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 Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 6:41 pm
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Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2019 6:42 pm
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Day # 81
Theme: dreams
My world was a pit of agony and darkness. I couldn’t quite say how I’d ended up there or where there even was. All I knew for sure was that the pain pulsed through me, sharp and hot, like a heated poker skewering through me. Except there was no poker, only a pool of blood growing steadily larger beneath me.
It was hard to breathe through the pain, and harder still to move--but I tried to hold my hands over the wound in my stomach because some part of me still remembered that I should apply pressure to stop the bleeding. But the blood simply squeezed through my fingers, bubbling mockingly at him.
I was dying.
I didn’t want to think that but there it was. I was losing too much blood, and my cellphone lay smashed in the puddle to my left. There was nothing I could do but press my hands down harder, despite the pain and despite the exhaustion that clung to me like the sticky strands of a spider web.
My eyes felt heavy and my breaths rasped wetly.
I wanted to scream for help, but there was blood in my throat and when I tried to speak, I choked and the blood filled my mouth. I thought that maybe I should spit it out but I didn’t have the energy to turn my head to do so. Instead, I choked it back down.
I stared up at the sky, which blurred and darkened as my vision began to dim. For a moment, I thought I could hear someone’s voice, maybe footsteps too, but there was a rushing in my ears that made it too hard to distinguish sounds, and even if I’d had the strength to look to the side, my vision had darkened too much for me to be able to make anything out.
I was drifting, devoid of my senses except for the pain I still felt--burning hot throughout my body. I wanted the pain to end; I wanted to stop drifting.
I closed my eyes.
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I was still drifting, but the pain had grown distant.
Everything felt fuzzy and disorienting. I sat up and looked around; I was surrounded on all sounds by dense walls of shadows. Dark shapes flitted past my face before converging with the darkness.
A dream. I was dreaming. Or I had really died and this was the afterlife, but for some reason, that simply didn’t feel right. I didn’t think I was dead, despite the condition I had been in, so it had to be a dream.
I climbed to my feet and watched the dark shapes peel away from the shadowy walls. Some of the shapes had familiar forms--a cat, a bird--others were straight-up abstract and bizarre, elongated and stretched into something unrecognizable. But each one was formed from the shadows and each one eventually returned.
One shadow shot past my face and circled around me before melding with the wall.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Never had I felt so uncertain in either a dream or real life. I felt completely and undeniably trapped.
Maybe I was dead after all.
Another shape extricated itself from the shadows, taking the shape of a small bird. It landed in front of me.
My uncertainty vanished and I knew without a doubt that there was something very, very wrong.
A voice suddenly sounded from the shadows all around me, filling my head. It was so intense that I couldn’t understand what the voice was saying, except one word stuck with me, though I couldn’t really remember having heard the word at all.
Power.
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My eyes snapped open. My side throbbed painfully and when I moved my arm, the pain flared up, nearly knocking the breath straight out of me. I gasped in agony and that made everything hurt worse, too, so I tried to control my breathing, taking in small, quick inhalations.
I turned my head when I heard a door opening. A man walked into the room. His eyes locked onto mine and he smiled as he walked over to the side of the bed.
“I’m glad to see you’re awake,” he said. His voice was soft and gentle and managed to ease some of the anxiety I felt.
I opened my mouth, but the man held up his hand.
“Don’t try to speak yet,” he said. “You’ve been through a terrible ordeal, and you shouldn’t push yourself.”
So I closed my mouth obediently.
The man leaned over me, his smile calming me even more.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll feel better soon.”
I felt a small pinprick of pain in the crook of my arm, and then I drifted back to sleep.
--------------------------------------------
The bird was still there, but this time its beak was the color of blood. It tipped it’s head to one side, and I could hear that voice welling up from all around me again. I wanted to cover my ears, but I didn’t think it would actually matter--no one was actually speaking; the voice just existed everywhere, all at once, inside and outside of me.
Power.
Give us power.
I shivered.
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His hands were warm against my face and it was the one thing that made me feel connected, that kept me from drifting off into the nothingness. So I clung to the feel of his skin against mine, desperate.
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When I woke again, he was sitting in a chair beside my bed, his head resting in his hand, asleep. I watched him for a moment and despite the fact I no longer felt like I was drifting away, I wanted him to touch me again.
I struggled to pull my arm from underneath the blanket, and once it was free, I reached hesitantly toward the sleeping form. My fingers grazed his cheek, which burned with an unexpected heat.
His eyes opened and I jerked my hand back in surprise. He stared at me silently for a moment and then smiled.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
The question was simple, but for some reason, I didn’t know how to answer him. Pain still lanced through me, stemming from the wound on my stomach, but being here, with this man, made that made seem entirely insignificant.
“Okay,” I said. It didn’t even come close to conveying how I actually felt but how could I put that into words.
There was understanding in his eyes, like he knew exactly how I felt even if I hadn’t managed to put it into words.
“That’s good,” he said. “Do you know what’s happening?”
“I almost died,” I said.
He looked disappointed at my answer, though I couldn’t fathom why. I had almost died. Right?
“Yes,” he said. “That’s true, but that’s in the past. Do you know what’s happening right now?”
When I didn’t answer, the man sighed. “That’s okay,” he said. “You will understand. Soon.”
He lifted a syringe from the nightstand. A deep red liquid swirled around inside.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
It looked like blood, but I kept that thought to myself.
“This,” he continued, “is power."
Power.
Somehow, that word that had struck such fear into me before seemed entirely different coming from this man’s mouth. He made it sound right.
And when he injected the liquid into my arm, resisting was the last thing on my mind.
I wanted it.
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Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2019 5:59 pm
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Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:17 pm
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Posted: Thu Apr 04, 2019 7:06 pm
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Posted: Thu Apr 04, 2019 7:08 pm
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