Random Little Things

Tell me...

I woke up screaming yet again, my heart racing and my feet caught by the octopus of tangled blankets and sheets at the bottom of the bed. I wasn't even surprised that I didn't hear the thump, thump of my foster dad, rushing up the stairs to see if I was ok. I mean it's not like I hadn't been yelling blue murder at the top of my lungs every morning for the whole two weeks I'd been in that stupid house. Not that they really cared anyway. They got paid to put a roof over my head and feed me and even then they struggled with that. Doubt they would've even cared if I'd fallen down the stairs right in front of them.

They gave me an easy route out of life I guess, just in case I'd feel the need to end it all. Just a trip out the window and it was about a ten story drop down a rocky, salted cliff into the red and blue turmoil of coral and sea... Tempting, but I was always scared, scared that if I died, he'd just be there, waiting for me, like in every single cliché horror story you can imagine.

How would I know when I died he wouldn't be there? There wouldn't even be the escape of waking up; I'd be stuck with him, forever, and that's if I had known there even was an afterlife of sorts. I certainly hoped there wasn't the god talked about in the bible, for his own sake, 'cause he would get an utter mouthful from me. I would rather be friends with the supposed Satan than any god that makes a world that has so much suffering and just lets it pass. The man, though, was worse than anything Satan was described as, sure the guy might have, at a glance, looked like he lived in a New York homeless community, but when I get close; all I can do is tremble.

All he does is walk slowly to me my feet stuck and him getting closer each night. He was always there in my dreams, no matter how happy they are at the start; even if I couldn't see him I could still feel him lurking there just out of my imagined sight. That's the thing with dreams, when something is wrong, you just know. And he was definitely something wrong, the amount of times I went to Doctor Trisler's office to get him out was enough to know that; they just gave up trying to lose him for three months and let me suffer.

How can you get rid of something in your subconscious anyway? Because no matter how disturbing it is that... man... with ragged clothes that hung off him like a rag doll in a dumpster, dark peeling skin and sinister eyes like windows to a long lost soul, was a part of me. How else could he not have left by now?

After I managed to unravel myself from the death trap that was my puny little single bed, I ambled to my dresser fumbling around in my dazed morning state trying to find my god damned hairbrush. Luckily for me, hell, sorry, school has been postponed for the day due to a flooding of sorts. Finally I find the prickly thing and start my hundred. "One... two... three..." my slight whisper breaks the gelled silence like a hot knife through butter, "nine... ten..." I glanced at my French windows, possibly the most dangerous type of window to have when you're living on the edge of a cliff. My hand reached out and turned the latch up while pushing the glass panel outward at the same time. Finishing my menial task brought me back to the mirror on my dresser. But this time, I wasn't alone.

Dumbfounded, speechless, my mouth was hanging open like a wishful fisherman's net. A thousand questions raced through my head. 'What? How? Am I hallucinating?'

"Wha... what are you doing here?" I had a weird feeling in my gut, I was scared to death but at the same time, I felt like he was an old friend, someone familiar, someone to trust.

"I came here for you." His dark gravel voice gave me a shiver.

"Why? What have I don-" I stumbled backwards as he suddenly charged towards me, snatching me by my shoulders and hurtling us both out the window together only for him to disappear on the way down, he was just a part of my subconscious afterall.

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I now sit as a pale nothing. Minding my own business, watching as the ambulance comes down the driveway, the stretcher making its way down to cliff to gather a body that wasn't mine anymore. Smiling at the peace and serenity I will now have for eternity. Meeting others who went down before me and waiting to meet newer ones that go down after me. So tell me, what happened in the fifteen minutes before you died?