"The Pattern" By: Anatomically Incorrect Girl Site: Ambiguous Kelp "It does matter!" shouted Sara indignantly. "It does matter what we do." She jumped up off of the couch where she sat. "How does it matter?" Angie asked, calmly reasoned, coaxing her back down into a sitting position. The two girls were sitting in Angie's living room. Angie sat opposite of Sara in an arm chair with a mahogany coffee table between them on which rested a partially drunken bottle of vodka and a bottle of coke, that they were mixing it with. "It matters to people." Sara answered automatically. "So what if it matters to people. How does mattering to them matter? Think." Angie pressed. "Because that's all there is." Answered the younger girl with the kind of sureness that only alcohol can give. "What are you?" Sara was thrown. "A person." she said after a moment. "Yes, but what makes you a person... what makes you different from everybody else." "Genetics?" "Right. A little code. A biological coding. Little chemical messages. Electrons. You are a pattern." "I suppose." acknowledged Sara, as she lost ground. "The same codes make up everyone... everything. If you had a different pattern you'd be a rock." Sara squirmed but couldn't deny. "Everything you feel is just a little electrical impulse. It's not real. It's a pattern. Like a binary code. Blip, blip. Blip, blip. Off, on. Off, on. We might as well be dead. It would just be the same little chemicals sending different messages." Angie watched as this idea sunk into to the drunken 12 year-old. Angie watched as the little girl questioned her beliefs and found emptiness inside. "Then why are we alive." "A miraculous coincidence. The right chemicals got thrown in together to create "life." Life is the same as death though. Just a different pattern. It doesn't really matter. Not in the scheme of things. Everything is just a meaningless pattern." "It is." Sara slowly filled with revelation. "It makes sense." Angie smiled. Her work was done. "You're the same as everything else. There is no hierchy." Sara looked up, pained and trembling, into her friends eyes, searching desperately for any indication that it was a lie. She found nothing but a reflection of her own emptyness and then found liberation in hopelessness. She stood up, with a crazed grin on her face, and threw the bottle of vodka into the wall, and watched as the glass and liquid exploded into a crystal rain. "It really doesn't matter!" She screamed with her new freedom. She had nothing left to loose. Letting everything go, Sara jumped over the coffee table and then onto Angie, hitting her once hard in the face. Sara remained straddling Angie panting with a huge grin on her face, exhausted form the rush of adrenaline the exlosion of violence had given her. Angie smiled back at her, as she caught her breath, and the two girls sat there just grinning for an eternity of moments. The eternity ended as Angie's grin faded into a dark snear and she unexpectedly shot out and grabbed Sara's arm with incredible force. A look of terror entered the girl's eyes, as her capture fished a pocket knife from her jeans. The child struggled fiercely as the first cut was made into her inner arm and she screamed as the knife dragged through her skin into a circle and the blood slowly rose into the trench. "What are you doing?!" she shrieked with terror. "So you can remember." hissed Angie. "You wont remember what you really are otherwise. Relax. Enjoy the pain." Sara's eyes were filled her fright, but she bit her lip as Angie carved a series of jagged marks around the circle. She felt the sharp pain, shooting through her arm, making her shake even more then she was already. Slowly, she became light-headed, and the acute pain dulled into something beyond pain. Something beautiful. Angie finished with a triumphant smile and cocked her head thoughtfully so as to better admire her work. Blood completely covered the etchings on Sara's arm, dark red in the cuts, and bright across her unmarked arm. Sara grinned dizzily, in a strange form of ecstasy as Angie bent down to lick the blood from the cuts. She tasted the sweet irony tang and the thick consistency. She felt her heart race and the adrenaline made her head spin as she sucked hard at the open wounds, drawing blood from beyond the surface. It was addictive. The rush, the power of drinking the life of another human being. Angie drank. She felt the rhythm with which the blood flowed into her mouth and felt the rhythm give. She felt the body go limp and she felt strong. She had changed the pattern. But it didn't really matter. Sara was much the same in death as she was in life. It was just different chemicals and a different pattern. (c)opyright 2001 by Anatomically Incorrect Girl