Shade of Human

Eight - SoH

Eight:

“Beware of teenage girls and baked goods. I’m sure was in a Greek tragedy once.”

My mom stated as I was scooping gooey peanut butter cookies onto a plate. My father was too freshly from work to do much more than drool over the fresh sweet treat. Mom kept the entire house on a diet most of the time, so baked goods of the sweet variety were a novelty around here.

“Funny that, I’m just trying to show my fave fam how much I love them!”

Ok, Hannah, that was a wee bit much!

“Oh, and I will spot a wee little green man at this tea party!”

My mom snipped back at me in her thickening Irish accent. She usually attempts to downplay her speech and accent unless her smart-ass daughter triggers her in some manner or another. Not that I was trying to trigger her now!

“Anything is possible?”

I cleverly retorted and my dad scooped a hand full of hot cookies from the plate, not even asking what the catch was. Male parents, so much easier to bribe with sweets! I guess that can probably trace back to cavemen and the whole women cooking what they kill, thing. You tap into that primal male behavior and you are halfway to parent whispering!

“These are good!”

My dad said, around a mouth full of warm gooey cookie. My mom rolled her eyes and huffed.

“Ok little miss, what is on yer mind?”

Mom asked. I sighed a long-exaggerated breath as I tried to mentally fortify myself for the task at hand.

“Look, I love you both with all my heart, but I have good reason to need to learn about my birth mom. I need to know what happened to her. Why she was where she was when she died. I also need to see if I can find out anything about my birth father. It’s not some teen rebellion thing.”

I could see the pain in my mother’s eyes at the mention of my birth mom. This was the chief reason I never mentioned her. I did not relish this emotional pain in my mother’s eyes reflected at me. I may be a teen, but I am not a monster—well, not a mean monster anyway.

“There isn’t much to find. She was in a hospital when she died. Those places are very tight-lipped about everyone in their care. Even if we wanted to help, we wouldn’t know where to begin.”

My dad said, speaking up for both. He placed a supportive hand on my mom’s lower back instinctively.

“What prompted this, Hannah?”

My dad asked. I sighed again.

“I just, I had a lot of time to think recently. I needed to know where my genes came from, and why I am the way I am. I need to know what makes me this way.”

I said honestly to them. I managed not to feel too guilty about the gaping omissions in that truth. As far as I could tell, they were human and completely in the dark about what I was. I did not know much about this ghost and not so human world I was discovering around me, but I was sure the rules of that old movie Fight Club applied here. My parents would likely try to protect me from this emerging new reality. Or worse, they would commit me and blame the arson on delusional behavior.

There were countless times in my cell when I question my sanity. What I saw that night. However, everything I have seen since my subsequent release has only reinforced my surety of purpose and soundness of mind.

“I’m sorry, but there is no good tracking down where that nutter was kept!”

My mom snapped in obvious pain. I winced at the chilling hostility of her tone. I had hardly expected this to be tea and sandwiches with the rents, but this felt like a bit much.

“Now honey, she is just curious, can’t you see the difference between curiosity and rebellion?”

My dad soothed her. I felt her pain as if it were my own, and for a moment, we were connected through a firestorm of fears and self-doubts. I felt how much she loved me, how deeply she loved. I felt all that was the kaleidoscope of her and me over the years. It was vast like an ocean, and it was as immersive as a deep dive. In this moment of unimaginable sensation, I realized that there would be no reaching her with reason or pleas. I had hurt her. I had made her feel as if I did not love her or did not view her as my mom. It was all miscommunication, but it tapped a deep primal fear she always had, worried that some phantom parent would rip me from her arms—her daughter.

Mom was completely consumed with fear. The emotions were overwhelming me. I did not even have the presence of mind to wonder how I felt about her, just that empathy had nearly crippled me. Self-preservation kicked in and I ran from the house as fast as my feet could carry me. I ran. I knew the steps, knew the path well, I ran towards Clarke’s house, to his bedroom window.

Human suffering was like a miasma around me in every direction and I felt almost suffocated in the sensation. If my mom had felt this way, she could have driven herself mad from the trauma of the surreal. Everything was amplified. I could practically taste the different shades of human thought and human feeling. They were little to my mind, far beneath me, beneath my massive presence of mind and intellect. It would be like nothing to squeeze and extinguish them each in their little pods.

No!

I screamed into my mind. Hearing my thoughts echo and rattle up with deep reverberations of horror. There was something inside me, something that could never be called human. That part of me was awakening for the first time in my sixteen years! I was terrified of myself, of what I was, and what answers I was about to discover in the next days and weeks of my life.

Love was the blanket of cool wet watery saturation that tethered me to my sanity, to Hannah Graves. Extinguishing the mental flames and covered the mental pathways of the plethora of human mice around me. I was in open horror. Discovering you are some megalomaniac in the making will do that to a girl!

I heard several people trying to stop me, but I ran faster than I had before, leaving them in the dust. Clarke’s house did not feel safe. I let my feet spirit me away, towards the place I felt most comfortable. My feet swept me away from Doylestown. I could vaguely recall there being some woods off to the eastern edge of town. The area was a well-traveled little hamlet, but with the lack of population boom in this general area, the woods had filled out again.

Finally, the cars, the roads, and the people vanished from all my senses. All eight of them! I had heard so many jokes and so many people speculate about alternate senses of awareness, a “sixth sense” but I had discovered far more than six. I could feel, I could experience, and I could even pull some spark of energy from the world around me. Something was off, something was awakening inside me, like a hungry leviathan from the depths awaiting its first bloody kill.

My mind spun out more. The implications of this all seemed to send me reeling. I was a monster, a beast, an aberration of nature! The hunger, the thirst, the need inside me, it seemed to be some almost vampiric trait, like I hungered to feed on that which I sensed around me. I was some supernatural emotional leech! Hyperventilation may have been a thing if I was not already running at top speed. My mind seemed to keep rushing through all the ways I was unnatural. How many of those were possibly the reason for my mother’s untimely death. Maybe if she had merely ended me before I began, she would never have died?!

Torrents of terror perplexed my youthful but intellectual mind. It assaulted me with the many potential ramifications of my newest discoveries about myself. It was also possible that my birth mother had been driven insane by the very abilities hammering at my skull like a sledgehammer on stone. Every one of my newly discovered senses was on high alert. I felt like I could still pluck the thoughts of the humans in the distance, even from here. I could feel their minds crying out loudly. Like an unfiltered, overlapping discordance of many conversations playing out repeatedly on a loop.

The logic seemed to disappear for me as my thoughts congested and choked out the normal flow of distractions into my mind to keep my headspace free and clear of any clutter. A girl could be forgiven for mentioning tumbling down a certain rabbit hole, considering the accuracy of this experience.

‘Damn, I hope she’s ok. She looked like she just about flipped her s**t!’

I heard the voice of my best friend as he approached me rapidly. I could feel his concerns and his doubts riddling me as if they were my own. I could feel the teen angst of a male. Which was even more confusing since I lacked the proper physical similarities to fully register the array of his hormonal flux.

“Stay back! And please stop thinking so loudly about that actress from Stranger Things!”

I told him. Clarke stopped in place. He frowned at me. I felt his heart rate soar at the implications of what I had said.

‘What the actual f**k, she can read minds now?!’

‘Yes, now zip it!’

I shocked myself, as I felt the thought fly from my head, and press itself into Clarke’s mind. Telepathy, the ability to read minds and to communicate mentally. I had not wanted, nor had I hoped for strange powers, but they seemed to roll in steadily.

“I didn’t see you open your mouth, even though you’re not facing me completely.”

Clarke said. I pushed my thoughts to him as I turned around.

‘No, I thought it and somehow it seems to transmit at will.’

I thought as I turned to face him, like a magician showing empty hands to show they were not tricking you. Though, that last comparison felt a tad ironic and false, considering all magic acts really are just tricks, gimmicks, and sleight of hand. What I was experiencing was the very thing that human frauds attempted to fool audiences to believe they could do.

“So, just to review, you can see ghosts, read, and send mental messages, and you can kill non-physical beings with your bare hands?!”

Clarke tallied what he considered being my impressive list of superpowers. I sighed and rolled my eyes. I looked away.

“It’s more than just that. I can feel things, emotions, energy, and I feel as if I can suck them from all around me—even from humans. Clarke, this is not fun, and it isn’t a game. I could be the reason my mom is dead!”

I told him somberly. Clarke moved over to me and squeezed my shoulder with his hot masculine hand in assurance. I could feel his c**k-sure confidence in my purity as if I were the second coming in female flesh.

“Look, Hannah, whatever you are, you are always my bestie, and you are not evil!”

He said both softly and sternly at the same time.