“Wind-Up Action Figure On Her Day Off”

by David Michael

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010 by David Michael.

Published by Four Crows Landing.

Wind-Up Action Figure On Her Day Off

by David Michael

Ange’s left eye twitched as she visualized a blue filament connecting her hand to her PO box, short-circuiting the distance between where she sat on a park bench in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the post office in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, a thousand miles away. She felt only cool metal against her fingertips. No mail today.

She let the blue filament dissolve back into the riot of neon colors that was how she saw the world. She looked up at the sky, seeing the thin strands of green and blue and red that crisscrossed a black void, what she once would have seen, before she had been Awakened, as a clear blue January sky. What should have been a bright yellow sun was a churning mass of red filaments, traced with silver and purple afterimages. The dedicated joggers in their spandex who shuffled past her bench were tight weaves of pulsing gold and silver and purple wrapped in red and green.