Free Vision2 by Kristi Brooks

the history they ’ d been given wasn ’ t merely wrong but a travesty to what the ancients had truly believed. Whatever came now was unavoidable.

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Six
    Conversations with the dead
     
    Eleven years earlier…
    The yellowing rose covered wallpaper mocked him with weathered strips that curled off the sheetrock, and he couldn ’ t remember how long he ’ d been in this room of death.
    She had been dying for a while now; Roger just hadn ’ t wanted to admit it. His mother was all he had left. As far as Roger knew, the bastard he ’ d once called dad was out fondling the new breasts on that truck stop slut of his. Hell, the idiot had stopped by the hospital once, and the stench of whiskey was so strong Roger had practically gagged.
    Now Roger sat in the living room listening to her shallow gasping and the steady hum and click-click of the machines they had her hooked into. Because it was such a small house, and he was only five feet away from her door, he couldn ’ t help but listen. A nurse stopped by twice a day to check the machines and make sure his mother received her daily round of injections and pills.
    Snatches of memories came to him in an onslaught, floating up and mixing together like the colors in a kaleidoscope whenever he closed his eyes. He could remember them dancing around the living room to her old 45 ’ s of The Beatles, Manfred Mann, and Jimi Hendrix . He could remember making Christmas cookies and falling asleep on the couch together waiting for Santa. But each of those memories, no matter how happy, was now tainted with the memory of her lying in the next room, waiting to die.
    There was a part of him, as deep and hidden as it might have been, that just wished she would give up.
    If she would just go….
    An irregular click on the machine brought him from his thoughts. Roger ’ s head tilted toward the room. When he heard the strange sound again, he stood on unstable legs and wobbled to the bedroom door. He stood in the doorway and silently watched his

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    Kristi Brooks
    mother. Several seconds later, she took a deep, ragged breath, and the monitors went back to the regular click-click and hum that he had grown so accustomed to hearing.
    When he was reassured that she was still alive, he returned to the couch. As he walked across the room, he noticed that the TV was on. The land that spilled across the screen was covered in pale, puke-green sand, and the picture quality had the gritty and realistic look of a documentary.
    The camera panned across the horizon, revealing two suns, one on each side of the screen. One was a bright orange-red fireball that lit the room up with its glare. The other looked a lot like the normal sun, except for the static-filled picture.
    The picture zoomed in on what looked like a bug nestled on the ocean of sand. Roger leaned into the TV, his body drawn and crouched, like a panther waiting to pounce. He turned up the volume until the neon green bar read that it was all the way up, but he got only a sharp, loud burst of static in return.
    The scene was moving at an alarming rate of speed, and the dark spot took the shape of two men. One was on his knees, his upper body hunched over as if he was trying to vomit while the other lay motionless on the ground. Just as it looked like the camera was going to run right into him, the poor creature looked up, and Roger let out an involuntary gasp when he saw his own face looking at him.
    He was older, and there were lashes of thin blood leaking out of several cuts, but it was definitely him. Roger leaned in to get a closer look, but the picture went black just as the machinery in his mother ’ s room began to shriek.
    The dark TV screen stared back at him as the reality of the alarms registered. He ran toward the urgent howl in one swift movement, every muscle in his body suddenly on fire. She looked at him with the wide, red-rimmed eyes of a prisoner as her breath escaped from her body in sharp, harsh barks. He