SCRATCHED

Chapter 28

Timeless, Somewhere in Nowhere.

She didn't remember the space having any colors. The door was the first thing she saw, closed and repaired, like the rest of the interior now shaping into life before her eyes; the wooden floorboard spreading, a lighter brown rising to twist into a sofa, then another, then another. From underneath them, a color spilling, rushing to become one quiet carpet in the middle. She saw everything clearer when the floorboard reached the end of the room, standing to form the walls, parting up and down, turning and stretching, turning and meeting. Windows. Sunlight freezing softly into curtains, swayed by the just-arriving breeze.

The framed pictures, which should've been somewhere in-between the shirts and jeans in her bag, dripped from the moving brown, like skin leaking blood, descending into their own spaces on the wall; beautiful and sad figments of her imagination, the blood that formed she believed was hers, and the turns it took to complete their squares the rough and smooth edges of what she called her life.

Soon she realized why she had seen the door first: it started there, the travel of changing colors. The kitchen and stairs had appeared, and she was left to wonder about upstairs, her room, the dark corridor. Would it get a window too? A touch of light? Would her life get it too, once she was awake?

She became conscious of her body, once suspended in nothingness, now standing in her living room. Stretching the shirt over her shoulder, she looked down at it, now a mere discoloration on her skin. A long greenish-black reminder of the woods, the sound of her scream, and the oblivion after. There was no pain. And then there was pain. Everything changed with the slightest shift of thought.

She felt it again. She saw it again. The fear. The sight. The claw yanking at her flesh with all its might. She screamed again, just like the first time, loud enough to break anything breakable, make the house quake, invite more creatures for a feast. She felt it again because she remembered.

The living room looked exactly the way she remembered it, like it was architectured from her mind. Even the vase she had broken was sitting like a gnome on the TV drawer. But as much as she wanted it to be the only version of her living room she remembered, she kept seeing flashes of the broken door, broken vase, thrown-about cushions, and opened drawers. Images from when all hell broke loose in her home. If it was supposed to be a replica of what she saw within, how could it be this tidy?

Her answer appeared before her.

"Dad?"

His shadow was so tall it touched hers. One look into his eyes and all her pain was forgotten and gone. He wore a spotless lab coat, perfectly black and brushed hair on top of his genius head, a cologne she could smell if she was upstairs, and something he never removed in her presence, in their home. A smile.

"Hello, my baby girl."