
08-12-2009, 05:43 PM
Everything happens for a reason. This phrase is a queer sort of optimism and the very same morbid compensation I got when I was thirteen and my only friend in town, a cat I had named Bootsie, was taken to the clinic and put to sleep. The other option was to sit at home and watch her die slowly as the cancer ate her away. I remember digging a grave in the hard Georgia dirt for her while the wind and rain of the cold Autumn night bit into my pores. That was the first time I felt the kind of cold that eats into your skin and curdles your guts; The second time comes to me now in broken spirals when I dream. That was the night I lived for a second time.
A high street light sang like a mechanical cicada stuck in some great orb above the dirty back streets of the city. It was odd to see the sky as my vision parted to embrace the night façade, my head now sliding to and fro. It was cold and I knew my shirt was off. Before this I had been in so much pain, an unending Hell which stormed through my skull until all I could see was black and red and still more voiding black. My bed had rocked from the fever that I knew was killing me until just the time that a soft female voice began humming a song and I awoke to find that my pain was gone. The voice was my only clue that I was awake beneath the utter void of the starless sky and endless sea of unremarkable walls. When the sky falls away, and the angels come to play. Carry on. Carry on. Carry. On. In weak desperation I clung to those words. I had died not long ago, and the last thing I heard was my mother crying and then the soft humming that encased me now. Like two strings that could never knot.
The voice swooned and rose as my limbs began to shake. Something sharp touched by chest and the music stopped out into the void, vanishing without an echo. I opened my eyes more and felt the cold touch over my mouth. The blacks and reds of my sleep returned and when I next heard that song my limbs were weak but living. As I opened my eyes I saw the hand come back to smother out my voice. I turned one way and dug my head into the gravel road. The soft voice purred and I felt cold lifeless hands run down my neck. “Sleep. Die.”, The voice was soft and pleading, “Die, so I can live”. The small and frozen hands wrapped around my jaw and a smile escaped. “Die….in peace?’, my voice was distant but the look it spurred was so real It may be the only thing I may ever remember so clearly. A gesture of greed. A smile. She smiled and turned my head away. That’s when the pain of my bleeding gut began, I had only just then seen it torn so widely open, and a needle point pain entered my neck to take it away again.
In some way I knew what was happening to me. I had seen this sort of action in hundreds of movies and cast it aside in falsehood, as we all do, to later haunt my dreams. Only now, it was true. The fangs sinking into my neck were those of a vampire, and I was now going to die. That’s one thing I find strange in my dreams, never a shirt. I can always see that oozing blood dangling from my stomach. And I can usually turn just enough before I pass out to see the two strange and monstrous bugs smashed so entirely against an adjacent wall. Even their smell was too real.
That, in its entirety is how I died.
Also, that is how my dreams end every morning, and often times several times before. That scene is a comedic tragedy that I can’t rewrite. Books are easy, you take character A and mix in character B before sprinkling two tablespoons of action over it and baking at three hundred degrees. Not so for life. Not when you are the character A. That’s something entirely different. In retrospect, I should have thought of that a long time ago.
Well, in short I woke up in the same position that I had been left in when I had died, loose and pitiful with one arm tucked mostly under my chest. Everything was cool against my face and toes, but something heavy had been laid against my stomach. As my weight shifted I felt my entire abdomen shake in agony, like being hit very hard very many times until my stomach sort of knotted up. And then like being stabbed. “You really didn’t want to wake up, huh?’, the voice was familiar now. I could feel my nerves tense as the woman spoke softly into the carrier winds that tore through the street. As I opened one eye my vision split and focused to show a young woman now towering over me. The sight of her beauty soaked entirely in foul smelling blood may be a final warning.
Carah flipped to the next page of lined paper and found a cruel sketch of a man laying in some dark pool, on his back was a scar identical to the one she had left when she had thrown the stitches sloppily down his stomach. It was funny how well his body had taken to the infection. The stitches she had laid had been engulfed within minutes, well before he had awoken again, but mental limits had never truly been lifted. The scratched out journal he had made was proof that he was still too human.
As the pages flipped by with no other clues Carah could hear the strange young man, John he had said, in the back bedroom groaning as the icy cold faucet spat huge tears of water within the narrow standup cabenit. In a way Carach almost liked taking him more than if she had fed. He had been so very weak. The look in his eyes was beautiful as the disease burned him from the inside out. If he had not been so ill she never would have found the Infection nesting in him, but to see a boy like him so weak and susceptible made something very human in her awaken even now as she thought of it.
Last edited by UbrePrinnyBaal; 08-12-2009 at 05:46 PM..
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