Young Writers Society

Not entirely edited...lacking a direction. The apathy of the story must have gotten to me.

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It was red, blue, green, orange. The vibrant colors of the playground were beginning to fade but still managed to mock the insanity of the situation. At the top of the tallest slide sat a girl, her knees pulled up to her chest and her eyes wide and empty. She wore a sweatshirt over a drab flowery dress and tight black jeans, a veiled madness hidden behind her pretty features. A dirty, black car turned the corner and came to a screeching halt at the curb; an unconsciously vindictive boy stepped out, blood-red hair mingled with black, slipping into his eyes. The girl perched at the top of the dirty red slide was trembling, she didn’t know why.

‘Baby, you need to come down.’ He was yards away but his voice carried and she shut her eyes, irrational terror pulling at her heart. ‘Right now.’ His tone was casual, innocent, but his forced patience would soon give way to something else. She opened her eyes and peered down at him, a smile slid onto his sharp features and a light died in his eyes. Horror froze on her face and she slipped, tumbling down the cold slide and collapsing at his feet. The sand was in her hair and when he pulled her to her feet it slipped down the back of her shirt.

‘Let me go.’ Her voice was void of emotion and her eyes were blank.

‘Stop it. What the hell is wrong with you? Tell me!’ He shook her violently and her response was that of a rag doll. He bit his lip harder then he meant to and blood trickled down his chin. Growing more and more frustrated, he dragged her back to the car and shoved her into the back, the driver pulling away from the curb before the door was shut.

‘I’m sorry…dad.’

The man driving had on a dark green beanie and his profile was lit up by the street lights; he looked feral, in a very dead way.

‘How did she get out?’

She stared vacantly.

‘I don’t know.’ He slipped a hand onto the back of her neck and she flinched. ‘Maybe she would like to tell us.’ His voice shook slightly and he licked the blood from his chin, trying to keep his frightful energy under control. She merely shook her head and didn’t move. It had started to rain and when they pulled into the dirty apartment building and the headlights sent cold light skidding across the asphalt. The driver got out first, slamming the door behind him without a backward glance. The boy pulled the girl out of the car and she struggled, confusion filling her eyes.

‘Stop it!’ he shouted, hitting her across the face suddenly. She started to fall and he caught her, his face changing like a cloud across the sun; he realized. A pure desperation slithered incoherently into his mind and his pleas for forgiveness were heard within the deepest, quietest recesses of his soul. But all he could do was stand there in the rain with a fifteen year old girl in his arms, sobbing for more then he wanted to remember. Dying might be better. He wasn’t entirely conscious as he helped her gently into the apartment, still burning with nothing to say When she looked up at him all the hateful insanity of earlier had left her and she simply looked fearfully transfixed on something he wasn’t sure he understood.

‘I can’t say anything. Because I have nothing. I - I -’ he let his forehead fall against the wall, the agony in his body language more potent then anything words could express.

‘No. No.’ She stood and wrapped her arms around him, forcing herself into the freezing cold water that could only be trust. And that was all she had, no knowledge, no certainties, just trust. He seemed to collapse into her and she helped him onto the couch where he fell asleep holding her. But she couldn’t sleep, not until she forced herself to remember why it was like this, so that one day a dream might stop becoming a nightmare…

She was born in a slum in Detroit to two junkies. Everything and nothing were pressed so close together they felt to be one in the same. She never actually found out how she survived to be old enough to go to school but at that point it didn’t matter. Her little brother was born when she was seven and after her parents got into a drunken fight that somehow involved him she held him while he died. The horrifying feeling of his cold skin against her cheek returned in her blackest, most despairing nightmares. The dark and filthy held her close for what could have been a hundred lifetimes, never changing but always worse, never alive but just barely above dead. Strangely she never wished for death but even now she wasn’t able to explain why. The November after her eleventh birthday she came home to find her mother dead on the kitchen floor, a bullet in her mouth. And after that all she could do was run. She ran for nine blocks before someone stopped her and she remembered nothing after that. Just the running, her eyes dry and stinging and the freezing air tearing her emptiness apart.

The next thing she remembered was being shipped off to a suburb of New York State to live with her uncle and cousin. Cruz was only three years older but hardly better off. He father, Les, had treated him not much better then a pet, if even that well. Cruz had spent his short life striving for a cruel impossibility, his father sometimes found it amusing, but usually he ignored him. Her arrival had meant nothing to Les, he had just put his fifteen year old son in charge of her care and shrugged off whatever responsibility his new child might have entailed. Cruz, while trying to prove to his father that he could be a parent to a twelve year old, had grown quite attached to his cousin. The name her parents had given her was immediately thrown out when he realized how much she hated it and he decided to call her Tay, after her little angel brother whose name had been Taylor. Her parents hadn’t named him, she had, and so the name meant everything to her.

Symptoms of slipping sanity had begun to show up in Tay’s already abnormal life. Most of the oddities could be dealt with fairly easily but the running was the only one that Cruz didn’t seem to be able to control.

Cruz’ damp hair let a drop of acid rain fall onto her cheek and she clutched him tighter as he slept, hoping that insanity would not take hold again.

In imitation of the last time she would see her mother, Tay would fall into senseless terror and repeat that day that she had run until she could run no more. Often to the playground…perhaps recalling the fact that Taylor would never sit on her lap on the swing or chase her down a slide. It had begun to happen more often as she neared fifteen and Cruz had tried everything to make it stop. When it happened anyway, like tonight, Les would send his son into dark rages by telling him how incompetent he was and reminding him that it must be his fault that his wild cousin was running away from home every other night. Cruz couldn’t control himself, he was still a child.

‘Tay? It’s okay…its only a…dream.’ Cruz touched her damp forehead, blinking in the intruding light. Frayed curtains hung limply on the window, not bothering to block out what weak sunlight there was. The clock on the microwave across the room glowed stupidly and the girl with the bruised cheek pulled away from her cousin, the fleeting remnants of her nightmare fading in the cruel onset of reality..