[inspired by true events]
The voices were back, hauntingly familiar. They always returned—sometimes after a long drink of something warm and cozy, sometimes after the feel of soft fur between coarse fingers. They always found a way to reach out to Ingrid, using their icy fingers and manipulating rhythm, ensnaring her within their firm grasp.
They spoke, not always in English, as if narrating a story already told. They knew the beginning, they sensed the present, and they foreshadowed the dreadful ending. They knew how she would die, how her last breaths would escape her throat like so many droplets of blood.
She would face her fate with a cold reality and indifference, just to prevent her from giving the voices any satisfaction. She would not give them even that.
They already took more than she could possible give. It seemed that every moment she spent breathing, awake, staring at her ceiling or at the sweaty palms of her hands, was with the voices. They were loud at times, screaming with indignant pride and unrelenting effort, and were so muffled and quiet at other times, that they were more like butterfly wings brushing softly against the fabrics of her mind.
The words were not always completely audible, and not always understandable. Some sentences could not be distinguished from others, and when they could they usually came with foul language and heavy perspiration. Ingrid tried to write them down when she could, believing with an intangible hope that if all the words were visible, perhaps they would make a shred of sense.
Backward glances....of proprietary...
Ingrid’s pen scratched the paper on her desk with an affirmative that made her insides squelch. Thousands of crumpled pieces of paper lay beside her, forming a mountain that bellowed, “Failure, failure, FAILURE!”
She would not fail this time. Drawing on the brink of....reality in the midst of....mist....mixed...
Her mind could not focus in the sweltering heat. God, it was so hot, so hot! The windows were open, the door was open, and the walls were falling away, but the heat, the heat! She couldn’t stand it, the salt, the tears, the sweat, the salt, all mixing together in pools of sticky liquid at her feet. She couldn’t, she mustn’t.....she had to....
Drawing on the brink of reality...in the midst of immortality...and unaffectionate...
Too much air, too much air...she was suffocating in the openness, the bright light, it blinding the very core of her existence...if she could only get out, get free! If there could only be one goddamn breeze in the whole city...but they would not give her that, would they? They would torture, here, in her mind and in her soul, her spirit in the pen, writing, writing, forever writing, of nothing, of everything, of herself and of them...embedding them in the ink that dripped like so much blood...
They would not let her escape.
They would not let her escape.
