"Michael..." Angela's voice was calm, and yet... so distraught. Her arm draped over my shoulders like the comfort of the sun. So warm, so loving. But it wouldn't be enough to pull me from this stupor.
Clutched in my crossed arms, was a small, red book. It barely fit between the gaps of my lanky arms, fumbling between my forearms and sliding against my sweat...
"Michael... please, say something." She pleaded. Her soft, green eyes gazed into my own as she tried to get my attention. Like the plains of field overtaken by then emerald, wave-like grass, her eyes peered into my face, as if she was trying to read me. Her forehead touched mine as she sat closer, edging into me until she buried my face in her chest.
Shaking, trying to hold back the tears from what I'd come home too... I embraced her. My arms felt fragile as they shook around her waste. The small book that had the words, "God, Forgive Me" on it, had fallen to my side. I hadn't even opened it. I hadn't even thought of it. All I could do here, was try not to feel anything.
The image of my father's lifeless body leaning back in that chair... his face... his face, gone...
I felt her tears fall into my hair as she held me forward, though she didn't make a sound.
"Michael." Came a stern voice from the doorway of my father's sun room.
Ever since we'd discovered the body... no one has entered but me... and my comforting efforts to coax me out, was thwarted by Angela's threatening stares sent to them to leave me alone. And I was grateful, though, at the time... I couldn't feel it.
"I just want to know if you're o-okay." Wilson pleaded from the doorway, his voice cracking a little.
My head was spinning. I couldn't remember how to talk. Sentances, phrases... these things became fragments, lost in my psyche and hidden by grief. His words barely made sense to me, and then after hearing his question echo in my mind, I'd found myself repeating it back to him, over and over.
"If I'm okay... I'm okay???" Weak and deliberately low, the words seeped from my mouth like an open wound. I could feel my lips drying and coagulating, scabbing over, and sewing themselves shut.
"Leave now!" Angela hissed, her hands covering my ears... as though that helped. "He doesn't need this!"
A warm scent washed over the room, something I'd been too shocked to catch when I'd gotten home. It was musky, but still warm. It was familiar... so familiar.
"He also doesn't need to be cooped up in a dark room with a dead body!" He snapped back at her. His voice sounded as if it had been pushed through clenched teeth, making me think of how water filters through river rocks. Rolling over it and then sifting through the cracks and holes. There are so many holes... so many holes... I thought to myself.
That scent started to spark memories like a lit match to a gallon of gasoline. Thoughts of ghosts and ghost stories. Thoughts of camp fires and gun fire. Thoughts of a haunted night...
"Just give us some time t-" Angela became very quiet. And I'd have never known what had quieted her, if I wasn't seeing it with my own eyes.
That scent, had driven me from the floor. It squeezed my fists until my half-eaten nails dug cuts into my hard palms. It lifted my head in the darkness, and suddenly, the scent wasn't a scent at all anymore.
A thin red line had appeared to me in the darkness. The line swirled apart in places, like an uprising wind in the mist, and came back together. I didn't know what to think of it... but still, it drove me forward.
Each footstep was slowed to a crawl, and each revealed a small memory of my past... a small tragedy.
I thought of him. So funny how I'd have never noticed if his daughter wasn't in the room adjacent to the one where my father lay dead in his favorite chair.
Memories of Emily, flickered in fragments across lazy eyes. And like a zombie seeking out flesh, I stalked... hungrily. Step. I saw her leaning against that old shack, the cold, grey legs of her illusion stepping before my half-conscious eyes.
Step. Seymour boasted about his fire starting skills, piling bits of wood and sticks into the fire pit as he continued. Turn. My hand gripped the doorway, and I softly put my hand against Wilson's chest, maneuvering him out of the way as politely as possible.
"Michael?" His voice sounded concerned, and caught the attention of Nick and Emily. They sat apart, with Nick on the couch against the wall, his eyes red, his knuckles white. Emily had stood up at my arrival from my depressing dungeon. Her eyes weren't as red... she must've been crying just because...
I thought of her and her father, sitting across from each other. Their movements were that of strangers, both exchanging looks. It was right before I'd told them I knew better. I don't know why I thought of that memory, but I did. And as I sighed, and rubbed the tears out of my eyes, I contemplated what I had to do to know...
I heard Angela gasp behind me as she finally got back into my mind. Before, I was frantic and wrought with many emotions, but now there was only one. And it was all aimed and ready for what I was going to do with it.
"NO! MICHAEL!!!" Angela yelled. But I was just a step quicker. I could barely feel the breeze from her hand swiping behind me. Wilson was none the wiser about what I was about to do. And as I bolted by him, everything went black and white, slowing down to a crawl. Nick was barely off the couch, diving towards Emily as I passed him. My hand drove his face into the window behind the couch. I hadn't even known that I was screaming.
Then it snapped back into regular time.
I snatched Emily up with my right hand, and drove her to the opposite side of the room. The furniture around us seemed to part politely as we blew past them. I tried my hardest to keep my hand from snapping her head from her neck.
She slammed against the entertainment center, and it splintered from the impact.
"WHERE IS HE!?" I yelled, my voice croaky and half changed. The summit of a growl followed my words, along with the sound of her gasping. Her legs kicked around me... just like old times.
When she didn't answer, I struck the wall next too her head. My hand blackened and menacingly threatening. My claws penetrated through the drywall, and I ripped it down, tearing out a huge chunk of the wall, along with a stud.
"I... d-don't-- know!" She gasped through my grip. I could feel her trying too swallow, and under that, her heart beat. Something made me let go of her, and slung me across the room into the kitchen. I didn't fight it.
Angela was over me now, bleeding. In a quick motion, she scribbled a small letter on my forehead, and I was paralyzed... and fading out of reality...
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Everything spun. The red in my closed eyelids spun, the piercing, white splotches across my eyes spun. My stomach spun. The only thing that didn't seem to spin, were my thoughts.
What had I done??? I could have killed her... Morose pain filled my heart at the furious outburst that seemed to have happened before my eyes. I felt as though I couldn't control it, but deep down, even as I sighed in assurance... I knew what I was doing...
I awoke screaming. Praying my horrible memory was a nightmare... hoping that when I adjusted to the bright light of the morning sun, peering through the window, that I'd be okay... that everyone would be okay... that my father...
I couldn't have been more wrong.
Vomiting almost instantly at the smell, I knew that my nightmare was real. Decomposing in the room next too me was my father. And alone, feeling beaten and forgotten... was me. I pushed myself up from the kitchen floor, wincing at the searing pain in my
Memories started to flash across my eyes, burning them, torturing them. My hands found their way to my horrified face... My mouth was agape, my eyes full of tears... I screamed.
It brought me too my knees... the amount of force that was behind it. It didn't even feel like me, mourning on the floor, propped up with one weak, left arm. To my right was a small pool of vomit, and it almost made sick again. Rather, it would have, if I weren't still screaming.
The horrible ache of my soul sounded through the house, over and over. My lungs felt like a beaten rug tossed into an oven. It made my voice rasp more and more with each howl, and before I knew it, I was climbing to my feet. My breathing was harder than it ever was. They left me...
My right hand gripped the soft, smooth, marble counter top of the new kitchen island. Something ground up helped me keep from sliding back down as I pulled at the smooth surface. They left me...
A constant puffing came from my throat, keeping mildly numb to what my body, was refusing I do. My legs shook as I tried to stand, my stomach lurched, and all the while, my voice crackled and whined. They left me... all of them...
My mind was furious at how my body was acting. Weakly trying to keep me down... I was infuriated. They'd just left me there, like some sick dog! It left me with a burning hate in my chest, at everything around me.
I reached back, and despite my horrible condition, I managed to rip the refrigerator from it's cubicle in the kitchen wall, and send it sailing into the wall where the splintered entertainment center now rest in pieces. My arms didn't feel sore afterwards either. But it wasn't like my tantrum had helped me either. Before I knew it, I was screaming again. Though this time, I screamed her name.
"ANGELA!!!"
Over and over it rang in my head, forcing me to rip out my own hair from my head in a moment of hysteria. She had left me there... to suffer.
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I destroyed the better part of the kitchen within seconds. And yet, now, I found myself in the living room. Kneeling down by the fridge, sifting through the lopsided mess I'd created when I threw it. I was starving, and delirious. Time didn't seem real to me, though nothing else did either. I was at one with my supposed "Non-Existance". It left me quiet, and dead as I shuffled around the decimated room.
"I don't want to cook," I said to myself, eyes peering through the mess in the laziest of ways. "I want to cook..."
I'd confused myself for a second, staring into the spilled milk. Bit's of lettuce had spilled out of their bag and floated along the solid white swimming pool. I found myself thinking about sand, and water, then... of her.
Someone was at the door. Their footsteps were closing the gap between the steps and the door, and I curiously walked right up too it.
I opened the door before the guest had time too knock, and was greeted by a shotgun barrel too the face.
All I remember after my shock, was a small, red bean-bag shaped bullet being fired point blank, into my face.
A lot afterwards was a blur. Just some snickering between two older men, and the feeling that someone was holding my head in her lap... Stroking my hair, and telling me that she'd help me through this... I love my Angela...