Come Home, Casey [Alex Casey & Saga Anderson]
Light flashes Alex Casey in a different shade Saga has never thought of knowing. He kneels. Darkness encroaches him as if within the eye of a hurricane. Resists. The flashlight pries through the density. Her knuckles hurt, but her will is all she got against him.
“Casey!”
What are words against words from beyond? The Writer has established this beat as it should be. Scratch has Casey in a rope wrapped around his throat and pulling at the strings of his limbs; he grasps his partner’s wrists, attempting to hurl up and fight. Saga aims at the eyes to see, for a barely minute, a scared friend—although infuriated with what consumes him—and cannot let herself fail. Casey is still there and she can still save him. At this fact, Saga screams again:
“Casey, I’m not giving up!”
Her words prod, flicker against, and Casey’s pupil dilates. Saga hardly feels her fingers now—shivers run across her sides as she imposes more will, more want, all to bring him to his true self. She has been threading too close on almosts—her daughter, her husband, her life… she cannot. She won’t.
"Casey!” Those are her screams of the same repeated word meaning every single word. Light turns into a sword, a needle. It pierces right within his eye. “Come back!”
The hurricane undoes in a violent burst of wind, cracking wood and branches and fluttering out into the night, dragging with itself whispers of sentences scratched out and fizzing incoherently in its wake. Is it poetic license of a story writing itself or has the Writer decided on her victory? Saga doesn’t care. Casey falls on the grass, labouring breaths, and she drops the flashlight to hold her partner and let him ground himself. When he looks up, he is fragile—as if a part of himself may never be the same anymore.
Saga, exhausted and voice-hoarse against the rules of the Writer, thinks she herself might not be either.