A/N: Hi guys! This is a short story I wrote for my English class. Tell me what you think, and enjoy!
Blood. There is blood everywhere. On the palms of your hands, soaking through your shirt, staining the grass around you with its bright crimson. It’s real, tangible, and so very warm, and it’s an unsteady rope tethering you to consciousness. You try to move out of the uncomfortable position you are in, one leg twisted at an angle you are sure means that it is broken and your right arm losing circulation because it’s pinned underneath you, but pain sears through your torso and you slump back down.
The world is becoming a muddle of blurred lines and bleeding colors, and it hurts so much, and it would just be so much easier to let the darkness that’s slowly gaining at the edges of your vision just take over and drag you away.
Now your eyes are closing, and you feel yourself slipping away from the world of the living, guided away by a gentle hand, and you are close, so close, but a voice cuts through like a knife and pulls you away: “Are you okay?”
It’s the voice of a small child, trembling with fear at the twisted and bleeding body before him. The darkness suddenly retreats and your eyes open, and you want to tell him that it’s alright, you’re fine, that he should just go back to his mother, but when you try, you choke on a fountain of blood trying to force its way out of your throat. It spatters on your face, and you turn your head towards the child and allow the gushing red to flow onto the sidewalk beside you. The little boy begins to cry.
His mother comes running, and when she sees you, she screams, “OH MY GOD!” She pulls out a mobile phone and presses three numbers into it, and you soon figure out what they were when you hear the faint, barking voice: “911. What is your emergency?”
An emergency, you think, what emergency? Then, you suddenly remember how you got into this situation in the first place, bleeding out in front of your mailbox, the mail still clutched to your chest. You remember a man, small, lithe, more of a boy than a man, really, and the .32 caliber pistol he held. You remember hearing the gunshot, but not really registering where it went until now, when you realized that the blood was yours, all of it, pooling around your head and underneath your back, and that it came from a hole just shy of your appendix, where there are still bits of a small, metal cylinder, now void of powder and scattered in pieces around your front lawn.
Now the pain is back, it’s burning and it crushes you, and you try to scream, but all you can manage is a little groan. There is a face hovering over you, the mother’s face, and her mouth is moving and you know she’s speaking but you can’t hear a single word she’s saying. You cry out silently, wanting the darkness to return, wanting it to take you with it. The darkness hears you, and it returns just as quickly as it left, slowly siphoning away the pain until you’re almost numb. But there’s another part of you, a small, timid part, growing weaker with each passing second that wants so badly to stay. The boy is still crying, and three tears drip onto your arm, drip, drip, drip, and he’s pleading with you to live as he presses his sweater to your wound, pressing hard just like his mother told him too, and the fresh wave of pain brings you back to reality, a reality that is so cold and so warm and surprisingly sticky.
Something’s flashing, right in front of you, red and blue and red again. There’s a sound, too, shrill and urgent: a siren. There are two people, all dressed in white, and to you, with smokescreens over your eyes, they seem to be surrounded by an ethereal light. They’re trying to talk to you, to help you, and you want to tell them that it’s no use and that they should save their efforts for somebody who could actually be saved, but your vocal chords didn’t seem to be working and they put the oxygen mask on anyways.
All of a sudden, the ground isn’t underneath you anymore. You miss the grass, how comfortable and warm and familiar it was, and the feeling of the blood beneath your back. The seconds seem like hours, and you pass the thirty seconds it takes for the white-coat people to move you using something hard and also white by thinking about your bed of blood, how warm and sticky and comforting it was. It calms you, and helps you to breathe, fogging up the bright yellow dome over your nose and mouth.
Just before the intimidating metal door in the back of the ambulance is sealed, you catch faint strains of a conversation between the mother and one of the men with coats – doctors, they’re doctors, you recall – asking what happened. She doesn’t know, she just found me like this, stop…
The events of the prior ten minutes come rushing to you, in flashes.
The young man came, with a friend- or a lackey, you weren’t sure. They were waiting on the end of your driveway, scrutinizing your house, especially the ivy-shrouded numbers on your facade, proclaiming your house as number 627. You saw them through a large window in the foyer and decided to go out and get the mail, using the chore as an opportunity to confront the men.
The angels – no, doctors, DOCTORS – reality is becoming so hard to differentiate from everything else – the doctors are pressing on your chest now, why would they do that? You register that there is no thudding in your chest, my heart stopped-
Both jumped when you emerged from the front door and slammed it rather angrily. You stalked up to your mailbox, swept the mail into your arms and turned to see the young man only inches away from you. You crept backwards so you felt the curve of the mailbox against your back, and he pinned you with one elbow, pressed against your right shoulder.
The thudding returns, and you hear one of the angel-doctors say-
What is he saying? It sounds so garbled, like you’re underwater-
Now the darkness is back, so hard to fight-
Where is reality? You vaguely remember blood, and grass – that is reality, and now it’s gone.
The thudding is gone again-
No, no, I WON’T GO.
The darkness is trying to take you, why aren’t the angel-doctors stopping it?
You squirmed, trying to free yourself from the man’s strong grip, while the friend-lackey smiled and waved nervously at you from his position behind the man. You stopped moving when you felt cold metal pressed against your abdomen.
No more reality, the angels, what are they doing? Why can’t I see them? Oh, how stupid of me, I closed my eyes-
You only registered that the cold thing was a pistol when you heard the colossal thud of the bullet entering your body, and the only thing you heard through the ringing of your ears was friend-lackey yelling something that sounded like “wrong” and “RUN!”
The angels-
Burning-
Why is it burning?
Not breathing. I’m not breathing. I want to breathe.
You struggle for air, but it’s all in vain.
You are numb.
The dark is so strong-
Then everything was black and red and bleeding and you fell, too tired to care.
The darkness is a person, flowing and black, extending a hand.
You take it.
