Note to Readers: Hope you like the poem in this one, it's probably one of my better ones I would say. Please comment and vote!
Two loud shots
Pierce the dark
Ringing through the night
As they fall
Lifeless
Two dead bodies
White against black
Stiff in the alley
Not breathing
Not beating
Two screams of terror
Fill the air
As two young children
Watch
The gun
Two feet pounding
On cracked pavement
He leaves two kids
Without their parents
Behind
I pause, my pencil hovering above the page of the notebook as the wild thoughts in my head finally stop swirling around in the form of a million different nearly indechipeherable terrifying images and start to make sense. I inaudibly sigh and set the pencil and notebook on the bed next to me, thinking it over.
When I was four my parents were killed. Shot in cold blood in an alley while we were coming home from a late night church service. I saw it all because I had been running ahead of them, and I stopped when I realized they were too far behind me for me to see them. I went back just in time to see my mom and dad fall to the ground, a look of fear frozen on their faces. The guy who murdered them was never caught, and I never saw him again.
I was so lucky to not have been spotted by him, or to have gone ahead of my parents just that once, or to have taken just a little while longer going back to them that he didn't try to kill me, too. One moment's difference and I could have been buried in the ground next to them eleven years ago. But some days I almost wished I was, so I wouldn't have to be terrorized by my nightmares every night.
This one, that I had just wrote about, was so bad I couldn't even lay back down without freaking out. I was glad I hadn't woken Kayla up though, it's not like I needed a little girl to get involved in my problems as well.
And it's not like my nightmares were getting any better either. Most of the time I couldn't even sleep, and if I could it was restless and fitful, punctured by flashes of memories taken to the extreme in my subconscious. It was so bad I fell asleep in nearly every class every day, so of course my grades were slipping, and I had always been a straight A student.
That might have been another thing that tipped my aunt off that my nightmares were back, besides hearing me up at night and what Kayla had told her. Which is why I was awakened to Two-Bit shaking the crap out of me the next morning.
I scrunched up my eyes rather than opening them and rolled over to bury my face in my pillow so my cousin would leave me alone, but obviously he didn't take the hint and started poking me in the side.
"Come on Mickey, get up. My mom said you have an appointment today or something and you have to get up, like now," he insists, pulling my blankets back.
I curled up in a ball around the lump forming in my stomach, suddenly cold. If I could have made noise, I would have groaned loudly. I so didn't want to go see a psychologist today, much less get out of bed after not sleeping all night long.
"Michael, get up!" my annoying older cousin demanded, trying to drag me by my ankles out of bed. "I will literally pull you all the way down the stairs if you don't get up right now," he threatened.
I barely moved, instead curling my fingers into the mattress and tangled sheets so he couldn't pull me out of bed and onto the cold hard wooden floor. Cause that would hurt.
"I'm gonna go get my mom to yell at you," he continued listing off threats, none of which were working. Until he said, "I'll have my little sister come tickle torture you," and I scrambled out of bed, almost falling flat on my face. If you had ever been on the receiving end of the Matthew's siblings' tickle tortures, you would have too.
I gave him the abrupt, forced wide-eyed I'm-up look even though I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open, despite the appearance on my face at the moment of being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as my grandma had always said.
And that's how twenty minutes later I was in the passenger seat of Aunt Kat's beat-up car on my way to a psychologist. The third psychologist I had gone to see in four years.
"Michael, honey, I know you probably don't want to be doing this, but you need to get over all the things that have happened. We're all worried about you, you hardly ever eat anything anymore, we still don't know why you can't, or why you stopped, talking, I'm guessing you're hardly sleeping at night judging by how you're always the last one up in the morning, and I noticed that your grades are slipping are you're normally so good in school--" Aunt Kat says in a sympathetic understanding voice, but her words are interrupted by me sneezing, which comes out sounding very strange because my vocal cords don't work.
"Bless you," she said politely, but the fact that I was sick all the time was another thing she could add to the list of everything wrong with me.
I felt miserable at the moment, and maybe it was lack of sleep or my cold from yesterday getting worse, but mostly it was the fact that I hated all the things about myself that Aunt Kat had just listed. But I didn't know how to fix them. What I did know is that seeing a shrink wouldn't help matters, I had already tried that twice and things only got worse every time, so I always stopped going after the first few times.
Maybe this time would be different, but somehow I doubted it as I got out in front of the office building that was right next to a clinic, and my aunt called out the window, "I'll have Two-Bit pick you up at eleven-thirty," and as I turned to go in, she added, "And Michael, please try this time. I don't know how else we can help you."
Guilt filling my stomach, I went in, dreading seeing yet another crazy shrink who couldn't do anything to help me.
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Quiet As A Mouse (Outsiders Fanfic)
FanfictionShe won't talk. To anyone. Ever. And it has to do with her past that she won't, and can't, tell anyone about.
