The Stories Inside Her

The Lullaby

Today I was dreaming, it was a dream with the perfect dose of creepy, almost like a lullaby. It kept pulling me back under the thick murky liquid of the dream state. The kids, they were all from different ethnicity and ranging of toddlers to teens, sitting in the rotting forest in chairs that lined along the edge of two wooden dining hall table. The only ones that were perfect and crisply clean were two adults that sat at each head table, one was a woman and the other was a man.

All the kids were dirty. No, not dirty, rotting and fatigued. It then focused on a little boy about the age of seven years, staring into nothing like the others. Suddenly, the man got up and walked towards the little boy and whispered a command into his ear and then walked away. The boy put his hand to his ear and began to tear his flesh from his skull. Then arms. Then the rest of his rotting corpse.

You'd think the other children would start screaming... but they began to follow into the little boy's actions. The headmasters just smiled in a twisted way, as they watched the children eat themselves alive. I had no clue how they were still living....if you could even say they were alive in the first place. The boy finally got to his skull and pulled with a curdling snap followed by a thud, the flesh of his fingers fell to the table...

The man looked over at the women and quickly but swiftly rushed over and laid his hand on the boy's shoulder. The boy's skull fell away to the ground with a thud but together the man and the rotting boy walked over to the mouth of a cave. The boy's skull in the man's hand and together they walked into the catacombs. Where there was a small mud room and if you looked past that one, there were many more. The man gave the boy his skull and walked back out, leaving the boy there alone. The boy had the urge to place his skull in the middle of the room that was almost like a shrine.

So he let the urge rush through him and went to place his skull to the mud floor, his rotting body fell away almost instantly and a freshly rotten body replaced the old one. Every bone disappeared into the muddy ground all but the skull, as the boy walked out and joined the man. Together hand in hand they walked back to the dining hall table that laid deep inside the rotting forest hidden by the magical trees that kept them alive in a repeating cycle of rotting and renewing.