100 Dreams

Dream 9

The shadows are moving. Breathing. Living. The shadows are memories. Friends. Loved ones. Lost ones. The shadows are chasing me. Beating me. Recreating me. One is my mom. One is my dad. One is the soldier. He plagues my dreams with no explanation for why. He's there to help me out of my nightmares, but I just fall right back into another one. Tonight he's saving me from myself.

She's sitting in front of me. A mirror of myself in an old, wooden chair. Her brown hair and green eyes staring right back at me. I'm standing in a rundown mini-golf course that closed after only being open for six months. Nothing lasts long in this town. While my hands are down next to my side, hers are on her face. A thumb tucked under her jaw, her smallest finger on her chin, and her three remaining fingers on her lips, the middle tapping lightly against her mouth. A nervous tick I have had since childhood. She doesn't look nervous though. She looks determined. Poised. Ready to strike at a moment's notice. She looks fierce.

I walk closer to her, and she smiles up at me behind her fingers, malice written across her face. Behind her are dirty, once-white walls. The floor's covered with enough dust to force a cough out of anyone. The walls used to be purple tinted when the black lights were on, but the owner was worried about injuries, and he took the lights down after a few weeks of being open. The place instantly lost money, but the owner was determined to keep the lights off. The courses remained neon painted, but without the lights, they lacked anything special.

The owner was a monster of a man. Over six feet tall, he had to have weighed over three hundred pounds. Rumors about him spread quickly through town. Accusations of rape, murder, torture. But, he always smiled at everyone. He laughed at the simplest of jokes, and he was quick to offer you help. He wasn't worried about lawsuits when he took the black lights down, he was genuinely concerned someone would get hurt. It didn't take long for the rumors about him to send him out of business.

A girl everyone from school knew was his first accuser. She claimed he came onto her when she was walking home from the library one night. There's a few reasons we all knew it was fake.

1) She told her parents she was out-of-town that weekend.

2) He actually was out-of-town on the day she claimed it happened.

3) She had never been to the library in her life.

4) We're all fairly positive she doesn't even know how to read.

People added fuel to the fire though, and more people seeking attention decided to speak out. Don't take this the wrong way though. Some of the rumors may have been true, but we knew not all of them were. They served their purpose. Half the mom's in town forbid their children from going anywhere near that old mini-golf course. The other half told their daughters to watch their backs, stay in groups, and even went as far as buying them pepper spray. Then, there were the parent's like my mom. The ones who didn't even know any of this was going on, or if they did, they just didn't care.

I'm staring at myself, unable to think of anything I should be doing at the moment, when I watch myself stand up. Two steps later and we're eye to eye, neither of us blinking. Neither of us moving. Neither of us breathing. When she's this close, I can see the freckles on my nose, and the blue mixed into my green eyes. I can't help but think that she doesn't look exactly like I thought I looked. She looks skinnier than I do, and her face isn't nearly as square as mine. Either we're not exact, or I look different than I had thought I did.

She takes a few steps back, and I watch as we both regain our breath. When she begins talking, my head spins in every direction possible. It's not my voice. It's mix between my mother's and the soldier's. Fight or flight kicks in and I feel my muscles clenching. This is one fight I refuse to back down from. I've fought with myself since the day I was born. From the mere, unimportant things to most crucial aspects of my life. I'm tired of letting my inner demons win.

My hands are clenched into fists, and I can feel my anxiously bitten nails bite into my palms. She starts towards me, and I pull my hands up ready to fight. All she does is raise a hand, and I'm sent flying across the room. I hit my head on wall, and my vision blackens. Raising her hand again, I'm flung against the ceiling and then onto the floor. I wrap my hands around my head to soften the impact, but the blows knock the breath out of my lungs.

I stand back up, convincing myself that I have to win. I have to control myself. I raise my hands like my reflection did, and she's tossed into a heap at my feet. Without thinking, I kick out at her. She grabs my foot and pulls me to the ground with her. There's shattered glass on the floor from punk kids knocking in the windows. Then an idea hits me. If I can't win, she can't win. Then again, that never really solved anyone's problems, it just pushed them onto someone else.

We wrestle on the floor until she pins me beneath her. Her arms falter for a second and I take the opportunity. I swipe up at her with the glass in my hand. The edge comes in contact with her neck, and she crumbles. No blood comes out, in fact, nothing dramatic happens. One second she's sitting on my stomach, the next she's a crumpled body on the neon carpet.