As her breath grew still and shallow, Iris Snider thought that her pure white ceiling would be her last glimpse of the living world. She was very wrong.
"I don't want to die. I'm only sixteen, I've never been on a plane, or had my first kiss, I want to experience life. I don't want to die yet. I can't die yet." Hot tears ran down her face, and the usual pain in her chest grew unbearable. She was always sick; two years ago she began to feel a sharp stabbing pain in her chest, the pain grew stronger until it made her bedridden and unable to move. She went to every doctor that she could, but no one could find the smallest trace of something wrong.
Iris spent day after day laying in bed. She read many books, and would occasionally draw a landscape picture; but she usually focused the little energy that she had on breathing, which became more painful by the day.
She took a deep painful breath, and slowly closed her eyes. She wanted nothing more than to survive, she would do anything for life.
As her eyes closed, she felt a boney hand being placed on her heaving chest. She wanted to see who it was, but she couldn't manage to open her eyes.
"You want life, I can help you with that" the owner of the hand said in a deep female voice.
"Pease, that's all that I want, life." Iris said in a small, shaky voice.
"So be it then" Iris felt the hand slowly sink into her body. Her eyes shot open to see a pure black figure, with blood red eyes, and sharp revealed red teeth. She winced in pain as she felt the shadow slowly take over her body from the inside. She felt bloated and full having another spirit inside of her. She got to the point where she felt like her body was going to pop like an overfilled balloon, although her body looked tiny and pale as usual.
Her fullness began to subside, she felt normal and painless; she felt alive. Iris sat up, examining her body. She looked exactly the same, but she never felt so real.
"Now, since I saved you, you're going to have to help me." Iris frantically looks around for the source of the voice. She suddenly looked at her shadow. It looked like her usual silhouette, except for its new blood red eyes and sharp red smile. She gasped as her shadow stood up to face her. Smiling wide.
"You can't live without my help, and I also need your help I order to survive. I live off of life energy, and now, you do too. In order to obtain life energy, you must take lives. Everyday you must take one life before this time every day, or else we will both perish." Iris trembled at the words that her shadow spoke. She looked at her pink wall clock that read eleven o'clock pm. This was now her fate. One life before eleven o'clock at night, that was her destiny.
Iris fell to her knees. She was a sweet and sensitive girl. She could never kill anyone. How could she be so selfish to take a life to save her own.
"I can't do it. I don't want to kill, I can't kill. I can't do it!" She wailed those words into her soft feather pillow. She cried; there was no way that she could accept this reality.
Iris' bedroom door flew open, her mother sat on her bed running her fingers through Iris' long silky hair. Iris couldn't stop crying.
"I can't kill them, I just can't" she continued to say. Her mother flipped open her cellphone and dialed the number of the hospital that Iris usually went to for her chest pain.
"We need to get her hospitalized, I think all of this pain is going to her head..." Iris' mother walked out of the room and continued to talk on the phone with the doctors at the hospital.
Iris was short of breath due to her weeping and screaming. She fainted with a loud bang onto the floor.
She woke up a few hours later in a uncomfortable hospital, wearing an ugly green gown. Her head throbbed a bit from the fall, and it took her a few minutes to remember everything. She soon remembered the whole incident and came to the conclusion that it was a dream; at least she hoped that.
