Rumination

Though it wasn’t real, it still burned. Tommy brushed imaginary ashes from his head and shook his shirt free of embers. The moment of ephemeral liberation through grandeur escapism ended; leaving a rotting question Tommy was too terrified to answer.

In these surging daydreams, am I the hero or the villain?

“You with me?” Asked Ms. Tenheart.

Even slouched as low as he could go, Tommy remained much taller than Miss Tenheart. He was 6’4” and 280 lbs. You’d think that a fourteen-year-old boy that big would get some attention. But he was invisible. At Least that’s how it was for him. Kids did talk. Just never to his face.

Ms Tenheart scooted her chair forward. “You want to tell me where you just were?”

Light filled Tommy’s empty eyes. “Somewhere I exist,” He said.

The sense of attention filled his pale skin with warm blood. For a moment he didn’t care to know the moral dilemma of his dreams. He only wanted to live in that moment, for better or worse.

A crowd chanting his name took him away from the claustrophobic room near the janitor's closet. Then, people ran from him, screaming in horror. There was no shaking the imagery of burnt faces; bodies lying still like charcoal. What terrified him the most, however, was the battle between pleasure and pain it caused him.

“Tommy?” Miss Tenheart leaned on the edge of her chair. The light from the window exposed the hair rising from her forearms.

“Huh?”

“I said do you feel like you don’t exist here?”

The smell of smoke pulled his attention away again. But just when his dream tugged at his desperate needs, the blaring sound of a fire alarm abruptly ended his counseling session.