"El, I'll pray for you."
"You're not religious." El is still oblivious.
"For your sake, El, it won't hurt for me to believe."
El begins walking toward the shower room located outside in the dorm hall. He is not certain whether, or not his chosen style of fashion resembling his idol, Andrew Ridgeley, will appeal to his date.
El is clearly undecided. Yet, what tears him apart is deciding between serenading 'Careless Whisper' or, 'Last Christmas' to her.
Suddenly, from five rooms away, Daniel yells into the hall.
"Yo, El!"
El reveals his head from around the corner of boys' bathroom door.
"You do know that origami is viewed as feminine in Japan, right?!" Daniel laughs.
"No, it's not!" El laughs in return.
"She might think you're gay!"
Simultaneously, from each side of the all-boys hall, rows of doors abruptly open. Each resident peers outside their rooms, curious and amused to whom Daniel is shouting at.
El rushes into the shower room, his hand covering his face before a noticeable blush validates the subtle, but obvious embarrassment of his face.
| Author Notes |
This is a continuation from my novel that I have been working on. Parts may be misunderstood. Please understand that this is a developing story, and you are arriving near the middle of events. Previous chapters are available by clicking onto my portfolio. Thank you in advance for any insights and comments.
Picture from Google. |
By Cybertron1986
Their first date together was like a tender comedy script. The future of this moment would not be determined by her genuine interest in him, but by whether, or not she could tolerate saying, "I love you just the way you are," for the rest of her life.
Already, her patience was dissolving faster than ice in boiling water.
The evening began with their eyes locked at an awkward standstill the moment El presented her with a cheap, unopened pack of origami paper and suggested they spend the night creating something children would find intriguing: kirigami, a variation of origami that involved cutting paper to create artistic designs.
In the middle of their activity, Kaoru anticipates El to make the move that would turn their focus away from the scissors, and more toward her need for his attention.
Rather than paying attention to her obvious restlessness, El amplifies his precision to his paper cutting skills by slowing down each careful incisions. Kaoru, a native of Japan where kirigami has been a familiar, but uninteresting part of her life since grade school, smiles back in politeness more than with enthusiasm.
For the last half hour, El oversees the signs that included a "Hajimemashite," a colloquial Japanese greeting which means, "Nice to meet you," followed by Kaoru's strong Japanese accent that should had sparked a thought of consideration in his approach to impress her with Japanese culture, a subject she attempted to leave behind when she chose to study abroad. Neither her sigh, reeking with boredom, accompanied with her subtle comment, "I was born in Tokyo, but you know more about Japanese history and culture than most my family would care to know," could slow El's childish fervor of spewing historical facts about origami like an encyclopedia come to life.
Between each of breath, El somehow infuses the biography of George Michael's evolution beyond his success with 'WHAM!' into their conversation that quickly turns into a lecture-like, classroom experience regarding pop music history.
He adds with equal clarity, advice on how she could be compatible with both his mother and younger sister.
Unnoticed by El, is Kaoru's declining desire in spending another day together. Her interest is dying faster than the time it takes light to reach the moon, an analogy that could had nudged El's limited capability of identifying Kaoru's discomfort.
Unknowingly, for El, the embarrassment of his first impression of him has chiseled into her mind like a steel tool chipping away at a stone.
"Did you know my little sister is in the seventh grade? She sent me a 'Savage Garden' CD the other day, and claims they're just like 'WHAM!' because the group includes a lead singer and a guy, like Andrew Ridgeley, who plays the guitar, but never sings for some reason like Andrew Ridgeley. I don't think there can a group as equally as good as 'WHAM!' What do you think?"
Her eyelids struggle to stay open.
"Honestly," she wearily begins, "I never heard of "'WHAM!'"
Her response conjures a surprising, uncomfortable dismay that silences El, who is now speechless to Kaoru's unknowing. Identifying his confusion more quickly than El can recognize her boredom, Kaoru suggests an alternative.
"Can we go outside? I'm getting hungry," she says, winking her eye.
"I love noodles! How about you?" he exclaims. Kaoru giggles at his childish spirit.
Suddenly, his roommate's warning, the advice he gave him just before their night began, replays in his mind. "When she tells you she is hungry, don't say, 'Panda Express.' Don't say, 'Panda Express.' DON'T SAY, 'PANDA EXPRESS!'"
Naively, El regurgitates the last words that echo inside his mind.
"How about Panda Express?" he proposes.
Eager to shift away from the dull conditions, Kaoru accepts. Yet, inside, she craves more than a fast food atmosphere to set the kind of romantic mood that could alter the path of where their date is heading. She is unaware of the limitations to El's creative imagination that would satisfy Kaoru's romantic standard, one that included anything beyond the ideas he solely retrieves from the experiences of other classmates who attended high school prom, a rite-of-passage that El, instead, replaced with making "Happy Meals" and returning home to change his younger sister's dirty diapers.
"Do you have a car?" she asks.
Instead of admitting he has barely enough money to purchase an upgrade for a "Super-Size" meal, El offers what he believes is something no girl could refuse.
"How about we...walk? That should give us more time to converse more about origami and introduce you to the history of another great '80's band: 'A Flock of Seagulls!'"
Kaoru laughs uncomfortably. Out of politeness, she accepts his suggestion with a noticeable sigh of frustration-- a sound which, probably, is directed to the lack of desire involving subjects she has no interest in.
"Can you guess WHICH 'WHAM!' song I literally listened to everyday for two years?"
"I don't know any 'WHAM!' songs, but..."
El interrupts Kaoru as if she never breathed a word.
"That's okay. I'll tell you! It was 'Last Christmas!' I played that song over and over again in the cassette deck of my car; even during the summer!" he laughs, oblivious to her flatlining conscious.
As El continues into the night, Kaoru decides to retract her hand that was reaching out to hold his.
Preferring the security of her own empty pockets, she makes a deeper sigh that sounded more like a last breath...
for life.
| Author Notes |
This is a continuation from my novel that I have been working on. Parts may be misunderstood. Please understand that this is a developing story, and you are arriving near the middle of the events. Previous chapters are available by clicking onto my portfolio. Thank you in advance for any insights and comments.
Picture is of Paul Reynolds, the lead guitarist of �??????�?????�????�???�??�?�¢??Flock of Seagulls,�??????�?????�????�???�??�?�¢?? and El. |
By Cybertron1986
Daniel feels the heavy gloom from across the room. "Are you depressed Kaoru doesn't want to see you ever again? I'm sorry. Maybe, you're not ready to be dating."
"It's more the triathlon," El mutters.*
"Don't let yesterday get to you. That sorta negativity opens up holes in our world for bad spirits to enter!"
El turns his attention to the bottom of his glass cookie jar, where an empty space the size of a fingernail has yet to be covered with one, maybe two paper cranes. He hesitates to complete the last fold to the crane already in his hand.
"I'm not the only one," El replies.
"What does that mean?" Daniel asks, sitting by his bedside, confused.
"Everyone has at least one in their life, right?"
"One what?"
"Regret," El sighs.
"Regrets? That's a part of life!" Daniel smiles.
El, his energy returning, completes the folds to the small paper crane.
He places the piece into the empty spot in the jar, realizing an additional crane is needed to cover the bottom completely.
Instead, El walks to the window, where a reflection of himself is staring back at him. The reflection triggers many more unfulfilled moments and the countless disappointments with his father.
"You know that saying, El? About how life is cruel? Your experiences tend to be slightly more challenging than us 'normal' people. For sure, they're unique. Eventually, everyone gets to where they need to be...when the time is right. Maybe, your time isn't now."
El chuckles.
"What's so funny?" Daniel asks.
**El laughs louder. "Are you trying to convince me that my date with Kaoru was supposed to end up so badly? It's no lost to me. After dinner, we came back to to play chess. She asked me to remove my shoes. So, I did. And, then she was strangely more interested in my feet than having me teach her the 'Blitzkrieg' move. It weirded me out."
"At least, you didn't take her to Panda Express like I told you not to," Daniel adds.
El's laugh turns uneasy, knowing he did the opposite. Daniel's laughter confuses him. He is uncertain if he is laughing with him, and not at him.
"Like I said, I don't know the future, but I can interpret it. That was your first date, El. Nobody EVER gets it right the first time."
An unexpected pause hints another embarrassing moment from El's past.
Daniel infers, "Wait. Have you ever kissed a girl before?!"
"My cousin kissed me once."
"El," Daniel, disgusted, makes a sour face. "Maybe, it's best you don't talk about that."
El shrugs his shoulders; his understanding is equal to a child's cognitive understanding to the real world.
He completes folding the last crane that would cover the jar's bottom. Before placing the crane inside, he analyzes the folds under the light with his palm. Like a jeweler putting the finishing touches to a freshly crafted diamond, he is patient and precise when positioning between the spaces of the surrounding cranes.
He notices a few imperfections at the edge of the crane's head which he corrects with careful, repeated motions of his fingers until the symmetry turns flawless.
"I picked out the notable parts of your palm, and I was able to analyze your future," Daniel says, pulling out a notebook from his pocket.
"According to my calculations there are a number of interesting things that connect your past, present and future," Daniel states, reviewing the scribbles inside the spiral notepad.
"El, your experiences, no matter how strange and difficult they seem, are purposeful."
Daniel continues flipping through the pages, skipping more than half of the contents until he arrives at the page he needs to emphasize.
El places the crane into the jar. Finally, the entire bottom of the glass jar is blanketed with small paper cranes as Daniel begins muttering several long, indecipherable sentences in Mandarin.
Daniel starts to talk under his breath, searching for the English words that would best translate his calculations in a way that would make sense to his non-Chinese speaking roommate.
"El, listen," Daniel says in a more serious tone. "The fate of the world depends on your son."
| Author Notes |
*Details explained in Chapter 11, Weight of the World
**Please read Chapter 16, First Date (EVER) Conclusion |
By Cybertron1986
"Check your mailbox! I sent you a package!"
"I'm doing laundry," El informs his sister. "'There's a stain on my WHAM!' shirt."
"You mean that shirt with 'CHOOSE LIFE' printed in big, black capital letters?" she asks sarcastically. "Throw that away already!"
There's an awkward realization in El's laugh as he understands the possibility to his fashion sense could be years out-of-date. "Yeah," he replies, uncomfortably. "That one."
His sister giggles, "The package I sent you will surpriiiiiiiize you."
"Why?"
"I gotta go, big brother. I'm going to a party. Tell me what you think when you open it!"
Before leaving, El requests to have his collection of Robby Thompson baseball cards mailed to him. "Love you," he says, before hanging up the receiver.
His walk to the mailbox in the dorm lobby is met with the muffled, shy laughter of approval from a group of International girls from countries he's never been to. Their hands covering their mouths, each girl makes a comment in their native language about El's physique, built for sprinting, revealed by his cut-off t-shirt with the kanji character for 'Love' boldly printed in the front. El's image mistakenly implies a desperation for companionship.
His interpretation of their laughter triggers a high school memory; one that has closely attached to him like a hidden scar...
-Summer 1989, Stockton, California-
A dark grey car, its old engine coughing like a dying, obsolete model, rumbles to a stop by a boy carrying a wooden softball bat on his shoulders with a broken, soiled mitt that is one size too small. Upon closer observation, we see the boy to be a younger El, who is years away from attending University. The middle of his bat has an autograph of Steve Garvey, signed with a blue sharpie and protected with double-sided tape with dirt and grass sticking on the outside.
Laughter pierces through the convulsing rattle of the car's muffler as taunting words spew from the open windows. Their ridicule hits El harder than the egg thrown from the backseat. El's naive perception of the world is supported only by his faith and characteristics portrayed in the pages of 'Web of Spider-Man,' issue #31.
"Dude!" a voice yells from the passenger side. "A skinny-buff China man from Japan thinks he's Jose Canseco!"
Another egg is thrown that hits El's exposed arm, its shell piercing his lower right elbow. He examines the blood that drips heavily onto the ground. El looks up, noticing that one of the passengers is a former classmate who sat behind him in middle school history class three years ago. This is the same classmate he helped pass a chapter test about the Civil War.
"Hey, China man!" the driver yells, pulling at the corners of each eye to the condescending squint of thin eyes. "You're a little too early for Halloween, China man. Did your mom dress you with those tube socks?!"
Without wincing, El pulls out the eggshell from his elbow, wiping away the clotting blood.
Before speeding away, the tormentors laugh one last time.
"WANNABE!"
He arrives home, ringing the doorbell as the label of "Wannabe," replays over in his mind. His father, annoyed, opens the door. He is upset because he is missing the Red Sox game featuring a match-up between Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire, who will eventually break Babe Ruth's home run record years later.
"You've been playing baseball again?!" his father asks, upset.
El nods, turning his body to conceal the wound on his elbow.
"Why don't you stay home?!" his father continues, irritated. "Your younger sister needs attention! There's cleaning around the house! You're wasting time! You're not good at sports. Just quit already!"
El, ashamed, mutters an apology, but the rising tone of anger in his father'a voice continues rambling about how life on the farm was difficult when he was a boy. He explains to El how survival depended on the cooperation of all family members and not the selfish aspiration attachment to personal goals.
"Playing sports," his father adds, "is a luxury. Not a necessity."
El's father returns to his recliner, where he just misses Clemens striking out McGwire with a 95mph fastball.
-Present day, October 1, 1996, Mary Park Hall Dormitory-
El retrieves the large brown envelope from the mailbox. Running back to his room, he opens it without delay. Reaching in, he pulls out a letter along with the latest holiday issue of 'Animerica.'
El takes the letter, reading it as he places the magazine onto his bed, just above from where his copy of 'Web of Spider-Man' issue #31, is perfectly aligned onto the wall.
The letter reads:
Dear Insignificant Second-Born Brother #2,
Surprize! Remember that drawing you helped me color for the contest? Skip to the magazine's 'Fan Art Gallery' page! That drawing of our Veritech Fighter and Rick Hunter WON honorable mention! Thanks for convincing me. I know I didn't want to submit anything when you asked. I guess it's because I didn't think we would win. Now, I feel like drawing forever! Maybe, one day, I'll become an artist? Can't wait for the next contest! Thanks for believing in me!
Love,
Insignificant Last Born Sister #3
El secures the letter into his desk drawer, against the window. He is aware of his roommate's absence. However, from the corner of his eye, he notices an insidious outline of a girl, her face hidden behind long, black ruffled hair. Her dirty white dress clearly reflects against his window.
Surprisingly calm, El pretends to be unaware of her presence. He begins calculating from the corner of his eyes the analytical possibilities.
He concludes the image is a figment of his imagination, an illusion of the company of the girl from the phone booth.
The shadow raises its neck. Its face is covered completely behind hair that is darker than shadows.
She moves like a puppet, invisible strings attached, in a haunting glide.
Her reflection in the window is enough to jolt El, who turns to find nothing but his closed door.
Between them, for now, an unseen line separates them from one another. This is a line drawn by the laws of the universe for the purpose of separating the living from the dead, and the present from the past.
Very soon, El will return to that familiar darkness.
| Author Notes |
This is a continuation from my novel that I have been working on when time is allotted from both work and family. Please understand that this is a developing story, and you are arriving near the middle of events. Therefore, parts may be misunderstood. Previous chapters are available by clicking onto my portfolio to clarify any questions. Thank you in advance for any insights and comments.
The picture used is the actual drawing that was printed in the holiday issue of Animerica from 1996. Yes, this is a true story. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
On the first floor of San Francisco State's Mary Park dormitory, an empty room exists. Almost everyday it is ignored unless, periodically on some nights of the day, residents hear noises from the inside.
Janitors of the residential community are aware of the fact the room is unoccupied.
Yet, in fear of spreading rumors, the unspoken history attached to the room is a traumatic memory that was thought best to never be mentioned.
The silence, however, could not stop the curiosities of the neighbors residing a door, or two away.
The questions began innocently,
"Does anyone live in there?"
"Do you know the resident of that room?"
"Is this room rented out?"
And the answers varied.
"Nobody."
"It's a storage room."
"They're making repairs."
And, sometimes, the responses weren't comfortably embraced.
"Is it true? I heard someone died in there."
"They can't rent out the room because a suicide happened in there a few years ago."
"I heard the last resident complained about weird stuff happening inside."
Occasionally, when someone happened to walk by, the slaming sound of a closet door or dresser drawer could be heard coming from the inside and the mystery of anyone occupying the room was assumed to had solved itself.
"See. I knew someone lived there."
But, the question remained:
"Who?"
_________________
October 24, 1996, Mary Park Hall, first floor of the all boys' hall...
Two familiar roommates begin walking down the hall, six doors from the empty room.
They are in disagreement to the possibility of Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker to ever conceive a child together.
"Isn't Luke the boyfriend of Leia?!" Daniel asks.
"No. That would be Han...Han Solo," El replies, clearly discouraged to the lack of 'STAR WARS' knowledge. "Didn't you watch 'Return of the Jedi?' Luke is her BROTHER."
"You're a dork. The point is, according to your palm, Mr. Baseball," Daniel continues, his passion for science fiction clearly not as great as El's, "you're going to have a son born in the year of the dragon."
El is confused. He wants to know more, but the fear of the future exceeds his curiosity. There is an unpleasant sense of dissatisfaction in El's eyes.
"But, what about my future as the first Asian baseball player in the Major Leagues?" he asks, doubtful of his capabilities as a parent.
"Let me describe the details in a way you can understand more easily."
There's a higher sense of urgency in Daniel's voice as he continues, "IF Han and Leia were to ever have a baby, then depending how good a father Han Solo is will determine the fate of the universe because their child, LIKE YOURS, will also become either powerfully good... or powerfully bad."
"You mean like Darth Vader bad, or an EVIL Superman kinda bad?"
"Stop with the dorky references! But, yeah. And, when you become a father."
Daniel pauses to makes sure he place more emphasis to the next point. "I recommend you complete your studies as a teacher with that same intent to do good in the world as you explained to me. Don't aspire for a better paying career. Becoming a teacher will help you as a parent. The field of education will not make you wealthy; there will be no amount of wealth more important for tomorrow than you becoming a good parent to your son."
"So, what you're telling me is...I'm Han Solo without a chance to play baseball in the future."
"Sure. Ok," Daniel replies, tired of trying to convey the importance of his future son.
"As long as you understand that your son is going to be a very important person then I've done my job," Daniel adds with a smile.
"Possibly," Daniel continues, "your son could be Superman."
"You're referring about Kal El?" El interrupts.
"Whatever. As long as WHAT I'm telling you gets into that space fantasy head of yours. YOUR son is vital to the future of humanity."
"But, what about me becoming the first Asian baseball player in the major leagues?"
Daniel sighs a breath of discouragement, frustrated at repeating himself. "According to your palm, you're an average guy who will be the father to the one that will save the world a generation from now. That's something more important than baseball, El."
"Wow! I'm like Joe El!" he exclaims, more satisfied.
"Who? Jor El? WHO is Jor El?! Your uncle?" Daniel asks.
"Jor EL," El answers, enlightened to the coincidental spelling in the names, "was the father of Superman. He imprisoned the three criminals of Krypton which included the infamous General Zod into the phantom zone, a place that looks like a window only it's a prison, before sending his infant son, Kal El, to earth moments before their planet was destroyed by their neighboring sun."
As they pass the door of the vacant room, their discussion fades behind the slowly closing hall door.
Inside the vacant room, an unseen darkness stirringly intensifies. However, this shade is slightly different from the shadows from the surrounding foliage.
There exists no light, manmade or natural, that is able to pierce through the intense blackness that extends beyond the shade of darkness conjuring from inside the room on a mid-day afternoon.
The cloud materializes into a dark, grainy and obscure figure that splits into the form of not one, but three figures. In the front, a girl stands with a white dress; her black, ruffled hair covers her face. To the right of her is a young man wearing a leather jacket. His gaze is affixed to the spot below him where a pool of blood had been replaced with a new carpet.
Lastly, a towering black shadow stands behind the couple. Underneath its deep, dark outline of a black hood are the exhales of a cold breath that seems to defy the controlled temperature of the dormitory. Seemingly, the intimidating figure becomes tied to the conversation outside involving a child who will be born in the year of the dragon.
What is equally important as this ominous moment is another instance which already occurred exactly a week before this day, the anniversary of the death of history's most honored athlete who wore number 42, Jackie Robinson.
On that day, an incident took place a few rooms down to the end of the all-boys hall from this vacant space. This incident marks a long, familiar encounter with the unseen demons that have plagued an ever evolving world, where vulnerability feeds the hungry, forgotten souls.
And, in this particular struggle, an unheard, meager contender, whose name happens to correlate with the symbol of hope from a planet destroyed by a solar explosion will stand between the light of life and the darkness that is death.
Far into the future, a struggle between good and evil will occur in a room on the first floor of Mary Park Hall located just before the emergency exit to the right.
Armed with the inspiration of character observed in 'a Spider-Man' comic book he read underneath his bed as a kid during one rainy night in 1987, with a Green Lantern lantern, this young man will make a choice that will determine the fate of both his future son and the future.
Somewhere within the now unfathomable depth of a vacant room where an ascending eclipse of a black cloud buries an unspoken past, is a vengeful longing to repossess what was taken by a boy who, long ago, chose to save his baby sister from the cold grasp of a crooked, desperate
hand that never forgot.*
| Author Notes |
*Please read chapter 5, "The Curse" for more details about this mysterious entity.
To grasp the backgrounds of the speakers, please read previous chapters. I purposely limited the identity of the speakers for the purpose of feel to the listeners hidden within the empty room, the dark entities who have no idea who are actually talking. Picture found from Google search with key words, DARK ROOM. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
October 17, 1996, 6:02 a.m., one week earlier...
A shadowy cloud moves ominously to the end of Mary Park's first floor, where the all boys rooms reside within the hall.
From every angle, neither the light of the early morning nor the lights from the ceiling above bring justification to the concise movements of a shadow fueled by purpose, rather than from a dawn shining from a small window. A dense mist thickens around a doorknob with control, convincingly appearing to grasp the knob with urgency.
The door shakes but the sound goes unheard by the sleeping residents who will awaken from their sleep within an hour to the day in which the seventh anniversary of game three of the 1989 World Series, in which a historic magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck and froze the world of sports.
On the other side of the shaking door, El remains asleep until the noise of metal and wood creates enough disturbance to stir his attention. He discovers his body's unwillingness to react to the desperation of force that creaks his door to a slow open.
The shaking stops briefly as the silence suddenly gives way to the sound of the rusted hinges that enable El's partial consciousness to distinguish a familiar, but unwanted recognition of a pale foot.
Again, the foot slowly drags along the carpet scrapping it barely with its toenails, while the saturation from the dripping seams of a dirty white dress leave behind a cold, wet trail of water.
With morbid grace, this uninvited guest completely reveals itself from behind the rusty door in a surreal hover. Each of its long, pointy toenails continue grazing the bumpy carpet as if without concern, or soul.
The moment feels as if the familiarity of time and tangibility had been replaced by a realm not governed by the laws of earthly physics, but by an inescapable, dark force hidden within the blackness of the universe.
It pauses either to be noticed, or to issue a silent warning to El, whose conscious has partially returned. His faint wake is confirmed only by the noticeable chill of mist that exhales from his breaths, and the familiarity of feeling like an insect trapped in a web revisits his memory from a few days ago.
Each foot of the visitor turn counterclockwise in a complete, awkward circle that implies some disturbing sign of disagreement with the world's normalcy. And, without effort, the feet complete their twist, stopping as each toenail curls toward El's bedside.
El struggles to open his eyes, understanding the uncomfortable situation. He is able to turn his neck to get a better view of the mysterious stranger, but he cannot adjust his vision clearly without his glasses.
El makes more effort to take sight of what he knows is a nightmarish dream; however, the moment materializes into an undeniable truth he refuses to accept.
The feet come in and out of sight with each of El's forced glances. They float closer as does the intensity of his heartbeats that equal the rhythm to the drumbeats of New Order's song, "Bizarre Love Triangle" (The Extended Dance Mix Version).
Turning his head one last time, El discovers the feet have vanished.
He breathes a sigh of relief. The now vacant spot of the carpet convinces him the last few minutes were one of many bad dreams he has experienced since moving in the dormitory, this one being more unforgettable than the others. Yet, his state of paralysis convinces him the event was real, and unfinished.
*(Every time I see you falling, I get down on my knees and pray...)
El forces his head to face the ceiling. Without his glasses, he barely makes out a shocking, blurred silhouette of a girl floating above his uncovered feet where his toes peek from the blanket's edge. Each feature of her face is completely hidden underneath her thick black hair that seem to deny the light of dawn.
(I've waited for that final moment you...
say the words that I can't say)
Like a lightbulb moment of certainty, El is convinced he is in the presence of a frail, vulnerable girl.
Like the girl, El, too, defies the world's normalcy in his own style, a genuine reflection of his unique past but disturbing past.
"A girl!" he tells himself with passionate interest. "Isn't she from my Japanese 101 class?"
There's an awkward pause between them as the beating of his heart slows to a calm wonder fueled by desire, rather than fear.
Again, he acknowledges to himself, "There's a girl in my room! Awesome! A girl...on my bed! My friends aren't going to believe this! I'm not a loser!"
Like an innocent schoolboy, he advises himself, "Don't be a doofus. DON'T BE A DOOFUS!"
His eyes turn far enough to the right, where he checks on the well-being of his copy of "Web of Spider-Man" issue 31. A spider scurries behind the comic tacked perfectly onto the wall as if to seek protection from the cold aura of evil that fills the room.
Oblivious to the potential danger, El smiles towards his silent visitor, never understanding he is now in a place he does not belong.
The gesture connects a bridge of emotion between the awkward pair; one possibly evil, the other alive but naive. In an instant, time stops long enough for El to witness the parting of her hair that opens wide enough to reveal one of two eyes.
As their gaze connects, she feels...
salvation.
| Author Notes |
Please note this is chapter 20. Please read previous chapters to understand what is being developed. Picture is of my niece, Rein, which was edited to capture the moment. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) *Bizarre Love Triangle, written by New Order in 1986, from their album, Brotherhood. |
By Cybertron1986
-Stockton, California, Fall 1989...
She bought the wooden softball bat from the sports department at SEARS partly because it was not only on sale, but for the reason that she could not distinguish the difference between a softball bat from a baseball bat.
El's mom noticed his growing interest in baseball since the first day he decided to step out of the house and began playing with more frequency during his sophomore year of high school. After that first day, returning home just at dusk from the sandlot, there was a feeling El's life was forever changed.
The majority of his classmates played on various teams, or some organized city youth league. El, on the other hand, spent his developmental years perfecting the science of babysitting. This was at his father's request. His sister, who barely begun kindergarten, needed more attention than from what his father provided her between every televised inning of a Boston Celtics game, or the amount of money he threw away to the relatives in East Asia. His father did have a plan for the future, but it did not include El, his second born.
When El was able to practice baseball, he improvised binder paper which he crumbled and taped together to form a crude ball. He learned through much trial and error that by adding more layers of binder paper around the center, the sphere became heavier. Since he never held a real baseball in his hands before, he estimated the proper weight by feel. His father would never think of buying him a real baseball for him to practice with let alone spending money to celebrate his birthday, buy a Christmas present or consider capturing El's developmental memories with a photograph.
El's father was convinced his second born son was born to fail, to embarrass him as a parent. And, his father was intent on justifying that just to prove he was right all along.
However, El was special. El's father played catcher in high school. According to the stories his mother shared, El's father was quite a hitter. Eventually, a bit of that talent had carried over into El's nature. Unfortunately, his father refused to see or nurture that ingrained love for the science behind hitting a baseball. There was never a small acknowledgement of his son's uncanny ability to consistently pitch a ball and hit a six inch target from fifty feet away, a target El drew onto the brick wall of a classroom at the nearby elementary school with chalk.
This marksmanship was strengthened from the countless, summer days he spent in a place the neighborhood kids called a "Sandlot," a bumpy, grassy field that hid countless gopher holes.
His mother never spoke of sports. To her, badminton and tennis rackets were all the same as the balls used for American football and soccer. Even with her lack of knowledge of sports, she was the only adult willing to acknowledge El's passion for baseball, even when she had little money to spare.
The softball bat was unique among all the other bats. This bat was autographed by Steve Garvey, record holder of most consecutive games played in the National League (1,207).
El had it signed in that summer of '89, when his mom took him to a sports card show at the local mall in Stockton, where his mom usually bought new church clothes. El didn't know who Steve Garvey was, but his mom insisted the softball bat be signed by the All-Star since she remembered seeing him in a 'Hungry Man' commercial that aired between "The Price is Right," and her favorite soap opera, "General Hospital," during the late '70s.
El didn't complain. Like his mother, he, too, perceived all bats to be equal.
Besides, awkward as it was to use a softball bat for baseball games, El finally had something more respectable than the broken broomstick handle his father gave to him.
There would be games for El to compete in. Yet, they mainly comprised of a rag-tag ensemble of children of various ages and skills. Some of the players were as young as seven years old, while the eldest, the pitcher, had recently attained his driver's license.
"Shut up! I need to go soon! I have to call someone!" the pitcher exclaimed.
The younger players were intimidated by the pitcher's masculine, deep voice that already passed puberty. The fact he was almost legal to drink alcohol seemed to emit an aura of invincibility to the rest of the younger players.
The "phone call" the pitcher mentioned was meant for El's cousin, Gigi. The pitcher had a crush on her ever since he met her the week she visited from Florida to spend Christmas at El's house two years ago, in 1987.
Gigi, a year younger than El, used him, for most of the time, as an excuse to escape the surveillance of El's overprotective parents and spend the afternoon unsupervised at the arcade. Yet, instead of playing Galaga, or Ms. Pac-Man with the twenty dollar bill El's father gave the two, Gigi left El without any arcade tokens, or money for the remainder of the day that she, instead, would spend with the older player.
The pitcher had just struck out two batters...with just six pitches, each third strike a swinging out.
Now, El walks up to the plate...
| Author Notes |
Please note this is a chapter from an ongoing novel I am currently writing. To understand the chapter, and the relevance of events, please read the previous chapters. Thank you.
Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
-Present moment. October 17, 1996, Mary Park Hall-
He was not aware, but death was staring into his eyes. Ironically, the uneasy chill looking down from atop his chest felt less awful than the years of his father's and brother's bitter criticism; years that are now submerged underneath the depths of some dark baptism by the tears he's cried since childhood.
The figure lunges forward, grasping El's arms that silently warns him of a coming storm; a deadly chill that would follow him like dark clouds do. From this moment on, this lingering entity chooses El to survive without understanding of what is happening.
Despite the surreal vision, the unthinkable thought of a girl occupying his bed fascinates El. Together, they seem like a pair of parallel lines that, somehow, defy the rules of geometry the moment she grabs him.
She speaks with a soft, scratchy desperate voice.
"Get out of my bed."
El turns his stare away from the eye peering from behind her slowly parting hair.
The sight of her screams a danger El cannot hear. With much effort, the vision of the girl, deduced by his logic to be nothing more than the consequence of having a Taco Bell dinner the night before, would not leave no matter how hard he attempts to wake from what appears nothing more than a bad dream.
Her second eye reveals itself from behind the now fully separating hair; together, they connect with stares that were not meant to intersect as would lines of an asymptotic graph.
Louder, her voice repeats as if to assure El this is more than a dream.
"Get out of my bed!"
As a bridge that connects two separate areas, her voice carries El over like some ominous mistake committed by the Universe that transports both of them into their respective realities, where each of their unique pasts are now shared...
-*Stockton, California, October 1989, the sandlot at Clairmont Elementary School-
The whispers were loud enough to expose the evident fear inside each batter observing from the side of the baseball field. The pitcher glares at El, the next hitter, from the mound.
"One mistake and El could die if a fastball hits him on the head!"
The pitcher threw a noticeable fastball that caught everyone's attention. A sprinkle of rain, probably caused by the Indian Summer that unexpectedly arrived to the Central Valley that day, begins to sprinkle at the moment El steps into the batter's box, his autographed Steve Garvey bat calmly gripped in his hands.
The cloudless sky somehow produces droplets of rain that sparkle in the Fall sun, producing a shining rainbow across the afternoon grass of the sandlot. The beautiful colors reminds El times he spent watching rainbows from the hose he watered his mother's flower bed.
"How's it possible that it's raining without a cloud in the sky?!" Jules asks El.
"Is this heaven?" another of El's teammate asks.
El smiles, enjoying the spectacle with inspiration.
"It's a sign," El replies, "Enjoy it."
The pitcher had just struck out the two previous hitters with six pitches, both swinging strikeouts. This enticed both teams to place bets on El, The Sluggers' last hope for heroics.
"Three bucks says El strikes out."
"Five dollars he strikes out swinging in six pitches."
"I'll give him five pitches tops, then he strikes out swinging."
"Don't make El mad. He's got pop. I've seen him hit the roof of the classroom once," one player claims, pointing to the building that, to this day, sits deep in centerfield of Clairmont Elementary school's grassy field.
"He's not going to hit it," Jules pessimistically exclaims, "The pitcher is throwing a hundred miles per hour! Jose Canseco couldn't hit that! At best, he'll foul a pitch. Five bucks he strikes out swinging in four pitches."
El ignores Jules with the same forgiveness he will apply in three years when Jules trades the entirety of El's G.I. Joe and Transformers collection for a semester's worth of french fries.
El's attention is directed toward the rainbow across the outfield.
The moment triggers another song to replay in El's head; its lyrics signaling the conclusion to the most perfect summer as the rainbow dissolved behind the radiance of the coming sun.
It is at this moment that nature deviates from its rules and awards one true believer with an unforgettable memory.
| Author Notes |
*Please read the previous chapter, "Awakening Pt. 1" to understand the totality of this chapter. Remember, if you choose to review, then please note this is chapter to a continuing novel not complete.Thank you.
Pictured: The actual Steve Garvey signed bat that was from the story. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
Stockton, California, October 5, 1989, Clairmont Elementary sandlot.
Belinda Carlisle's 1989 song, "Runaway Horses" plays in El's mind as clear as the first time he heard it on his cassette Walkman player between English and chemistry class.
(Baby, the wind has changed again)
The song unlocks emotions that rekindle a few key memories from where he draws inspiration.
From across left center field, El spots the shadow of a spectator hiding within the corners of his memories, but he thinks nothing of it.
Simultaneously, half a nation away, it is the top-of-the ninth inning in Wrigley Field as Robby Thompson steps to the plate on national television with his team, the San Francisco Giants, down five runs versus the Chicago Cubs in game two of the National League Championship series.
With two outs and a full count, Thompson, the all-star second baseman, sends a wicked line drive over the left center field fence that forestalls the celebration in Chicago.
(Suddenly, all of my fences have broken)
Like his boyhood inspiration, El responds...
(I'm cutting the reign of my life...!)
to his moment.
(Whoa! Runaway Horses!)
The Universe briefly deviates for two separate batters: one in which a nation of baseball fans applauded Robby's "go down swinging" spirit, and the other in which a handful of neighborhood kids take witness to the unlikely strength of a fifteen year old's hope against a flame throwing, sidearm pitcher who recently got his driver's license.
Two asymptotic lived come together with one identical swing of their bats in the graph of fate.
(We take our chances everyday)
Fueled by the power of faith, El's abilities come together without thought. He calculates the variables of time, velocity and Newton's second law of motion with his eyes closed.
(Oh, oh! Baby, hold on tight!)
El connects with the fastball.
(Whoa, Runaway Horses!)
The baseball travels 367 feet to left center, over the shadow of the standing figure, sailing over two basketball courts positioned as far as the bleachers in Wrigley Field, where Thompson's ball landed in Chicago.
Rounding each base, El is briefly liberated from the vulnerability of adolescence, the baneful criticisms of his father, and the tormenting flashbacks of his older brother choking him breathless before the start of the Saturday morning cartoons.
(Racing through the darkness
Whoa, trying to find the light)
Conquering fear, El discovers a greater purpose designed by a higher power.
(There's so much light, I feel alive when I'm with you)
Stepping onto homeplate, El scores the lone run, his team still down by four. His eyes are locked to the ground below where his bat rests on the gravel. The neighborhood kids, amazed, continue to cheer his name; but El is deaf to the commotion, never acknowledging his teammates' high fives.
Reaching for his bat, his eyes do not blink. The universe reminds him of his place, where sometimes unpredictable and unwanted circumstances are architected by the hands of destiny. He understands the message:
there is only one Robby Thompson.
El's holds his breath as his fingers slide across the bat's wooden surface where the blue Sharpie ink of *Steve Garvey's autograph is signed at a hand's length below the barrel. He notices the tilt of the barrel that confirms his fear.
(With every end
We'll begin again)
The bat has cracked.
"Your dad is going to kill you!" Jules exclaims.
-Present moment. October, 1996, Mary Park Hall-
El awakes from his deep sleep, but is uncertain if he is still dreaming of that perfect summer, a memory from seven years ago. His dorm room appears familiar, yet different once again...darker than he recalls.
He glances at the far wall, where the unfamiliar shadow of a ceiling fan he has never seen is clear to him as the shadow of the two twitching feet dangling below the blades and the outline of a rope that is tied around a shady appearance of a girl's body dressed in a white robe.
Like a disturbing movie projecting in his room, the sight persuades El to open his eyes to the frightful possibility of a girl gasping for her last breaths above him. His body becomes paralyzed in his sleeping position, his back resting on the mattress, as he barely twists his head that is pushed down onto the pillow.
His head makes a struggling turn only to discover, beyond his feet, the outline of the girl squatting atop his chest.
Bending awkwardly towards El, she positions her pale lips a breath away from his mouth.
As she did before, she whispers to him again,
"Get...out...of...
my bed."
| Author Notes |
*An actual picture of the Steve Garvey bat is presented (with the crack and signature) in chapter 22, "The Awakening, Pt. 2." Picture is from Wikipedia. It is recommended that previous chapters are read first to understand the totality that encompasses this chapter before commenting. Please note this is an ongoing chapter that has yet to be completed.Thank you. |
By Cybertron1986
Her grip, cold but strong, positions El onto his bed as if he were a toy doll being displayed into a sitting position. Their touch, like the currents of electricity, one positive the other negative, sends each of them into opposite directions through a wave of time fueled by the emotions of their unique experiences.
There's a glow of hope in El's eyes, a light sparked by the inspiration of '80s ballads, particularly, Belinda Carlisle and WHAM!, which empowers El with a passion for resiliency, courage and an awkward sense of morals.* This, she knows, is something she is unable to understand even if she were alive. She sees the glow and follows it like a light guiding her through a dark and endless tunnel.
She reciprocates with a memory, one with a disturbing background from a time when El was not a thought in the world. Her eyes paint a portrait of suppression colored by many tears. Her stare, imprisoned with fear, conceal a tormenting, silent scream of regret to which the Universe never forgave.
El acknowledges the shadow of a ceiling fan that reappears onto the wall across his room. Yet, like before, where the fan should create a shadow, there is nothing but the flat, white surface of a ceiling.
In between the blink of his eyes, El discovers another shadow; one he has never seen before. It rushes across the field with the frantic vigor of a person seeking help. In between another blink, he sees the eerie outline of a rope with the twitching body of a girl swaying beneath the fan blades.
El, desperately wanting to wake from the absurdities surrounding him, is unable to break from the grip that feels stronger than the force of gravity.
El's stereo unexpectedly plays a song that conveys more confusion, but is appropriate in describing the event he is witnessing.
This melody is new and lacks the bright, youthful rhythm of his favorite WHAM! songs. Instead, the melody and lyrics beautifully contradict one another like life and death, an imperfect match meant to co-exist but never touch one another.
The message speak the words she can no longer explain from a world where life cannot exist.
("I'm so tired of being here
Suppressed by all my childish fears.")
Closing his eyes, El absorbs the slow, sweet voice. As El's song, "Runaway Horses," carried her back to 1989,* her song shifts him to a future he has yet to understand.
There's a reflection of his older self sitting inside a car he does not recognize. He cannot associate the car's design to any familiar Transformers character shapes in vehicle mode. Yet, the contour, in his mind, is as equally appealing as his approval of the Batmobile. He is parked in front of a Safeway grocery store somewhere in San Francisco the night after Thanksgiving.
The same song plays on the car's radio.
("Your presence still lingers here,
And it won't leave me alone.")
Heavy rain is pouring and no one is outside as, blocks away, power lines and small branches are dragged down by the wind.
The reflection of himself is wearing a black Superman baseball cap with a white, cotton logo that illuminates in the dark.
On the top of the empty passenger seat is a large open bag of Ruffle's potato chips, the only food he is thankful to celebrate Thanksgiving with.
Aglow, is a handheld electronic device that has yet to be invented. In El's mind, the device appears to look like something from an episode of 'Star Trek.' A small, still picture projects from its eight megapixel screen. The dull light of the picture exposes the outline of exhaustion and sadness along El's face that is surrounded by the night, but he is not defeated; his eyes hold that familiar glow of resiliency.
His reflection is staring at the picture in the device, which is a face...
of the girl wearing the white robe.
The song continues,
("There's just too much
that time cannot erase.")
Like a flash of lightning, El is transported back to the familiarity of his dorm.
Along the wall, where the shadows of the fan, the rope and the girl's body continue to project, are the drops of tears falling onto the carpet.
The thought of carpet stains remind El to check on his prized possession, "Web of Spider-Man," issue #31, hanging on the wall above him to his right.
From the corner of his vision, he notices a deviation of a quarter centimeter. The misalignment irks El to adjust his comic. He conjures enough strength to break the girl's hold, enabling him, just barely, to move his right hand.
Naively, El corrects the misalignment with slight struggle; seemingly ignoring every unsettling motion of the girl's desperation to be acknowledged by him.
El seems to find more solace in aligning his favorite comic book to match his perception of a perfect Universe than to acknowledge death's cold, angry grip that squats a breath away from his lips.
Angered, the girl's expression is quickly engulfed with rage. The stereo abruptly turns off as she continues her message with a scream that vibrates the threads that intertwine life and death.
"GET OUT OF MY BED!"
Un-phased, El politely replies, "I'd get out, but...you gotta help me wake up."
El's voice conveys an uncanny level of calmness.
As if his request was granted, El opens his eyes to the morning that soon gives way to the sound of a knock coming from his door.
He is surprised to find himself sitting upright on his bed, but never recalling if he had voluntarily sat up in the first place.
El discovers deep, purple bruises on each side of his arms. Each perforation, in the shape of a hand, begin to question the validity of the past few minutes, or hours. El checks the alignment of his issue of "Web of Spider-Man," #31, before opening his door.
It hangs perfectly.
Hastily, he combs his hair to try and regain that Andrew Ridgeley style, the one with highlighted bangs youthfully streaking across his forehead.
He finds Tai, his neighbor from across his room, standing with a worried smile. El recalls the time he refused Tai's invitation to watch the adult videos which Tai purchased from Chinatown.**
"Is everything cool?" he asks El, "Who's shouting? Sounded like a girl in here."
Tai attempts to glance around El. He scans the room for the kind of gossip that would award him approval among his friends.
From down the hall, El hears a radio loudly playing a former Madonna hit from 1987, "Who's That Girl."
The lyrics seemingly tease him.
("When you see her, say a prayer and kiss your heart goodbye.
She's trouble, in a word get closer to the fire.
Run faster, her laughter burns you up inside.
You're spinning round and round,
you can't get up,
you try but you can't.")
"Yeah. I'm cool," El, exhausted, answers. "It was just a dream... a bad one."
| Author Notes |
For new readers, before commenting, it is recommended that previous chapters are read first to understand the totality that encompasses this chapter. Please note this is an ongoing chapter that has yet to be completed. Thank you, Euell *From Chapter 23, Awakening: The Conclusion ** From Chapter 13, The Thirteenth Chapter Picture from Google. Songs: "My Immortal," by Evanescence, 2003, from the album, "Fallen." "Who's That Girl," by Madonna, 1987, from the album, "Who's That Girl." Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
The choices were not many for El, who ventured further into the darkness and awaited for whatever could be heard quickly approaching him. This, however, was not the most frightening thought. The scary part was the blackness that smothered him, and the unknown possibilities that were ahead.
Beneath him, El searches for the ground he is walking on, but he feels nothing but intangibility.
This mysterious place brings back the disturbing familiarity from far inside El's memories as a six year old, in which he wakes up to a crying sweat that had his mother running from the master bedroom to assure his safety.
This particular nightmare concluded with him screaming; only to repeat the ordeal over and over each night until he turned seven.
For some reason, now, as an undergrad living in a dorm during his first semester at SFSU, that dream had returned for one night.
El searches for something special... something genuine and real. Yet El is the perfect stranger in this dark place where hope is nothing more than a cold grip of an abandoned memory conjured by a painful past.
From the distance, a faint heartbeat echoes against the corners of the walls he cannot find. With each unsure step, the beat gradually increases. He senses security in the sound, the only obvious hint of life inside a place where having sight felt as useful to him as a flashlight guiding the blind. For a moment, out of curiosity, he sprints closer; his pulse rising frantically. With equal rhythm, the echoing heartbeat coincidentally matches each "lub-dub" of the throbbing uncertainty that pushes his chest.
Within moments, he arrives to the source where he finds a large, oval-like boulder standing upright, its edges uneven and distorted, palpating like a giant heart. From afar, El notices the outline of the obelisk constricting and contracting... as hearts do.
A minute passes before the details of each artery and vein convinces El the object is exactly what it presents itself to be: a heart large enough to fit the giant from the fairytale, "Jack and the Beanstalk."
Cautiously, El walks close enough to notice the man kneeling besides the bizarre monstrosity. The man is occupied in constructing a crude, wooden fence around the beating organ with barb wire that pierces it between each powerful contraction. In small amounts, blood spews onto the man's clothes that El recognizes to be a uniform decorated with the insignias of a U.S. Naval officer.
The man continues hammering, oblivious and unconcerned to the thickening plasma that absorbs deep into my he material of his uniform. El cannot decide whether to move closer, or to keep a distance between him and the blood-soaked man whose cynical laughter mixes with the rhythm of the scornful hammer clamoring against the wooden boards of the fence.
From somewhere in the darkness a voice cries to El.
"Run!"
The familiarity of the voice reminds El of a time he was a middle school student.
Other voices begin intervening, confusing his grasp between fact and fiction.
"Don't show Dad or Mom your report card. I don't want them to see your 3.89 GPA."
"I don't care how you feel, or what you think. You're a loser."
"Whatever. I don't believe you."
Forgotten somewhere in the cold, scornful remarks of his father and brother, El has forgotten the '80s ballads that once lit his way through any situation. Now, there is not even a flicker of light to guide his way home.
No longer screaming, the familiar voice continues.
"El... El, Wake up."
He feels the neutrality and concern of the voice, which he identifies to be his favorite Transformer, an Autobot whose function is:
WARRIOR.
"Get up, soldier. It's time to suit up."
"Who...?" El is interrupted before he can finish his question.
"El, it's not time for heroics."
He continues looking around the darkness for answers cannot be seen, but only heard.
"Wake up. Your team will be counting on you today.
Don't be late."
| Author Notes |
For new readers, before commenting, it is recommended that previous chapters are read first to understand the totality that encompasses this chapter. Please note this is an ongoing project that has yet to be completed.
Thank you, Euell Picture from Google. Enjoyed this chapter? You'll love the additional chapters already posted. Feel free to follow on Facebook: Fortune Cookies (EL) |
By Cybertron1986
El diverts his attention to the grass beyond the right center field of SFSU's softball field, where the girl from the phone booth is looking downward toward the diamond. She is seated on a bench in the resting area of Hensill Hall, the Science Building.
She holds a cigarette delicately between her fingers, exhaling thick puffs of smoke smoothly as if to savor the time between classes. Her legs are elegantly crossed in a business skirt appearing relaxed though the concrete of the bench could feel somewhat cold in the late morning.
With the long bangs of his new WHAM! haircut falling in front of his eyes, El notices the girl's stare that is focused beyond the playing field. He slides his hair to the left, its highlights blending with the sparkle of the remainder of the morning dew of the grass, to get a clearer view of the girl he has thought about since the day he first saw her.
From far away, beyond the dissipating fog, El senses a hint of concern in her eyes.
"El!" a teammate yells from the opposite side of the dugout fence.
El's attention is absent as he continues gazing toward the girl's direction, his head swaying to the beat of another WHAM! song, "Ray of Sunshine," playing on his portable CD Walkman.
(Sometimes,
You wake up in the morning with the bass line,
A Ray of Sunshine!)
The lyrics are loud enough to amuse a few of El's teammates to the forgotten oldie which debuted thirteen years ago.
However, from the stands, people find another kind of humor in El's personal choice of attire for the scrimmage game: grey short shorts, a sleeveless t-shirt displaying a single, oversized, bold black kanji character for "love," and a pair of tube socks that stop inches below his knees.
Alan, the centerfielder, attempts to snap him out of his trance. "El! Get up! The team needs you!"*
(Sometimes!...
Sometimes!...
Sometimes!...
Sometimes!)
Alan removes El's headphones from his ears and throws them on top of El's new black sweater with the "No Fear" logo.
"Dude, get up!" Alan repeats. "It's time to play defense."
El puts on his mitt, a Wilson A2000, the same model used by Robby Thompson, the all-star second baseman for the San Francisco Giants. The laughter grows louder from the stands as each of his steps emphasize the contour of his bare legs and firm outline of his buttocks that are enhanced by the tightness of his short shorts.
"El," Alan explains to El, "you gotta listen to music that makes you angrier. These corny oldies are holding you back, making you into a...a... dork."
"I like '80s music," El replies. "Didn't you know that Flock of Seagulls and WHAM! changed the world?"
"You can also change the world with your two second sprint to first, but you're swinging the bat like my sister who never played before. Why are you holding back?!"
"I'm holding back?! Two seconds from home to first isn't good enough?" El wonders to himself.
"It's not that," Alan continues, "That loud mouth there made fun of you, and you're acting like nothing happened!" Alan points to the player, a dirty blonde, blue-eyed, chiseled-chin player for the University's baseball team.
"He made fun of me? What'd he say?"
"You didn't hear him? He said the reason why you run so fast is because, you eat rice!"
El, his head shaking in confusion, does not understand the humor behind the remark. "I eat the same amount of rice as anybody else. Should I inform him?"
"You don't get it?" Alan asks, continuing to stare down the player with spiteful eyes. "He's stereotyping us because we're Asian. Isn't that enough to get you fired up?! If it doesn't, at least think about how the other Asians who heard him are feeling. They're expecting you to shut him up! Hit a homerun or something! Stop holding back!"
El looks into the stands. He finds Kaoru, his first date sitting next to another Japanese girl he never met before.
The girl leans over to Kaoru's ear, whispering, "I think your boyfriend is gay."
Despite El's buttock tight shorts, there is an expectation for El, a player who has solidified his athletic potential by running the 20 yard dash in 2.12 seconds.
"Give me your glove," El orders Alan.
"What? Why?!"
"I'm going to do something. But, I need your glove. It's larger for me to play third with," he answers.
El points to the player. "He's hitting next."
El secures Alan's glove firmly onto his hand. He trades his position with the third baseman, who wonders why El, who has never played third base before, would leave right field, his strongest position.
"It's just for this inning," El assures him with a fist bump.
El's eyes never blink as he smooths the dirt in front with his ungloved palm. He brushes the dirt off, wiping his hand across the large Chinese character for "love," pronounced "ai" in Japanese, of his sleeveless shirt. His focus, intense, blocks the joking comments of the spectators who cannot take their attention away from El's tube socks and short shorts.
El, checking twice, positions himself by assuring he is exactly a tube sock distance away from the foul line, not a centimeter more.
The baseball player steps into the batter's box, pointing at El with the barrel of his bat laughing, "Yo, Egg Roll! I bet you can't field as good as you run...or dress!"
El smiles, acknowledging his challenge and accepting it with a smile.
The WHAM! song automatically rewinds in El's mind...
(Shuffle to the beat,
Gonna take a cut,
There's money in your feet,
Gimme what you got!
Watch out boy,
Watch out boy!)
"Your shorts look too tight, Rice Boy!" he laughs.
The WHAM! song drowns the laughter of the crowd as it continues to play in his mind...
(Sometimes,
You know today you're going to have a good time,
And you're ready to go!)
Viciously, the batter swings at the first pitch. He takes a ferocious, impatient cut to the ball.
His impatience causes the barrel of the bat to prematurely get in front of the ball, producing a laser fast ground ball that hits just fair inside the foul line...where El anticipated it would be with one bounce.
El makes one calm, effortless motion that ensnares the ball in front of him without blinking. The batter, refusing to be outplayed by an opponent dressed like an early '80s pop music video, frantically dashes for first.
(Turn the music up,
Turn the music up, turn it up,
Because the sunlight
It's all I've-
All that I've got!)
Besides the music playing in his mind, El, in a split second, calculates the mass, time, force and velocity of his throw that will get the batter out in a single step before he can beat the throw to first. He knows it must be a perfect, strong and accurate throw.
He decides to double pump his throwing motion, giving the batter an additional step or two, before letting the ball loose; the batter only three steps away from beating the throw. The ball jets from El's hand like a laser. A loud pop in the first baseman's mitt is followed by the coach's yell, "Ouuuuuuut!"
The first baseman, hesitating to remove the ball from his mitt, discovers something unreal that the batter, too, wants to verify.
"Holy cow! He broke my glove!"
There is a slight, but obvious tear in the glove's stitching. The first baseman is shocked, but is not as disappointed as the batter who walks back to the dugout knowing that El, dressed like a dancer from the "Wake Me Up Before You GO-GO" music video, has damaged his ego.
(But I'm the only one with the key.
And that's me.)
El glances to the stands, where he sees Kaoru smiling. Seemingly, she has forgotten the embarrassing details of their date together. She winks at him as if to hint she wants to give El a second chance.
El, instead of acknowledging Kaoru, looks to where the girl from the phone booth had been sitting from across right center field. She is no longer there.
El is not finished with the baseball player.
"Excuse me," El says to him as he walks by.
The batter responds in disgust, "What?"
"Got rice?" El asks.
Kaoru's friend leans toward her ear. She whispers loud enough to make El blush.
"I take it back. He's not gay."
| Author Notes |
By Cybertron1986
"Does El live here?"
One by one, her voice lured every resident outside their rooms and into the hall. Her presence emanated more energy than the beat pulsing from the music within the halls of the all-boys floor of Mary Park Dormitory.
"Is El's room on the left , or the right side?"
Her delicate voice conveyed the kind of vulnerability which no recent high school graduate could ignore.
"You're looking for El?," a resident laughs.
In synchronicity, several more rooms open except for the last door to the right, El's room.
A resident points to the lone door, at the right of the emergency exit.
"That's El's."
A reaction of interest within the growing number of residents explode like a chain reaction of firecrackers on Chinese New Year.
"I'll take you there!"
"I can show you!"
"Follow me!"
A disabled resident in an electric wheelchair maneuvers his way through the crowd shouting to the girl, "Hop on! I'll take you!"
Somewhere from the commotion, a question captures her attention as she tries to free herself from the crowd.
"Have we met? I've seen you somewhere before."
Nervously, Jennifer parts her hair from her eyes. "I-I'm not sure," she nervously answers.
"You dork!" someone exclaims in attempt to defend her from the inquisitiveness .
"Excuse my friends for being so rude," he continues, taking her arm and leading her to El's room. "But, aren't you on the cheerleading team? I saw you at the game against Sac State last Friday."
She stutters knowing how the information could create more unwanted attention.
Arriving at the front of El's door, she replies nervously, "Y-Yes. I'm the squad leader."
The crowd's gasp exhales like a comical orchestra.
"Uh...Why are you looking for El?"
"Yeah! Why do you want to see 'him?'" the student in the wheelchair asks.
"He's tutoring me."
"Ah!" the group smiles. The look in each residents' eyes wonder to themselves, "HOW does El do it?!"
"Yo, El! Eeelll! It's Melvin. You have a visitor!"
From inside the room, El is correcting a slight misalignment of his comic book, "Web of Spider-Man," issue #31, that is tacked on his bedside wall.
He feels compelled to make a final attempt to adjust his comic book, but knows he needs to open the door, where he discovers the entirety of residents from the all-boys floor standing outside, where Jennifer is standing in the front.
"El!" Melvin laughs. "Your date is here."
Jennifer smiles. Her lips, glistening with lipstick, emphasize the natural red blush of her cheeks in a way that tease all the guys.
"Thank you, boys," she says, stepping inside El's room.
All at once, the residents acknowledge her.
"My pleasure!"
"Nice meeting you!"
"Come back soon!"
El tries to close the door, but Tai, the neighbor from across, places his foot against the sill.
"Have a good time," he winks.
| Author Notes | For new readers, before commenting, it is recommended that previous chapters are read first to understand the totality that encompasses this chapter. Please note this is an ongoing project that has yet to be completed. |
By Cybertron1986
El's interest to Jennifer was clearly opposite in contrast to the curiosity of his neighbors outside his room, where their distinctive arguments for a spot to eavesdrop in front of El's closed door is clearly noticeable.
Jennifer, the University's head cheerleader, looks pass El's social awkwardness. His schoolboy character, large eyes and athletic physique overshadows the fact El's social IQ ranked below a high school freshman, which was apparent the moment Jennifer took it upon herself to greet and acknowledge his roommate.
"Nice to meet you!" Daniel exclaims, aware of Jennifer's popularity on campus.
Jennifer smiles back. "Hello!"
She observes El thumbing through a textbook, never considering to commit to formally introducing her to Daniel.
"You must be El's roommate," she continues.
From the other side of the door, sounds of rustling feet and the clatter against the sill becomes more audibly obvious. Against the light, the shadows of their feet can be seen from the gap below the door, pushing and shoving against each another for the best spot to hear Jennifer's voice.
"I'll leave you two alone," Daniel winks, "I forgot I need to get to church."
"But, it's Saturday morning!" El exclaims.
"It's for confession."
"Y-Y-You're," El stutters in amazement, "You're not even religious!"
Daniel, hoping his roommate can take advantage of the opportunity, hastily opens the door, avoiding to explain his sudden need to leave. As the door opens, the group of eavesdroppers stumble on top of one another into the room. Jennifer laughs in amusement. El continues to wonder the residents' unnaturally strange reaction to Jennifer.
As the crowd of University freshman apologize and closes the door, a George Michael's classic, "Faith," is playing in El's CD stereo. The lyrics express an unspoken hope in Jennifer.
(Well, I guess it would be nice...
If I could touch your body)
Jennifer risks a nudge against El's side as they sit on the sofa. The slight physical contact results in nothing more than a brief look of annoyance in El's eyes.
"That's George Michael!" Jennifer exclaims. "I haven't heard this song since middle school. I love this song!"
Their eyes connect a second time. This time Jennifer winks as the song continues on with a more direct implication.
(I know not everybody...
Has a body like you)
Her wink fails to hint, nor acknowledge the desire she has for El since their first encounter in their Japanese language class.
"A-ha! Here they are!" El is thrilled to find the replacement batteries for his electronic Japanese dictionary, a device which El knows would reduce their time together, so that he can have time to call his mother before dinner.
Impatient, Jennifer attempts diverting his attention away from the dictionary by sliding closer, her arm brushing against his.
"Which is your favorite George Michael song?" she asks him.
El thinks long as a grin forms on his face. Jennifer interprets his smile as the sign she had been hoping for.
To her surprise, El leaves the sofa before she can make another move.
"Hmmmmm...," El begins. He walks toward his stereo and changes the CD to a pre-programmed song from another George Michael album: "WHAM! Edge of Heaven."
A new track plays, "Last Christmas."
"This song is deep," El says to her.
| Author Notes |
For new readers, before commenting, it is recommended that previous chapters are read first to understand the totality that encompasses this chapter. Please note this is an ongoing project that has yet to be completed. Thank you. Picture is of SFSU�??????????????�?????????????�????????????�???????????�??????????�?????????�????????�???????�??????�?????�????�???�??�?�¢??s Humanities Building, where El and Jennifer first met. |
By Cybertron1986
The song played on his CD stereo as it had for the last three years, regardless of the day of the year including the seasons - Spring, Summer, Fall or Winter. Whether it looped on El's last three cassette stereos, CD Walkmans or rewound on the cassette deck of his Toyota Tercel, El played that one song over and over like a morning, afternoon and nighttime prayer for three years...
straight...
EVERY day.
Each time, when the song reached a particular lyric sung by George Michael,
(...you gave it away.
But this year, to save me from tears,
I'll give it to someone special.)
another flashback from El's childhood replayed in his mind much like how the song replayed on his stereo.
Only time could tell if El would be capable of letting his past go in order to see that moment described by George Michael regarding that special moment in which he would give his heart "to someone special."
If ever that day would come, it would not be this year; nor would his heart be given to Jennifer, the University's head cheerleader, who is rubbing her arm against his side as they sit on the edge of his dorm bed, staring at El's textbook.
Distracted, Jenifer's concentration was not equally in tuned with El's wavelength of determination to pass next week's grammar test regarding subject/verb agreement. Instead, because of El's lack of interest, she worries of going home with her expectations unfulfilled.
El reminisces of a Christmas Eve memory sparked by the WHAM! song, "Last Christmas,"
Christmas Eve 1979, Stockton, California...
"But...," a six year old El sobs as his father turns his attention to the visiting relatives. El observes his second cousin, a boy he's never met before, slowly opening the present with El's name handwritten on the tag. From underneath the colorful Christmas wrapping, he watches as his distant cousin proudly holds up a collectible Batmobile bubble bath toy, a favorite vehicle from El's favorite Saturday morning cartoon which his mom purchased for him, not his cousin.
"...D-Dad. Mommy bought that for me," he explains.
El pleads as thoughts of Adam West and Burt Ward from the original Batman series play in his mind like a toy commercial.
Even as the tears drop onto his Christmas socks, nobody in the room shows concern to El's despair, nor acknowledge how this Christmas Eve would replace the joys and meaning of the Holidays with dejection for the rest of El's life.
It takes one more glass of whisky before El's father finds the pleasure in informing his youngest child that none of the remaining presents underneath the Christmas tree had his name on them. El's big brother walks over, punches him on the chest while yelling for him to quiet down.
His father sees El get hit again, this time on the head. He approaches El and lightheartedly makes an empty promise that he would take him to Toys R Us and find a Batmobile that would be a hundred times bigger, IF he quiets down.
El's gut tells him there could be no replacement for his mother's gift. Yet, the thought of visiting Toys R Us with his father, whom he loved without question, comforts El, his innocent smile illuminates with trust.
November 1996, back in SFSU Mary Park Hall, El's dorm room...
The flashback in El's memory fades as the song concludes, but the verse repeats like a broken record in his head.
"You gave it away...
You gave it away...
You gave it away..."
"El," Jennifer says, attempting to get his attention. "Did you hear what I said?"
As if he just returned from a long absence, El asks Jennifer to repeat herself.
"I broke up with my boyfriend...last week."
She waits for El to reply, or at the very least respond with any kind of emotion other than an uncomfortable smile.
Perhaps, it was the childhood trauma of his father giving away his toy Batmobile for Christmas which El could not forget that prevented him from understanding Jennifer's current relationship status. Or, perhaps, it was the permanent damage to El's underdeveloped sense of trust by his father who had yet to keep his promise to take him to Toys R Us twenty years later that affected El's ability to recognize the emotions connected with longing. The emotional void was evident in El's reply...
"El," Jennifer continues, "I'm accepting applications."
"For what?" he asks, confused.
Jennifer, confident she will take El home to meet her parents for Thanksgiving break, takes a different approach, never realizing that nobody alive could be THIS oblivious to something so obvious.
"You know...applications for my boyfriend opening. Do you want to apply?" She asks, blinking her long eyelashes.
Eager to return to the subject of past participles in conversational Japanese, El expresses his true feelings to her.
"Sorry," El answers. "I'm not ready for work."
| Author Notes |
Please read past chapters from my book, "Demons, Heroes and Fortune Cookies." Please note this is an ongoing project that has yet to be completed. Chapter 29, "Last Christmas," takes place after a visit from an unexpected visitor, Jennifer, the University's Head Cheerleader who asks our hero, El, to assist her in tutoring her for next week's class test in Japanese literature. Instead, she discovers how awkwardly unique El really is.
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By Cybertron1986
From the back of the dorm room a Mario Kart tube plays as two competitors finally reach the final stage, Rainbow Road, after three hours. Sitting on top of the VCR is an empty VHS case from Blockbuster Video while on the large screen television the Nicolas Cage movie, "The Rock," completes the opening credits. Meanwhile, as the early evening of a perfect Saturday evening begins, a conversation at the front door hits everyone's attention like a wrong note sung at a karaoke.
"You did WHAT?!" Tai sounds like a scolding parent.
"I helped her understand the rules of syntax involving the subject verb agreement in the present and past tense form of Japanese grammar." El's honesty resembles the purity of an innocent schoolboy, straightforward and truthful; however, for Tai, El's obliviousness to the underlying aspects of young adulthood seems too painful for him to accept.
"Let me get this straight," Tai interrupts, "The University's head cheerleader was alone in YOUR room, sitting on YOUR bed with YOU sitting next to her, and all you did was explain Japanese grammar?!"
The curiosity of Tai's friends quickly turns into disappointment with El's five words:
"There's an exam next week."
"So, nothing happened?" they ask, while dropping their attention to the movies and video games.
"Like what?" El, confused, struggles to understand what his dorm mates are implying.
"El, you're saying all you did with her was study for a test?"
"She did forget where she parked. So, I helped her find the garage."
"Okay. At least he walked her to her car," someone points out.
"No, I pointed to her the direction of the parking garage," El clarifies, emphasizing his concern for the girl.
"Look everyone," El addresses each person in the room, their mouths dropping to the floor in disbelief, as they continue to hear about their expected fantasies with the University's head cheerleader is sounding more like a nightmare.
"Why is everyone acting strange? It's Saturday and I'm having fun playing Mario Kart and watching movies with all you guys. I NEVER got to do this growing up."
The Mario Kart tune, comical and awkward with its "advanced" 32-bit technology, seems to precisely emphasize El's statement with perfect timing.
"Oh, I get it. You all think I should have done something with her like propose to her. Doesn't anyone understand that's not what love is?"
Other than the sounds coming from the television and Super Nintendo, El's anticipation of an epiphany is met with silence.
"What I'm trying to say," El continues taking a deep breath, "is that love isn't about what you see from the outside. Haven't any of you ever read 'Kraven's Last Hunt?' It's a six-part series that continues across all the Spider-Man titles from 1987. In part two, 'Crawling,' there's a meaningful moment when Peter..."
An eruption of laughter muffles El's explanation as the attention of the room shifts toward Tai, who is pretending to cut his heart out from his chest with a plastic knife. The moment extends beyond El's comprehension behind the science of dating girls.
He feels his soul hemorrhaging slowly under the knife of humiliation, a familiar feeling from his childhood.
Over the years, El learned to find refuge and inspiration from the pages of his favorite comic story, "Web of Spider-Man" issue #31.
Unnoticed under the laughter and distractions of video games and movies, El slips into the hallway. He walks pass the doors into the lobby as the laughter fades, but is replaced by the whispers of criticism aimed at El's taste in his bedtime attire: a white "Zubon," or karate pants, with a matching white t-shirt with the arms sleeves cut off. Printed on the front in bold, black print is the Japanese kanji character for "Love."
"I think everyone looks buff nowadays," a girl chuckles.
"He looks desperate," another girl claims as she points at the kanji character brandished on his chest like a superhero symbol.
If there is one thing that separates El from the guys who fetish over the University's head cheerleader, it's El's strong belief that love should resemble something close to 'Amazing Spider-Man' issue #293, pages 27 to 29.
It is this belief in which the Universe felt it was time to give El a chance to hit a home run.
Sitting in the middle phone booth, the receiver gently pressed against her shoulder length, black hair is the girl he has thought of since moving into the dorms. Her eyes, connecting with his, replaces the sound of laughter and teasing with the song, "Kissing You," by Des'Ree. This was a song his younger sister had shared with him during their last phone call. El's sister claims the song is currently the most popular song in her middle school. Though he heard it only once over the phone, El hears the lyrics clearly, word for word, as if he is familiar with the meaning of the lyrics.
El, walking across the floor, notices her eyes are following his. He sees the pause in her conversation in order to make a smile towards him. *Her smile reminds El of the first time they met in the elevator.
Like a riptide, a rush of emotion hits El. And, that frightens him. His heart begins racing as he dries the sweat from his hands against his Zubon. Yet, his hands continue unmanageably sweating.
El has entered unknown territory, an experience he has no knowledge of, or advice to guide his direction. However, he doesn't want this feeling to end.
Recalling page 29 of 'Amazing Spider-Man' issue #293, El thinks to himself as their stare locks deeper.
He thinks to himself, "I know there will be risks but I want to face them with her."
El's understanding of life from the perspective of superheroes and watching Christopher Reeves play Superman on HBO as a child, would never prepare him for the decision he will make. Vulnerable and naive, but genuine to the code of superheroes, El will unknowingly open the doors to a place where many are not able to return.
And, as the doors open to a Universe in which reality is stranger than fiction, the Universe could not have chosen a better candidate to face the demons arriving from there.
El, the naive schoolboy and unlikely champion, would be that candidate.
And, his decision will be based on love.
| Author Notes |
* From Chapter 12, The Wait.
This is the Final Chapter to my First Book, 'Fortune Cookies.' Fortune Cookies will continue in Book II, 'Fortune Cookies: The Empath Warrior.' |
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