Short Story
The Plunge
By Vanessa Long

When they awoke to the sound of ectopic beats circling in their apartment walls, both Jamie and Sorenson knew that this was not going to be the day that they had planned.

Damned neighbours, Jamie thinks to herself. She slowly gets to her feet and moves in shuttered darkness toward her bedroom door. She takes down from it the coat hanger that holds her black dress. She fingers the lace at the sleeve.

Jamie creases her brow as she realises that this isn't the way that she expected to be feeling. This is, after all, her wedding day. Jamie slowly gets into her wedding clothes, tulle veil and all. As she smoothes the creases of the dress over her pregnant stomach she can not shake the feeling that there is something that she has forgotten.

In the apartment above, Sorenson, Jamie's fiance, is propped up in bed staring intently at his black walls. He is trying to remember when they got painted that way. He shakes his head and stands.

Sorenson moves towards hhis bathroom door, and removes from its handle the coat hangers that hold his red suit and tails. DIstractedly Sorenson puts these clothes on. He takes the wedding ring off the top of his dresser and places it in his left coat pocket. Dressed six hours in advance of his wedding, Sorenson's mind is clouded with the notion that he is missing something.

Jamie slides in stockinged geet across her polished floorboards to the dining room table. She sits and slides her hands along the table's badly scratched surfaces. She lets her hands rise above the centre of the table. As they hover there she begins to remember what it is that has been disturbing her. That dream last night...

She and Sorenson were standing on the steps of the church. Sorenson's mother tied a borrowed blue ribbon in her hair. They both chanted something olf. something new, something borrowed, something blue. The ceremony had just begun when a gun fired. The bullet from it passed right through Jamie's blue ribbon. Jamie and Sorenson fled from a side door and ran into the adjoining forest. They ran not knowing who was pursuing them but realising that they must move on. The next thing Jamie remembered was being at the bottom of a grassy hill one minute, and cresting it the next. She recalled enthusiastically reaching for an apple atop the only tree on that hill and her white shock when a gun went off again.

Jamie and Sorenson reeled around as one to see who had shot them. There was a smoking gun on the dewy grass at the bottom of the hill and a shadowy perpetrator among the trees. Jamie lingered for a moment, sensing something oddly familiar about the gunman. Sorenson tugged at her arm and the couple turned and scanned each other. Despite the fact that all their well groomed surfaces revealed not a tear, they were going down anyway, falling backwards into soft packed snow. Jamie thought something cold, something blue, someone broken, someone bruised before consciousness let go of her.

When she awoke Jamie turned her head and could see Sorenson staring intently up into the sky. She smiled at the sight of him. She looked up into the sky and thought she saw something in the clouds. It was... it was the Virgin Mary flying down towards her.

Jamie started to cry, and raised her free hand up towards the Virgin. Jamie figured that the Virgin was there to save them. Then the Virgin is upon Jamie, replete with her soft, baby blue dress and long narrow arms. Jamie can see the Virgin's eyes now. They are hard and grey. The Virgin purses her lips. Jamie starts to frown. The Virgin looks at Jamie and Sorenson and begins to shake her finger at them. Jamie tries to protest, but the ire in the Virgin's eyes silences her. She strips back all the surfaces. In her hand are a cloud of red memories that Jamie had buried. The Virgin thrusts them upon Jamie.

Jamie remembers crying and waiting for her heart to implode. She remembers everything vividly except what it was that the Virgin had shown her. Jamie has a sinking feeling in her stomach and a particular sense of foreboding.

Sorenson stands in his leather boots and moves across the scratched floorboards of his studio apartment. He goes towards his highly polished dining room table. There are no seats at this table. Sorenson kneels before the table and moves his track covered arms toward its centre. In the centre of the table there is a gun. Sorenson lets his hands hover over it and begins to remember what it was that he had forgot.

That dream he had last night. Someone shot at them during the wedding ceremony. Next thing they were running amongst shadows which jumped and splashed in such a way that it was almost as though the whole forest was running with them.

There is the crack of a .357. Both Jamie and Sorenson reel. There is a smoking gun and a shadowy perpetrator amongst the trees. For a second Sorenson feels guilt jump in his chest. He has the dinstinct feeling that this person is somehow linked to him. But there is no time for that. He wheels around to check that Jamie is okay just in time to see the shock in her eyes as they fall backwards from the top of that hill into a river of ice. The whole world is white and then cracks black.

When Sorenson regains consciousness the air is thin and filled with the constricting smell of squashed body parts. Sorenson is sure that he is going to gag. He opens his mouth and begins gasping and gulping at the clouds. He is trying to scream but that is not possible because there isn't enough air. There isn't enough air until he sees what he sees moving through the clouds.

It is... it is Jesus, descending through the clouds. He is wearing a long white gown and his hand is pressed to his heart. Jesus comes closer. Sorenson can see Jesus' sacred heart glowing, beating red velvet through his clothes. Jesus is pointing towards it. Sorenson thinks that it is the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen. He looks at Jamie. He smiles. He reaches his hands up. Everything is going to be okay now. Now Jesus is right upon Sorenson. His eyes are hard upon him and he is shaking his finger back and forward at Sorenson is warning. This stands as a warning.

A silent understanding has passed between the two of them, a knowledge that escapes Sorenson in his waking hours. He presses his fingers to his temples and massages the headache growing there. His fingers are cold.

Jamie's hovering hand drops onto the surface of her dining room table. Splinters cut into it. Jamie feels as though the fabric of her life is about to be ripped from between her hands. She pulls off her tulle veil and lets it float to the floor. She begins pacing up and down her apartment. It's not a long walk. She keeps having to turn back again and again.

Jamie walks faster. Little memories begin snapping at her heels. She is beginning to remember foreign pieces of white paper. Long halls crowded with scores of middle aged doctors and lawyers. The doctors cracking into her uterus. The lawyers saying that she had no recourse against them because she had walked in on her own two feet rather than being rolled in on her back. She sees her empty hands cradled in her lap.

Jamie is running now, back and forward, back and forward, vision blurred. Her thigh smacks painfully into her dining room table. Jamie lurches to a halt.

Sorenson moves his hand away from the gun in the middle of the table and goes over to his apartment window. He lifts the blind and smarts from the glare outside. If he cranes his neck away from the pigeons mildly cooing above he can see a patch of blue sky. He does.

He rests his head against the window pane and closes his eyes. He is starting to remember what was beyond the trees in that dream. He sees an image of a boy in a navy cowboy suit. The boy is sitting at a kitchen table. There is also a man at the table. He is placing his hand on the boy's thigh. Sorenson sees that the man's tongue is moving back and forward across his lips. The man leans forward towards the boy. Sorenson senses the words "ride em cowboy" spoken hot and wet close to the boy's face. Sorenson opens his eyes. He recognises that the man is his stepfather and that the boy is himself.

The realisation slowly comes to Sorenson that he is not breathing. His vision is beginning to dim, is increasingly becoming obscured by black holes. It strikes Sorenson that they look like death stars. They are eating up the air. He can see less and less. His arms are rising. Fumbling with the lock on the window. If only he could get it open. If only he could let them out and the air in. His hands are smacking on metal. Then he is trying to smash the glass out of the window. He is throwing his weight into it. He gets one last smash in. The glass cracks and falls. But it's too late because Sorenson is going down anyway. His body cracks flat down onto the floorboards. The last thing Sorenson sees are shards of glass becoming lodged in his eyes.

Jamie uses her hand to steady her against the table. Her pregnancy is a barren lie. Her stomach is full of nothing more than the navy blue hauntings of the Virgin Mary. Jamie crumbles under the pressure of her new knowledge and falls hard onto her dining table chair. Blood runs down the inside of Jamie's thigh. It sneaks a trail onto her yellow velvet chair.

Sorenson is lying flat on the floor in tuxedo and tails. The tracks on his arm are a lie. There were no needles. There is just the fact that Sorenson tried to emulate the pure haunting pump of Jesus' sacred heart. And couldn't do it. Thus the collapsed veins, the bruises. Sorenson bounces the ring in his trouser pocket within his tightly fisted hand. The circle closes. Sorenson gets to his feet.

Jamie is very still. She doesn't know what she is going to do. She just knows that everything is wrong and that there is no way out. She knows that if she doesn't act she will always have to be hiding behind those trees. And she can't do that. She can't do that any more. She sees a book of poetry on her coffee table and her head clears. She thinks I know, I know, I'll drug the children's milk and stick my head in the gas oven. She's halfway to the kitchen before she realises that there are no children. There is just her in her one room apartment with its electric oven.

Sorenson is at his dining room table. He is kneeling in front of his gun rocking back and forth and whispering the words "I want this, I want this". His stomach begins to churn. He wraps his arms around his middle. Sorenson presses his hands to his head and tries desperately to remember exactly what it is that he wants.

Jamie turns. She goes round, round, round in circles. Darkness is flooding the room. She sees that it is streaming in through the window. She goes to it and slams it shut. But it is too late, because the death stars got in anyway. Jamie has the feeling that there must be another way, that she has not been totally thwarted yet. She turns and heads for the kitchen.

Sorenson takes the gun in his right hand. Outside the pigeons are cooing serenely. Sorenson tests the gun's weight against his hand. He releases the safety catch. Cocks the gun. Slowly tweaks the trigger. He feels the resistance. Figures out just how much it will ta ke. How read y he will need to be. A slight breeze from his smashed window blows though the bark of his hair. Sorenson knows that this is right. That this is right for both of them. He takes in a sharp breath and blinks slowly. He is ready for the flash metal smash that will obliterate him. He is ready. The pigeons are silent. He pulls the trigger.

Jamie slides her hand over black handle after black handle. So many knives. How ever will she choose just one, left alone a single vein? Which will be the fastest acting, the least painful? She finds a knife. FInally. She decides that she will be a traditionalist. She knows that this is the only course of action left. Jamie presses the knife's blade to the white flower of her arm. She closes her eyes and stands very still. Jamie drags the knife back and forth, back and forth again and again and again.

Sorenson is running toward this ending in his head a mile a minute, a mile a minute is only for the peace. There was a flash from black to white. And now nothing. Nothing. He can't believe that he feels no different. Sorenson waits. He is still waiting. He opens his eyes. The gun had jammed.

Jamie keeps sawing away at herself, biting her lip against the pain. She keeps wondering when she can stop, when it will be enough. She is waiting to lose consciousness. She waits and waits. It's taking longer than she ever imagined. Jamie eases her eyes open. Her arms is a blank canvas. Nothing. Not even a single drop of blood. The knife was blunt.

Jamie and Sorenson calmly stand. They brace themselves against the far walls of their rooms. As the circles of space and eterntiy reign themselves in they start to run. They rapidly pick up speed. They move past their dining room tables. Past their meager kitchens. Simultaneously smash full force into their windows. Speedily they pass through them and are ejected out into the night. Before they know it they are falling side by side. Falling without end in veil and tails into the windy dark.

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