The Girl, The Girl

A Story by Kate

the beginning of a story i will never write.

She wakes up.

She has, at last, slipped free from that smothering darkness she was so sure would never release its clammy grasp from her flesh, and has broken free into the light.

But the second she does so, she realises it to be a mistake. An error. A grave error. And justly so. For what is here, in the light, is far, far worse than what lay in that darkness.

Oh, she should not have tried to escape! She not have struggled and fought as desperately as she did. She should have accepted what was to be and taken her place in that eternal black.

But she did not. And now she is here. And she does not belong here. She does not belong here at all. And she knows this.

This thing, in the light, is powerful. Very powerful. She can feel it, literally feel it, in the air, on her skin, flowing through her veins. And she knows it will never cease, she will forever feel it pounding through her, animating her limbs, because it is what she is now. This thing in the light, is her.

Eternal. Powerful. Dangerous. Wrong.

She is something wrong.

She does not belong here. Oh, not here at all. Not like this.

She mourns, she grieves. She wants so much to fall back into that timeless void where she lay before. That is how it should be, that is where she rightly should be. And yet, mingled with this regret, she feels a kind of excitement.

She feels so alive, like nothing she has ever experienced before. A whole new level of consciousness. She can feel what she never could, can see where there once was only black. She feels as though she is wakening for the very first time, and in a way, perhaps she is. What she was before, was nothing, not compared to this.

Everything she once knew and loved, is ashes. Scattered by a wind and forgotten. They mean nothing. This, now, is everything. Everything she never wanted, and yet so much more.

The girl fully resigns to this new consciousness, and opens her eyes.

At first, she thinks she is back in that deep, black void, but that the darkness has been replaced with white. A thin veil shimmering, iridescent, with silvery strands of light drifting and sparkling faintly beyond it. But this is an illusion. It is merely cotton sheets draped over her naked body.

The next thing that she notices, is that she hurts. Her body hurts. Her limbs feel heavy and stiff, as though they haven’t been moved in years, her bones feel hollow and there is an ache, from that place down below, an insistent aching humming in the background.

It is strange. She feels as though she has the weight of feathers, yet her limbs feel so heavy.

She feels almost as though there is nothing inside of her. She is a hollow vessel, needing to be filled (so that she can carry on the pretence that she is still living).

And yet, she can feel her insides acutely, they are restless, gurgling and swirling, struggling to escape.

It is not a pleasant sensation, and so the girl allows her insides the release they so obviously seek, and vomits, gagging violently as the rotting matter rises up her throat and splatters down her front, in her hair, onto the blanched sheets and floorboards.

Staining everything red.

Red. Everywhere.

God, the taste is something indescribable. So revolting it makes the girl choke and gag even more violently, makes her eyes water, makes her sure she will die, over and over again, that she is dying, right there. This is her moment.

Rotting, old, stale, faeces, bile, blood, flesh.

Her body contorts and shudders with every heave, until she is sure there can physically be nothing left. Nothing left inside of her at all, not even herself. She feels as though she has vomited out the last remains of who she truly is because this being, standing here in her body, bears no resemblance to herself at all, not as she was yesterday, or days before, not at all. She is something completely new today.