TROJAN

5➤NIGHTMARES AND MEMORIES

Her ginger hair and amber eyes shine like the autumn leaves of a blazing forest, a striking contrast to her dangerously pale skin. Drops of crimson trickle from her nose and slip over her mouth, over her chin, splashing onto her blouse, onto her sandals, onto the kitchen tiles where it rapidly pools around her feet.

It's everywhere, I realize, taking in the blood that's smeared across the counter and the cabinets and the chairs and...

My hands. I frantically rub them off on my turtleneck, although it doesn't make much of a difference.

The dying woman reaches out to me, her terrified gaze pleading with me to call the ambulance.

I don't.

Instead, I shrink back into a corner and watch her drop to her knees. But before she collapses into the welcoming arms of death, the floor opens up and the walls peel back, thrusting me into a white room. A room that's even whiter than that woman's pallid skin.

In front of me, a pad of paper leans against an easel. Harsh, bold black lines run across the once-white page at swift, sharp angles. At first, all I see is a meaningless tangle of bottomless shadows, but on closer inspection, I can pick out the silhouette of a cold-blooded killer looming over a corpse, its forbidding claws dripping with innocent blood.

Subconsciously, I stretch out my right arm, my hand inches away from the chilling piece of art. I stop myself short, noticing my charcoal-stained fingers. My eyes widen. My heartbeat stops.

I made this.

A shiver licks at my spine, dragging its icy tongue across my vertebrae. As I pull away, the solid stripes of charcoal stretching across the paper start to wriggle. The mysterious silhouette shifts forward, dislodging itself from its two-dimensional prison. I stumble backwards, my breathing becoming as uneven and unsteady as my footsteps. The faceless figure lunges at me, knocking me off my feet. Its sickle-shaped fingers curl around my neck, pressing down onto my throat. One of its long, ugly talons digs into my jaw and rips its way down towards my chest, splitting open skin. While the tears roll down my cheeks, tendrils of tangible ink twist around my limbs, around my waist, around my neck—smothering my eyes and nose and mouth before plunging me into total darkness.

When I open my eyes, I find myself standing before a bloated man sprawled onto the couch, his serrated snoring scraping against my eardrums. A cigarette slips out of his grasp, falling into a sea of empty beer bottles littering the carpet. The sharp smell of tobacco and alcohol and fresh copper—fresh blood—stings my nose. The overwhelming stench slams into my stomach, making me keel over with nausea. After retching up my guts, I lift my head, only to discover that the scene has already transitioned...

↺↺↺↺↺↺↺

I'm staring straight at her. But she doesn't see me. She cannot see me. I'm standing in the darkest corner of the room, watching her, scrutinizing her soft, youthful features that seem so familiar and yet so foreign.

Her freckled face is caught in the colour-shifting glow of the TV screen, her honeycomb eyes glued to the animated characters. She's not supposed to be up at this time. She should be sleeping. Or at least be pretending to sleep. But her favourite show is airing and if she misses another episode, then she might as well never climb out of bed again.

Behind her, the staircase creaks, straining under her father's bone-crushing weight. Unfortunately, she does not hear him over Princess Analee's commanding voice.

Of course, I try to warn her, attempting to step out of the shadows, to reach out to her and tug on her arm. But in such uncompromising nightmares, I am immobile, intangible and utterly invisible. A mere phantom in my own mind.

All I can do is watch.

Just when the mighty fire-breathing dragon is about to swoop down on the princess and burn a hole through her crown, the screen turns black and the living room lights switch on. The little girl's terrified gaze swings towards her father, who stands beside the couch, his grip locked around the remote like a crocodile's airtight jaws.

His words slowly drop out of his mouth like sharp, heavy stones. "What did I tell you? Seven P.M. means bedtime."

"But—"

That was a mistake. She knows full well that if she ever wants to make her father really angry, then she simply has to trigger him with that defensive, argumentative, challenging three-letter conjunction.

"But nothing!" he snaps. "I am not here to negotiate with a spoiled brat!" As if to conclude his statement, he hurls the remote against the edge of the table, its guts splattering across the rug.

The girl flinches and I can see how her lip begins to quiver.

A woman rushes into the room, a yellow gown wrapped around her petite frame. It is the same woman who had been bleeding in the kitchen. Now she inserts herself between her daughter and her husband, but this also turns out to be a mistake.

The man's hand shoots out in a horizontal arc before striking her across the cheek, the heart-wrenching sound of a calloused palm colliding with soft skin exploding in my ears. When she crumples to the floor, he mercilessly rams the front of his cumbersome boot into her stomach. And when I scream, my voice is torn away by the piercing cry of the girl. The man kicks his wife again. Harder. Knocking the breath out of her lungs. Slamming his shoe into her ribs, into her chest, into her chin.

Entirely hopeless, the girl breaks out into a shoulder-shaking sob, watching the monster drink her mother's innocent blood.

And I also watch the memory unfold before my very eyes, my blood boiling over with a fresh volcanic rage, remembering that the little girl—that helpless, tormented twelve-year-old—is me...

Sierra Thorne.

[1010 words]