I thought I would go ahead and re-edit and post a short story that I wrote last year, if I recall correctly. Is there any relation between what happens within and my first novel? I'll leave it up to the readers to decide!
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It was dark. Not that darkness was much different than any other day for Malia Brennan. She hadn’t seen anything since she was six. She still saw images sometimes in her dreams, but even those few glimpses were becoming rare. Now, she mostly saw darkness, hearing voices and feeling the touch of her environment, guiding herself by the sounds and the smells around her. She figured this change came about because she could barely remember what it was like to see the sunlight, the face of her mother, or her own reflection. These were all distant memories much like most people’s first memories. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if the images she recalled were actually what she saw or something she was now making up in her head.
What time is it? she thought. She wasn’t sure why she had awoken, but she could tell by the way she felt that it wasn’t time to get up yet. Her body was as heavy as a bag of concrete. It felt as if she were crushing into the mattress almost breaking the bed’s wooden legs. Just moving her arm over to the alarm clock took an amazing amount of willpower. It dragged heavily across the bed and flopped limply onto the nightstand. It flailed about like a fresh fish just thrown onto the floor of a boat until it finally found the clock. “2:35,” the robot voice droned out when she pushed the button on top. Malia’s arm fell to the table with a soft thud. “Ugh.” She sighed. This was always the worst time to wake up. Just enough time to go back to sleep and wake up feeling like you only went to sleep a few hours ago and just enough sleep already that you feel like maybe you could get up and feel fine. Maybe.
Malia rolled onto her left side. She was not getting up now. She laid there quietly, still for what seemed like five or ten minutes. Her body nodded off several times. She could feel the brief falling motion as she drifted in and out of sleep.
BAM! Click, click, click. Tap…tap…tap. Malia zoomed up from the downward sinking motion of sleep like a superhero that was going to come flying up out of the bed, but she did not fly. Her eyes shot open revealing only darkness. It was an instinctual reaction, opening the eyes. She would have been a little embarrassed that she did it if her heart wasn't racing and her ears weren’t fixated on the sounds in the rest of her house.
She lied perfectly still. If she was breathing, she didn’t know it. The house was silent. Only the rushing sound of air coming from the vent, and the slight ringing in her left ear that could only be heard in absolute silence, made any noise. Where is Nauni? she wondered. Nauni, her yellow lab and seeing eye dog slash best friend, usually slept curled up on a pile of old sheets and pillows a few feet from the side of the bed. She never left Malia’s sided until she got up and went into the bathroom to get ready, and even then, she didn’t go very far. She could normally be found lying just on the other side of the bathroom door waiting for Malia to finish and making sure that she didn’t need any help, or anyone to pet.
Now, she couldn’t hear her breathing. No snoring, no sighing, not even a slight nasally whistle. “Nauni,” Malia whispered. Nothing. She turned onto her stomach and reached off the bed towards the make shift pallet. Her fingers stretched and grasped for something, or anything, with a little twinkling dance, but they found only air. “Nauni.” She listened again, intently turning her right ear towards the floor. Still, nothing.
Malia pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her legs hung over the side of the bed at her knees. Her feet dangled loosely as she built up the courage to take the first step into the darkness. Well, no time like the present, she thought. Malia slid slowly off of the mattress until her feet connected with the soft carpet below. Barely a sound except to the trained ears of a lifer. That’s what she liked to call people like her that had been born with her disability. She wasn’t quite a lifer but had been blind long enough for her other four senses to take over and become finely tuned.
She walked quickly to the bedroom door. Had someone seen her, they wouldn’t have known she was blind unless she told them. She had made the trip from one room to the other so many times that she could do it with her eyes closed, that is, if she had to close them. One, two, three, four, five steps. Slam! Her forehead crashed into the hollow bedroom door, bouncing her back a few inches and creating a loud, reverberating echo throughout the house. She reached out immediately, feeling the door. Her hand slid across the smooth paint until it found the crack between the door and the wall. It was flush. Only a small crack remained.
Malia always kept the door open to avoid incidents like this. All of her walking paths always remained clear throughout the house as well. As long as she kept her house in this order she could easily get around without Nauni’s help. So, why was the door closed today? It would have been nice to say that her boyfriend had been over and left it closed, but she hadn’t had a boyfriend in quite some time. Almost a year perhaps. And, no one had come over earlier that night.
Her hand slid down the door following the crack to the door knob. It fidgeted with it for a moment as she felt for the correct orientation to turn it. A couple of times she thought that she felt herself trip the lock, but the switch always seemed to be turned the right direction. And so she turned it, slowly at first until she could tell that it wasn’t going to make any popping noises. She opened the door even slower, not knowing whether she was going to find the one who closed it on the other side or if she was going to find more surprises in her path.
“Nauni,” Malia whispered again. Her head peeked out into the hallway. The air was cooler in there, but that was normal. Something about her bedroom always kept the temperature just above how it felt in the rest of the house.
Malia entered the hallway. She walked slower this time in case there was something else out of place. She didn’t want a repeat of what had happened with the bedroom door. Her feet scooted quietly just above the carpet, barely scraping the bottom of her feet on the fibers. It tickled a bit, but this wasn’t a time for laughing. She likely had a bruise, knot, or both forming on her forehead, and Nauni was M.I.A. “Nauni?” This time she didn’t whisper. The house was quiet, and she was sure she was alone. “I’m sorry baby, I didn’t mean to lock you out.” Although she couldn’t remember closing the door, she must have. She was the last one in the room. With work and her sister’s problems with her husband, common law but her sister didn’t mind, she had been pretty lost in thought lately and might have done it unconsciously. There was a lot that she did every day like that and had no recollection of those things either, like going to the bathroom, fixing Nauni’s breakfast, or even walking out to get the mail. All of those things were normally done while thinking of something totally different.
Tickticktick, tick, tick…tick. The silence was broken. The noise reminded Malia of a door with sticky hinges that was being slowly opened or closed. It also sounded somewhat like a settling house when it is cooling at night or as the temperature outside drops in the winter. Her house was built in 1964, settled frequently, and was full of sticky old hinges that had rusted or tarnished. So, while startling, the sudden noises were not that uncommon.
The house was otherwise silent again. She still could not hear Nauni who was not responding to her calls. Malia walked into the living room on the cold hardwood floors. The wood planks creaked in spots as she shuffled across them. As she made her way around the end of the couch, she felt something hairy brush against her foot. “Nauni!” Malia crouched down to pet her little friend. She pushed her hands underneath Nauni’s hair and gave her a good, playful shake. “What are you doing in here girl?”
Nauni lied still momentarily. Then, with a sweeping zip, her body slid out from underneath Malia’s hands. “Oh my god.” Malia stumbled backwards into the brick wall surrounding the fireplace. She felt like one of those girls in the horror movies who couldn’t seem to stand up and run away, but in real life it was easier said than done, especially when starting from a squatting position.
Malia tried to listen, to see if there was anyone else in the house with her. All she could hear, however, was her own breathing and the pounding of her heart. Breathing might have been too optimistic at this point though. What she was doing was more like hyperventilating. In and out, in and out. Too fast and too deep to actually replenish her body with oxygen. Instead it was depriving her of it. She was already feeling lightheaded.
The other sound that was vaguely familiar was the sound of her fingernails clicking haphazardly against the smooth bricks along the floor in front of the fireplace. Malia quickly picked her hands up off of the floor and began rubbing them together trying to calm them down.
The next thing she heard, she did not recognize at all. The slow leak in the toilet down the hall finally came to a head. The water in tank kicked in, refilling it with a slow hiss. From above this hissing. or maybe even underneath it. came a garbled, guttural laugh. It was quiet, no louder than the toilet, and almost indistinguishable. It’s origin was unknown. It came and was so brief that she couldn’t get a good listen in on it, and once it was gone, all she could think is that it sounded like it came from everywhere.
Her legs began to tremble, so much so that they seemed to begin to scramble on their own as if they were trying to move her to safety since she was so dumbfounded that she wasn’t doing it herself. Of course, on the inside, all she could think was, Run! Get your dumb ass off the floor and run! And then she did, around the corner into the hallway, scrapping against the wall with her shoulder and nearly tearing the thermostat off the wall. She bounced back to the other side falling into the bedroom. She caught the doorknob on the way in and flung the door shut behind her with a slam.
Once inside, all she could think was, Why didn’t I run outside? Now I’m trapped!
Tickticktick, tick, tick…tick… This time she knew what that sound was. It was the bedroom door slowly opening. There was no doubt in her mind. Malia walked backwards until she had nowhere else to go. She slid against the wall until she reached the corner furthest from the door. She still did not hear any footsteps in the house or in the room.
Malia stared into the darkness from the corner of the room. Her focus did not change from the doorway. And how could it? There was no where she could go, nowhere she could run. If there was something or someone in her house, she was about to meet them. The only thing that could break her concentration was the warm air that was now blowing gently across her cheek and neck. The air reeked of mildew like a damp wet basement. Just on the edges she thought she smelled either shit or dead animals, but she wasn’t sure which. She was having such a hard time concentrating at this point. Could she have died from fear, she would have chosen to do so. Any way out was better then what she imagined would come next.
In a brief rush of bravery, or a flood of panic, Malia sprinted for the door. Three strides into the run, and she appeared to be home free. Nothing could stop her, until she saw it. Or saw everything to be exact, the paint on the walls in her bedroom, that color she could have done without, the open doorway, and then, there it was. Next to her foot was a woman’s arm and hand. She recognized it immediately as her own. The silver ring with Celtic engravings was a dead giveaway.
Malia stood motionless taking it all in. She was overwhelmed by all of the visual stimulation, the least of which was seeing what looked like her own lifeless hand below her. And as she stood there staring down, there was another sensation. This time, it was the feeling of a cold, scaly hand grasping her shoulder.
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Copyright © 2010 Jared Boren
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