summer school
Entry posted by Verdance in Misc writings
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You stumble out of the school in a daze. The world around you is almost worse than the graveyard of the hallways, lonely and broken. You cross the quad, the parking lot, the sports field, and by the time you reach the forest you have accelerated to a full sprint. You don’t notice until your vision is suddenly distorted by an inconvenient drop of water that the rain has finally broken open, and you suddenly cannot tell the raindrops on your cheeks from the tears. No, you can’t cry. What’s the point in crying, you tell yourself. You vault over a fallen log and duck under a few branches, but something is wrong. How do you get home? Where is home? Have you been leaving school each night just to sleep in the woods? You push the thought away and keep running, leaping into a large ditch-
The ice, covered in fallen leaves and other debris, beaks under the weight of your fall, and you are plunged into freezing water, a small river moving quickly, dragging you away from the opening. You immediately go into shock, blind, scrabbling at mud and pebbles and twigs and soggy leaves and ice on the riverbed. Voices cloud your thoughts, speaking singing screaming MAKE THEM STOP!
Bubbles tickle your nose gently as the heavy freezing water digs into your lungs. Call me when they bury- you try and drag yourself to the edge of the river, out of the current, but the frigid, water has sucked all the heat from your body and is feeding on your energy now. Your joints are all stiffened by the cold, all your body completely and utterly shutting down due to the all encompassing cold. -bodies underwater- you can’t see anything in the filthy water, so you shut your eyes, and all you see is the dark red of the faint light fultering through your eyelids, coupled with electric yellow lines twisting and contorting madly like a box of snakes and black spots dancing, dancing, dancing forever, tainting and taunting you. -its blue light over- you’re losing oxygen, your chest burns and freezes with the water in your lungs, it hurts so bad but you are so tired, you just want to go to sleep, and suddenly you are in bed, folds of warm cloth wrapping around your body even as you are dragged further by the current. -murder for me. Your eyes shut, though they are already closed, and you are about to fall asleep, no you are already asleep and dreaming, this is just a bad dream, a story even, words on a page-
Something yanks you from the water. You didn’t notice but the ice locking you beneath the surface of the river had been gone long ago, but you didn’t have the motor functions to pull yourself out anyway. A hand, feeling what seems like as hot at the sun, painted red- no, it’s covered in blood, bleeding, grabs you around the wrist, and pulls you from the water. You emerge, spluttering, choking, spitting up water. Something dark within you is reluctant. It was almost all over. The cold is back, unimaginably frigid, biting grasping clawing, and you don’t think you can handle the pain but you have no choice but to deal with it, as your lungs are too weak to scream. So you whimper and curl up into a ball, while a million little birds made of ice hop around in circles and eat your flesh.
”hey, hey. Survivor. It’s going to be okay. I’ve got you, we’re going to make it out of this.” The voice is gentle and soothing, and it drives the madness away. You look up, your neck is so stiff that the motion aches like a bad bruise, but you look up. Her face is kind, understanding, and you break down and cry again, and you don’t know if your chest hurts from the sobbing or choking or coughing, they are all one and the same, and somewhere you can hear a damn cicada screeching. “Come on, survivor. We need to get to the safe house before the storm tonight. Then you can cry as much as you want and we’ll talk it out and see where to go from there. Plus, there’s fire and food and warm clothing.” She pulls the backpack from your back, slinging it across a shoulder, and you reluctantly get to your feet, even though you’re still freezing and hurting. It’s time to go.
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