Jeremiah Quick by SM Johnson Page B

come to this, this quiet existence where what she looked
forward to the most was time alone in the house to take a long
bath, to masturbate for an hour – with toys, no less – to read or
write without constant interruption.
    Most of the time, between kids, dog, and
electronics, she could hardly hear herself think.
    And yet… when she could think, what she
thought was how boring her life must look, from the outside,
although she never felt bored.
    Her vivid imagination and rich inner fantasy
life made its way into books, and her usual state of mind was
waiting in aggravated anticipation to get back to writing the
stories.
    They were alright, her little family. There
was enough money to pay the bills, and Pretty had a part-time job
that forced her out of the house a few times a week. Every year the
kids got more grown-up and more independent. Before long, Pretty
and her husband would be back where they started – just the two of
them, letting each other go, then breathing each other back in
again.
    Sometimes she remembered a time when she'd
hoped to change the world.
    At this point she didn't see that happening,
and decided she'd have to look to Sarah to do that. And Sarah
would. That girl was a force.
    And how lucky was Pretty, to have stumbled
into all of this? A husband who loved her beyond all others, who
consistently provided for them so well she worried about almost
nothing. Healthy kids to raise up and try like hell to make sure
they knew what was important in the world.
    Perhaps she suffered from restless boredom, but the
seasons changed and the kids were off school for the summer, and it
was all late nights, sleepovers, bonfires, and mom's taxi service.
And when she couldn't bear it for another minute, school would
start again. She dreaded the oncoming winter, but adored the time
alone. She was always melancholy in the fall, but the time was good
for writing novels, even if she suffered a minor depression each
year, dreading the appearance of those first sharp white flakes of
winter.
    And maybe she was wrong, to be so accepting of her
easy life. Maybe she needed to find some injustice to fight, some
cause to stand for, to keep looking for her chance to change the
world.
    Maybe that's why she was here, now, with Jeremiah
Quick. To find the fire, to re-ignite her passion for bigger
things. Maybe there was a purpose much bigger, much higher, than
her family or herself.
    It was time for paying attention,
time for change.
    Jeremiah would surely start the changing.
    She couldn't bear to think or remember more.
She ran song lyrics through her head to stop the mess of noise and
memory. The Who … no one knows what it's like to be the bad
man. And Lifehouse… how long have I been in this storm? Guns-N-Roses' Patience . And she waited for Jeremiah, wide
awake, staring into the dark.
     
     

     
     
    The silence was deafening, so pronounced she
started imagining sounds, a click, a rustle, a ringing in her
ears.
    The darkness was as total
as the silence, and she stared up at the rafters where she knew
chains were hanging and… the scrap of black materiel swayed
in the dark, she knew it did, black in the dark, swinging
back and forth, black on black, impossible to see, and yet she
saw.
    Her mind started playing tricks on her,
imagination running wild from too much dark, too much silence, too
many questions in her head.
    She thought she heard a muffled
sob.
    It startled her to attention, the
way a noise interrupts a dream, and she strained to hear more, to
hear a real sound past the silence, but there was only ringing in
her ears, and nothing else, and time dragged by until she thought
maybe it hadn't been a real sound at all. But as soon as she gave
up listening on purpose, she thought she heard it again, and a
minute later thought she heard her name.
    And this time, the more she
listened, the more she heard. Murmurs and mutters that were barely
audible, unintelligible, although there was a cadence to the sounds
that she