Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
━━ DEMONS
Nights are always the hardest.
When the darkness is complete, when all light seems to drain from the world, smothered in a blanket of evening, those are the times where it's hardest to keep the voices at bay. To keep the memories from forcing their way to the front of my mind. To keep everything I've spent ten years pushing down come crawling back to me all because of a little shade.
But it's not a little shade to me. To me, Leena Talley, the shadows are everything. They are the tears that dry on my freckled cheeks. They are the wisps that tug at the side of my vision. They are the matter keeping me together, and they are very thing trying to tear me apart. The shadows are my ghosts, my demons, they are the very thing that I am named after. Phantom. The word feels bitter on my tongue, a word from another era, another life. A life that seems like a far off dream. A distant memory. A life for a different girl, an innocent girl, a naive girl.
I sit on my bed, a quilted king size with grey sheets and a knitted blanket thrown over top. My room is large, larger than the one I had when I was fifteen. Everything is in a darker shade; the curtains, the furniture, the windows. Pale sunlight streams into the room from where I have the panes of glass propped open. My bedroom looks out across the front of the house, an overgrown pachwork of weeds and vines that none of us ever bothered to clean up. I can see the closed off gate, the warning sign hanging limply across the rusting metal. A sign that once held all the meaning in the world for so many young children is no longer visible, knocked off its hinges by a disillusioned man who'd had too much to drink.
I remember when Charles had come down that night, his eyes crazed and determined. In his hands he held a large hammer he'd somehow gotten from the basement. Both Hank and I had gotten up from our spots at the kitchen table, an unfinished game of go fish between us, a beer (for Hank) and a coke for me (I tried alcohol when I turned 21 a couple years ago, and found that I'm not a fan) sat on the wood. We'd taken several steps back, and a hand went to my head as I keeled over from the pain that punched me in the gut. He'd reeked of scotch and something disgusting, bitter and rank, and the agony in his mind was enough for the shadows to take over my head. I had been so good, so good at keeping them at bay, ever since Hank perfected his serum and I took a dose a day, they hadn't bothered me. Until that night. Until Charles ran outside, still in his pajamas, and knocked that sign off the brick wall.
Hank and I had stood in the doorway, my arms around my middle and his eyes worried under his large glasses. We'd shared a look, but did nothing. Later that night, when both men had gone to bed and I was still awake, I went outside to that brick wall. The night air was fresh on my face, cooling the sweat that lined my brow from the nightmares. I'd walked across the overgrown courtyard, pulling my cardigan closer around myself, and sauntered over to the gate. I'd opened the metal with a flick of my wrist, dark energy erupting from my palm, pulling the gate open because I was too lazy to open it myself. Too weak.
