Once was a work in progress..

It may be again one day...  The following was the opening to a book idea I had.  I actually typed up about 15,000 words before something happened and I lost more than half.  It was a bit discouraging, and I haven't really picked it back up again, even though I think about it a lot.  Just a little something to share for now I guess...

Ch1 - The Dream

Avalynn

I started awake with the insistent beeping of my alarm.  I moaned and slammed my hands on the clock fumbling clumsily in an attempt to get it to shut up as fast as possible.  I’m probably going to have to fix the time before going back to bed tonight, but that wasn’t something I wanted to think about right now.  I closed my eyes and tried as hard as possible to recall the dream I just had.  It was fuzzy around the edges, as all dreams are when you wake up, but it was so real, and so disturbing and sad.  I remember the flash of blue and red; the police lights.  I remember the panicked voice of a drunken street bum; his face smudged with what looked like dirt and oil, his hair stringy with grease, a brown hat barely hanging onto his head, eyes wide and excited and just a little bit crazy.  He was being dragged off to a cruiser by a couple of officers, all the while the guy was yelling, “He just jumped!  He just stepped off the edge and down he went.”

            The dream faded out then back in, and I was watching as emergency workers dragged a body out of the water.  I was watching from above as people rushed around the body in the dark, I could tell that it was probably noisy, with all the lights flashing, people moving around; but it was as if I was watching a TV on mute, no sound.  Just before they covered the body with a white sheet I got a quick glimpse of the face of the person they pulled out of the water.  He was young; definitely my age, someone familiar. Dark black hair was spiked around his head, and a tattoo on his arm, some kind of tribal thing circling a bicep.  ‘He is just so familiar,’ I remember thinking, then flash; there he was sitting in the back of my Civic’s class.  Flash; him again sitting under a tree with a guitar in his lap in our common area at school where we sometimes ate.  Flash; him once again walking down the hall, black backpack slung over one shoulder, head down, shoulders drooped in a way as if to look invisible.  His name escapes me.  Or did I ever know it?