Short Stories

Alone

There used to be six of us altogether.Now, I stand alone. And I don't even remember my own name.

We spent years together, alone,together again. Our time was spent in relieved merriment—or as close to that as we possibly could manage. We were allowed time together...but we soon learned it came at a steep cost none of us could afford.

Our alone time was spent caged, barred like animals behind glass, a strange distance away from each other.That's how they'd extract what they wanted from us. That's how they punished us. That's how they took their payment for our joy.

In the end, we simply spent our together time sitting, staring, forcing ourselves to forget.

Forget what they did to us. Forget what they wanted from us. Forget what they took from us.

I cannot recall my name, but I can recall the demented tortures we endured whilst held in their captivity.

The start of it all was the day my mother died. She'd lost her continuous battle with liver disease after her ongoing bouts of alcoholism. She wasn't much of a mother; nonetheless, my heart still grieved when she passed.Nowhere to go, not a soul to turn to, I fell into drinking myself.Not completely at first, but soon I found myself submerged helplessly in empty bottles—that is, until one night all I remember is nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Not even darkness.Not even a drunken unconscious dream. Simply nothing. I surmised my intoxicated self fell unconscious after finishing off a bottle. My suspicions were quickly confirmed when I regained consciousness.

Unsure of how much time had passed, I wiped sleep from my eyes and attempted to blink away the blurry vision. But this wasn't the usual blurry vision. The blurry vision where you stayed up too late reading or drinking and your eyes grow weary and tired and no longer can hold anything in focus. This was the type of blurry vision where you stayed up until 5in the morning with tears streaming down your face, darkness enshrouding you, exhaustion overcoming you.

Slowly, my eyes regained their focus, but relief was not what followed next.

Panic. Fear.Anxiety. Terror. Anything but relief.

My eyes darted around as my legs frantically tried to hold my weight to no avail. I was weakened. From drinking, I had assumed. But how wrong I was.

I awoke to find myself caged like an animal at the zoo, but with much less dignity.And I was alone.

And that was when the memories flooded back. Memories of a strange white shadow figure hurling me onto its back. The same figure that sent pain shooting through my veins with a strange liquid trapped neatly inside a syringe. And then the fear settled deep within the recesses of my mind at the thought of feeling the flames of that liquid again.

But somehow I found myself relieved. Relieved that I was alone and without the white shadow of a man.

For weeks I was alone. Not even my captor revealed himself in that time. Days would pass before a tray of something I hoped was edible would drop from the ceiling. It wasn't long before my muscles weakened and my body struggled to function.

That was when she came. Lorelai. I never asked for her last name, but she also never offered it when introducing herself. Not just to me, but with the others as well. The first night or two she pleaded and screamed and sobbed for her release—which would never come. Eventually, she spent her nights huddled, holding herself closely. Perhaps she was crying—I assumed she always cried from the way her shoulders shuddered—but the space between us silenced our voices save for only the loudest of wails. The type of wailing that clawed at your throat like sandpaper and rendered your voice useless for at least a week. She always spent her every night as such. Face in her lap,shoulders shaking, and body scrunched as if trying to hide herself behind the clear glass that housed her.