❝SORRY IS THE KOOL-AID OF HUMAN EMOTIONS. IT'S WHAT YOU SAY WHEN YOU SPILL A CUP OF COFFEE OR THROW A GUTTER BALL WHEN YOU'RE BOWLING WITH THE GIRLS IN THE LEAGUE. TRUE SORROW IS AS RARE AS TRUE LOVE.❞ - CARRIE, STEPHEN KING (1976)
CARRIE WHITE was...
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CARRIE: GRAY MATTER
❝AND THERE WAS NOTHING, NOT FOR A LONG TIME.❞ -STEPHEN KING, GRAY MATTER (1973)
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IT WAS THESAME THING for months before the boy showed up. The world was unmoving, unchanging, and it stayed that way. The world was cold, frigid even. The world was darker than the one she once knew, and the things that lurked inside were monsters beyond imagination; though they weren't the monsters that looked just like her that caused her so much pain. Perhaps this was the Hell and God placed her in it for all of her sins on Earth. That only seemed the most reasonable, for her Mama always told her that whatever sins you have done on Earth must be atoned for in your sentence to Hell in the afterlife. And her eternity here was enough atonement to make up for all the lives she stole that night.
The monsters were pesky things. They often snapped at her, trying to bite off bits of her pale, almost translucent flesh. They were never any bother to her. If any of them- no matter the size or species- came charging toward her, they never lasted long. But then there were the monsters in the yellow- the monsters that looked too much like people for her to confront. If she heard their booming, muffled calls, she cowered away in the darkness of the shadows.
Though it wasn't the monsters that made her journey insufferable.
Visions of the bodies dropping to the floor haunt her memories, enacting in front of her when she thinks about the flames roaring around her. The smell of smoke and burning flesh still lingers in the air around her, the heat still on the skin of her neck like a scarf wrapped around too tight, nearly strangling her until almost all the air was gone. They follow her as she walks through the world of ice and fire. There's no other way to describe it than that.
Shivering, she walks through the barren land, a small ringing in her ear as the winds from the north blow through the air. Nowhere to go, no one to turn to. All she was left to was her own devices. She spoke to herself because there was no one else to talk to. She walked the streets that so closely resembled everything she grew up with but looked so different. It was another part of this Hell that made everything horrid; seeing what she once knew but it not being the same as she remembered. It was sickening to pass by the houses without seeing the children playing with a rubber ball on their lawns or pass by the bookstore without getting hit with that caramelly scent as someone opened the door. Everything was covered in these grotesque vines and sticky substances. It was everywhere you went on everything you saw.
She often visited the remains of her old home. It was simply a pile of stones and wood chips with a wooden cross with vines coiling around it planted at the center. It was a form of self-inflicted pain, but it was the strongest comfort she could get. It was the one thing that stayed the same. And that was how the second part of her story began.
