IRVING //a short story//

1.

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It appears.

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WREN

It appeared on a Thursday and stayed the rest of the week, just sitting and staring from in-between piles of crinkled and dog-eared pages of books, favourites and not-quite-finished volumes of series and sagas slightly too painful to read. Its bulging, grit-grey eyes squinting in the darkness.

At first Wren ignored it, she had other things to fret over, and they were hard enough to concentrate on through the ever-present fog that thickened and thinned over her mind on a whim. Some days though, she almost felt clear. She had a list in her mind, set out in the grey blur of her head. For instance, the bricks weighing down her bag required attention, as did the goldfish swimming aimlessly at the end of her bed, the light glinting off of their shiny cage. Tasks seem to glare at her from every angle and that familiar feeling of frustration and anxiety swept down her spine, and she found herself ignoring their gaze as she opened her laptop to the wrong web page. The covers of her bed were her only refuge from the pressure of a million eyes weighing her down. Unfortunately for her the creature didn't take kindly to being ignored and began making an odd deep shrieking noise, still staring at her with an unblinking fixation, blank of emotion.

It was a horrible sound, like the scratching of a chalk board and the high-pitched squeal of a microphone rolled into one in a never-ending stream of noise. The laptop dropped to the floor with a thump.

"Would you stop?" (a whisper broke out through the noise).

Wren returned it's stare, pleading desperately for silence, her eyes tired and dull. Miraculously by some shred of something close to either emotion or cunning, the creature stopped it's noise.

Its slimy legs clambered out slowly from in between the mountains of words and perched itself on top of one of the smaller ones, still staring... and out of the corner of her eye Wren could've sworn she watched it grow.

It was still there when she woke up on Friday, and when she came home from school. And once again it continued to stare, and shriek. The bricks on her back stayed untouched, the goldfish still swam slowly, and the fog was slightly thinner, only just tinging her mind that odd colour of obscure. Today her bed wasn't a bed, her floor was made of grass and the walls were falling to bits, entwined with moss, creeping flowers and green.

"Do you ever do anything but scream?"

The shrieking continued.

"Will you at least talk to me?"

The scrape and static of its voice rose to unbelievable heights and her hands clutched her ears, her fingers turning white with the pressure. Wren wondered how the neighbourhood dogs hadn't thrown a fit yet.

"Please go away."

It didn't.

"Just shut up already!"

Silenced ensued and the creature moved closer, finding refuge on the pile of cloth shoved to one corner, the voices of the fish claimed  it smirked as it expanded.

Saturday and Sunday were something Wren imagined to be similar to Hell, she was desperate to do something outside, away from the house, her room, the bag of bricks and the horrible staring creature and its screaming. But her mother stayed in bed all weekend, her sister was with her friends and Wren was alone and trapped with the creature. Her bed whispered sweetness and promised her sanctuary, but she knew the trap too well. Her mind was foggy, and weary all through the days of Saturn and the Sun. Her room was dim and the light of a screen trapped her, away from the creature, away from the world. The creature stared and screamed, but Wren grew used to it after several hours. Besides, she thought, sleep didn't come easily on a normal day. She'd tried to draw it late at night, but she couldn't seem to capture it. The creature was a certain kind of indescribable, the kind that you couldn't quite remember the details of once you looked away. Wren quickly grew frustrated and gave up, it seemed that every picture she drew was somehow lacking a peculiar type of horror. The kind your mind tries desperately to shield you from.

"So what is it that you're here for exactly?"

She asked Sunday morning. The creature continued to screech like a banshee.

"Okay then."

Her head rested on the bars of her ancient bed and her legs entwined themselves under the sheet. On the day of the Sun she was lost at sea.

"Could you be quiet for a while, I'd like to sleep."

And once again the creature was silent.

The Jane Austen novels were alarmed when it grew, they whispered in shocked tones as he clambered over them to perch on the dresser, chewing on the weeping copy of Frankenstein.

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A/N
So, that's the first bit.

The story behind me writing this whole thing is almost funny; it started in my English class when my teacher told us to write a short 900 word story ( I've never been good with word limits, they are the bane of my existence) and so I sat down and developed an idea.... and soon after I started writing and didn't stop for the next few days and suddenly i found myself past the word limit-like wayyyyy past the word limit. My story now had 6043 words and try as I might I couldn't make it any smaller, I couldn't even take out the bits I didn't like as much. They were too woven in with the good bits and I absolutely refused to unravel it.

So then my teacher made me hand in a tiny bit of it and i felt slightly sad that I wouldn't be able to share the full thing... so now I'm posting the whole of 'Irving' here on Wattpad, for people to love or hate. As long as someone reads it my purpose here is complete.

Stay posted for the rest.

Love - Blurple.