The Boy and the Beast

1| malevolent

Wake up.

The cliff edges soon, my weight being forced over the edge.

Wake up.

I fight back, unable to find myself to gather up the strength to fight back. My limbs are static, steering het overbearing bodyweight closer to mine to push me over the banister.

Wake up.

I look back, heaving one last fighting breath. "Please, don't do this," I beg, gripping my eyes into the black portals clasping onto the little bit of hope still reverberating somewhere in the back of my mind. She retorts with a malevolent smirk, batting her lashes at me as if she's trying to sedate me. She doesn't care.

She doesn't care if I die. Her eyes glint of baneful hatred, shunning off all the hope I clung onto for life.

That's what she is.

Malevolent.

She is evil and I will not praise her, no matter how much she begs. She's here for a reason and one reason only. She wants to kill me.

Wake up.

"Don't try to fight me, Ally-boy," she grins, pumping the power of her arm into my torso. My weight shifts off my feet to dance across the line, over the edge...

I jerk up in bed, staring straight into the black void swallowing my entire existence between four walls. My breaths run in ragged, strained patterns, my lungs heaving air like vomit. I swallow hard, but my throat closes up as if a noose is wrapped around my neck. I drag myself to the edge of the bed, but my arms quiver anemic, as if an earthquake ruptured through my veins.

She didn't want to kill me. It was just a dream.

It was just a dream.

My skull implodes violently, memories of the dream playing over and over again like a scratched record. I am a scratched record, the same lethargic three notes sounding over and over again like the call of a house alarm, but no one's home.

"It's just a dream," I repeat to myself in a whisper, unable to tie all the loose threads together. The mantra became the only words able to calm a palpitating heart, even though I know none of this is true. It was never. It will never be.

It's no longer a sing-along mantra to remind myself that tomorrow is better, to reinforce benevolence, but it is a lullaby to calm a beast inside my head. This turned into war dreams ago and yet; there is no end. It's the Cold War, sempiternal and internal.

It mocks me day by day, from the sun prowling the soft azure sky to sneakily stealing kisses with the contorted horizon. I was sick of it before it even started and now I can't figure out a way to contort my mind's habits.

"Just a dream," my words slide smoothly over my skin like a sharp blade, throwing me scarlet glitters. "Just a dream," I mutter, checking around for my cellphone. My hands scan around like a metal detector over my crumpled bedspread. My fingers eventually crash into a slim smartphone buried beneath a mountain of pillows. I pull the charger out of it before clicking every possible button to activate the little machine.

03:37.

New record, Alistair. You've slept for two hours and still managed to get yourself stuck beneath terrors and sleep paralysis.