Somewhere between a yes and a no, something faltered.
A fraction of a second stretched too long.
A thought refused to land
At first, it was subtle.
A driver missed a turn because he couldn't decide.
A surgeon hesitated half a breath too late.
A trader watched two numbers flicker and did nothing.
The pattern went unnoticed.
Until stillness began to spread.
Not fear.
Not violence.
INACTION.
CHAPTER ONE: OCTAVIA
Octavia lowered her head. When she looked into the bottom of the bottle, she understood it was empty. Yet she had no idea what to do with it; instead, billions of possibilities began flashing through her mind all at once.
She could throw it away — into the trash? onto the ground? into the sea? She could smash it — the shards might pierce her hand, slice her skin, injure someone, harm some living thing…
The intoxication of standing still felt like a future seared into her retina.
No one was beside her. And even if someone had been, how could anyone dive into her mind and carry oxygen through that suffocating flood of decisions? What would that even give her? She didn't know. She had already drowned long ago. At last, anger rose within her.
— Something is wrong with my feelings. But why?
she murmured to herself.
How did she even know she was going to ask that question? She had decided to ask it — but where had the impulse come from?
Then came ANGER.
Dressed in its sharpest suit, it stood before her.
It leaned in as though to flirt with a woman as beautiful as Octavia — and she could not soothe it.
In her pink-walled room, dim under a wash of yellow light, she struck the bottle against the marble coffee table. Wine spilled across the rug patterned with the motifs of her favorite band.
It was better that there was no reason. Had there been one — rest assured — Octavia truly loved that rug.
She looked at it now. It felt as though the freckles might slide from her face, because she was occupied with a single question:
Should I cry?
Or should I simply be sad?
She stared at the rug as her decision-making mechanism collapsed inside her. Yet her memories were alive — like land burning from within — and just as close to death.
She chose to retreat to a day when she had gone to the concert of the band woven into that rug — back when life had not yet been built upon decisions.