Chaos is a Friend of Mine: Part One

Aon. 

Chaos is a friend of mine.

       I came to know the true meaning of chaos being my friend when I was nine and three months. We were having a birthday party for one of my fat siblings, and I had been put in charge of carrying out the cake. The cake was a colossal waste of money, in my opinion, and it was ugly too. It was towering and massive and smelled like dog food. Also it was pink. Well. I decided to improve that cake. My idea of improvement was simply to douse the entire thing with chocolate syrup and peppermints I had found in the cabinet. Ha ha ha ha ha. Chaos had officially been invited to the party then, because as soon as I stepped out with the cake, everyone gasped. Chocolate syrup dripping onto our plush carpet, the smell of stale peppermint penetrating the air, I began to sing quietly. “Happy birthday to Chalkle, happy birthday to Chalkle, happy birthday dear….” I stepped towards the table. “Chalkle,” And tripped.

        The cake went soaring through the air and landed in the lap of Hal Biscuit. I slipped and fell backwards, into the puddle of chocolate syrup. My head buzzed, but even through the sharp pain I could hear Hal shouting at me. Chalkle was crying. My sister Lucille was roaring. It just so happened that Hal was allergic to peppermint. And I was sitting in the middle of it all, wondering where I went wrong. 

        Turns out I went wrong the very moment I showed up at the Biscuit household. I could feel it more than ever now. In the way they looked at me, talked to me, poked at me. They thought of me as an annoyance. A pest which no pesticides could put out. So I did everyone a favor and got out of the house myself. It was about two weeks after the party, and I had had enough of the condescending tones and patronizing sighs. I packed all I had in a faded gym bag and a rolling suitcase and headed out to the bus station with a stolen credit card. I took it from Hal while he was out golfing. I took his TicTacs too. As if he needed them. 

         The bus caught on fire.

         I don’t know what happened to everyone else on the bus because I ran away too early. I was scared. I left both my bags on the bus and that meant I left the credit card too. As I ran away I smelt the burning burning and I couldn’t breathe and I peed my pants. I couldn’t do anything about it but run and run and run and hope no one caught me. I didn’t do anything wrong but I knew it would look like I did. I was a runaway. I was the one who stole the credit card and technically everything else I brought with me because I’d never bought anything with money of my own. The woods were taunting me as I ran, the trees bending this way and that, the branches snagging on my skin and breaking me up. 

        I stopped running once the sky got dark and the moon was the only thing lighting my path. I crawled up into a pile of soft trash and fell fast asleep. When I woke up, I was no longer in the pile of soft trash, but instead I was high up in the branches of a tree. Peering down, I saw the ground below me and I had to close my eyes before I threw up. How did I even get into a tree? Was it a bird? Did a bird pick me up out of the trash and carry me to her nest? And then I realized that there was no birds and no nest to be seen. I slowly sat up and winced in pain. My scratches were deep and wide. I gently rubbed my fingers over one on my left knee and flinched. That hurt. 

       “Careful, darling.” 

       I looked up in surprise. The voice continued. “Don’t you know me, child? I’ve been with you so long. Really, don’t you recognize me?” 

         I didn’t, but I guessed the lady in front of me could be my mother, since I had never met her properly. I reached towards her sharp cheekbones and glinting eyes. “Oh, mama?” 

          She laughed at me and smacked my hand away gleefully, as though smacking traumatized young boys was her favorite pastime. It was probably high on her list, considering she was definitely not my mother. “I am Chaos, and I am your friend.” The lady sat down next to me and folded up her long legs. “Haven’t you ever wondered why your life has been so tumultuous? So absolutely tragic?” 

I knew this from the very moment I was born; when the world rocked with my arrival. My mother died four minutes after I started to live. My father died six days after she did. He was a lumberjack, so you can see his untimely demise was a hazard of the job. Needless to say, I didn’t get to know my parents properly, and I soon was thrust into the arms of my oldest sister. Her name was Lucille and she was married and already had three fat children of her own. Their names were Dagger, Chalkle, and Tuskegee. And as I said, they were fat. The sister of mine, Lucille, was married to a fellow named Hal, and Hal Biscuit was the CEO of a Christmas Carol company. So the Biscuits were filthy rich and they lived in splendour. When I came along, small and yet still undoubtedly troublesome, they decided that they certainly had room for one more fat child. They gave me the name of Ogeeo, even though my mother’s last wish was for me to be called Solly. But no. The Biscuit family had taken me in, and the Biscuit family had called me Ogeeo. So for nine years and three months, Ogeeo Biscuit I was indeed. 

           I was only nine, so no I hadn’t wondered that. I only cried myself to sleep every night and felt under appreciated and unloved my whole life. I never wondered about why I felt like that. “Well, no.” I blinked. “Your eyes are flashing.” 

          Chaos cackled. “My boy, so are yours.” She smacked my forehead with the heel of her palm. “You didn’t set that bus on fire.”

           “N-no?” 

           “Not at all. That was me. I follow you around. Because we’re friends, you know. I know all about you, Solly.”

            “My name isn’t Solly. My name is Ogeeo. And I don’t want to be friends with you. You’re scary. Like a vampire.” 

             She hissed at me calling her a vampire and pushed me out of the tree. As I fell, I felt my brain turn somersaults inside my skull. I landed on the ground with a sickening crunch. My nose laid flat against the ground, the bones broken and smashed. I didn’t move. Blood puddled beneath me. Now I had blood and pee all over my clothes and I hated feeling so helpless. Chaos landed gracefully beside me and with a flick of her wrist I was sitting up again, blood still steaming from my nostrils. 

*

Dhà.

“I AM NOT A VAMPIRE, FOOL. Do you think it’s okay to call me, the living embodiment of chaos, something like a vampire? Do you know how degrading that is?” She knelt down beside me, whispering now and that was much worse than her yelling. Because all that the volume of her words didn’t say, all the things that her voice didn’t betray, we eyes certainly did. Her eyes were slicing me, boring into me, gutting me from inside. I gaped like the stupid fish I was. My words had left me absolutely helpless. Again and in ways I didn’t know were possible. Chaos was in my bones. 

         “I’m sorry.” My voice came out so quietly I wasn’t sure I had said anything in the first place. Chaos smiled a splitting smile and reached for my nose. I flinched away, thinking the worst, but she tilted me back towards her and ran her long fingers over my nose. I felt the blood drain back into my body and the bones crack back into place. Chaos was showing me she had the power to break and heal. “Thank you.” 

           “I’m just being a good friend, Solly, and I hope you are a good friend to me in return. I’d be awfully disappointed if you were ungrateful for my friendship.” I just nodded. I hardly knew what the word friend meant. “Okay. Would you like to come stay with me? You have nowhere else to go, and it’ll make it easier for me to follow you. I have such a wonderful place for you at my house, Solly.” 

           “Yeah, I mean, yes, ma’am. I’ll go with you.” 

 Chaos smiled and stroked my hair. I watched as it grew longer and longer, darker and darker, until it was hanging down to my shoulders and as dark as a starless night. 

           “Friends bring out the best in each other, darling. Come now, my pets are waiting for you.”

 With that, Chaos took my hand and we started deeper into the woods. 

           Her home was a tree, and it was all the gnarled and tangled problems of the universe twisting into the sky and scraping the bottom of the sun. I tried to remember the feeling of Chaos’s hand holding my own. I wanted to memorize the warmth and her fingers and nails digging into my skin. To me, that was the most interaction with anyone I had ever had. I knew then I’d do anything to keep her attention. 

“Do you like it, Solly?” I knew she was asking about the house but I didn’t like the house and so I pretended she was asking about her hands and I said yes, absolutely. So she smiled again and that made me feel like something I wasn’t sure about. Like a friend, I guessed. We went inside the tree house and Chaos showed me to the staircase that led to my bedroom. It was bigger than the one I’d had with the Biscuit family, and that was saying a lot. The bed could have fit me, Lucille, Hal, the fat children, and Chaos and we would still have plenty of room to be comfortable. And the walls were painted with scenes of such beautiful chaos I almost felt right at home. 

          I was sixteen years old when I realized that I was trapped. Chaos had been in one of her moods since a parade promoting world peace, respect, and kindness was spreading over the world. She had been a hurricane of fury, and it didn’t seem to be calming down anytime soon. I was hiding in my room when she came swirling through the walls and knocked me off my bed. She had shorn her long hair and her clothes were tattered, like she had gone through a paper shredder. She leapt over the bed and grabbed me, slamming me up against the wall. At sixteen , I was taller than her, but knew never to fight back. Friends didn’t fight friends, and it was only fighting if I hit her back. 

        “I DO NOT CARE IF YOU WANT TO OR NOT. YOU ARE GOING OUT INTO THE WORLD TODAY AND YOU WILL WREAK COMPLETE HAVOC. Do you understand me?” 

I nodded. She let go of me and I slid to the floor. Chaos patted my head nicely. “Good Solly.” She frowned slightly, more to herself than anything. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so unhappy lately. But I’m sure you, as my friend, can help to cheer me up.”

            “Of course. What can I do for you?” I straightened up and tried to unmuss my hair as much as I could. “Bring travesties to Tahiti? Horrors to Hawaii? Badness to the Bahamas?”

             “Still with that silly game, Solly. You’re growing up so tall and dashing. But, ah, you are not fit to be Chaos’s true friend unless you pass this test. We wouldn’t want to think our entire friendship was based on lies, now would we?” 

*

Trì.

I sat up straighter still. Lies? I hadn’t been lying. “I want you to go and bring woe to the world. All of it.” I opened my mouth to ask how, but Chaos shushed me. “No, no, Solly. I tell and no questions. We don’t want you getting a guilt complex or anything.” 

             “Right.” I didn’t say anything after that. Chaos continued.

              “So I want you to start small. There’s a little town called Quaker Hills, in the state of Pennsylvania in the USA. I will send you there and you will wheedle your way into the lives of the mindless fools that live there. From there, your small chaotic events will spread like wildfire. Do not get attached to any of the humans there. You are not like them. You are better than them. And most importantly, they don’t want to be your friends. They’ll never understand you like I do.” 

And I believed her, because friends were supposed to trust each other. 

The next Monday, I started school at Quaker Hills High School as a grade eleven student. I had only been to school those short years that I lived with the Biscuit family, and so the classroom environment was startling and new. The teacher walked in, took one look at me, and sighed. She didn’t like my hair. It was a sentiment often expressed by people who saw me. She probably didn’t like my tattoos either. They trailed down my neck and dipped off into the collar of my shirt. They had different sizes and shapes, but they mostly all were the same. Chaos had done them over the years when I did either something really good, or something really bad. The bad thing tattoos were dark and blocky, with words like failure and nothing. They had sad faces and tears, scars and all. The good thing tattoos were brighter, lighter, and I loved them. They were reminders that Chaos really was my friend. Everyone was staring at me. I felt my skin crawling under their eyes. I wanted to run away, but I had promised Chaos I wouldn’t let her down. So I stood firm at the front of the class. Tattoos and long hair and my deep, flashing eyes. The teacher asked me to introduce myself. 

         “Solly. My name is Solly.”

         “Last name?”

         “I dunno.” Chaos didn’t tell me this part. “Biscuit, I guess.” 

The class giggled. I glared at them. Why was Biscuit such a funny last name? I thought it was fine. And I didn’t think it would be fitting to share a last name with Chaos. She was just my friend. And I didn’t remember the name I got when I was still my parents, so I had to use Biscuit. The teacher grinned thinly. She thought I was lying. And I was. Just not about my last name. The teacher told me to go sit by a girl in the back of the classroom. She also told me that if I needed anything I could tell her. Ha ha. How could she help me? With a haircut? Ha ha. As if as if as if.

The girl I was sitting by had long hair too, and it was almost as dark as mine, but no one seemed to mind. She had a very white face and very blacked out lips and long eyelashes. And those eyelashes were batting in my general direction. I guess she thought I was mysterious or something. Well. I was something, alright. Because Chaos is a friend of mine.