BURNING BODY WAITING | ellie williams

3 | animal instinct

WINTER
2 years ago

Burgundy and pink wax dripped poignantly down the slender candles, pattering on the grimy, unfinished wood floor. The winter wind howled ominously, whistling through the cracks of the deteriorating shack, the battered, peeling Hole poster you half-heartedly pinned up fluttering with it.

Hot tears trailed down your cheeks, warming your wind-numbed face. You adjusted your mother's lavender cardigan over your shoulders, her lingering scent growing fainter alongside the memories of her voice as the days without her pressed on, ceaselessly. The Cranberries blared disjointedly through your staticky headphones, your shaky fingers drumming to the beat against your walkman.

Do you know you made me cry?
Do you know you made me die?
It is the lovely thing
The animal, the animal instinct

You squeezed your damp eyes shut and craned your head back, resting it against your mounted wall of sketches, humming softly to yourself. The cold had raked phantom talons through your spine, chilling you to the core.

The dim candlelight flickered as the shack door abruptly, forcefully swept open. You deliberately disregarded the pulsing presence occupying the threshold, the snow billowing in fiercely around his broad, heaving frame.

Zander hollered something incoherent over your boisterous music, the shack walls vibrating at the intensity of his voice.

You swiveled away sulkily, somberly tucking your knees to your chest, staring out the splintered window. Snow fell gracefully like an all-white hour glass, plodding and dense. Snow that you spent hours fumbling through in search of him.

He grabbed you, shaking your shoulders rapturously, your teeth clattering at the violent judder, panic contorting his features. You shredded off your headphones and shot him a withering glower, swatting him away. "What?" You sniped heartily, lip curled.

Your brother's mutilated, gauged eyes were concealed by a strand of fabric you'd cut from your sheets, enveloped around his head in a makeshift blindfold. Recovery was torturously slow. The wounds were open and gaping for weeks, baring soulless, fleshy caverns to the world. The memory of those black pits penetrating through you blankly sent a shudder of repulsion trickling up your spine.

Blood still oozed from the punctures in the delicate, healing flesh. It'd been months.

Then again, it had been months, and you were still waiting to wake up from the nightmare; to burst out of your tucked sheets, your mothers tender smile illuminated by the morning sun, as she smoothed back the hairs from your forehead and murmured a reassuring, "Just a dream, baby. It was all just a dream."

Your dad would be planted on the porch, sipping his scalding black coffee. Zander would be in one piece, zig-zagging through the fields of corn, chasing you with a laugh.

"Don't do that!" Zander bellowed in outrage, his severe, deep voice extracting you from the depths of your memories and reverberating through your shack, one of the candles winking out from the gust of his harsh breath. "Don't what me, fuck ass! I couldn't fucking find you!"

His hands vehemently patted your features, before pinching each of your numb cheeks. "Ow! Asshole!" You exclaimed, thrashing your head out of his unyielding grip, slapping his hands.

"I thought something happened to you. I know you're pissed off at me, but you cannot do that!" His voice had magically escalated, spit lurching through his barred teeth.

"Where else would I go, Zan?" You drawled acidly, rolling your eyes, heedlessly flicking off your walkman and popping out the cassette tape you found crammed under your parents bed, labeled in fraying marker: "OUR MIX."