blood - E

     They won't let me out.

      I've been here for six months and they won't let me out.

     I think that maybe since it's been this long, it'll be okay. Maybe, maybe I'm lucky, and it won't find me, and I can just pretend nothing ever happened and I can just pick up my old life where I left off. When I sleep, I dream. Sometimes there are nightmares, washed in scarlet and plastered across my frontal lobe.

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for the sake of complete honesty, i must tell you that when i wrote these few lines i was utterly drunk. i figured, "fitzgerald did it, it seemed to work out for him." but i am not my hero, not by a long shot. i'll finish it later. right now i'm drinking water and staring down the child-proof cap of a bottle of ibuprofen.

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     But oh God they won't let me go, they won't. They put me in this jacket so I can't scratch my nose or pick up a pencil or a fork or a knife or anything at all. They make me use a special mouthpiece that sticks in place so I can't bite my tongue in half. They really think I'm crazy. They really won't let me go. And every minute, every second I can feel it getting closer. I can see it in my nightmares, oozing through the ether toward my plump, ripe veins. I scream and I cry and I beg and they won't let me go. I don't need food, I try to tell them in desperate vowels around my mouthpiece, I don't need water or sleep or anything except to get rid of this blood and right now.

     Donovan didn't know. He couldn't have, he wouldn't have called it if he knew what would happen. We were at his place one night, and he said he wanted to try something different, a ritual that was deeper and older and more powerful, that would summon something that we couldn't imagine. He said he'd be even stronger if he could strike a deal with it. He said the sex would be even better, and God had it been good until now. Every ritual made him better, more charming or better looking or something. I wouldn't argue with results like that. I'm not superstitious, really I'm not.

     Everything was fine, as far as I could tell, and he looked really confident. The candles flickered to black like the other times. He was talking to something, bargaining, I think, I don't know. He was speaking some language I didn't understand, and then he started to argue with it, and he told me he'd been insulted and wouldn't stand for it. He tried closing the gate, I had seen that part before, and then it was

     and then the flames went dark and red as arterial blood and i saw it, i saw it oh my god i saw it there in the crimson darkness, nothing but a slick and alien grin with a body like bullets strung together by a spider's web. and donovan, he wouldn't move, he was as dumbfounded as i was and stood there with the knife in his hand and the blood was still dripping into the gate out of his spindly little wrists, feeding it the whole time. and the thing, it inched closer to him and closer to me and it crawled into his open vein, slimy and thick and terrible. i was crying and screaming, terrified and deaf from the adrenalin but i couldn't move. he looked back at me, and he gurgled the sickest and most pathetic wet sounds like someone drowning from the inside, and then his screams split my ears. he was wailing, and all i could hear was that it burned, and he was tearing apart and oh god, oh god please no...he was bleeding from everywhere, from fingernails and his eyes and ears, and his skin was splitting in cuts and gashes, and when he screamed i could see his teeth bursting open like popcorn in his mouth, one by one, and god the screaming, oh god the screaming still won't stop. i ran and ran.

     And I woke up here.

     The first thing I did was carve open my arm with a fork from the cafeteria. The next week I tried again with the plastic one they gave me, and then I bit my tongue really hard, and that's when they finally put me here. I keep trying to tell them, I told them everything, and they still won't let me go. It's out there, it's inching toward me. I feel it. It wants my blood, too. If I can get rid of it all, I won't die, I won't be torn to pieces, I...

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edited/added @ 4:11AM - M