The Mold

Awakening

The Basement of house 37 on Bernstein road held an amount of high strung tension equivalent to that of a nuclear bomb. Mandy sat atop a foldable chair in her kitchen with her focus targeted towards her unmoving interlocked fingers. The background clatter of her clearance TV in the living room tried to invade her unsteady state of calm, but she held it at bay. Deep breaths, deep breaths, deep breaths. Anytime she felt she was losing her grip on sanity, she fell back on her breathing. A simple meditation technique she had learned years ago from her years abroad in
College. Mandy sat there, refusing to check on her daughter, refusing to even allow the thought of her daughter to pass through her highly sensitive brain, for fear of succumbing to the panic she already felt building up against the barricades of her serenity. And so Mandy sat, devoid of emotion or anything that had the potential to elicit emotion, in a position of agonizing anticipation.

Samantha sat amongst her 4 favorite stuffed animals, Puff among them, teetering back and forth between sleep and consciousness atop the new couch. The new couch that smelled kinda like strawberry's and gramma perfume. She would've slept in her new bed that also smelled like gramma perfume, but mommy was awake downstairs so that's where she had to be: awake and downstairs. It was hard staying awake this late, 1:00 in the morning, a forbidden hour to Samantha as her mother would tan her hide if she were to be caught awake at this ungodly time. But Sam stayed awake anyways, the hearty sound of Selena Gomez casting herself into some proscribed situation with the aid of her wand keeping her intrigued enough to fight off her heavy eyelids.

The swampy and inundating must of the lowest floor of house 37 laid atop Arabelle's chest, making her already hitched breathing even worse. Cold sweats cascaded down her body, her muscles twitched with no warning and her mind was almost completely unable to arrange coherent thoughts. It was as if she was in her own personal hell. Her stomach churned in rotations, making her pray for the so desired release of vomit, but nothing ever came up. A build up of saliva was on the verge of choking her, and she had close to no feeling in her tongue. Every bone in her body sung with despair, every orifice ached, she could feel her own fragile heart delicately pump less and less blood. She knew in a deep part of her being that her body was giving up on her. Yet from that same hidden section of her being, she knew her body could not give up. She must live, she can't leave her floundering family on their own. She couldn't bear to imagine her sister growing up without her, and what kind of agonizing pain her mother would go through if she died. Her family needed her, and she needed her family. Her body resonated with this need, a need so charged with white energy that she could almost feel the poison being destroyed within her. Almost an entire 24 hour period in her own private hell, a physical hell that was so painful it its own mental hell. Almost 24 hours of twitching,
Sweating, churning, and pain so powerful she could barely think. But, alongside all of this restless agony, she had her will. Her want to be living, her need to be living. It was that, her sister, her mother, her will, that extinguished the fiery hell she was confined in. Ever so gradually her heart beat sped up, her stomach once again became serene, and even her sweats started to diminish. A good 19 hours after the start of it, Arabelle was once again able to produce linear thoughts, and a few minutes off of the 24 hour mark she could generate enough strength to sit halfway up in bed.

Arabelle slowly forced her torso upward, maintaining a sitting position. What had put her in that perpetual purgatory was a mystery to her. It was a pain she had never even considered exists. Although flooded with multiple different kinds of confusion and curiosity, one question stood prioritized among the rest; how long was she out. It couldn't have been that long... If it was any longer than a day she knew she would've woken with a mass sweat stain on a hospital bed, not her own. With much concentration she lightly treaded towards and up the stairs, not wanting to make too much noise in case she had awoken in the middle of the night. Queasy and on the brink of losing balance, she made it to the kitchen where her phone lay plugged in and charging. She flipped the light switch and almost screamed in fright at what she saw. There her mother and her sister lay, on the kitchen floor next to a foldable chair. Although quite odd, after taking the time to assess the situation she no longer saw it as frightening. Her mother lay with a pillow under her head and Samantha's "Police Blanket" draped about her and Sam's body(she called it her police blanket because it was fuzzy) With this noted she concluded that her mother must have passed out while filing some paperwork  for her new job and her daughter must've joined her, unusual but plausible. Carefully stepping around her sleeping kin she grabbed her phone resting on the kitchen table to check the time. 3:00 PM, August 2nd. A day, Arabelle had only been out for a day. Well that wasn't so bad. Abruptly a muted buzzing sound started coming from her mothers back pocket, waking both Mandy and Sam simultaneously. A little disorientated, Mandy grabs her phone to check her reminder, the buzzing pop up reminder which read "check on Ary." Mandy almost walked out of the kitchen before realizing Arabelle was there, and when she did it was if she was seeing a ghost. They locked eyes for a moment, Mandy's going from fright to relief to pure amazement in a matter of seconds, ending with Mandy pulling Ary into a tight embrace. "Mom I'm alright, it was nothing, I just overslept--" Ary lied to keep her mother from worrying. "Honey just let me hug my daughter for a little bit,
You scared the absolute shit out of me." She said while pulling away to look her in the eyes. " But that doesn't matter now, what matters now is how you're feeling." Seeing it was futile to lie about her well being she went with the much too glorified route, the truth. "I... Overall... I'm fine, I lived, a bit disorientated but that'll pass...Mom, really I'm good." Another hug.

Absolutely nothing.
Ary consistently heard that sentence being thrown around in her head, ever since she started researching her ailment. There was absolutely nothing that captured the extent of it. Some information on cold sweats, something on headaches... One website even tried to convince her she had brain cancer, which to her shameful surprise took a couple seconds to contradict. It could be anything, so why not brain cancer? She knew it would be smart to ask her mother to do this type of thing-- research was always her forté. But, on the same line of thought, her mothers plate was quite stacked as it is, so placing an extra helping of worry on there would only create new problems.

The noonday sun casted potent overhead shadows, making the hollow of Ary's eyes look like dark taverns. The sparse foliage of her backyard tree provided little protection from the sun, but it was still preferable to being in a stuffy house. To her mothers dismay, she laid under the tree in a one piece bathing suit, accentuating her curves and toned body. Her mother was not dismayed for the obvious reason, her skin being showcased as was, rather she was upset that the drastic change of environment would upset Arabelle's body in some way. She didn't want to risk it, but Arabelle had been sleeping in a dark room for an entire day so she could at least understand her motive.

The trees were beautiful to Arabelle, absolutely stunning. The graceful way they danced around the branches, flowing in rhythm to the majestic music that was wind. This captivating scenery reminded her of her younger, much purer self. That version of Arabelle could be found trying to conquer the ever intimidating height of a tree at almost all hours of the day. As sudden as the gust of wind that coerced the leaves into dancing, she felt an urge to reconnect with her past self and climb those looming branches, and she did just that. The bark felt so rough, so stable beneath her bare feet (not the brightest thing to do...climbing a tree barefoot, but she was caught up in the moment)and before long she was looking over her house's peak and on to the stretch forest beyond Bernstein road. The wind was so much more powerful 25 feet above the ground. Hair, clothes, nothing was immune to the winds music, and soon her entire body was lightly shaking to fit its rhythm. Her eyes were closed, totally enveloped in this hippie style meditation, she even went so far as to put her left hand in the air, like those freeloaders she'd seen on the metro once, dressed like Jesus and trying to convince everyone that their 2 quarters will "save the world." Just like those Jesus cosplayers, she knew she looked like a total airhead, but honestly she didn't care. She was, as Margaret Mitchell had once said "Gone with the Wind." She felt the wind get stronger, but dismissed it, she wasn't ready to get down just yet. 'SSssssssSSSSssssSSSSSSSSSS' the wind mimicked a snake and the ending gust shook the tree so vigorously that she lost her balance and flailed downward to the ground, her eyes wide and full of fear. Looking back at that moment, Arabelle thought it quite humorous that if circumstances were different, her last thoughts on Earth would've been "This shit's gonna HURT."

"Craack"

Her entire body made a vicious cracking sound when she hit the ground, landing square on her back, the pain was like being shot out of a canon at a brick wall. She would've screamed if the wind hadn't been brutally forced out of her lungs. And she was reminded of why she stopped climbing trees. The pain really wasn't that bad, well it was bad, but it wasn't that bad, compared to the pain she experienced less than a day ago it was more or less a trip on uneven sidewalk. Just based on the earsplitting crack, she could conclude a few broken bones. Gearing up to scream in utter pain for her mother, she heard a quiet, muted cracking sound and a piercing pulling sensation in her left leg, then her right, and eventually both of her arms as well. Miraculously, the debilitating pain started to subside and the only emotion that was left was dumbstruck awe. Already feeling as if she had never fallen in the first place, she slowly escalated to her knees, and then her feet, taking a quick inventory of herself, she was once again dumbstruck to find nothing, not even a scratch. She had healed herself. She knew she wasn't crazy, she knew she had felt the broken bones, the pain, it was all there. Yet, it wasn't, she was fine, the muted cracking and sensation of pulling was her bones being pulled back into place and her muscles restitching around them, it had to be. What the actual fuck. This had to be related to her illness somehow, or maybe she was just crazy. Quickly poking her head around to their back door, she saw no sign of her mother anywhere, so thankfully she could bring this situation up on her own terms, as she knew she would have to if she started feeling ill again. Although generally confused about what had just happened, she was completely certain about one thing: Her life just got much more interesting.