Ceaseless

Pinky Promise

Marley did not sleep. He could not sleep. He utterly refused to.

If you sleep, you die.

You surrender.

Nothing but darkness unfolded itself in front of him.

Slumped against the wall of greying plaster, Marley exerted every vestige of strength he could attain in order to prevent himself from letting his eyes clamp together, from transforming his dark world to an even darker one. Marley scarcely even dared to blink.

His eyes itched and stung, each eyelid yearning immensely to feel the warmth of comfort of one another, but laboriously refraining themselves from drooping.

They wanted light.

All his eyes longed for was the light that would surrender to the arduous battle of tenebrosity and its afflictions and horrors, and usher him into its enclosure of blinding protection.

Where was the sun?

Perhaps it had been hours. Days. Maybe even weeks that Marley had been rooted to this corner that despair had managed to bend its bloody, flesh mangled fingers around. but then if they had extended to even the outskirts of the village, of course they would have.

The smallest finger was wrapped round Marley's throat, choking him. The red pointed fingernail impaled the centre of his chest, the bone and flesh encasing it crushing his ribs into dust.

His sister, stirring in her sleep, pervaded his blurry perception. Andrea's body had responded completely differently to the night's turmoil; it had shut off completely, trying to escape reality through sleep, however, it was clear to Marley that the inhumane creature of reality had desecrated that barrier with its serrated teeth and infiltrated into Andrea's region of security.

Again and again she muttered in her sleep, words that were just barely audible.

Words that probably only Marley would be able to understand.

Not that there was anyone else to actually decipher them.

He was alone.

Everyone who he ever needed had left him.

"I don't want to die, put me down."

Each time her voice rang louder and louder until she began to scream. Muffled screams that her nightmares smothered; her limbs thrashed and flailed around her, as if struggling for freedom, as if fighting against the mist of death that shrouded her, reaching for the elusive glint of infinitesimal light. If Marley had it in him; if he hadn't have been cast away into a world distant from reality, where the barbaric beast of fear paralysed him, constraining every limb, throttling him with its tenacious grip, he would have comforted her, like the protective and nurturing brother he'd always had been.

Her screams reached a bone splitting crescendo, then she fell still and silent. Still and silent.

Just like a corpse. Just like Ma.

A resounding voice permeated through his mind, breaking him out of his trance.

The voice that once belonged to him. four long years prior, emerging from a talking to from Ma.

"Ma said that one day we'll be apart, like her and Auntie Sandra,, she says that I need to stop following you everywhere, and you me. She's not always right like she says though. Remember when I told her the stew was burning and she said it wasn't, but It really did burn and we had to eat raw vegetables for a week,"

He chuckled glumly to himself at the memory before meeting Andrea's eye. Watching her face set into worry, and then the mask of hope that always seemed to coat her face.