Withdrawals

I retch into a wastebin while auntie holds my hair and slowly rubs circles into my back. As she continues to rub the same spot it begins to grate on my nerves as if she’s going to rub a hole straight through me. I do not tell her though. She wants to comfort me. Knowing there is nothing she can do, I let her remain ignorant and keep trying to save me from the pain I have chosen. Guilt bubbles in my throat with the bile, mixing a nasty concoction that burns out through my mouth and nose. Thankfully when my migraines are this bad, they don’t just blur my vision, they completely take it from me. At least I can’t see how badly I am hurting her.

“You’re alright El, I got ya. I got ya baby.” She jams the words into my pounding skull as she continues to erode my spine with her incessant rubbing.

Unable to speak I attempt to picture the way she writes my name to take my mind away from the physical sensations threatening to shatter me. El. Short for Lana. She is the only one who calls me that and honestly it doesn't make sense. It is not like my name is Elana; if that were the case just L would make more sense. The stupid distraction works for only a few seconds before the letters E and L start to swirl into an image. I see Michael, the next door neighbor’s five year old kid standing in front of a large castle.

 

NO.

 

I wrench away from the dream as quickly as my body forced me into it. It has been three days since I have eaten. I’m beginning to sense pathways into minds farther away than I have had the ability to reach in the past. My body is telling me I need to feed on these innocent minds, that these dreams will cure me of the pain wracking through my skull if only I give in and eat.

 

“I am a person.” I grit the words out through barred teeth, trying to keep the rest of my bile down. Auntie doesn’t respond, she’s heard this mantra many times, though I am not sure what she thinks it means.

 

I am human, I must be, but there is a deep vampiric hunger that devours me from inside whenever I threaten to keep what it wants away from it. An addiction deeper than what took my mother’s life. I know it’s stronger because I spent my childhood eating her mind along with the drugs. Until I was eight, I fed on the dreams of an addict. I coped well with her death not because I was a child who didn’t yet understand the damage the loss of a parent could cause, but because through her dreams I knew she never truly wanted to fight. The hunger for drugs was something that could be satisfied, and she chose to continue eating. The hunger for dreams does not come with satisfaction and I have no choice but to eat.

 

Without dreams, retinol migraines take my vision. I do not get auras or hallucinations; these are not the migraines caused by something broken in my mind. I just get darkness, a darkness that threatens to pull me into others’ minds without my permission. It has been three days now and my auntie has been feeding me pills, water, caffeine, and everything she can come up with to try to help my migraine leave me. How can I tell her that I welcome this darkness, that without it I see too much? That I see father than my brain can comprehend and am unable to live freely?

 

“I don’t think there’s anything left to puke up auntie. I’m going to try to rest now.”

 

She carefully removes herself from behind me and I quickly miss the warmth of her hand on my back that I criticized just moments before. She slips the trash out of my hands, and I only know she’s left the room with the sound of the door creaking closed.

 

I know I need to feed now.

 

Ignoring the wave of dizziness, I lean back into the bed. I leave my broken body behind, projecting my mind out of the house looking for new prey. Since my reach seems to have widened, I push far away from myself, sniffing out for someone who is already asleep in the late afternoon. Someone I hopefully do not know.

 

A strong unfamiliar scent draws me in. A girl, must be around my age, is having a nightmare and it smells delicious. I hate seeing the horrific things that haunt others, but I know this dream will satiate me for longer than a child’s jumbled fantasy dream. As my head begins to meld with the girls I feel as though I have sunk my teeth into a juicy stake. I can’t help but gag at the feeling.

Author's Note

New to writing.

Reviews

[ogirhsog]

Well, the story is a bit difficult to understand so far. Why exactly does your character need to consume other's nightmares? At any rate, it's an interesting start to your book. I'd be curious to know what exactly inspired it.

[V.R.S.C.]

Thank you for the comment! Honestly, I am still trying to figure out where I want to go with it. It would be easy to make it a vampire style story. I'm more drawn towards H.P. Lovecraft cosmic horror though.

My initial plan was to have her enter my version of the "Dreamlands". That's the reason she is sniffing out the dreams in this first chapter. She doesn't feed often enough to be able to see when she is in the dreamlands but when she eats more she begins to see a world of "unearthly geometry" or "impossible landscapes".

I am definitely nervous about my ability to write that kind of story though, and as someone new to writing and trying to have fun, I am not sure if I should write something that could stress me out.

[ogirhsog]

There's no harm in trying. If you try to write it and it's too difficult, you might just try writing a shorter and simpler version of it first in order to work out the main characters and the basic plot. Then you could expand the story later by adding more details once you have the basics worked out.

[V.R.S.C.]

Thank you! I feel like I should have already known to do that, I've always written outlines for reports and speeches, I just have never been told to do it for writing. Which of the two story options do you think would be more interesting based on what I have so far?