Visions

There's a saying among my people. It was something about how you have nothing to fear from a pond full of leeches, how it's not the pond's fault. I used to remember it a lot more clearly, but that was before the loss of cohesion.

The elders say I was sent as a warning of things to come. The medicine man never said much of anything. He waved his bones and feathers and trinkets around, he lit his grasses and fanned his smokes, and after singing his songs he just stared at me with a deep pity shining out from under his skeleton make up.

I am subject to visions. They are sudden and striking and painful to the point of debilitation. When they come, my senses stagger and die off. There is always a great sound like a huge zipper being pulled, and as it unzips, all other noises fade into nothingness. Gray static envelopes the edges of my visual field and creeps slowly and deliberately in, turning my surroundings to an indistinct slate.

I discovered this gift when I was fourteen. A robber had broken into my family's home in the dead of night and ransacked all the valuables. My father heard the noise and awoke. He ran downstairs to protect us. I followed him. I watched the man shoot him from the other end of the hallway, saw the expression on his face and the cold in his eyes before he disappeared out the back door and into the darkness. My first vision came a week later, right before I went to bed.

The timing was always the same. I would be at some point in my nightly routine when I'd suddenly lose equilibrium and my mind would melt. I'd crash to the floor, jerking and grunting; my eyes would glaze over and I'd hear the zipping, then a faint, distant pop, and I would be somewhere else, some terrible black boundless void I would go spinning through, weightless and still, not so much as breathing. The very first thing I saw was those stony eyes, the void around and the void inside. Then came the images.

Surreal snatches of lunacy strung together with no rhyme or reason, scenes of blasphemy and evil, morbidity and horror, gratuitous sex and horrific violence, baths of blood and burning cities all flashing past me so quickly I could barely process the previous when the next came. I would see Babylon's most depraved whorehouses, blazing cities born of the deepest pockets of Hell, the half-missing flesh and frenzied agonies of the living damned, towering piles of graying infant corpses in monastery closets, torture and rape and pedophilia and pure, seething Hate, distilled down to it's most basic components and thrust full force, time and time again, into my being.

Back at home, where my now-empty body shuddered and shook, I would roll across the ground and spasm wildly, foaming from the mouth and clutching at whatever was nearby, be it furniture or people. My teeth would gnash and my eyes were wide and shining.

It would be over within minutes, and I would return to my body with tense muscles. I always came to terrified, but never really hurt, and I never hurt anyone during my episodes. The elders said I had touched another world, some other, darker place. I respect the elders and their judgments far too much to disagree, but I do know better.

There is nothing otherworldly about what I see. It is our world. The one we have made. The pain and the suffering and the anguish are all made here, by our own hands. I have visions of life.

And one day, they became visions of death. I was always able to control my curse, and being as it only happened before I went to bed, no matter what time that may be, it never interfered with any other facet of my life. I went to school, graduated, and got a job. I have a girlfriend who I plan on proposing to. My existence is almost normal.

No one could have anticipated it the vision striking when I was behind the wheel of my pickup, least of all me. The last thing I remembered seeing was a sign that read "Speed Limit 45" and, further down the road, a stoplight which had just turned from green to yellow. The static began, then the haze, and then there was nothing but bedlam and terror. Even through the glimpses of radiation-deformed fetuses and bodies mutilated by war, a voice within me was screaming, "No, the road! You have to wake up, you have to watch the road!"

I came to in the driver's seat of my truck, seatbelt still fastened. The truck had rolled off into a ditch and smoke poured out from under the hood. Distantly at first, then more closely, I heard whole symphonies of car horns being frantically pressed. I shook my head and whirled around.

There was a badly mangled red car in the middle of the intersection. The rear end had been annihilated, the windshield and all the windows smashed into glass dust. In the driver's seat I could just make out a shape, totally still.

I rushed from my truck to the car and wrenched open the driver's side door, pulling the prone shape from the wreckage and I looked into the still, dead eyes of the man who had shot my father.

After that day, I never had another vision.