Children of the Tilts (ON HOLD)

I

I remember pain.

I remember cold metal.

I remember blinding light.

I remember when I felt like I was a torn sweater and someone was sewing me back together.

I remember my eyes feeling like they were on fire.

I remember guilt, and I remember fear.

My name is Caden Bellroy, and I remember the day I died.

_____

Before I died, I remember lying on the gerny in some sort of infirmary, I think the boy called this place The Uncles, and I think I already knew that, but my memories are wilting and leaking away like my very life itself.

A woman with a cropped haircut is bustling around me with a much older woman, her pale grey hair in knots and tucks. The younger one has smooth charcoal hair, with a few grey hairs peaking from her hairline. The younger one's eyes are shadowed with a watery blackness, her chains have droplets of tears on them.

I know her name I know I do, but the only thing I can think about is what's right in front of my face, and the horrible pain that puts weights on my brain. I want to cry out, maybe release some of the pain through my slack jaw, but pain chaps my lips, makes them bleed--like the rest of my body-- and sews them shut.

My eyelids are as heavy as my agonized brain, making me drift away into an odd darkness that scares me, but the dark haired woman shakes me until the darkness retreats. The woman and the darkness play cat and mouse for a long time, before I feel a rough cloth being wrapped and unraveled around my gut and my limbs, they're trying to stop the blood from flowing, but even I know that the attempts are futile, I've already lost too much blood.

I begin to try to sneak into the darkness that beckons me when the young woman isn't looking, I remember that I've wanted this darkness for a while, and if I look close enough into it I can see... happiness. Something that is as rare as a four leaf clover to me know. The young woman is trying to keep me away from the darkness, and I don't know why.

When it is pitch black in the sky, the woman passes out into a chair and I seize the opportunity to flee into the dark, to flee to death.

____

I wake up in a tunnel. The tunnel is dark, winding into infinity. Despite the length, I can still catch a flickering light at the end. Without thinking, I erupt into a run towards the candle-like illumination. My gut is fluttering and flipping, urging me on. I feel cold tears slide down my newly cleansed cheeks, I feel hope. I feel the sense that my family has made this very trek, my family has found the light and I will meet up with them. I see a face on my way there, a chipper round Asian man with flecks of grey in his hair. He beams at me with a smile, and waves. The usual signature is so foreign to me that I hesitate for a moment, but return the wave.

I speed up, calling out the names of my family. I can smell them, see their smiling faces. I scream for them know, my feet blurring beneath me due to their speed.

Suddenly, a piece of the dark wall cracks open, and a figure crawls out of the opening. I freeze, dust coming up behind me from the sudden stop.

The creature is reptilian at first, before it eyes me, and it turns into a round dome shape, before standing and showing that it looks just like me.

I gasp, turning to run the other way, but it is there as well. I want to scream, but my throat is dry, and full of something that tastes like soil.

The other me laughs, his teeth rotten and sharp. "Your family isn't at the end of the tunnel."

My heart drops, and so many questions buzz in my head like bees and wasps shaken up.