↞[Luke]↠
Crystalline-blue ripples in the lake glimmered as they caught sun-rays when a fish or two leaped out, splashing around the water before disappearing again.
"Dad, I don't think we're fooling any fish today," I said without paying attention to my father, too busy poking a snail with a twig. The snail, munching on the edges of a leaf, wiggled and hid inside its small shell. I dropped the wobbly twig beside the colorful coil in disappointment.
"Come on, Luke, don't be like that! Maybe if you pay a little attention to fishing, we might catch something. And look at the lake. It's so." He paused, bopping his fishing-rod as he processed his thoughts. "So, blue."
I craned my neck to the endless lake ahead of me and turned back to my dad. He was sitting on a boulder with a long fishing rod in his hands, the basket beside him empty. "Fishing is kinda boring, Dad, and the lake is always blue," I mumbled, picking on the grass blades.
"What?" He extended the syllable in a long note.
I huffed. "What's the fun in holding a stick tied to a worm?" I asked gravely, "—a dead worm." A small shiver moved down my spine, imagining the limped worm hung by a hook. "I wanna go home. Tom and Jerry would be playing right now," I whined. I thought about playing with my snail again, but it had left. My branch was missing too.
"You've got it all wrong, son. It's the worm that's tied to the rod," my dad responded in an equally serious tone.
Throwing my arms across my chest, frustration rose rapidly. "Wow, that's it. I'm leaving." With that, I got up and brushed off the grass from my pants, turning away from my father, determined to leave and walk all the way home by myself.
Looking around, the meadow was pretty. A strange relief settled around me with the echoes of a bird chorus, hidden within the oak branches. I had more fun chasing the small rabbits in the expanse of lush grass, stippled with white daisies, than staying indoors. But Dad definitely did not need to know that tiny bit of a secret.
My previously awakened determination dissipated when I realized how clueless I was about which trail to take back home. I turned to look at Dad.
But where did he go? He was sitting right there on the big brown rock, fishing. My hands trembled a little. "Dad?" I called out meekly, but no one responded. Looking around in confusion and cold feet, I noticed how silent it suddenly became. No air stirred the grass or leaves. No water dripped or flowed. Not a sound was audible either close at hand or in the far-off distance. Even my breath seemed to die as soon as it left my mouth.
"DAD?" I called out once again with all my strength and immediately turned away from the lake, ready to sprint back on any path.
Tears stinging the corners of my eyes, I lifted my foot to leave, but before it set on the ground, a robust thing attached itself on the neckband of my shirt, dragging me down on my back. A scream tore through me when it started pulling me. An ineffective attempt to grab it and push it away made me realize that it was a set of hands — rooted like a stone. Shirt, snaring around my neck, was choking the living lights out of me. Tears rolled effortlessly down my face and screaming turned into gurgled noises.
It kept pulling me. Full panic set in when my back felt the cold water. I searched for anything to help, but all my fists could grab was grass. As the water rose above my body, I saw sunlight and treetops melting into shadows, vision blurring in the murkiness. I tried reaching for the fissure of light above me and watched as the back of my hand was slowly pulled back. The last bit of hope fading with the sun as darkness drew over my vision like curtains over a glass pane. I curled into a ball, hugging my knees. My ears clogged with silence, the weight of water hugged around my body, and my mind buzzed with an ache for oxygen.
One sharp inhale.
Acidic burn bloomed across my chest as water filled my lungs. As my thoughts were being taken away from me, sinking into the darkness of the bottomless lake, a deep voice invaded my mind. Unfamiliar to my ears, I tried listening as my consciousness dwindled. "Seems like." Break. "Drowning."
A different voice, much thinner. "Should we pull up?"
The last thing I heard was, "no."
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Blinking into the darkness, I woke up with uneased breathing. My body was lying awkwardly on the small couch, head resting on the armrest, my mind was spinning. I sat upright, and an ache throbbed across my chest, lungs still burning. Just another nightmare. I palmed my forehead, matted with hair and sweat. But the vividity. I was used to having nightmares, but this was the first time my childhood memory was prodded so...realistically.
A low pressure persisted over the nape of my neck, where I was grabbed. What a fucking mess. Getting off the sofa, confined in front of a stained coffee table, I stretched my arms, distinctly remembering falling asleep in my bedroom. My eyes focused on the silver slits of moonlight washing the floorboards. Sleep-walking was the cherry on top.
Locking doors stopped working a long ago, so I had accepted ending up in a random place at my house. Not that I had any complaints, being glad about not ending up in my backyard or my neighbor's bedroom. The worst incident was when I was eight. Very tiny for an eight-year-old, I had woken up inside the washing machine, feeling confused and scared for what felt like hours, but were minutes of crying my eyes out until my father found me.
I got used to it. Yet, the few happy memories with my father being tainted with the horrors of every single night made my heart sink.
As the dim yellow light weakly permeated from the kitchen, throughout the living room, I wondered if my father was at home. A barren thought—the man has been doing night shifts for years now. Spent the day-hours sleeping and sulking around. I was used to the empty, the alone, and the frost which settled on my skin every night after waking up.
Promptly making my way back to my bedroom, taking two or three steps at a time, I closed the door behind me with a soft thud. My upper lip twitching up in vexation as I noticed the light-grey blanket splayed over the floor, and the bedsheet lifted off from the edges, revealing the mattress. Kicking the quilt to the bed's end, I laid on top of it, keeping my eyes open.
Plain white ceiling. One fan. No glow-in-the-dark stickers because I was too old for them. Though, I kind of missed having them.
The cold bedding warmed with my body heat. I slid my arm down and tapped my fingers, to an unknown beat playing in my head, on the bed frame. I could never pinpoint when my nightmares began, but I knew they weren't always there. I saw them evolve to the worse: from eerie dreams to night terrors to straight-up walking all over the house in a half-awake state.
When professionals couldn't help and each medication disintegrated into side-effects, against my father's will, I simply gave up. Still, being reluctantly dragged into therapy—only a few years back—I tried practicing the relaxation drills before falling asleep. Breathing. Fancy thoughts. Background music. Blah, blah, blah. Didn't fucking help.
I rolled to my side, red digits of the analog clock glaring back at me, indicating the few hours which remained before school. Last year. Few months. I'll be free from the hell-hole they paraded as high-school. There was no point in trying to sleep, so I picked up my phone, planted face-down on the end table. Unlocking the screen, Instagram timeline opened—the last app I was using—and Alison Hayne's bright-as-fuck picture made me wince. Her glossed lips stretched into a smile, reaching her eyes. A turtle neck sweater was barely covering the hickey mark, dark against her olive complexion. Captioned with "taken, so stop asking." and a bunch of emojis.
A shudder rose the hairs behind my neck, and I quickly shoved my phone under the pillow. Alison was the cheerleading captain, the talk of the town, a total hottie, and a one-night-stand gone too long. The girl was wild in the sheets but had a personality equivalent to uncooked-chicken. And not to forget how clingy she was.
With a low grumble, I sat up, leaning against the headboard. The night will consume me if I don't busy myself. Reaching out, I opened the drawer of the end table and grabbed the leather-bound art book with the set of pencils above it. More than half of the blank pages were filled with graphite scribbles, alternated with sketches from my dreams. My father had gifted me an easel on my fifteenth birthday, and my skin still tingled with the memory of holding a paintbrush in my hand and bringing life to the empty canvas.
It became my personal escape.
Flipping over to a new sheet, I held the pencil, feeling like an extension of my arm rather than an object. As I placed the tip against the paper, my mind brimmed with the images of a young boy sitting in a meadow, his father beside him.
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Chapters after this will be longer (and occasionally end with my notes!) Man, this was one hell of a start! Please feel free to provide feedback, or just say hi :D
Also, English is not my first language, and I'm blind to typos (a recipe for disaster, lol), so if you see some errors, point them out. It won't be offensive. Aaand, I hope you enjoy and stay till the end.