On The Sidewalk Bleeding

Chapter 7

Short update and it's a bit of a filler, but it helps you to understand what happens.

Chapter 7

Payton

            When I woke up, it was quite in the room, except for the steady beeping of a heart monitor. Why was there a heart monitor? There wasn’t one there earlier…

            Then suddenly the burn came back up my throat and I leaned over the edge of the bed and started to vomit into the waste basket beside the hospital bed. It all came flooding back. First the confrontation with Luke, then vomiting, and then Kyle. Oh god, what did he see? Where was he anyways, he was here earlier.

            I looked around for any sign of a clock, and then I found one against the far end of the wall. I had to get closer to see it, so very slowly and as quietly as I could manage, I got out of the bed and headed over to the clock.

            When I could finally read out what it read, I discovered that it wasn’t working. The seconds hand was frozen in place at 11 seconds. The hour and minute hands were frozen as well, showing that the time was 11:11.

            Turning around to head back to the bed, I was no longer in the hospital room. I didn’t know where I was, but I didn’t like it. The room I was in was dark, and had a slight draft of cool air seeping through the wooden door at the other corner of the room. The more I looked around, the more I felt like I had been here before. The dresser beside the bed must have, at one point, been painted white, but now the paint was slowly chipping away, showing the wooden frame beneath. It looked familiar, but I didn’t know where from, or at least, I couldn’t think of it at the moment.

            I turned to a plain black desk that was in the room, the only modern piece of furniture and the only thing that didn’t look like it was for a little girl. Walking over to it, I noticed how the wood curved in certain spots, almost like someone had done it against their will on the desk. But that couldn’t be right, who would do something like that?

            Finally, I walked over to the door to try the handle. It was locked. It must have been by fault though because the door knob what rusty, some of it coming off on my hands. Wiping my hands off on my jeans, I froze. Two minutes ago, I hadn’t been wearing jeans, had I?

            Confused about what was going on, I walked over to the desk again and started looking to see if any of the drawers opened. Two of them didn’t, but one of them did. I was so horrified by what was in the drawers that I screamed. Hooks and chains covered in fresh blood was not what I expected, but that’s what it was. But again, it struck me that this scene seemed familiar, but I couldn’t seem to stop moving. I didn’t want to see any more. But my hands moved anyways.

            Lifting the chains and hooks out of the drawer, the blood came off onto my hand. It was much fresher than I had originally thought, almost as though someone had put it in there recently. I wanted to leave, but my body was no longer my own, almost as if it was a memory compared to a dream.

            I wanted to scream. Of course it was a memory. I had been here before. This is where Luke kept me when he wasn’t done with me. This is where he kept me if he did it to me at the house. He would do it here and chain my hands to the headboard of the bed. He would tie a knot in my hair and use the hooks to keep my head held back. Sometimes he would tie me to the bed with the chains so tight that they would dig into my sides, arms, and legs until they broke through the skin and cut me.

            Every time he did that, he would tell me he loved me. Why would he hurt me, if he loved me? Something had made this day different though. As I go through the memory, my mind starts to remember, but my consciousness hasn’t quite caught up yet.

            At the bottom of the drawer – which was a deeper drawer than I originally thought – there was a box with my name on it. I can’t seem to stop myself from pulling the box out of the drawer. I don’t want to. I already know what’s in the box and I don’t ever want to see it again. The first time I saw it was heart breaking enough. My hands work like they have a mind of their own though.

            It’s the size of a regular women’s shoe box, probably because it was one of the many boxes I got with my shoes. There were bloody handprints on the outside of the box. Big, thick hands must have been holding it. The handprints belonged to the hands of my abuser.

            My hands untied the knot of string on top of the box before pulling it open. My heart falls as I look at the tiny body in the box. The body that wasn’t even fully formed. The body that had its life taken from it before it even got the chance to life a life. The body of the baby that I carried for 5 months of my life, before Luke beat me; therefore killing the baby.

            I looked at the face of my child, tears streaming down my face. I had loved this child from the moment I had found out I was pregnant. It wasn’t fair that my baby had to die by the hand of the person who helped to create him. I thought it would be a boy, that was what I had imagined when I thought about it.