LOUD WHISPERS

Prologue

It's the pain that is unbearable, strikes deep between my joints leaving my muscles sore like marshmallows. There are voices in my head, each of them screaming to be heard, all whispering at inaudible high frequency just hoping for a fragment of my attention.

They are there, always there. When I was 5, I saw the dead body of my neighbor and I could have sworn I saw her left hand change from a tiger claw to human digits, I was too terrified to believe anything that day. Then the weird incidents began and it all started with a dream of my neighbor being half human and half cat, she was chasing me to a clearing and whenever I stopped she would attack, the dreams continued. My parents eager to help their child, took me to a shrink; repressive therapy. It worked for a while until this time in my dreams she swiped me with her claws and I woke up bleeding on my bed with a deep gash across my chest. After that incident we moved away. Then the voices started, even while awake. It started with small requests like

"Open the window" and whenever I did nothing will be there. Then they grew aggressive.

"Help us please" .

Most days I would be sent home from school for crying and screaming at the wall. I was once suspended when I attacked my classmate for believing she was possessed. The climax came when at the age of 6, my parents came home to see me wielding a strange sword while standing over my babysitter's decapitated body with no head in sight.

After so many interrogations and psychiatric analysis, they said I was fine and forensic showed that the murderer had to be at least 6 feet and I didn't have the strength needed to decapitate a 19 year old with no sign of struggle. I would have told them truth but they wouldn't believe me.

If I thought middle school was hell, high school was Tartarus. I was constantly mocked for my bright gray eyes that looked translucent with strands of white hair and the girl that kept screaming at walls to " shut up".

My life was hell walking on two legs. I once walked into a road with moving traffic, after that my parents decided it was better for me finish high school from home. After high school we moved again, I became recluse and my parents became those people that had a "troubled child".

My father got the contact of a psychiatrist who worked on patients with schizophrenia, that was the only name close to what they could to describe what was wrong with me. I spent six months with him, taking suppressing medications, meditating and most of all forced to believe that what I saw was not and never real.

I finally applied to college and got accepted to study History. My parents were more scared than I was that if I moved away from them, the voices will start all over again but I was hellbent on having a life.