The red headed woman held her arms out in front of her, fingers spread, falling to a certain death...

She had been brought in for questioning following a major disturbance at the Fountains Institute Science Laboratories during the night. The investigating officers had found her family photos, her ID, gallons of blood up the walls, numerous unidentified and unidentifiable body parts at the family residence of famed neurosurgeon Doctor Jack Reiman. The interrogators had tried to break her, the sweating Mr Good Cop and the time obsessed Mrs Bad Cop. Like a silver-wedding double act of office party boredom they had tried in vain to shatter her defences. Mrs Bad Cop had terrible coffee breath when her shouting face was close up.

But she was reinforced concrete made flesh and they were in the weak tactical position. They did not see that which swarmed all around her, disturbing the everyday from its natural perch. They did not understand that physics was a festering parrot show compared to the flight of the albatross possibilities the universe hid from normal view. They did not dare believe that beings like the ones she had glimpsed used stars to propel their influence across the galaxy the way a sleazy back street magician shuttles the peanut back and forth below his cups of deceit.

Throughout her questioning, she had been mesmerised by the corner of the Day-Glo pink interrogation room. It had angered even Mr Good Cop so much that he had to be physically restrained from punching her in the face. Corrosive fear scalded her bewildered eyes as the pink plates of reality that held the corner together at ninety degrees shifted apart, revealing a soft orange glow from beyond. You sometimes had to wait a long long time to catch another glimpse of the surgeon's laser. But if you were a good girl, and patient, you would be rewarded. With more than a glimpse. With an eyeful of opportunity. And finally, there it was.

Mr Good Cop bit the bullet with a huff. He asked her to describe the phantom and actually looked into the corner, seeing only cold reality. She turned a lunatic face on him; the wet-soap slip of everything she ever had known to be true. He got the picture then and asked her if she would like a closer look, grinning his sickly smile. His left eye just dislodged, there was even a small squeaking sound as the eyeball twitched off centre.

The red headed woman was petrified. She could not move. He helped her out of her straight back chair. Dragged her squeaking heels over to the corner. Once real. Once illusory. Flip flop. The pull of gravity immense in this no man's land of where you are and where you might soon be.

Drugs, burped Mrs Bad Cop. The girl is stoned. She checked her wrist watch again and banged on the door to be let out.

Mr Good Cop: Come on, little space woman, let's go meet what's hiding in the stupid corner.

Mrs Bad Cop: She's wasted. No shagging use. I'll buy us both a coffee. Shag though it is...

Mr Good Cop took her wrist and forced her hand into the cold and fearless corner. The hand passed right through. Mr Good Cop saw the suspect's fingers vanish into solid concrete and nearly vomited up his evening meal of wild rice and spicy beef. Brenda, you will not believe... he was saying.

Blink.

In the act of being spoken, Mr Good Cop's words were translated into three-inch long wood splinters, the universal quanta of fear in both consistency and dimension. Strips from the bark of birch and lark and pine burst forth from his lips. Mr Good Cop's face peeled back like shimmering steel petals and barrels broke through the bone ejecting a deadly poison into the interrogation room. As the cops choked to death, she eased herself into the line of orange light that bisected dual reality.

...as she wasn't actually falling from any height at all, no amount of patient waiting would facilitate a deathly splatter. She lowered her arms and unscrewed her face. Raised a hand to the violet migraine sunrise of SZMONHFU. She was in the middle of a desert. She didn't know the name of this desert or its location. She had always thought it funny how a place so devoid of water could look so wet in the heat haze as the refracted light glistened on the illusory lakes. She dug her toes into the hot sand. Reminding her of times she might have spent on beaches in her childhood. The magic bottle of orange pop drowning breadcrumbs.

She blinked, very softly this time. Memory mosaic of the prodigal pink interrogation room was reshuffled once and then again by this alien place. It all seemed so long ago. Four right angular corners like wings of angels unfurling all that remained. She gazed around this desert, cradling the shattered recollection of concrete hoping that something symbolic would stir her out of this teacup into some less torrid storm. But she got only the feedback from scorched retinas playing back the maze of blood vessels. A barrier of barbed wire in a war-torn enclave. Despondency threw her to her knees. Why this place? she shouted.

Desert air was not normal. It had a hungry property she did not like. Why this place, got a pure, anechoic reception that sneered with all the self satisfied mockery of vast open spaces hot as ovens.

Her guts grumbled in case she had any doubts about just how long it was since she had last eaten. When did she last eat? Did material matter? In the distance on the rim of a pyramidic sand dune, something shimmered, the first arrhythmic movement in the uniformly stable heat haze. A sign of life?

The distant entity was either a mirage or a purposeful distraction because right then the sand before her started to roll off the back of something as it rose to the surface. Submerged for God knows how many moons. She tried to get to her feet. Tried to back away from the revelation. But the shuddering of sand had her in its trap and she slid down into the flurry up to her waist. Jane Reiman, for this was the married name of the red headed woman, thought nostalgically of Dave Price, the truck driver, as the thing was finally uncovered...

Jog-shuttle rewind five years. Auto focus. Lights. Boom. Action.

Jane Templeton Rice, to give her full maiden name, was, as the contemporary fashion rags came to call her, a woman of classical beauty. Pre-Raphaelite was a common column inch term for her austere elegance. Her liquid spot-lit presence. All of life, they proclaimed, was a bulging orchard for her to pick idly from throughout the long and sultry day, the glowing prose of her more prosaic fashion editors.

Jane Templeton Rice, above and beyond the restriction of her obvious beauty, could seem quiet, personable, demure; some might use the worst of all four letter words, meek. But with emerald eyes like hers, with charisma on the catwalk like hers, dynamism under the spotlight, the perfect decoration for the arm of numerous millionaires, fashion modelling was the play she was born to perform.

You could imagine Jane as a gawky child all freckles and prescription glasses. Scuffing the chins of lads three years her senior with her tomboyish repartee of knees and punches. See her battling an entire school ground of spotty admirers. Only the seniors ever conquering her. The sucker for the life of charm promised by more mature liars than she. The disappointments. The little twists and turns of the knife. You could see where the almost indistinguishable worry lines emanated from. It was as if her exterior beauty was a conscious bodily evolution to mask the hurt inside.

As with all charismatic figures, and theatrical types in general, there was something not quite right about her easy switch of character from the meek and platonic private individual to hip and predatory star of the stage, her Jeckyll and her Hyde. Some external driving force. No sane person could juggle so well for so long. If the truth were told, Jane Templeton Rice was not the least bit well.

She had been a normal girl.

1) Left high school with the useless A level, Sociology.

She worked hard to find herself a suitable college to further her study. She could see herself two years down the professional county line, her heart stung by the interminable inevitability of broken home after foster parent database search, after rape crisis centre counselling, after...

2) She had a cute freckly nose and a good long pair of legs.

Lucky for her, she was head hunted in the centre of her hometown one Summer Saturday out with friends and accepted the swift job offer from Clinique, the world renowned Modelling Agency. Jane Templeton Rice, would-be sociologist in a low paid government position, garbed in woollen rags, cheap underwear and horned rim glasses, did her first $100,000 shoot at the mindless age of seventeen... and not yet a woman... as the song goes.

She often thought of how different her life might have been if she had continued her dead end studies: rotting in seedy lodgings, one-bar electric fire for comfort, beans on toast at each irregular sitting, working three years on her thirty thousand word dissertation, finding the only job vacancy was at the local council shifting abused wives and rickety families in and out of inadequate sheltered accommodation. Playing the numbers.

She had this comical and protracted argument with herself about life the universe and well, evolution, to be quite honest. Argued for nonsensical hours about the misrepresentation of Evolution, the so-called survival of the fittest, projected by the media. Wept openly at the thought of life forms who 'knew' it was their time to change suddenly discarding their gills and leaping up on to land to breathe the air. She had visions of some pre-historic dog some few thousand years later scavenging along the seashore and suddenly bouncing into the surf as a dolphin on some evolutionary whim. Had this really solid heart to heart with the mirror in her hotel suite the day before the Gaultier Show in Guatemala. Tribal Dolphin, the show was to be called. She couldn't see the connection with her line of thinking and her future that would patiently unfurl for the next fifteen years.

She had screamed things, hateful, wretched things her mother always made her promise she would never say. Filthy freeform that had scalded her tongue far too many times during the term of her captivity. Swore that she could no longer work out the equation in her head; maths not being her thaang. Spurred on by her ranting reflection, the remedy came to her as if on express rails. Logic indisputable.

Throughout the duration of her captivity, as she calls it, her campaign of wars with the demons of design had borne the worst scars. The most instantly recognisable of these being the continued degeneration of her shock-red halo that once so-spherically framed her over-ambitious features as no artist's imagination would allow.

As a school child, mizz Templeton Rice's hair was a fly away masterpiece. The ochred scales of its human medium once drawn out to a wild conflagration that forested the basic scalp. Now, the lamentable attempts of her being to reconstruct the glowing icon was under the close scrutiny of the scissor-happy, their tempering edge denying any extravagance of form of length of texture. A hostile hedge too often coloured, too often crimped, too often tugged at, as now in the silence she was tugging at it. Kneeling on the hardback wooden chair; legs quite dead. Back rigid with frustration at this deaf existence. The interminable Come On I Deserve It Hurt Me Bite Me Make Me Cry Keep Stabbing Stabbing Stabbing Stabbing. Metal marring flesh...

Reaching through the pain like a slow yawn, body-long across the dresser, she sought the one antidote to this vast catalogue of mental and physical torture. Pure. Unadulterated. Television.

The model she carried round with her from $100,000 assignment to $100,000 assignment was a beaten up portable black & white whose vertical hold was permanently on comatose drift mode. The technological equivalent of a battered old teddy bear. Her Electronic Messiah, as she liked to call him, always helped soothe away the trauma of the day's megalomaniacal floor managers, tired designers and serial autograph hunters.

The dust-silvered face of her Saviour awakened, loop after ponderous loop dismissing her gaunt reflection for imagery of a less radical bent. The narrator, some between plays Thespian, soliloquised in pregnant anticipation of his companion pictures that slowly warmed to his solemn yet competently delivered elegy.

For her, television had become an abstract art. Each of the separate one 50ths of a second that television represented cut into the phosphor ice with one continuous electronic blade. All narrative content pared back. Each raster edited by the linear mechanism some of the braver philosophers have named time to follow one after the other. Scalpeled incidents onto which her dainty consciousness alighted every one 100th of a second, neither remembering what came before nor able to anticipate what was next to come. Televisual comprehension a long invalid daydream. Left for dead. Rotting away in public for the avant garde of fabric's sculptors elite. Shamed by it all. Blink.

That battered, old, permanently scrolling black and white television was all they found in her room come show time.

Copyright © 2003 by Hertzan Chimera