A cross-country meet, from high-school.
Lucy had not been the most athletic child, to say the least. In fact, one of her parents’ favorite stories to tell around the table had featured a toddling Lucy getting so distracted by a strange flower that she’d sat down in the outfield of a youth tee-ball game.
The punchline came when the coach jogged over to gently remind her that there was a game going on, and she should be keeping an eye out for the ball, which might be coming her way.
“Why?” she had asked. The ball wasn’t too hard, and she knew from experience it would only hurt if it hit her in the face. Which was why she had taken the precaution of facing away from the batter. And Lucy always wore her helmet. Otherwise brain cells died when you got hit in the head. As far as she was concerned, she was taking things very seriously.
“So you can catch it!” A thin smile from the coach, who Lucy would later remember as a harried man trying his best.
Lucy had leaned back from the flower in the ground, considering this and screwing up her face to remember how exactly the rules of this game worked. Eventually, she had given the coach a doubtful look.
“And that…will make the game end sooner?”
This was the part of the story where her parent’s friends would laugh, and where Lucy would wonder if there was something wrong with her.
No one had ever said as much, but when grown-ups laughed and you didn’t know why…
Later, as a teenager, Lucy would understand the humor of the situation, and would smile along and quip about how her clumsy hands precluded her from ever finding out the answer to her question. By then, her lack of interest in sports was something of a point of pride for Lucy, a part of her personality that fit with the rest.
They’d tried soccer next.
“But I don’t care if they have the ball,” Lucy remembered saying, with some vehemence. “I’d be perfectly happy to let them nudge it down the field and kick their shot, if they’d let me do the same!” It hadn’t made sense to her.
As she got older, Lucy had come to somewhat appreciate the joy of competition people found in sports. In theory, at least. From the sidelines, the thrill of pitting your skills up against those of another and seeing who came out on top looked very exciting indeed. It was just when she tried it herself that it felt awkward and inane. So she’d had no interest in actually participating in sports, organized or otherwise.
Until she started running.
Unlike soccer, no one stuck their legs out and tried to trip you as you ran. And unlike tee-ball, there was actually something to do the whole time.
Running had not quite felt like the total freedom some of her more zealous teammates seemed to experience when they ran, but it had felt good enough and different enough from the rest of her rather stationary life that she had embraced it.
Not enough to win meets, but enough to stay on the team. If it was a choice between an optional running workout or studying for a test she wasn’t quite ready for, Lucy studied.
But in a way it was a relief to care less about something, to have an activity with no strong attachment to who she was. It made it…simple. Not always easy, but not complicated.
So Lucy ran, for a while at least. And in the track-meet of her dream, she felt that same familiar friction she always felt, whether she was running at a meet or at practice or just for fun.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The world resisted you when you ran. Whether the air bit with cold or sagged down on you with sticky heat, it was always there; an ever-present barrier that human eyes only couldn’t see because the molecules that made it up were too small. When you ran you ran through something, whether you could see it or not.
A vague idea floated in the periphery of Lucy’s mind as her sneakers pounded the dirt beneath her feet, murky and indistinct. It was something about the scale of things, of sizes and similarities and what it all meant, but it couldn’t seem to coalesce into language.
So she let the idea float and tremble in the back of her mind, and focused on her running. On the winding path before her and the trail flashing by, on green leaves and the sound of her breath.
Eventually, the dream shifted, oaks and elms turning into metal bleachers and the dusty path becoming a red rubber oval beneath her feet.
The vague presences of the other runners ahead and behind her condensed, growing more real as they packed in tighter around her. They flowed like grey ghosts, storm clouds in the shape of humans that crowded in around her.
Lucy felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and her skin begin to tingle with unease. She looked for the reassurance of the blue sky overhead, but the sky had come closer, and as she stared at the old-sapphire color of it she felt more and more like she was looking up into the bottom of the ocean.
In real life, the race had been mundane. Lucy had run her best and come up short. Her team had won the meet overall, but she had actually set a personal worst for her official 5k time. She had lost.
It was the last race she’d run. Too busy with schoolwork by that time anyway, Lucy had dropped the sport to focus on academics, leaving behind the rush of wind and the warm-rubber smell of the track. She hadn’t thought about that last race in years.
In the dream…
At first she thought her sense of unease was due to the unfamiliar setting the dream had shifted to. She had never run a race on a track, had she? Cross-country meets had always taken place on trails.
Then, slowly, she realized that her body didn’t feel quite right, the shape or size or…something. Then the red track of the high-school field had changed, the tiny pellets of grippy rubber smoothing and joining, lightening in color and acquiring a sheen that reflected the weak rays of golden sun that made it through the depth of sky lurking just above.
She tried to run as her opponents soared past her, but she sank down into the track; warm, melted rubber gripping at her shoes then pulling at her ankles. Like thick sticky mud at first, but when she’d sunk to her calves the mud suddenly gave way beneath her, its half-solid form gone liquid.
A familiar smell filled her senses as she dropped into the liquid.
Into the blood.
As she sank into it, she saw that the other students whizzing past her had been transformed into grotesque horrors of all different kinds, monsters with tentacles and spines and shadows that bent the wrong way…
Lucy thrashed her arms, and saw with surprise that they were green and partially translucent, like her current cell-body had been stretched into her old human form.
Right, she remembered in a daze. I’m not quite human anymore, am I?
The copper smell of blood in her nose intensified, and nausea roiled in her gut as she felt the warmth of the blood around her, the thick stickiness covering her body.
The sky descended further, dropping down over her like a dark wave that deadened her senses and swept away what little familiarity lingered in the dream. From a pleasant run on a sunny trail, it had turned to a horror of blood below her and dark ocean all around. The forms of the students were now foreboding shapes that lurked silently in the water or darted by, circling streaks of black shadow she could only make out from the edges of her vision.
Most of the creatures had fins, she saw, some long and serrated like ancient deep-sea myths, others oblong and soft.
A student she somehow recognized as a boy from her Calculus class drifted by, and rather than a scrawny teenager Lucy saw something out of a monster manual, a lithe shark-like form of ridges and supple power.
Out of the darkness, a bobbing yellow light began to move towards her, slowly revealing the ever-open mouth of spines and blind eyes of a massive anglerfish.
The other creatures circled around her, closing in. Any memory of running in the warm air was gone now, though as the shadowed forms closed in on her own writhing body, Lucy still felt somehow that she knew them, could call each monster by name if she could see it just a bit better.
But the other creatures stopped before she could truly make them out, and none entered the sphere of light cast by the anglerfish as it continued towards her.
As its bobbing yellow light came closer, Lucy saw that it was no longer an anglerfish at all, but a tall, black-haired man carrying a lantern. Dark grey robes draped his form and gathered shadows as they drifted in the current, and she shivered.
For a moment, two forms seemed to fight for dominance, a flickering image of a man overlaid on a huge, gaping jaw stretching wide as black-scaled fins rushed toward her.
She blinked, and only the man remained, holding aloft the lantern like a guide for lost souls.
Then he smiled, and the anglerfish was back.
“Hello, Lucy.”