Suspended Animation

(A metafiction exercise from class)

As I sit here conjuring this story, with the events unfolding around me, I am overcome by the feeling that I am rotoscoping life, moment-by-moment, with every word. These assorted letters are the sketchy, twitching lines that construct and animate his face. If I had been familiar with the shade I would have accurately called his eyes Persian blue. Not knowing it however, I instead settle for cerulean and in doing so do them little justice.

His eyes were cerulean. He begins to walk from the gated park entrance to my left but, for no reason other than my neck hurts, I blink and find him now waltzing from my right. I stare at him as he makes his way unknowingly before me and cannot help but marvel at his sweetness and the way youth glows from him as though he is filled with plutonium. I notice his hands looking purposelessly empty which raises the question: what object or activity might adequately occupy them? The balloon that suddenly appears dissolves into a lollipop of a similar colour before fading to a nothingness that ends up as a painted wooden horse. It was the same one my younger cousin received one Christmas.
His name is Ely Epstein, you can see it spelled out in his gait and in the name labels stitched into everything from his socks to his boater. His shorts are long but not nearly long enough and he absent-mindedly bends to scratch the itch just below his knee instigated by the added fibres of my description. The bland burnt sienna of his boater ribbon fades through a slow spectrum of colours until it becomes a rich maroon because I will it to. As I stare at the world around me my pen documents that which I choose to acknowledge or alter.
The shrubs grow and shrink with the undulating fluidity of my dreams and I have complete control. In my minds eyes I can watch myself writing without looking.
Alex was tapped on the shoulder by what had begun and a genderless shadow. As the varying shades of darkness are drained from the figure and float through that air towards my bench and I, the shadows leak down into my pen and turn into the ink I use to describe him. The Persian blue irises of the angular man of thirty-four looked down into themselves. Alex’s older doppelganger is visiting from the future, from the moment he dies. Travelling chronologically through events and memories from his life in that single future second that drags on into eternity.
My kettle has boiled. I need to make tea.





I have returned with tea.
It takes a moment for vitality to be breathed back into my scene. It is as though a breeze washes over everything, bringing it all back to life as I quickly read back through what I have written.
Intrigued to see quite how far I can take this I drawer a line through Ely Epstein’s name. A gaping rip scars everything behind him as my world turns two dimensional. The nameless character shimmers like a mirage before being sucked away from me though. He is lost to the nothingness beyond this page on which my words have drawn.
The image that is left blurs into pixilation. What have I done?