It was dark all around me. I could only see my body. My hands, scarred from work in the garden, seemed to glow along with the rest of my body. What was this? I must have been dreaming, but I felt cold. My skin was numb for several seconds before pain erupted throughout my body. My lungs, my throat, my side, even my skull felt as if it would explode any second from the pressure behind my eyes. I couldn’t hear myself screaming, but I knew that I was. My hands were firmly placed to my temples as if to quell the ache. The pain only seemed to worsen as I sank to my knees in this world of darkness.
I didn’t want to be alone…! Tears welled in my hazel eyes as I realized that there was no one there for me… I looked up, the pain an afterthought, to find my aunt and uncle laughing at me. The pain became more apparent, so I turned away hoping that not looking at them would make the pain stop...
I saw Eric standing there. Why was he here? He was smiling, twirling a lock pick in his hand as if he had just finished breaking into my dreams… The pain was subsiding slowly as he held his free hand out to me… I wasn’t sure why, but I reached for it. When I held his hand tightly in mine, he smiled reassuringly down at me and leaned down to kiss my cheek. The pain faded from my body entirely and I thought the nightmare was over… But he pulled back and waved at me before turning and walking away.
Why was he leaving? He couldn’t leave me, too… I felt a pain in my chest that shouldn’t have been there, but it wouldn’t go away. Eric turned around just before he disappeared into the darkness and smiled a final time. That smile triggered a pain worse than the first to shoot through my chest relentlessly, causing me to sink to my knees and press my hands against my heart as if that would halt the awful stabbing sensations…
I looked up, hoping to see Eric kneeling over me, worried, but my eyes looked up into the faces of my mother and father instead. They looked so disappointed… My father, the CEO who had wanted a son to take over after he retired… My mother, the woman who could have no more children after she had birthed me… They looked the same as they had before they had died, stern and angry. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching for them, but they simply turned their backs on me and disappeared the same way Eric had.
The darkness engulfed everything for a few seconds where the pain dulled and I thought it was over… Then I was in the room… I shook my head back and forth as if to tell my nightmare not to show me this, but I couldn’t look away from the scene. The door I was standing in front of opened to reveal a younger me. I was eleven during this memory. The younger me had come home from school, her little backpack hanging from her shoulder. I saw her mouth start to move, but I didn’t need my nightmare to fill in the words. I remembered…
“Mom, Dad, I got an…!” I had been so happy that day… I had gotten a perfect score on my first big exam after my parents had made me skip two full grades… I had been so proud of myself, and I had wanted my parents to be proud of me, too…
Tears welled in the younger me’s eyes as her backpack slid from her shoulder in slow motion and fell at her feet, her face petrified… I could feel tears in my own eyes as I turned to look…
“Mom…? Dad…?” The younger me sank to her knees, her hands unconsciously searching her backpack beside her for her inhaler… I didn’t want to open my eyes to see it again, but I was no longer in control of what I could or couldn’t see. Even when my eyes closed, the scene came back again more vividly than it had been the first time for me to see my mother and father, holding hands as they hung from the center rafter in the middle of the study.
The little girl I had once been screamed at the top of her lungs when she couldn’t find the device to quell the ache in her small lungs. The moment she was on her feet again, she ran as fast and as hard as she had been able to. She ran through the front door and toward the young neighbors sitting on the porch of their home next door. She hopped the fence and ran to them, sobbing and trying to speak between each gasp, but when they couldn’t understand her, they came back to the house and walked with her through the front door. They had intended to speak with her parents when they had pulled the younger me into the study. The woman screamed and the man was struck speechless.
The two ran from the house faster than I had been able to with my shorter legs and asthma, but I was gasping for air. I hadn’t been able to breathe… The younger me had forced herself to get back to her backpack and remove her inhaler before she ran from the house again. This time, she grabbed the phone on her way out and stayed in the garden, breathing from the inhaler a few times before she was capable of calling the police.
When the operator had picked up, I had looked up into the window that looked out into the garden from the study to see my parents hanging there again. I had forced myself to speak, but I couldn’t look away. “Please come to 313 Sycamore Drive. My mother and father are hanging from the rafters…” I had thought a moment and remembered the way my parents had always told me to end a phone call… “Good day.”