Dynamite

It was early on a starlit Saturday night. It was finally a new beginning, the beginning of reality, of life. She closed the door and looked up at the sky. Brilliantly twinkling stars smiled back at her, as if they were giving her permission to begin her life anew. She sighed quietly and looked down at her shoes. She knew that it was time to move on, time to walk away and start over. Still, there was a voice in her head telling her to walk back inside the door and never leave again. Shaking her head to rid herself of it, she breathed in the crisp fall air and it seemed as though it was the first breath she had ever taken - clean, new and innocent. She wasn't sure if her lungs had ever filled with air before; She hadn't felt alive in what seemed like forever.1

It was a new city and a new state. It was a place where she could completely start over. No one would know anything if she didn't tell them. She was a girl without a past, anonymity in the flesh. She had been in this foreign place for weeks but had been wallowing in the darkness that had been surrounding her, opting to stay in her self-inflicted cloud of pity rather than experience life around her. After all, she always thought that the best way to protect herself from pain was to remove herself from any situation in which it could be inflicted.2

As she walked into the street, she heard painfully loud music blaring out of a house a few streets to her left. This is your chance, she told herself, turning towards the music. She followed the thumping bass until she arrived at a gaudily extravagant mansion with people pouring out of it. Girls were laughing hysterically, their drinks spilling out of the cups as they tripped and tumbled, grasping each other for support. Boys watched from the sidelines, making bets on who was the easiest and who would pass out first. Their laughs echoed through the night like thunder and she wondered why none of the neighbors had complained. People waved to her without even a thought; none of them had ever seen her before but she had a sneaking suspicion that they weren't sober enough to know that. She stopped on the sidewalk, staring, unsure about whether or not she would go in. No one would notice her, she was positive. She could begin a new life, one that didn't have to be like the last. She could even make up a fake name.3

Suddenly, a beautifully blonde, too-thin girl latched on to her arm, whispering loudly in words so slurred that they weren't even coherent. She dragged her inside, her volume increasing with the music. "Call me Glass," she yelled, "and follow me to the Emerald City." As they walked farther and farther into the progressively surreal home, the colors grew more and more vibrant and the people spun around faster and faster. She felt like a star crashing and burning into Krypton as the entire room turned neon green. It grew bigger and smaller in waves, and the people became tall and then short, wide and then thin, until she wasn't sure what was human and what was furniture. She stumbled with Glass over to what seemed like a boy, but then as Glass pulled her down, she noticed that the boy was particularly plush and pillowy. She dismissed this thought and wondered where his hands were. 4

"So what's your name?" Glass asked, forcing her to take her focus off of the boy-sofa and onto her question. Names, she thought, what a silly concept. Why should she have a name? She was anonymity. 5

"Dynamite," she said. 6

She looked around, searching for meaning. Shapes came and went and her vision became clear and faded all at once. Her head was spinning and the Emerald City was turning sapphire and ruby and amethyst and oh god, she thought, what dimension have I so unwillingly entered? Glass chattered aimlessly to a chair to their right and Dynamite put her head in her hands, trying to remember why she had come, trying to remember anything at all. Everything in her head was a jumbled mess of too many colors and images of evil lurking beneath cotton candy. It was a twisted amusement park that she was in. Nothing was real. She had a vague sense of disaster coming, but she tried to ignore it. What lies beneath, lies beneath, she whispered to herself. It's not my place to find out.7

She watched the room twirl and fade into smoke. Whose house is this, anyway? she thought, trying to locate one person who seemed to be the center of attention, but it was no use - there was so many people in the room and so many colors and so much smoke that it was ridiculous to even assume that someone even owned this nightmarish fun-house. There was a girl - she assumed - dancing on a table with nothing on but a garter belt while men and chairs around her smoked and stared. She had a glass in her hand, spilling a rainbow substance onto everyone beneath her. Across the Emerald City were people puking clouds and screaming sunshine, speakers blaring bass and nothing else - her head felt as if it were being split in two. She held it in her hands, trying to keep it whole, thinking vaguely about the night sky, wondering if it was real. In this room, she could be persuaded that everything she thought was once real wasn't. In this room, everything she believed was turned upside-down.8

A hand appeared in her face with a red plastic cup filled with rainbows. She grabbed it, desperate, and chugged down the liquid. It burned as it went down her throat, scorching her insides and causing her to black out momentarily. Glass looked over, worried, and then laughed.9

"Welcome to the jungle, Dynamite," she said, turning back to her chair and gesticulating wildly at it.10

Dynamite tried to breathe, but her lungs felt constricted. Her vision was dancing with mimes and sunhine and her head had never felt clearer -- as long as her eyes were shut. She peeked through her fingers and groaned as her senses bitterly and brutally attacked her from every end. Everything was too sharp; she opened her eyes and oh god, she thought, my eyes are razored and I can't see. Her skin was hot and tingling, and every contact made her heart dance and scream within itself. Breathing was out of the question - every time she tried to open her mouth she was hit with a barrage of confused scents and tastes. They tumbled around her mouth, rending her taste buds into tiny - albeit more sensitive- fragments of their former selves. Everything was hazy and undeniably clear at the same time, and the dancing girl grew bigger and smaller with the beat of the music. It's all wrong, she thought, this place, this party, it's wrong. She felt as though she were standing upon a very thin membrane - as though at any moment she would fall through into something much more terrifying than she could imagine. This isn't real, she told herself. Heart pounding, she put her hands out in front of her, whispered a choked goodbye to Glass, and ran for her life. 11

She sprinted through hallways with moving walls and suffocated on pink roses masking the scent of decay as she fell deeper into the rabbit hole. There were strangers everwhere, with the same cups of stale alcohol hanging loosely from their hands. They looked at her with detached amusement as she ran from them. Teenagers, she thought. I will never, can never understand... She was running out of breath and there were fewer and fewer kids this deep into the house. She knew she was going the wrong way but she had to get away from the swirling stench of alcohol and vomit in the Emerald City. She could hear bedsprings creaking from behind closed doors and she tried to push the sounds out of her head while dodging liquid death drenching the carpets. Faces swirled around her, laughing until they didn't even resemble faces anymore - only peach blobs floating in and out of vision. The air was becoming more and more saturated with changing colors and she was choking --12

Finally, she reached a dead end. This can't be happening, she thought frantically, pounding on the wall. She had run through so many hallways that it was impossible to be sure which way was back. She looked to her left into an open room with red and blue modern, square-shaped furniture in it. Or people, she thought, remembering the boy-sofa in the Emerald City. To her right was an octagonal room filled to the brim with records. There were so many that she suspected that it was another trick of this house, of the psychotic designer, one meant to confuse and amaze. She hit the wall once more, hoping for a secret passageway, and sighed as the wall remained unchanged, the horrifying clown painting that decorated it leering at her in sickening entertainment. She resisted the urge to reach out and snap it in two. Oh, how she would revel in the ripping and tearing of the clown with his lewd eyes and immoral intentions. Instead, she turned around and trudged back up the hall, her vision spinning and fading as the colors became too much.13