Tyler Emery
My body was ripped out of the Darkness, pulled from the place of my nightmares and my strange encounter with the girl I was supposedly guarding. Had that been real? I wondered frantically as the Darkness dissolved, melting like candle wax around me. It felt like a rope was attached to my hips and was dragging me through space, time, and realms. I couldn't form a thought, couldn't process anything except that my skin felt like it was being torn off. My eyes were squinched shut, trying to protect them from the speed, but even through the lids I could see the bright, almost heavenly light surrounding me as I flew like a comet to wherever I was being taken.
Suddenly it all stopped, like someone pressed the pause button on a movie. There wasn't a crash or a bang, no big boom to announce my divine arrival. I slowly opened my eyes, trying to prepare myself for anything: another church with high ceilings and dark pews, a hovel with bare walls and dirt floor, or a bedroom in an old folks' home, with white sheets and a generic painting of a fence hanging on the wall. Charlie's voice hadn't sounded old in the Darkness, it reminded me of a bird, like the blue jays that sing in the Georgian tree tops, but you could never be sure. My eyes opened to a light teal room, with white lace curtains hanging like ghosts in front of the tall windows, a white wrought iron queen bed covered in a white coverlet with teal and black floral designs. The bed was placed in the middle of the long wall, and across from it was a desk, littered with an old desktop computer, two printers, a keyboard connected to the desktop and what looked like another cordless one. Wood bookshelves painted white surrounded the bed on either side, leaving no room for regular side tables. I was lying on my back on a plush, white, rug that covered the center of the room, underneath it was a pale, blond wood. I sat up slowly, registering little details that didn't seem to make sense. There were no lamps in the room, not on the desk that was already overflowing or on any of the bookshelves that were stocked better than my local library. There also wasn't any form of poster of decoration on the walls. Even my mother, a woman in her early forties, had a crucifix hanging over her bed, and Charlie sounded like she was in her late teens. Every teen girl had a picture of her favorite celebrity, a picture she painted in middle school, or her name in wooden letters displayed proudly on the walls of her safe place, her inner sanctum. Charlotte O'Brien was the outlier.
There was a noise from the bed beside me, like a snuffle or a sigh, and I leapt to my feet, my heart racing in my chest, rushing to speed out of its prison. A girl laid on her side in the bed facing the opposite wall where two windows showed the lightening sky of early dawn. The blankets were pulled up to her chin, like she was perpetually freezing, and her wavy black hair covered her face. The skin that I could see, her chin, neck, and the tip of her slightly pointed ear, was white as milk, like the snow that she was raving about in the Darkness. I walked around to the other side of the bed, the side she was facing, and knelt down, bringing my face close to hers. Her upper lip was thinner than her full bottom lip, and they were opened slightly as if in a sigh, or as if she was just on the brink of whispering her inner secrets. She groaned and I jerked back, falling on my heels.
"Daddy," she grumbled, her voice hoarse with sleep. "J-just five more minutes." Charlotte buried her face deeper into her pillow and her hair. Her voice was exactly the same as the one in the dream, even down to the little sigh at the end of her words.
"Good morning, Charlie," I whispered, bringing my lips close to her ear. "I think we're going to have an interesting life together." That's when it hit me: it was my job-my duty-to make sure this girl survived until the Lord decided her fate, which probably meant that she would have to be alive until she was as wrinkled and grey as an elephant. My head spun with the possibility, that I would miss my mother's death and funeral, and I would have no idea about Drew's fate, if his flask at the funeral was just some form of coping or if it will become a true problem. I was chained to this girl's side, a girl that couldn't even see me or talk to me out of the Darkness, and when could that possibly happen again? Anger flooded through me, rolling in vivid waves from my scalp to the tips of my toes. I wasn't even given a choice, a catalogue of people in danger to choose from. Why couldn't I have been Drew's stalker, follow him around and keep him from ruining his life? Why couldn't I stick around my mom and make sure Colin didn't use and abuse her too much? Why this girl, why this mousy pipsqueak from a state I never stepped in before now?
YOU ARE READING
Book Covers
Romance"Is this how it feels, Charlotte? To talk to someone when you're blind? You can't see their face or expression or their hands; you just focus on their voice and let their words wash over you?" ... Everyone is judged by their book cover, how they...
