[Nano novel] Chapter Five: Ava.

Ava Gordon was eating alone again, and she was eating on the couch instead of at the kitchen table.  Her mother would be mortified.

She had ordered three different meals from her favorite Chinese restaurant, even though she usually had trouble finishing half of one meal.  It was one of those days, and she was in one of those moods.  Sometimes food helped distract her.  That was another thing her mother would be contemptible about - food as comfort.  Food as a stress-reliever.  Food as a friend - but that last was really taking it too far.  Ava was not stupid enough to think that food would ever be her friend.

The television was on, but she wasn't really watching it.  A crime drama was half-way to its anti-climactic ending, but she was barely paying attention.  It was only on so that the silence would not drive her insane anyway.

She had no roommate to annoy with either the silence or the noise - she could do anything she wanted.  Except, apparently, hold down a job. 

She sighed and smacked herself in the forehead - the reason for all the food and the tv was so that she would NOT think about getting fired.  Buying food she could no longer afford was like saying, hey job!  Up yours!  Hey, uncertainty?  Kiss my ass!  Language, Ava!  her mother's voice echoed inside her head, and she groaned loudly.  "Why can't I just get away from you!" she cried, and slammed her sweet and sour chicken down on the coffee table, where it began to ooze a little bit.  There was already a sticky residue on her hand, and she licked it off instead of wiping it with a napkin.  She had to physically make her mother's voice leave her alone even for that little social no-no.

Now her appetite was gone, and not just because she had stopped being hungry at least ten minutes ago.  Thanks a lot, Mom, she thought sarcastically.  If her mother knew, or could hear, all the conversations that Ava had with her inside her head, she would probably try to have Ava committed.  Or at least medicated heavily.  She could picture herself, sitting in a white wicker chair on the front porch of some posh insane asylum for the chronically rich... somewhere down south, although why it was down south she had no idea... dressed in a spotless white straightjacket and drooling from one corner of her mouth.  She shivered. 

She decided suddenly that she was all done eating, but that she was not really interested in cleaning up any food-related messes just yet.  Instead, she took her coat and favorite scarf from their hook by the door and put them on.  She stuffed her keys in her coat pocket, turned to wave goodbye to her cheap little messy apartment, and locked the door behind her, forgetting to turn off the light as she left. 

Even though her apartment was as cheap as they could possibly get in that part of the city, she was not in what you would consider a 'ghetto.'  Her mother, of course (ever-present in her imagination and consciousness) did not approve of where she lived, but that was probably one of the main reasons Ava had decided to take that particular apartment, if not the main reason.  The other main reason, if there was one, would be that there was a lovely quiet park only a block away.  It was full of trees and private paths and there was almost never anyone there.  Ava suspected that everyone else in the area either thought it was a sure place to get raped or mugged or murdered, or they didn't know it existed.

Not being one for feeling afraid, and also having a can of mace in her other coat pocket as well as three years of karate in her available defense repertoire, Ava went to the park very regularly.  Walking there always made her feel better no matter what was going on in her life; whether it was her mother's real voice hammering away at her or just the accusatory voice in her head that sounded just like her mother, it all faded away when she went to her park.  That's how she thought of it - as hers.  When there were other people there, she glared at them and avoided them until they left, as if it was actually her property and they had no right to be there.

It only took her a few minutes to walk to the park, and there was nobody out at this time of night on the sidewalk.  A few cars sped past on the road - another of the shabby apartment's drawbacks was that it was situation on a main road.  The speed limit was barely reduced for the residential area.  Not that Ava cared, really.  She had to take the bus to work and never really needed to worry about the relative safety of pulling out of the apartment's parking lot onto a busy four-lane road during morning rush hour.

Once in the darkness of the trees, Ava began to relax.  She slowed from a brisk walk to an amble, and breathed in deeply.  No flowers bloomed this late in the year, but the smell of crisp fall leaves was in the air even at this time of night.  It was her favorite time of the year: cold, full of color and smell, and windy.  She loved wind, especially so because it gave her an excuse to wear a scarf.  She took a hand out of its warm protective pocket and fingered the lime green scarf she was wearing.  She had actually knitted it herself, which gave her an immense sense of pride every time she wore it; and its strange combination of cables and stripes made it the most unusual, personality-shouting accessory she had ever had.  A happy smile curled at the edges of her lips.  Walking at night was good, handmade scarves were good, being in a place of her choosing was very very good.

She walked this way for a while, smiling at some secret joy that was hers alone, kicking at small piles of leaves that arranged themselves on the path every now and then.  Preoccupied, she had traversed the park's short path twice before she realized it.  Deciding that it was a good time for sitting now, she found a bench that had been built into the bole of a particularly large and friendly oak, and sat down on it.  Then she changed her mind and reclined on the bench, her knees up in the air so that her legs didn't dangle over the end.  She could barely see stars in the city sky as it was, and that was made even more difficult by the overhanging branches of the oak.  If it weren't for the fact that it had already lost over half of its leaves, she would not have noticed the rainbow gracefully arching overhead.

She blinked once, then blinked again, then rubbed her eyes.  Surely this was an optical illusion.  It was a cloudless night, and the sun had set hours and hours ago.  For once, her natural curiosity was replaced with caution.  She was still curious, of course, but a rainbow on a clear night?  Her foolishness had its limits.

Now completely focused on the rainbow, she continued to lay on the bench, staring through the gnarled branches.  It wasn't fading, and it hadn't disappeared when she looked away and counted to thirty.  The longer she stared at it, the more it drew her toward it somehow.  She wanted to reach up and touch it but it was too far overhead.  She jumped up from the bench, brushed off the back of her pants out of habit, and reached up with her hand to trace the rainbow's path to earth.  It looked like it was just a little further on in the park, actually... how very strange and interesting.  There seemed to be no harm in following it, just like there was no harm in finding trees and chickens and dolphins in piles of puffy white clouds on a sunny day.  Her feet made almost no sound as she hurried along the park path, deeper into the trees.

She looked up many times, checking the shafts of clear colored light.  A rainbow had never looked so close before, nor so reachable.  She came to a curve in the path, which was near the back of the park.  She could either keep going, toward the chain-link fence, or give up and continue walking around the park until she came back to the entrance once more.  Not one to give up, Ava barely hesitated as she scuffed through the cool grass, still following her rainbow.  At the fence, she did hesitate.  She could see nothing beyond it but more trees, and she was honestly not sure whose property it was; but she couldn't imagine them caring much if she crashed around back there for a little while and then went home.  There were no 'Trespassers Will Be Shot' signs posted anywhere, so she felt confident about continuing on her trek.

Hooking a foot through the fence, she hoisted herself up high enough to grab a low branch, and then swung the rest of the way over.  Her landing was graceful although not quiet - she crunched quite loudly onto a pile of sticks and leaves that looked like it had been dumped there last fall and left to decompose.  After dusting herself off again, she began pushing her way through the underbrush, past the shadowed trees that she had never walked through before now.

Only a few minutes later, she came upon an opening in the trees that was somewhat dimly lit.  She assumed at first that the light was coming from the moon, but as she looked up to ascertain the moon's position in the sky, she remembered that it was a new moon that night.  Now she was ever so slightly spooked.  She moved into the opening, and immediately was bathed in dimly glowing light, a faint spectrum of colors that danced across her arms as she moved them in front of her.  Almost like cosmic bowling, except outside, and not actually a disco ball with a black light.  She walked further in, slowly, and sat down exactly in the middle of the circular clearing.  There were no leaves or sticks piled up here, and the ground felt entirely flat, except for some small hard thing she had accidentally sat on.  She pulled it out from under her leg - it was a smooth grey stone, oval in shape, and it was warm to the touch.

A great and terrible feeling gripped her suddenly, as if she was being wrenched out of a moment in time or space - the stone flashed with light and color, and a flash came and she fell back unconscious in the soft grass.