Little Talks

The voices were in her head again, dragging her down. It didn't matter what they said most of the time, but the fact that they spoke made her whole body shake, made the tears surge to her eyes. The blood appeared in stripes over her wrists, and she had no idea how. They told her she wasn't good enough, that one day her body would wash up on the cold ocean's stony shore and no one would care.

He took her hands and held her wrists, telling her that it would all turn out okay, that she would be fine if only she could hang on and not fall away.

Her feet cracked the leaves underfoot. That house was gone now, but the memories were not. Her scarred body was the sapling in the storm, branches made to withstand the constant rain, but breaking now after the pressure became too much. The sky was still blue-gray, but the sun no longer shone like it had. Clouds were not seen on the outside, but had formed within her instead.

Long ago, she had played on those rocks, the ones that stood solemn and weathered against the ocean that stretched beyond. The house where her cries could have been heard years ago was rotting now, but it would make her final resting place today. She had gotten better, but he had gone past this life, and her body was permanently submerged in the icy-cold of oncoming death.

"Darling, don't cry, I'm right here." He placed her head on his chest, holding onto the bandaged wrists. She believed him, kept the thought in her heart though the rest of the world didn't seem right.

The voices, they kept shouting at her. They weren't kind, either. It wasn't all "Darling, you can let go," like the voice of the one sitting beside her. Instead, they screamed in the way witches might cackle on movies watched during Halloween.

"You're not worth it."

"Kill yourself."

"Little girl, the world has no use for you. Spare them the pain."

There was a blade in her pocket, through when she first left this empty house, he had made her promise not to use it again. However, those voices were coming back. When she had left California to return to this old, broken place once more, they were only a whisper. She had thought at first it was the other people in her apartment building, or people chatting on the streets. But the things they said, she knew no one in their right mind would go around saying those things just out in the open.

It took a drive out to the countryside, surrounded only by the occasional rodent or bird, to realize that they were back. The voices, void of anything to make them unique or individual, had taken over her brain.

"I can't get them out," she cried into his shoulder.

"Then why don't I have a little talk with them?" He always did that, those little talks with the demons that infested her mind.

"Okay," she whispered so softly that she didn't hear it herself.

"Just like every time?"

She nodded. There was a sort of ceremony that they had created in order to get those voices to go away for a time. Of course, it was all pretend, but she found it to help.

He began. "Oh, demons and devils that haunt the body and mind of the beautiful girl," she smiled weakly, "I request to speak that I might keep you at bay."

"The demons give approval, to see this man eye to eye, heart to heart and mind to mind." That was her part, as if she were letting the voices of her head take over her mouth. It was all pretend, as these words were her own, not those of a monster.