Round 2, Match 4: Supersession vs Gilgameshuu. Supersession:

Round 2, Match 4: Supersession vs Gilgameshuu. 

Prompt: There is beauty in the mundane

Participant: Supersession (https://www.honeyfeed.fm/u/7049)

When I sleep, I often see a spirit.

It doesn’t matter how long or what I’m dreaming of. It could start off as an adventure running through cornfields I’ve never been in, or romantic escapades with featureless girls I’ve never met before—my dreams always conclude with an encounter with this apparition. And though I always end up forgetting the specific details of my dreams, I’ve run into this spirit enough times to recall his face with absolute clarity.

I wonder if I’m being haunted.

It would be fun to believe that, but I’m not superstitious. The logical answer would be that my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Perhaps that spirit is the embodiment of some primal desire to be whisked away to an alternate universe—one where I’m not bound by responsibilities or expectations. Perhaps that spirit is my brain trying to communicate that I’m dissatisfied with my life; that I don’t want to be locked into a 12-year system which prevents me from doing the things that I want.

After all, the spirit is always frowning.

After all, the spirit looks exactly like me.

As my father put it, your life only starts after you’ve finished your education. Until then, you have a societal obligation to learn so that you’ll be able to find a job, so that you’ll be able to support a family you haven’t met yet, and so that you’ll be able to die after 40 years of corporate slavery.

They might be bleak prospects, but this is how the world works.

I’ve always looked forward to the day I would stop running into this spirit. I never realised it would come so soon, after a mere sixteen years and change of living.

***

Mikaela is always alone reading a book in her own corner of our classroom. With a posture so straight, I’d always harboured fears that she was secretly smuggling steel rebar under her clothes or was forced to wear a back brace as the

penalty to some lost bet between siblings. I wouldn’t know, since this is all conjecture. I’ve never actually talked to Mikaela before. Neither have I witnessed her ever exchanging words with anyone else.

At times, the book she’s reading is literary fiction, and at others, it’s a light novel that’s targeted primarily towards teenage males to judge from the anatomically incorrect heroines breasted boobily across the cover. She seems to do nothing but read. Perhaps she doesn’t care as long as it’s a book, perhaps she has some sort of criteria that she faithfully sticks to. One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that the books always have the school library tag on them.

Her uniform, though far from tattered, indicates to me signs of family distress at home. They’re always cartoonishly crumpled and grey to the point that the boys in our grade are always gossiping about Mikaela—they jokingly refer to her as ‘Grime Girl’, though I know this is all half-hearted because their eyes betray their secret desire to talk to the beautiful peasant princess.

This includes myself, of course. But the world doesn’t operate taking into consideration the whims and dreams of individuals. I don’t expect to exchange a single word with Mikaela over the next three years we’ll be sharing this classroom.

To be more precise, I didn’t. Until one fine day.

Until yesterday, when Mikaela dropped a golden ticket for me.

Okay, to be more precise, it wasn’t so much a golden ticket as simply the book she was carrying around with her. By a stroke of luck or fate, she didn’t seem to notice she’d dropped her prized possession, proceeding as usual, going wherever she was meant to go without noticing any disruptions to her normal life. On the other hand, I proceeded not as usual and picked up the brown journal that belonged to Mikaela Kim.

My diary.

Curiosity got the better of me, and so I opened the book. “Uh, hi.”

I heard a sheepish voice calling out for someone, and with no one else in the corridor, I instinctively brought my head up. I was greeted by a face so symmetrical I wonder if it were sculpted by God himself.

“Um, hello Mikaela.”

“I think that belongs to me.”

“Yes... I was about to return it to you.”

I handed the journal back to her, and she quickly snatched it with the unmistakable demeanour of an individual trying to run away. Just as she was about to disappear from sight, she threw me an innocuous question.

“How much did you see?” “A little bit.”

“...What do you think?”

“I don’t really care, I guess.” “I see. Goodbye then.”

I played it cool. I didn’t want to seem like I was eager to help, even if I were genuinely concerned. Society looks down on those who over-extend and reach beyond acceptable boundaries.

***

Today, Mikaela Kim killed herself.

She was found with her wrists slit in her bathtub at home. I thought it was an odd suicide from what little I read from her journal. I privately doubted that it was a suicide, and more likely the older brother she’d constantly written about finally boiling over and giving in to his abusive desires.

Maybe if society hadn’t conditioned me this way, I would have stepped forward and helped.

I know that’s an excuse, but it’s all I can think of to maintain my sanity. After all, to admit that my dissatisfied livelihood is a product of me choosing to perceive

the glass half-empty and not half-full; the mundane and not the beautiful—that would require a strength of character I do not have. I’m just someone who can’t achieve his dreams and blames it on the imaginary shackles of a ‘system’.

On an unrelated note, I no longer see a spirit in my dreams, only the ghostly whispers of regret that sound like Mikaela Kim while I’m awake. 

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Judge's Feedback

znf: If you had just resisted the incessant and infuriating urge to insert the "sometimes she reads a light novel" line. I might not have been able to tell that this was you. Otherwise, I think it's (Good).

OscarHM: Fucking control yourself. “Breasted boobily?” Ffs man. Other than that this is actually pretty good. It feels a little outside your comfort zone with how serious it is but I think you’ve done a good job with a difficult prompt. The twist at the end was sudden at first but I think works really well. I think you could make it clearer that the narrator gets to read a little bit of the diary before Mikaela gets it back, in the moment it read as instantly occurring. This made the last paragraph have more whiplash than I think was intended. Unless the intention was that he’s imagining that’s what she wrote about to make himself feel a certain way, which would also be interesting but would’ve required more context clues for me. Good job.

otkrlj: wow, interesting interpretation of the prompt. wasn't immediately clear how much he read, so ending came as more of a shock than it should have overall