Define Crazy

Technically this is a prologue for a muchmuchmuch longer story I'm working on, but I suppose it stands its own as a story.

She was my sister. Her hair was splayed around her doll-like face, golden and glowing. She had our father’s hair, and I always envied it. I wasn’t as envious as I ran my fingers through it. They came back coated in blood. Sticky red matted her perfect curls. The ever present flush on her cheeks was lost for the first time, her petal pink lips faded. Most frightening of all were her eyes, big empty eyes. Their clear grassy green color was fogged over and unfocused. I leaned over them, begging for those eyes to look at me, but they continued to stare at nothing, unblinking. It could have been seconds or hours I waited for those eyes to see me, her long lashes twitch, but only to be met with the coldest, eeriest gaze of my life time.

My eyes snapped open. Reaction automatic from countless nights I buried my face in my pillow before I screamed. I didn’t want to wake Aunt Maria. Instead, the nightmare violated my mind, blazing behind my eyelids until it was branded there. I had it involuntarily committed to memory, like all it predecessors. When the frenzied gasps for air stopped clawing so savagely from inside my chest I rolled back onto my back. I tried to focus on the rise and fall of my chest rather than my sister’s blood staining my palms.

But they weren’t my palms. I didn’t even have a sister. They came more and more often—gruesome nightmares featuring gristly deaths, but never in my own mind. Branded into the headache that always plagued my forehead like sinus pressure, I could recite every one from memory. A girl, little lungs exploding with water. A man, the life bleeding out onto the frigid hardwood floor. A woman, the knife above her painted crimson as her thinking gets fuzzy.

Laying there put a sickening knot in my stomach. In the face of complications I needed space. I needed to take action. Tossing tangled sheets aside I rose from the mattress and snuck quietly into the only bathroom in the apartment. Aunt Maria and I didn’t have much money since my mother—her younger sister—dumped me on her. We lived in a house, each of the two floors a separate apartment. It was small, but I never particularly minded until the nightmares started a few months before. Its size made it that much harder to not wake her up.

I flipped on the light, its sting blinding me. After dark blotches faded from my vision, I took in my reflection in the mirror. I wasn’t gorgeous or anywhere close, but generally I was passable in the least. But this—I was torment personified. My dense coffee curls were damp and plastered to my forehead. The golden undertones in my skin looked misplaced when I was so blanched. My heart shaped face wasn’t sweet—exhaustion gave it too many sharp angles. Purplish rings hung as half moons under tortured eyes. The sight made me want to heave. Instead, I splashed icy water over my face and the heat scalding the nape of my neck and ran it through my curls. The wet clinging to my spidery lashes made them starry, comforting me.

I wasn’t thinking when I slipped on my worn out sneakers. I preferred not to think: too much second guessing. I winced as I opened the door, pausing to listen to my Aunt’s reaction. My heart calmed when its thumping was all I could hear. I clicked the door shut behind me and tiptoed down to freedom.

The chill of late September poured over me. It smelled like sharp nighttime, raising goose bumps on my exposed arms and sending pleasant chills down my back. But underneath the skin, I was still searing. I needed to work out the flames in my veins. I started running. It took me a while before the strain reached my legs, but I ran myself breathless. It was the pleasant kind of breathlessness that stung my lungs like peppermint—like liberation after shackles slip off your ankles.

Then something glowed ghoulish under the washed out streetlight. My heart dropped; my rhythm broke, sending my toppling to the ground. My outstretched hand didn’t stop my decent, instead landing on waxy surface. I flinched in revulsion. Lifting my head from the gritty pavement, I opened the eyes I had no reconciliation of closing, ignoring the pain of the fall.

It was a severed head soulless pupils speaking curses. I recoiled into a stranger’s yard, heaving the little in my stomach in place of screaming out or sobbing uncontrollably. I swore not to cry and someone would undoubtedly hear me. I couldn’t get anyone involved no matter how much I ached for help. It would only touch them too.

I was trembling. I knew what this meant. This was beyond nightmares now that it was spilling into walking hours. I was possibly insane.

But I’m not crazy.

That became my mantra.