Fiction

ALIVE Chapter 3

by Ri Fritz
09/06/20
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Chapter 3 Alive Forever

            It had been too good to be real. Zecky, Tenatashi, and Tristan were not really sitting beside her playing cards. All that lay on the bench was three stacks of eight cards, the girl, holding the three cards, and a few leaves that were scattered across the bench. She had been daydreaming, and she knew it. She had never seen the three main characters she wrote alive nor even in the hypnotized state they had been in. She had imagined it all. Tristan Cascade, Zecky Davis, and Tenatashi Lanataro had never been alive in the strange room she had pretended to encounter on her way to a classroom.

            She didn’t even have brown eyes, and she didn’t go to school. All of it had been part of a daydream. She sighed as she collected the cards. She stared at the three cards she held. She imagined each of her character’s names written upon the cards. She couldn’t write the names, however. The deck was not her own, and neither was it Zecky’s. It was her family’s deck. She sighed as she stared at the fountain before her sending up gusts of cool water.

            “My only regret is…they aren’t real,” she thought with a forlorn sigh as she watched the water sink back down. She stared down at the cards once more as she placed them in the card container. She picked up a clipboard with a few pages of random images she had tried to draw of her characters, but she had given up. None of her characters were real people in reality. All they were was a part of her imagination.

            “But it was so real,” she thought as she stared wistfully at a drawing of Tenatashi’s mother. She glanced across the open plaza before her. She heard someone skateboarding across the cement. She turned and saw a teenager skateboarding down the cement path.

            “Strange. Not many girls get into skateboarding.” Suddenly, a thought struck her as she watched the skateboarder disappear around the corner. She picked up her pencil and flipped through the pages on the clipboard until she came to a blank page. Quickly, she scribbled down the following,

“Kayla Kahari

Died pink or purple hair

Skateboarder

Zecky’s to-be-girlfriend.”

She smiled as she finished writing. She glanced back to where the skateboarder had gone.

            “You have no idea what you just did for me,” she thought as she stood up, dropping her clipboard into her backpack.

            “Well, even if they aren’t alive in reality, they’re always alive to me.” She smiled as she stepped away from the fountain, picking up her backpack, and hoisting it across her shoulders. Her blue eyes stared forward to the setting sun. She smiled.

            “I never would have known I liked the sunset so much if it weren’t for Tenatashi,” she thought. “I wonder how many times I’ve written about him enjoying the evening. Many, many times, certainly.”

            As she stepped under a streetlight just turning on, she noticed a small piece of thick paper lying on the ground. She flipped it over, and realized it was a playing card. Her eyes lit up when she turned it over. The words “Zecky” and “Davis” were printed out clearly in Zecky’s sloppy handwriting. The words faded, but she still smiled.

             “I don’t care what others say. You’re alive to me, and that’s what’s important.”