Chagall's Torment

• Melissa Harrison, Grade 11, Lismore High School
• Short Story
• 2001

Finalist in the 'Zapped! 2001' competition

I feel her twitch. Eyelids pulsing, flailing palms curling against sweat stained sheets. Cavernous regions of a feverish mind screech and lap at my ankles, scratching…raking. I bathe in the storming howls of a broken conscious, diving through drunken images resonant with torment. Faces, eyes…laughter echoes around my ears.
I sink lower, into the filmy smog of sub-consciousness, feeling the incessant sting of a memory better left alone. The nauseating stench of insanity courses through my veins. Crimson droplets waltz before my quivering fingertips, twisting into ragged silhouettes of suffocating agony. Steel glints sharply against this intoxicating ebony silence. A shriek reverberates around the walls of her mind, as dream coagulates into reality.
A gunshot whittles past my ears as fear melts her body into a quivering sweat. She is shaking now, sheets clinging to her slight build. She cries out as a figure hits the ground a few feet away. I feel her muscles seize in fear. Voices darkened and demonic, clamor at the gates of her mind.
Two figures.
A pool of blood seeps into the cream carpet.
Through the darkness she sees them leave, hears their heavy footsteps echo against the floor. She pauses for a moment, heart thudding inside her chest. Listens as their footsteps recede. A sob settles in her throat and she retches. She falls to her knees beside a figure on the ground. Blood is on her hands, on her clothes, oozing between her fingers. Her stomach heaves as the sickly sweet stench writhes in her nostrils. She screams and sobs, vision blurred with tears and nausea.
She holds the figure to her chest, burying her head in its bloody neck. Rivers of blood and tears trickle past her lips and she reels in shock as the bitter taste sends jolts of agony through her body. She shakes as shock waves violently tear at her flesh and she opens her mouth to a flood of tears, watching as the life oozes out of the body on the floor.
Fading slowly, I leave her to wallow in her memories as blood-lit images sink back into the recesses of her mind.
A painful cry fills her room and I watch as she empties her stomach onto the white hospital floor. She writhes with the agony of a recurring nightmare as white coats as sterile as the building rush to restrain her. I float away; listening to her screams as the night sky opens its palms to receive me. Checking my list. I descend again, sliding through the tiles of a red brick house. He is snoring, nostrils quivering as each breath escapes his tar-filled lungs. I sigh and prepare myself…