Scars on the Wall

Seeing such a young child in such a horrifying state murdered my soul in a split second.  I had faced constant tragedies of all sorts, but nothing such as this.  No pain was evident on the child; no cuts, scrapes, or bruises of any sort, yet his tight clutch of defense upon himself said otherwise.

            I stayed still, kneeled down before the child.  I admit I was afraid to take action, to do anything at all.  So I was left watching, listening, and waiting, as reality continuously wrapped itself around me with suffocating chains of pain.  Silently, I mouthed a wish to the world that I, myself, didn’t even understand.

This cruel world that offers nothing but death and pain, this disgusting thing such as existence that throws us to the edge with its vague replies, angers us to no end.  It enrages us so much, to the point we take the ultimate test, the test that will truthfully define the border edge between this reality and the imaginative world we’ve been forced to create.

The next day we’re finding any way at all to accomplish our task of performing this said test.  We start small, and build, just like anything.  Yet some of us turn desperate beyond all means:  start small and go large within a second.

 

“You’re wrong,” I mutter, my gaze now glued to the ground and my hands in tight fists.  I speak out loud with no regrets to the voice that haunts my mind, knowing very well that I’m only arguing with myself.  I continue on my conversation, despite myself being on the other end, repeating words of a past friend.

Soon I’m roused from my own, wildfire-spreading-madness.  I blink a few times to check I’m truthfully awake, and fix my gaze back upon the child.

The child by now is pressed back against the wall as much as the cruel world will allow him, a demonic shriek that’s heart shattering and soul shaking rattling out here and there.  I feel my own life draining, sorrow devouring me alive, for I can’t soothe the child’s being.  Yet again, I couldn’t even bring myself to try in any way.  No matter how much I churned my planning thoughts over and over in my mind, I couldn’t bear to fully bring them to action.  The cries of the child that came from a different being chilled me through and through.  In all honesty, the ongoing cries sparked a hunger inside me to pound the child till he was silenced.

I carelessly let a curse slip past my clenched jaw, for thinking such horrid things.  There’s too much darkness in everything and anything, and so much of us don’t know how to form light out of this never ending sea of black.

My body trembled as yet another blood chilling shriek shot out through the still air.  I waited for the cry to die down in order to let my thoughts rampage through my mind once again, but once the cry was silenced, another took its place.  My teeth dug down on my tongue, a rough pain creeping through me, but not all the way.  One cry after another, the pitch varying slightly as the child would at least attempt to form words.  I stayed there, stone still and colder then ice for what felt like years, the only sound reaching me was the demonic cries of desperate pleas. 

The longer it went on, the more it shook me, the more it made me question everything.  I snapped as the child’s cries got more beast-like in sound and climbed in volume when it was all supposed to calm.  So I pushed the world away and reached out towards the heart of the bloodcurdling cries with a steady hand.

The child did not notice my movements at all, nor did it probably even know of my presence, for its face was buried in its knees and shielded by its arms.  My hand slowly, automatic-like, placed itself caringly on one of the boney shoulders of the child, the cries dying down in an instant from my touch.