catalyst: prologue
this is the prologue from my first novel catalyst, which I thought might be fun to have people read and see what they think.
Prologue
It was like tree bark; twisted and gnarled with galls running the length from shoulder to fingertips. A gentle brush of a hand, innocent, and now some terrible alteration was chasing its way across her body. The change was small. At first, a barely noticeable knot of dried skin on the edge of her finger. Though it wasn’t there yesterday, it didn’t feel foreign or even new, but rather that particular grip of flesh had decided to become something else entirely, given some unconscious authority to be.
The sun felt different that day though, the wind a different song to her. Each breath pushed and pulled summer through her body, and she swayed at the sliding door to find more of it. For a brief moment, she felt still in a way she had chased her entire life; not a stillness of movement or feeling, but of being, of existing. Her body still swaying, her limbs slipping away from each other, something began to contort her frame, tying her into the suggestion of knots.
The knots danced with each other becoming ropes in places and undulating nests in others, and she could smell life in the wind and taste it in the sun. Before her neck had warped into something un-turnable, she saw the first of the green shoots and buds burst from under her fingernails to lick up the sunlight coming through the glass. Her teeth clattered to the floor, her smile ripping vertically, tracing parallel the grooves of her barked skin. The twisting and snapping echoed in her little concrete chamber, and to any passerby, it would have sounded like a forest was performing in her apartment. She grew, and as her limbs sprouted, she could feel the stoma of her leaves respirating.
When her lungs finally burst into flowering fruit and her eyes floated away like petals, she still felt the air pulsing through her body, could feel her eyes dilating with the sun, however impossible. Tree though she may be becoming, her feet wouldn’t root, didn’t take ground, and the weight of her contorted shape threw her off-balance.
She fell.
Branches breaking, bark bursting and scattering across the room, little leaves running from their landing. She shattered into a thousand pieces, dislocating every part of herself from another, and in the sprawl, she could feel the space between herself. She felt the last bits of her skin fracture, the last moments of bone before they twisted into branches, and as each part fell to the floor, she felt the explosion into a petal flurry of new being. Every little touch was a chain reaction, a factory of organics.
Nothing would root, nothing would stop colliding, nothing would stop becoming.
By Wednesday, after the barking of the dog and the crashing of broken glass at the hands of the cat had caused enough of a ruckus, the neighbors had forced the landlord to open the door. Pets unharmed past a little hunger and a handful of accidents on the floor, the apartment looked as if the woman had simply vanished. She had lived alone to the landlord’s best knowledge, but it seemed like she had done everything in her power to make the place feel like a home for a family. It was nicely furnished, and the emphasis on a cozy space put the landlord at a bit of ease, though he was worried about the repercussions of the rental if this woman was dead in here.
A neighbor took the dog outside for a walk while the other set to getting the cat new water and food. The landlord made his way down the hallway, glass crunching under his feet, looking for any signs of a scuffle or break-in, hoping not to round a corner and find a body on the ground. It smelled like animal waste, not the familiar scent of a decomposing corpse, the memory of rot flooding his nose for a brief moment before disappearing back into his subconscious. He made his way through the kitchen, past the bathroom, and through the bedroom to the closed door of the walk-in closet. The closet light peaked out from the crack under the door, and a little bit of debris has trickled out as well.
“Are those…seeds?” the landlord thought, hand softly grasping the handle.
He knelt to pick one up and roll it around in his free hand, the other clasped as some kind of safety net on the door, and he felt like he heard something whisper to him as the seed turned over. It was an ordinary enough thing, not quite like an almond but also not unlike a cherry pit. It had a brittle green skin to it, and it looked like it could be peeled in layers to reach a pearl of fruit at its center. On the floor were other scattered seeds, each unique in its own way: some long, some perfect spheres, some flat and oblong, and they all tumbled from the gap in the door.
The landlord could hear the cat crunching his food in the kitchen, but the rest of the apartment was so silent, it gave the closet an opportunity to speak its own language. There was a rustling, like leaves falling in autumn, and there was the pitter-patter of seeds hitting the rest of the collection on the floor, some even daring to roll out to him. He stood up, his hand still on the handle and the hint of something on the edge of his hearing. A voice spoke from behind the door, and in a quick moment of panic, the landlord pulled his hand away.
It was silly, the landlord thought to himself, but he had had his fair share of odd experiences in the years he owned and managed the building. He steeled himself and pulled the closet door open, an avalanche of seeds washing up against his feet as he did. Frozen, confused, he stared at the back wall at what he swore he could read in the chipped bark and vines climbing the wall.
It wrote out ‘catalyst’.