The wall split open at the hairline crack, and she came through screaming. Not with sound, but with vibration—the kind you feel crawling in your teeth, rattling in your bones. Her hair—roots alive with autumn rot and evergreen hunger—whipped outward like roots searching for soil.
Where’d you go?
She’s alive, but barely. She stood out, so loud, so bright, you could see. Her silence sings to me, as if she belted out a primal scream. She was so loud, it’s wrong—she was strong. Where did we go? Tonight, the Sun will hum its final hymn.
She tastes the blood from her hidden, unhealed wounds. The plaster burns her skin; it’s slowly melting her spirit. There’s an itch under the surface she can’t stop clawing at, something crawling deep in the marrow, carving names she doesn’t want to remember.
Blood streaks her cheek, though she hadn’t been struck. It seeps from a single dark spot beneath her left eye, like the wall itself was leaking into her.
The air around her trembles. Not with rage, not with fear, but with the ache of a body caught between two worlds—one solid, one unfinished.
And still she screamed.
And still, I listened.
Because sometimes a scream is the only way a wound remembers it’s alive.
Author’s Note:
This piece was written for Di’s Three Things Challenge — today’s words: hairline, itch, spot. Much appreciation to Di for keeping the ink restless and the imagination cornered. I’ll be back to flash fiction once I iron out the kinks of Narrative Forge. Thanks for hanging with me — telling stories is my happy place, having you enjoy them is just the perks of the gig.
Memoirs of Madness 