She cried. She sat in the corner and cried a trail of silently flowing tears. Though they were a warm tickle on her cheeks, the pain was stronger; it hurt too much to ignore anymore. Even now she felt that if she didn’t let it all out after all this time, she would break. She could see herself cracking, tiny fragments spinning edge over end through the air in slow motion. There was silence filling up her ears.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and raised herself to her knees with the help of the window sill. As she glanced out over the darkened street, she realized that for the longest time she’d been unable to give in, to let loose the torrent of tears that had built up inside her. Her mind had created a dam; now it had crumbled... now she couldn’t hold back and they cascaded down her face, a Spring thaw streaming, bubbling. It felt good to cry.
For a moment her eyes scanned the street below in a frantic panic. What if someone saw her? What if someone was watching her, saw the glistening in her eyes, her face? Her mind reeled in horror at the thought and her muscles tensed. NO! she screamed quietly, hearing her voice bounce off the walls and reverberate in her ears.
If someone was there...
If someone saw...
No, it couldn’t happen. It was only the Nameless Fear, coiling like a snake in her belly, making her head spin. It was the kind of fear she could remember feeling during a nightmare, a sense of foreboding doom even when the dream was void of terrifying monsters and dark places. Even when her dreams contained nothing rational to scare her, she found herself trying in vain to prevent something (an event) from happening (taking place, taking over), but she didn’t know how or when or why or what it was she was meant to stop. The Fear would wash over her in wave after wave until she awakened drenched in sweat, hugging her knees to her chest, waiting for the Fear to go away.
No rational reason.
No reason at all.
She had stopped sleeping at some point. The Fear attacked her night after night, relentlessly pushing her to face something she couldn’t see. It was excruciating, this pain it brought.
As her eyes darted up and down the tree-lined street, geometrically designed with the same box-like structures some people (who?) called home, she noted with relief that it was deserted... no one was below, no one was staring up at the girl hiding behind the flowing white curtains that enveloped her like a billowing shroud in the cool breeze, the girl who was unable to cease the river of tears flowing across her face.
No one was there.
No one at all.
As the Fear receded, retreating like black slime to another place, another thought occurred to her (they were always doing that now, pictures and words singing and bouncing around in her head until a few would settle into place and suddenly — a thought). This one was an explanation. Although she felt she no longer had a use for any explanations, she permitted its meaning to filter through her brain, chasing and capturing the questions echoing there. Why had she been so afraid of someone watching her cry? The thought unfolded, telling her that when she stopped sleeping the Fear had followed her here. It had come to the Real World to find her.
Another thought: the Fear was taking over.
No rational reason.
It just was.
She abruptly turned away from the window and watched the sunbeams flickering across the room, lighting the faded yellow wallpaper dotted with tiny blue flowers. Pretty.
What was that?! She heard it. A noise out in the hall. She crossed the room in three strides, feeling the fuzzy warm carpet beneath her bare feet, and slid the metal bolt in the lock. Leaning against the doorframe, she heard herself sigh. Now she was safe. No one could get in.
No one at all.
She returned to the window, stretched out her hand and withdrew it in surprise when her fingertips rebounded against cold hard glass. Straightening, she frowned. Of course. She had closed the window... she’d forgotten, that’s all.
She pulled her white wicker chair across the bare wood floor and sat, playing with the frilly lace edge of a starched white throw pillow. The window remained shut.
Glancing once more at the street, she dimly noticed shimmering waves of heat rising off the tarred pavement. Empty and deserted, she thought of it as a modern ghost town. Neglected, rejected, dejected, alone.
Feeling something warm and sticky on her hands, her eyes traveled to her lap. First she saw the reddish smear on the immaculately white pillow which now had no meaning (how?) and then saw the cut on her index finger, long and glistening with dark, rich blood. It wasn’t deep, and automatically she stuck her finger in her mouth, grazing it against her lip. Amazingly — or so it seemed to her — the world stopped and yet so many things happened at once. She felt a piercing stab in her finger, tasted the salty iron in her blood, heard the wind whisper far, far away.
...Click...
The thought told her the sound was not coming from far away but right in front of her, pointed out that once more the curtains were flowing in the breeze, that the stab she felt was a sliver of glass lodged in her finger, that the blood she tasted had not appeared by magic, had not broken through the skin on its own. No logical reason.
She squinted, carefully observed the window. Yes, she could see it now, the jagged edges of broken glass. She’d put her hand right through the window and hadn’t realized it.
She shrugged and took the finger from her mouth, noting satisfactorily that the bleeding had ceased. Absently, she traced the outlines of the small green flowers on the wall with her nail. Yes, pretty.
Again she gazed out the window. This time her vision didn’t reach the paved walks below, for it was frozen on the yellow house across from hers, the one dotted with many windows of its own. One in particular had caught her attention.
There was a man in the window watching her. Panic filled her as his eyes remained transfixed on her face, unblinking, unmoving. For hours he sat and watched her. The clock in the corner ticked off the hours loudly. One, two, three, four, five the second hand ticked. Five hours. Such a long time to stare.
The Fear was playing with her. It licked at her neck with frozen flames, danced around with her thoughts, making her heart pound, her throat dry. Perhaps she would faint (what?) and be spared the failure of forestalling the inevitable awful thing (event) that was going to happen (take place, take over). In that moment, she knew she was powerless to stop it.
She forced herself to think calmly.
No rational thought.
No rational reason at all.
It had been such a long time (when?) since her brain was commanded to perform instead of passively letting thoughts form when and where it felt like it. She wasn’t sure she had power over her mind anymore. She wasn’t sure if it was worth thinking about it.
No reason at all.
Staring harder at the painted blue boards of the house across the street, pushing her eyes to see the man in the window. He was still there but something was missing.
A trick. The Fear was tricking her, making the man’s face disappear until there was nothing except a peach-colored blur framed by a mass of curling black hair. The Fear didn’t want her to recognize him. She knew.
Suddenly the faceless form moved, suddenly it had hands, shapeless hands that tugged at the windowpane and ever-so-slowly — so very, very slowly — raised the glass.
The loud clock next to her feet sounded off more hours, only now they were days. One, fourteen, sixteen, four! The second hand screamed. Four, five, seven, one! The hours grew louder.
Now the man had a mouth, lips wriggling, shouting foreign languages. She could almost hear him over the din of the clock on the wall.
Words blended together until they were no longer sentences but an endless, continuous word, raising in pitch and strength and higher, higher and now it was a tremendous deafening ROAR! The sound filled her ears as the Fear flooded her mind, blocking out (all rational thought) all the thoughts in her head until she didn’t know how to think, didn’t know what thoughts meant. Now, in the darkness of the afternoon, it did not matter.
She could take no more. She was dying, dying inside, and the Fear was killing her, eating her, she was drowningstrangledbleeding and now there was nothing left.
She stood and the wooden rocking chair hit the tiled floor with a soft tinkling bell.
With incredulous wonder she realized she must have stopped crying some time ago. That was all, for whatever reason (no logical reason) she had ceased to allow the tears to trail down and soak her soul. They were gone. And she missed them. After finally losing them, she wanted those tears back. They were right in front of her, scattered in the air, on the window sill, rolling on the pink wallpaper, watering the roses.
Suddenly she found this ridiculously funny and began to laugh long and hard, blocking out the tremendous ROAR! until she was hic-coughing between giggles, the sobs that wracked her body numbed her from feeling the Fear. She laughed until she was laughing for no (rational thought) conceivable reason.
Still laughing uncontrollably, she heard the clock on the wall tick off the hours sixty-eight times and that meant it was mid-nite you know so she rushed across the sand filled floor, though the open door, laughing, always laughing, straight past the Fear, head-first to hell.
Mr. Davis paused at his window, glancing through the bright morning sun at the Meadow’s house across the street. Their daughter, Robyn, was staring at him, an odd pallor on her face. She looked rather ill, eyes sunken, somewhat unsettling.
He lifted the sash and leaned out the window, which was when he noticed the broken glass littering the Meadow’s lawn and the overhang below Robyn’s window. Something seemed very wrong... he could sense it even at a distance.
“Robyn?!” he called, repeating her name when she failed to respond, louder this time for she hadn’t seemed to have heard him. “Robyn, are you alright? Who broke your window? Hey, can you hear me?! Hey—“
When she turned to him, he could see directly into her eyes and what he saw in the cold grey granite orbs sent a shiver through him. There was a feeling in his stomach, not nausea, not exactly butterflies.....and then he recognized it: it was the knot of fear he felt after waking from a nightmare. Yes, that was it exactly. Perhaps this wasn’t actually happening at all, perhaps he was still asleep and dreaming this. Robyn was laughing now, high-pitched, shrill, hysterical laughter that reverberated in morning air. Davis shuddered.
He saw her hand sweep along her window sill and return with a piece of the jagged glass. In one fluid, graceful movement, she sliced it mercilessly across her throat. Wet blood splattered out, painting the front of her shapeless white nightgown, creating worthless modern art.
As Robyn slipped to the floor, Davis realized he could hear the muted sound of her laughter reaching him, worming into his ears. It was not the sound that astonished him, that held him at the window, that made him unable to stop calling her name.
It was the fresh memory of the look in her eyes and the Fear creeping into his mind. He knew with clear certainty that Robyn Meadow had lost her mind for no logical reason (no rational reason at all)
Submitted October 30, 2019 at 12:32AM by Zrhoshame https://ift.tt/2NoPH7f
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