Believe: "Write Your Ending" Contest Entry

          All that was left of it was a picture—tucked away in the corner of one of her drawers, hidden underneath a box, covered by old linens. It wasn’t even in good condition. The corners were chipped, the ink was fading and there was a long scratch that ran from one side to the other, connecting them, like a line between two dots, engraved deeply into the paper cutting the man in half.

           Man. Man might not have been the right word, but boy wasn’t either, the same way she hadn’t exactly been a woman back then and hadn’t been a girl either. It was during that time in between where nothing was sure but everything was possible.

           Nobody knew about the picture. Not her five children, not her nine grandchildren and certainly not her husband.This was all that was left and it hurt to think it had to be hidden clandestinely this way.

          Oh, there were pictures of him elsewhere, in their house. He was on many walls. He was even in her bedroom. But he wasn’t hers on those pictures the way he was on the one tucked in the drawer. It was her in his eyes, he had said, and even after all these years, after everything,she still believed him.

          That picture was all that was left, yes, and it was hidden, but it was better like this. Because she didn’t, couldn’t share this with anyone else, share this part of him, this small reminder. That was all she had left. On that picture, he was hers, and strangely enough, she was his too.

She remembered when she first saw him when she was sixteen years old. She was alone, sitting in a white room on a white bed in a white gown.

“I know why you’re here,” he said, “and I’m going to help you.”

He knew about her past, so she didn’t have to tell him her tale that started at the young age of six... She was sitting in the livingroom while her parents were talking in the kitchen. They were under the impression that she couldn’t hear their words, hear what they were saying about her.

“She’s not normal, Jeb.”

“That doesn’t give us the right to just ship her away. She’s still our daughter, Mary.”

She knew what they were talking about, even only at six years old she knew. When she first showed her mother the scratches that marred her delicate skin, Mary went frantic with protection and spent every hour of the day beside her. She even slept with her at night. At first, she thought it’d be a blessing. The monster wouldn’t show up when she was around other people, and when an entire day went by without looking into it’s cold, murky yellow eyes, she thought it was gone. She was free.

How wrong she was.

That night, while her mother lay asleep just inches away from her, the monster conjured out of the shadows, its scorpion-like body covered in slick, black scales. Its head was human, the flesh burnt and stretched tight across angular bones. The skin of its ears was hanging off the cartilage like dripping wax, and the rotted teeth were set in brown, oozing gums. Its face had no eyebrows, the expression always set at a cross between malicious and teasing.

It never spoke to her, but night after night she heard its wheezing breaths as it crawled closer to her.

All she had to do was think about the creature, and she was frozen in fear. The monster would creep up to her, tormentingly slow, its stinger poised over its human face. And, for each hour that ticked by, it would count the minutes with a small cut on her skin, no longer than an inch. There was no poison to infect her blood, and the cuts always healed within twenty four hours, but the damage inflicted on her body was indisputable.