Wednesday, February 6, 2013

ONYX: Sneak Peek

Excerpt from Chapter 11 of my YA contemporary fiction novel ONYX:

(In this scene, the protagonist Enid is in utter agony because she has experienced a series of dreadful events within the span of a five days.  As she cowers in her room, she tries to make sense of everything but she is lost in her misery.  I wrote this while listening to "Caught by the Light" by The Boxer Rebellion - try to listen to it as you read below.)

I sprawl out on bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to find the answers to my life hidden in the paint.  I feel tears running down the side of my face and falling onto my bed.  I sit up and look around my bedroom.  I look at the furniture, linens, curtains, decorations, clothes; I look at everything.  Everything is in the same place as I left it.  Everything is static, not noticing the pass of time, not witnessing the distress of the world, not feeling pain or sadness.  Everything just is.  I sob, yearning to just be.  Longing to float through existence without a care in the world, it’s too much to ask for, only a fantasy.  

I am in shambles.  Fissures buried in my bones will burst at any moment, spurting my soul onto the inanimate objects that make up my room.  The objects that feel nothing, and will feel nothing as pieces of me soil them.  I once heard that trials and tribulations are all the tests of life.  If this is a test, where are the answers?  Where is the study guide?  Since I came to Onyx, Virginia, my world flipped upside down.  It was not enough that I am in a new place, at a new school.  The horrors of life strangle me all at once.  What can I do?  

Everything happens for a reason.  

© Mariela Ochoa

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