Wrong Guy

34 | red

Episode 34:
RED

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E L L I O T T ' S P O V :

"Jọwọ ji soke," the words echo through my ears, bouncing back and forth through my skull as though my brain were a jungle gym. The syllables jumping off swings and pounding onto the cracked pavement of my mind with the force of a cinder block being dropped. Unending footsteps trailing behind the sentences wherever they go, never leaving me at peace. In my brain, I can't seem to find peace.

I find peace, when I'm asleep. It's so much easier to be asleep.

Easier to not hear my mother's dialect bring me back to times long before any of this. Sure it may be easier, but it is not at all what I want, because what I want more than anything is to hear her voice just once more.

"Mom, give it a break he's going to wake up. I know him."

"Ṣe o da ọ loju?"

"Ko si, mo ti o kan gbagbo,"

The door opens, I can hear the wood creaking as it is forced open. I can't see it, I'm flat on my back and may as well be blind. Everything I see is white, and then after twenty minutes of that I go back to seeing nothing but the pit of nothingness. The endless void that fills with much more colorful dreams if I'm lucky enough. Most of the times, it's just nothingness though. When it's not, it's of her hovering over my broken body, eyes as red as her bloody hands, my blood.

That's the color I see the most in my dreams. Red.

"Sorry, am I interrupting something?" Her voice isn't the same.

"Fawn, you couldn't interrupt us if you tried, you're a a part of the family." I imagine my mother is smiling right now, maybe she's smiling at Fawn or maybe at Dakarai who's due for a clever comment right about now.

"Actually she could, and has many times interrupted both me and Elliott."

"Shut up, no one cares about you right now," My mom laughs, and this time the sound isn't like a cinderblock, but instead a blanket being dropped. Draping over the aching parts of me.

It's so relaxing. I'm so close to sleep, and so far from them.

"Well, can I – is it possible for me to just have a m-moment alone with him?" Her voice is quivering, the usual stutter unnoticeable as her tone is so shaky in and of itself. Everything surrounding her presence is so out of place, so wrong.

Nothing is right, right now.

"Of course, honey. Tell me if my son wakes up," The echoes of her voice bounce through the bone surrounding my brain, my mind, the way Daka and my mother's footsteps echo through the room as they leave me.

"Hey," she says.

I want to tell her to talk like she used to.
I want to say it back.

"Everyone's really worried about y-you," she sniffles, before clutching my hand and burying her face within it. I think it's in this moment that she realizes I'm conscious right now. I don't have the power to move, but I think she knows that I'm still here. That my eyelids may be too weak to open, but my mind is still wide awake and listening to her. To the sound of her voice, the hesitance in her words. The way her hands are rattling against me. I can still feel it all.