Catatonic

I can feel the shadows slowly dissipate. A light flickers through the darkness, and it reveals to me a world that I had never seen before. Or rather, never become known and familiar to.

The world is cold, quiet, still, and bright. It is filled with images and scenes, memories from a long time ago.

These images are like from fairy tales that I had heard once before. Stories about a happy girl in a happy family, living a happy life, with happy pets and home, visiting happy and loving grandparents, and belonging in a happy, warm, safe place.

In one image, the happiness shatters, and it turns into glass in front of my eyes. And it isn’t a smiling, cheerful little girl, but a lost, sad, and confused child. She stares back at me with glowing silver eyes and holds out a quivering, shedding hand through the mirror….

I was pleasantly surprised when the staff came into my room one morning and loosened the leather straps of the bed from around my arms, wrists, legs, and waist. The doctor came in after them, and looked over my charts and numbers before turning to me with a very charming grin. He turns to me, his eyes bright like the of the room, or the glaring sunlight streaming in through the curtains of the window.

The daylight still hurts my eyes.

“We have a present for you,” he tells me in a soft, convincing voice.

Behind that tone, seven lies flutter out and I can catch them in the air with my bare hands. Never once has the presence of a doctor in this room ever been fortunate or pleasant. Why should I believe this should be any different?

“Some of your family have decided to come visit you.”

A dead bird in my chest had suddenly come alive. It flaps its frantic wings against the fragile bones of my ribcage, cracking them, and then it drops down into my stomach, bringing with it the same strange, nauseous sensations. I look at the doctor, his labcoat wrapping around him, creating a robe-like appearance. The Angel of Mercy, dressed in white, bringing with him the gift of death from suffering….

“They’re here to see you. And they’ve brought with them some gifts that you might like.”

I can hear the tone of persuasion in his voice. But who was he trying to convince? Me? Or himself? Was he trying to convince himself that I wasn’t a lost cause and could possibly change and become for the better? After such a long time, I was positive that he, along with everyone else in this God forsaken place, had lost all hope in making me what they called “</i>better</i>”.

“Would you like to see them?”

He doesn’t wait for my answer. He doesn’t even acknowledge the fact that I’m the second person in this conversation. Instead, he goes back to checking my numbers, charts, the machines that are hooked up to the blue rivers under my skin, and then he places cold, metallic devices to my chest and bicep, listening to the sounds that they made before he finally stepped away from me – like I’m some kind of contagious, quarantined infectious patient – and gestures towards the door.

“You can come in now,” he says rather loudly to the closed door.

For a moment, a shadow crosses just under my sight and flies across the room towards the door, and then disappears under the threshold. I keep quiet about this – I had finally learned to keep certain things to myself.

The door opens – eerily, making loud scuffling sounds, reminding me oddly of a cliché horror movie scene I had seen years ago – and in step a crowd of people that I had no idea who they were.

There was a mass of faces, different features, different shapes formed upon the surface that are their portraits, and none of them are recognizable to me. However, something inside my dark and disturbed mind was telling me that they were supposed to be familiar to me. I was supposed to recognize them. But I didn’t. And why should I? It didn’t seem that they were of any true importance to me.

One of them steps forward, cautiously looking over me. His blue eyes hover for a slight moment over my head, hesitating at my brow, then scan over the condition I was in, sitting up in a medical bed made of paper pillow cases and thin blue cotton blankets, dressed in a white thin gown, and then his eyes went to the doctor quickly.

“How is she?” he asks to the doctor.

I slip into a quiet oblivion as the doctor informs him of the same things that I have heard him tell the staff and other medical faculty in the building. The man’s eyes grow wider slightly, but then slowly return to normal. He turns over his shoulder and points towards a woman his height and looks nearly like him carrying a large box in front of her.

“Go ahead,” the man tells her, and she drops the box down at the foot of the bed.

I look at it cautiously, and then I turn to the doctor, who is examining it, as well.

“I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. Are you also here to discuss her living arrangements?” the doctor asks them.

The man shakes his head rather quickly, and the look on his face is solemn and depress. He looks very pale and cautious. A thought ranges in my head that he belongs here with me, with the other people in this place, and be labeled the same way that I am.

“Do you know of anyone who is wanting to come and arrange the situation?” the doctor was pushing the matter. I can hear it in his voice.

I keep my eyes on the box, trying to see the shadows dancing behind the cardboard, wondering what fun the creatures find in not being seen and noticed by anyone else but me. When the doctor speaks, I can hear a determined plea in his tone, hidden beneath his words. I think rather amusingly that the doctor was trying to get rid of me. He didn’t want to deal with me, either. Might as well serve him right.

No one in this world wanted anything to do with me. I was “damaged goods” according to the whispered rumors spreading between staff ears.

“We don’t want her,” the man says bluntly.

I can hear the disappointment and sorrow fall through the doctor, like heavy stones dropping into a well, clinking on stone and crashing at the bottom. I want to smile, I want to laugh at his pitiful attempts to rid of me. I want to joke and mock him for his selfishness and how guilty he was of disregarding his patients that he had lost interest in trying to save.

But of course, I pretend to be a good little patient, and I keep my face frozen. I continue to stare at the box, but I can’t help but hear the conversation going back and forth between the two of them.

“She needs someone to take care of her, she needs someone who is willing to support her.”

“Well, that isn’t us. We don’t want her. We don’t want to claim any guardianship over her.”

“What about anyone else? Any other–”

“We don’t want to deal with her conditions. We can’t take it. So we’re leaving her to the state.”

There’s a lot of sighing and gasping in the room, and then it falls quiet. The group of people turn around and stalk out of the room, creating an orchestra of steps and stomps, and then the door closes quickly behind them.

That is the last I see of those ungrateful people.

The doctor takes a moment to breathe and calm down, and then he turns to the box on the bed.

“At the very least they were nice enough to leave this for you. Go ahead, open it.”

It was more of an order than a suggestion. He pushes the box towards my limp hands on the blankets, and on top, I read my name across in scribbled black permanent ink. It doesn’t say who it’s from or why they’re giving it to me. Just my name. Just that it now belongs to me.

I rip through the duct tape holding it together and pull it open. The box opens, and a cluster of laughing, taunting shadows fly out, screaming and hollering as they swirl around the room and dance in mocking patterns. I ignore them for the moment, convinced that they aren’t trying to endure my suffering for the mean time.

I look into the box, and see a collection of fabrics, cloths, denim, silk, and cotton, all neatly folded up and fitted into the box like perfection. Some of the fabrics I recognize as clothing, others as things that I had never seen before. They all look colorful and the smell of dust lifts into my nose, clogging my lungs. I shake my head, resisting the sneeze, and lift what was a pair of dark blue denim jeans from the box. The fabric feels odd and strange in my fingertips.

“Clothing. That was considerate of them. You certainly need it.”

The doctor walks around and examines the clothing. “Some of these might be too big for you. But we can fix that. I’m sure we can contact a tailor or someone who’s handy with a sowing needle to take a bit off them.”

I look up at him. The words dance on my tongue and spin through my head. I want to say it. But the courage lags in me.

“Looks like also they left you a sweater and jacket, for the cold days.”

“What does this mean?”

My voice sounds even odd and strange to myself. The doctor looks at me, and his face grows solemn again as the realization hits him after it has already struck me.

“It means you’re going to be staying with us for a while.”

I know I’m supposed to feel sad, depressed, disappointed, something. But I don’t. The bird had died again inside my body. And a numbness replaces it.

I lie back into the pillows, the paper crinkling in my ear. And I watch with bitter amusement as the shadows swirl around me in the room with bright eyes and laughing smiles at my misery. They mock me, and I let them, because I’m lonely now.

Fade

I wish I could go back….

There was once a time when my life wasn’t like this, when things had been happier. Now, everything is gone. It’s all disappeared, like the dew before the dawn….

I can’t even remember my family’s faces. I ponder this and grieve it as I toss in the bed. The paper cover of the pillows makes weird sounds against my ears as I move. The IVs and machines pinned to my arms, legs, and face beep nonstop as they try to measure every little movement inside my mind and body.

Outside the metal bars caging the window, I can see gentle sunlight streaming in through the gray, thick clouds. It rivets around the metal bars and bathes into the room, tickling the newly mopped and clean tile floors. The sunlight glitters and glows, as if speckled with the tiny essences of diamonds.

For the first time in a long time, I could actually see a light room, a place where shadows weren’t haunting and following me. Things were quiet here, at least, for this hesitating, pivotal moment.

I could feel the world slowly come back together. I closed my eyes—hesitating to do so, fear that the shadows might be waiting there instead—and then opened them. Nothing had changed. Everything was still bright and quiet. No one was here. There were no frantic doctors trying to explain what I was, what I was enduring, why I was experiencing this, and labeling me with such offensive and rude terms that I didn’t need to hear. There weren’t any panicking and fearful nurses trying to stick my body with needles and sedate my blood with drugs.

And there were no voices. Thank God….

I sighed and slowly drifted my eyes closed. It’s been a long time since I could peacefully sleep. I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t tried to go to sleep and was instead greeted by a horrible, repulsive nightmare filled with hot fire, screaming monsters of disturbing appearances, and bloody white bodies littering the ground I stood on.

I was hoping to fall asleep, but I couldn’t. My mind was restless now. I was curious to know why I wasn’t experiencing these things right now. It seemed to be a day-to-day incident where I couldn’t once escape the creatures spawned from reality and my nightmares.

My mind and body was just anxious for the moment to come, expecting to hear something, or see something happen.

But not this time. Instead, my mind receded back into my memories, and tried to pick something from the abyss that guarded everything.

One image stood out, a memory I couldn’t really see clearly or visibly, but I knew it held much significance as to why I had spent so much time here.

There are no people in this memory, only faceless beings with drowned, distorted voices. They speak to me in a language I don’t understand, like garbled words and slurs that leave me unsure of what to say. The beings tower over me, watching me, and in a flash of white….

“NO!”

A horrible, throaty scream ripped through my body as the image suddenly becomes clear, vivid, and it tears me apart from the inside.

I can feel my veins rip apart and boiling blood spill into the crevices between my muscles and bones. I choke and gargle on a pool forming deep in my throat, filling my chest, my lungs. I cough and spit in a frenzy to get the blood out of my body, while the image burns deep in my mind.

It hurts! It hurts!

I felt as if my entire body was on fire, and in my mind all I could see was this horrible, agonizing memory!

Around me, things had gotten loud and chaotic again, but I couldn’t tell what was going on. My physical eyes could only see black, while my mind’s eye could only see this terrible, gruesome display that had been unleashed from my memories. My mind was setting it free, and it was going to kill me now.

I could hear voices shouting, screaming, and I could feel my body thrash against the leather restraints that held it to the bed.

“Someone, sedate her!”

“She’s having another attack!”

“Quick, we need to get her to calm down!”

“Make sure those restraints are tight! We don’t want her attacking another person!”

“You are not mature enough….”

“WHAT?!”

I snarled as I twisted and turned against the restraints, and my head thrashed against the pillow. Slowly, the blackness began to fade, and through the blur of black and white labcoats I could see a figure standing at the side of the bed.

It was the most grotesque and horrifying being I had ever seen. It wasn’t Human, it wasn’t an animal. It was something gross, wrong, otherworldly, and menacing….

“You are not ready yet. You are not mature….” the creature spoke in a low, deep throaty gasp.

I screamed again as the pain ripped through me, and I thrashed against the hold of the doctors.

I didn’t stop until darkness completely consumed me, and I fell back into the depths of the darkness, fading from both reality and the nightmares.

1. Sixteen (Pt. 2)

 

 

My eyes froze on the mirror.  There was nothing different from what I could tell, but something prodded at the back of my mind and wouldn’t leave me alone. I’m not sure how long I was staring at my reflection, and I was more uncertain of why I looked away. It was barely morning and my day was already starting out weird.

I left my room and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. Once done, I finally went downstairs. On the wall overlooking the staircase was a lifesize portrait of Willow Black, my mother, with her long scarlet hair framing her translucent porcelain face. She was frozen in time with a soft smile on her full lips—which I inherited—that twinkled in her bright, gray eyes—also inherited. Surrounding her on all ends were white roses, making her otherworldly beauty stand out far more. It was no wonder Father never moved on.

But he avoided talking about her like the plague.

I entered the kitchen to find Father at the island counter, nursing a cup of coffee and pouring over the morning issue. Instead of his blue uniform, he wore a baggy white t-shirt that stretched around the muscles in his arms and chest, and dark shorts. Tall and lean, Father had ivory white skin, dark hair, and black eyes, and strong, handsome features in his jawline and chin, making him look younger than his thirty-seven years.

The kitchen light reflected off his eyes when he looked up, and then gestured to the chair next to him.

“That’s the third time this week, Lorelei,” he stated.

“Huh?”

He reached over and lifted my backpack with one finger from the chair. My face turned hot.

“Oops,” I smiled bashfully.

“Don’t leave it on the counter again,” he warned with a smile.

I sighed with frustration. A lecture before my birthday even starts. Great.

“Morning to you, too, Dad,” I greeted sarcastically, planting a kiss on his forehead and grabbing an apple from the fruit basket in front of him.

“Morning, kiddo,” he replied. “Happy birthday.”

“Thanks,” I gestured to the top headline on the front page. “What’s the story of the day?”

He sighed, folded the paper, and pushed it to a corner of the counter.

“The latest scandal in the mayor’s office,” he answered with a head shake. “Sex. Drugs. Greed. The usual.”

He leaned forward, brought his hands together, and pointed his index fingers to the counter behind me. “There’s a gift for you.”

“Oh?”

I spun and saw a small, black jeweler’s box, no bigger than the palm of my hand, with a white ribbon wrapped tight around it. I picked it up and turned to him, watching his face light up.

“Open it,” he instructed.

I obeyed and fumbled to remove the ribbon and the lid. Inside, nestled on top of pretty silver paper, was a teardrop black opal pendant, surrounded by a band of small diamonds, hanging from a thin, white gold chain. At first glance it wasn’t familiar, until a moment passed and I recognized it as the jewel Mother was wearing in her portrait.

“She would’ve wanted you to have it,” Father stated.

I was speechless, holding the delicate chain in my fingers, watching the jewel twist and turn under the kitchen light. Then finally I locked the chain around my neck, the pendant resting just below my collarbone.

Father exhaled. “You look like your mother wearing it.”

I beamed thoughtfully. It was the best thing anyone ever said to me.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful,” I murmured.

“Enjoy it, kiddo,” he said as he stood up. He smiled. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Uh-oh. I knew there was a catch.

“You obviously know that your grandmother is coming over tonight,” he started, taking his empty cup to the sink. “But I think she’s bringing a friend over.”I

“A friend?” Strange. It wasn’t like Grandmother Sophia or Father to have any “friends,” let alone invite them to family gatherings.

“Well, not really a friend. He’s a student of hers.”

“Huh?” Okay, I was really confused now.

Grandmother Sophia was a World History Professor for San Diego State University for as long as I can remember, probably before Father was born. She lived off of her own motto, “personal and professional don’t go together,” so it was unheard of if she bonded with one of her students, let alone bring them around her family.

Not only that, but my family thrived on secrecy. It was crucial to keep what we were hidden from the normal ones, the Humans. If anyone were to find out, it would be the Salem Witch Trials all over again. Keeping our way of life was the most important thing to live by, and Grandmother Sophia was more adamant about this than Father. So, why was she being hypocritical and bringing a Human around us?

And on my birthday, for Christ’s sake?

“He’s a medical student who is trying to complete his thesis for his undergrad,” Father explained, breaking me out of my baffled thoughts. “He became interested in something your grandmother shared about new age medicines and treatments for many ailments, and wanted her help to research it. So she’s taken him under her wing and teaching him more through experience. He may be coming over tonight. I need you to mind yourself and be on your best behavior.”

“Wait… is that a smart idea?” I asked, stunned.

The look that crossed his face showed that he was thinking the same thing as me.

“Your grandmother knows what she’s doing,” Father assured, with little confidence. “But she needs you to behave yourself. And so do I.”

I folded my arms in front of my chest, looking him square in the eye. Something wasn’t right here.

“I can’t make any promises,” I told him.

There was something that fell over Father’s face. A dark look that spun in his eyes and fell to his lips, which thinned into a straight line. He wasn’t staring at anything in particular, but his mind was elsewhere, and I didn’t know where.

I knew that look very well.

“Dad?”

He blinked, recollecting himself, and his posture became stiffer. He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. Then opened them and looked at me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said flatly. Then his eyes narrowed in my direction. “Just do me a favor. Watch yourself today. And be careful. We can’t afford any mishaps today.”

“I’ll…try?”

This was one of those many moments where I wished I could read Father’s mind. He was able to read mine without any difficult—and I was trying my damn hardest to keep him out—but him and Grandmother Sophia were able to blockade their minds to keep me from reading. I had to “learn” how to block them out, but it didn’t help when neither of them was willing to instruct me on how to do it.

“I wish you guys would tell me how to do it,” I said aloud.

“Do what?” Father asked, with a mischievous grin on his face.

I glared at him. “You know exactly what.”

He laughed, throwing his head back in amusement. “You’ll learn, kiddo. And don’t worry about what I saw. Everything will be fine.”

“But you won’t tell me what you saw?” I asked him.

“You know I can’t,” he frowned. “But if it was something that I knew needed intervening, I would let you know. Don’t worry about it. Things will happen as they’re supposed to.”

“Can you at least tell me how far did you see?” I begged.

Father liked playing these games with me. Nevermind being a strong Telepath, he had to hold the ability of Sight in front of me like a shiny, brand new toy I couldn’t have. Him and Grandmother Sophia both had these amazing abilities that I didn’t, and I envied them. Telepathy and Sight were just one of them—there was one in particular I was dying to have, and hated that I didn’t.

“By the way, tell that boy he’s going to keep hurting himself if he keeps doing that.”

“Huh?” I hated when Father slipped in tidbits of information that I had no clue what he was referring to.

He just shrugged and went to the coffee maker.

Mere seconds later, a loud crash sounded from the side yard, followed by an oomph! and a slew of curses shot underbreath. I pressed my lips together to stifle the laugh creeping up my throat, but it somehow made its way into my tear ducts. I couldn’t help it, I giggled loudly. We both knew who it was, and started laughing together. I buckled over at my knees, trying to hold myself up.

“I tell him to use the front door,” I managed through the giggles. “He doesn’t listen.”

Father breathed slowly, taking in a deep breath.

“Damn. He’s stubborn and hardheaded,” he stated. He threw a knowing grin out of the corner of his mouth. “Sounds like you’ve taught him well.”

“Thank you,” I beamed.

The kitchen door swung open and a teenage boy stumbled in, covered in sweat and dirt, and cursing under his breath.

“M-morning,” he groaned as limped with his hand clutched between his legs.

A hotness filled my cheeks. Father chuckled again.

“Good morning, Damien,” he exclaimed with a wide smile. “Got into another fight with the trash bins?”

Damien’s face flared a deeper red.

“Why didn’t you use the front door?” I imagined how I must’ve looked with my arms folded in front of my chest and scolding the poor boy with my eyes and words. But I lost count for how many times this has happened.

I watched Damien’s face turn a deep cherry red. It was cute.

“I don’t know,” he answered, gritting his teeth. “It’s more convenient to jump the fence?”

Father started snickering again, much to Damien’s dismay.

“Don’t complain if you keep hurting yourself, then,” Father noted.

“Or kill yourself,” I quickly added with a dark smile.

Damien’s black eyes widened in terror, glaring daggers at me.

“Damn it, Lorelei! Why do you have to go and say that?” he yelled. “Now you’ve just jinxed me! Thanks!”

“Don’t blame me for your own stupidity,” I reminded him, smiling from ear to ear.

Damien O’Sullivan was the quintessential boy next door—the owner of the mysterious bedroom window across from mine—and my best friend since we were three, when his family moved in. When we were kids, he tagged along in all of my crazy schemes, getting trouble with me—there was always plenty to go around—until we earned the nicknames “Bonnie and Clyde” in the schoolyard.

He adjusted himself awkwardly for a moment, pulling at the pockets of his worn out jeans. After a while, the redness faded from his face, and he wobbled to the middle of the kitchen, reaching for something in his back pocket.

“Here,” he said as he thrusted into my hands a white envelope. “Happy birthday.”

I froze, staring at the gift in my hand. Damien was never one to provide birthday gifts, at least not in the thirteen years that I’ve known him. The last time he gave anyone a gift was Valentine’s Day in the fourth grade, a makeshift card he gave to Priscilla Duran, which ended up in the trash three days later—I never told him that, it would break his heart.

“I hope you like it,” he added, making my heart gallop a little more.

I smiled up at him. “Thanks.”

A little blush returned to his cheeks. He cleared his throat and ran his fingers through his dark, wild hair. He was oblivious to how handsome he was, but every girl that knew him was fully aware of it.

Which made my blood boil at times.

I held the envelope up to the kitchen light, trying to see the contents inside. “Can I open it now?”

Damien shook his head, beaming. “Not yet. Wait until we’re at school.”

I frowned, but obliged, stuffing the envelope into my backpack. “Is your mom giving us a ride, by chance? If not, Dad can take us,” I offered.

Father exchanged knowing glances with me out of the corner of his eye. Luckily, Damien was oblivious to this, too. He turned to Father, though, mildly surprised.

“You have the day off?” he asked.

Father nodded. “Doesn’t happen very often, but I’m grateful to get what I can. So, is your mother giving you two a ride to school?”

Damien shook his head. “No, one of my friends is, actually.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Father looked quickly at me for a flash of a second, then back.

“Which friend?” I inquired.

Damien looked at me hesitantly. Something was up. And I heard it in his mind before it came fluttering out of his mouth.

And my body acted accordingly.

“I think you know her,” he stated. “Theresa Calvin?”

My heart dropped to my stomach. I knew her, alright. Every school had one of her. Pretty, born into a well-to-do family of moderate wealth, dark hair, dark eyes, and well done makeup and designer label clothes. I shared Economics with her, and although she never spoke a word to me, her mind was a small puddle barely able to get the soles of my shoes wet. Superficial, with an inflated ego to match, she lead a clique of like minded students as her friends, and I knew at some point she would hook Damien in, just as she did for all other guys she set her sights on.

Never once did I like her.

“Lorelei, you okay?” Father’s voice broke through.

I blinked. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

But he knew I was lying. Damien could see it on my face, too, but he still smiled, pretending not to notice.

Father turned to Damien. “Will you be over for dinner tonight?”

“Um…” Damien looked momentarily at me, then back. “I won’t be able to make it tonight.”

Stones filled my stomach. It hurt.

“I’ve something planned that I can’t back out of,” he explained further. “But I’ll be by this Saturday. Save a piece of cake for me, if you can.”

I don’t know what compelled me to do what I did, but I regretted the next set of words that spilled out of my mouth.

“That’s okay. Grandmother’s bringing one of her students over. Should be fun.” I hated how I sounded, how ridiculous I made myself.

And the look on Damien’s face was bittersweet. Surprised, shocked, and a bit disappointed. But he recovered quickly with a smooth, eager smile.

“Cool. That does sound like fun.” And I was back to wallowing in jealous misery. This time, Father’s expression made it so much worse—he knew exactly what I was trying to do.

Damien’s pocket started buzzing loudly, causing him to jump. He pulled out his smartphone, toying with the screen for a moment, then put it back in.

“Tess is here,” he announced excitedly. “We need to split.”

Like that, all joy and cheerfulness was zapped from me, and I felt the anxiety take over. Could I ask Dad to give me a ride separately from Damien? No, it wouldn’t be right. We went to school together every morning since we were three. If I broke tradition, he would know something was up.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Father’s voice echoed in my head.

I glanced up, meeting his eyes. But I gave a slight movement of my head, indicating that I wasn’t going to cower my way out of this. So what if Damien was friends with Theresa Calvin? It didn’t matter. He was friends with lots of people. Theresa was just lucky enough to be considered one of them.

“Alright. Then let’s head out,” I struggled to smile. Then I turned to Father again. “I’ll see you after school.”

“I’ll lock the door behind you guys,” he replied.

But his thoughts entered my mind, delivering their message loud and clear.

“You need to watch yourself today. Keep an eye on those emotions of yours….”

Something about what Father said left a cold chill rolling down my spine. I froze momentarily in the hall, letting his words bounce off the walls of my mind. What the hell did that mean? Watch myself? Did he think something bad would happen?

Monster

There is a secret side to everyone that is hidden, never seen, and it is buried deep inside, imprisoned and sheltered deep inside a dark corner of our soul. It only surfaces when pushed to a limit that we had never been before….

I had felt the pulls and calls from the shadows of my rooms, the eerie whispers murmured in the dark at night, the gentle brush of invisible touch to my skin and the crawling hands against the walls.

When I was young and I would see these things, I would dart quickly under the covers of my bed and sing myself to sleep so as to comfort my troubling fears and terrors. Nightmares were what my mother had called them. Terrible, frightful nightmares, she had claimed. But they were very real for me, to me, and still are.

Except they don’t just exist in the night. They’ve surfaced to the day, and are arriving more frequently. I had grown older and had learned that when speaking of these horrible and deranged things, people will not believe me, will not understand me, and thus I will be alone and isolated in a world that would not accept me.

At the point where the innocence of my childhood faded away, the nightmares became reality, and there wasn’t a point where I couldn’t stand to be alone without fearing that they would come claim me at any point — despite the fact that I was alone constantly in my life.

I began to see the shadows on the walls. Only they became more than just hands; they became full figures, black creatures crawling around with small round bodies, like toddlers, with large round heads and bright scarlet eyes. They would stare at me and I could feel them smiling, feel their hot red rage and hunger from where I was, and I knew they would come to claim me. Then they would disappear, as if faded into the light, and wouldn’t appear again for lengths of time.

I would hear voices constantly. Sometimes unclear whispers and murmurs, like overhearing a conversation in another room, and other times, they would be loud, bellowing…even screaming. And they would be close, and always different voices. Sometimes I heard women talking, or calling or speaking to me, sometimes it would be them screaming that I heard. Then I heard men, just as the women, but they would be screaming in pain, as well.

Then I heard monsters…voices that weren’t human, couldn’t be human. They had to be something else, something…deadly.

And those were what terrified me the most. I didn’t know what they said, or if they were even speaking so much as roaring and bellowing. I always heard these, no matter what, and I would be frightened by them to the point of shrieking in fright, startling and bewildering those around me, who could not hear them.

No one heard or saw the things that I did. And at times I did believe that I was going insane.

Until something happened.

Something very, very bad….

Thrashing, fighting, and screaming in the dark, the nurses are called immediately to my room with needles and syringes that terrify the shit out of me — I hate needles.

It had been nearly five years since I’ve been living in this bloody place. I want to kill all the people in here, the insane men in white who label me insane, and the wide-eyed nurses who stare at me as if I’m possessed.

The screaming doesn’t stop. I was supposed to be a success, a recovering patient that had stabilized finally and able to function normally in a society of normality. Apparently, I wasn’t that much of a success.

By my bedside I see my mother smiling at me, smiling with bemusement as the nurses stick my pale white and bruised skin with the needles, as if entertained by my attempt to fight them off — or maybe amused at what they were doing and treating me.

I spit and curse at her, but she isn’t there at that second. She’s gone, and the men in white claim I’m hallucinating. I tell them to take me off the meds and I’ll be fixed. I tell them I’m normal, I’m functional, just leave me the Hell alone.

Behind them I see shadows on the walls laughing and hollering at my choice of words. I tell them to fuck off and scream that they leave me alone.

The nurses sigh with relief as whatever they stuck into my body begins to take affect. My head feels heavy, my thoughts begin to spin into a whirl of blackness, and I fall back onto the paper pillows and pretend to fall into what they hope is a blissful sleep.

If only they knew that there is no escaping the nightmares that are with me. They are very real as they are dreams — now I can’t tell the difference anymore.

Silent Waters

The ocean swirls with black waves that crash and crash
Into a tidepool it rushes, carrying with it dead souls of the lost
Battered ships and drowning sailors
Pirates of the long forgotten dreams
The God of Thunder screams to the sea
And fire rains from the skies,
Crushed under the merciless tides
Poseidon dies underneath
And the maidens of the sea sing a last song
As those lost forever cry no more
The black sea claims them all
Swallows the world within its belly
A monster with roar that shakes nightmares
And under it sinks
A last farewell to the world
The waves retreat as the monster sings
And the world is still
White sands lit by moonshine
Dead cities with decayed towers
Babels that still stand over the empty world
The black sea turns white in the sun
And the waters are silenced