Sometime's We're Cruel and Other Stories by J.A.W. McCarthy

Author:J.A.W. McCarthy [McCarthy, J.A.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cemetery Gates Media
Published: 2021-08-17T06:00:00+00:00

Exactly as We Are Meant to Be

It starts the same as it did last time and all of the times before: I’m lying on my stomach, eyes open, covers half-off, one arm dangling over the edge of the bed like a dead girl in a movie, fully believing that I am about to become one of those dead girls.

Footsteps weigh in the hall, then in my room just out of my line of sight, the floorboards chattering wooden teeth under uncertain feet. I wiggle my fingers towards the baseball bat I keep tucked between the nightstand and the wall, but my fingers don’t move. All of the joints in my hand strain, but it does nothing more than dangle at the end of my dead-girl arm. This is when the other hands come.

Fingertips drag over the top of my back, bare where the collar of my stretched-out t-shirt dips down between my shoulder blades. Hands pull the sheets down to my ankles, and cold pricks every inch of my legs but doesn’t last long; once the fingernails dig into my skin, there is only the hot sear of pain.

Of course, I can’t scream. I can’t really see her either, not with all this hair over my eyes. There’s just a small, shadowy form—crouched, maybe—creeping along the end of my bed, pulling up strips of my skin with her soft, smooth fingertips. For some reason, even though I have never really seen her, I know she is female.

In the morning, after everything finally goes black again and the sun forces its way between the curtains, I roll onto my back and draw my right leg up to my chest. From mid-thigh almost to my knee is a bright pink stripe of raw flesh where my skin used to be. I keep my nails short and neat, so I can show that I am not harming myself, and as expected, my fresh coat of polish—Galaxy, my favorite shimmering black—is un-chipped and my nails are clean: no blood, no skin, no proof of what was done to me in the night.

“It’s sleep paralysis,” Jim insists every time, until I stop telling him all together. “Your mind wakes up, but your body is still asleep. That’s why you can’t move.”

Then, she’s real, and she’s there, and she’s really touching me, taking from me.

“Well, Ella, I mean, your mind is still half-asleep. It’s a hallucination.”

I used to show him the bruises, my skinned knees, the long scratches up and down my forearms.

He said I was doing it in my sleep, whether I was in his bed or my own. “Maybe you sleepwalk?”

When it got worse—the times when I saw her, when I woke up to a dime-sized chunk taken out of my thigh or a slender strip of skin peeled from my upper arm like a curl of orange rind—I called the police, told them someone had broken into my house and attacked me.

“No sign of forced entry,” the officer said after a cursory glance around my house.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.