The Hollow

Hollow

A second draft of a loosely Halloween-inspired short story.

Impi stared at the wall, too cold to move, too hollow to find any motivation to. Not that she had ever had any motivation in the first place. That's not true, she thought miserably. She'd had motivation when the nightmares had gotten to be too much, when the pills were getting to be too much.

Those stupid baby blue pills that her mother insisted would help her. They were supposed to soothe her. Well, that was what her mother had said. But they had only kept her docile, helpless.

A part of her did miss the blueness of her old life. Her electric blue mug, her turquoise quilt, the walls of her bedroom and the living room the color of bluestars. She supposed that she could only appreciate her former setting because of the pills, yet Impi still couldn't bring herself to feel anything other than anger when she thought of them. She could still taste them, as if they were sedating her mind this instant.

She rolled over to the other side of her cot and screamed into her filthy yellow pillowcase. It wasn't blue. Her sheets weren't blue. The walls weren't blue. The mug lying a few feet away from her wasn't blue. Even though the sky was pitch black, she didn't have to look at her surroundings to know that nothing was how it used to be.

She had nothing left. Her house, her friends, her passion, her mother...they were all gone. And it had been all too easy to lose.

She tried breathing. She tried listening to the silence, hoping to find an answer there. Instead, she heard nothing. So she screamed.

Again, she heard nothing, not a stirring from outside of her room, not even her own echo. She was alone, in a black room with yellow sheets, and she had nothing left of her sanity.

As her heart pounded violently, though, the sound in her ears was like the roaring of ocean waves pounding against rocks. There had been black rocks outside of her beach house, and she found herself imagining them, despite them not being blue.

She thought back to the day she was motivated to get up out of bed. How she had so wanted to leave her house, to see more, to know more, to be a part of more. Now, she would give anything to wake up in that familiar setting.

But would she really? There had been a reason for her to want more. She hadn't been ungrateful for what she'd had in the first place, she just knew she could have more. And then she did have more. It had been worth it at the time...how did everything go so wrong?

Her chest tightened as she clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. She wanted to scream, but she knew it wouldn't do anything. No one would come save her. Her mother wouldn't come to calm her down and wash away her thoughts. To some extent, she didn't want her thoughts to be pushed aside anymore. She was angry, and because it was for a good reason, she felt like she should stay angry.

Anger was how she had gotten things done before, and discovered her passion. Was there a way she could use this anger now? Sure, she felt confined to her cot in the dark room, but she could leave. She hadn't tried it before. She just had to keep trying.

For the first time in hours, Impi disentangled herself from her sheets, and rose. Her feet were bare, and the stone floor was cold, so standing upright was like a shock to her system, but she didn't focus on that. She moved toward the door and, holding her breath, slowly opened it.

***

Minutes later, Impi was sitting on the forest floor, having gotten tired of stumbling around over twigs and small stones. Although she had been in a forest several times before, she had never once felt comfortable in one. There had always been something lurking there, or some terrible reason she'd had to be there. Now, she was trying to find something calming in the forest, something that could counter her fears and previous experiences.

It wasn't working.

She tried to imagine that she was on the beach instead, but the soil was so obviously heavier and drier than the gray sand. The wind whistling through the trees brought goosebumps to her skin, but not because she was cold. On the contrary, she was warmer here than she had been in her beach house. It was the sound of the wind, being nothing like the roar of the waves. It wasn't even anything like the rush of blood to her head.

All of the sudden, a memory crashed into her mind like a brick being forced into her skull, except for it was more painful: She remembered the last time she had been in the woods, desperately searching for the boy whose blood had been swirling in the river.

Gasping, Impi started to cry. At first, it seemed like the tears were too deep within her skull to come out, but when they did, they overflowed and overwhelmed her tearducts. She was too blind to see anything besides the memory.

And then, as the salty tears spilled thickly out of her, more memories overwhelmed her mind, of the boy, of her other friends, of her club, of everything that had made life worth living. Her tears reminded her of her beloved ocean, of when her and her mother would swim in it, and of the last time they had swum together, while they watched their beach house burn in the distance.

It all came back to the river red with blood.

And then she remembered that there must be a river, somewhere in this forest, even if it's too deep in to get out. There was no use returning to her cot anyway. So she rose again, left the tear streaks on her face and imagined them as blood streaks, and ventured into her nightmare setting.

***

She was pretty sure she was bleeding underfoot. She couldn't really tell because everything was so dark. But even though it wasn't much, the stars kept her sanity by shining. Well, could she call walking in the forest in the middle of the night just to be by a river sane? Probably not. But just searching made her feel like she had, if only temporary, a purpose once more.

Every now and then, she would stop to listen for the sound of running water, or even the sound of something dripping from a tree branch. But she heard nothing comforting, just the usual scuffling sounds, or branches moving. Sometimes she could blame it on the wind. But even if something was tracking her, she was too tired to care much anymore.

She thought of just lying down in surrender, but she didn't like the idea of whatever crawls in the soil to scuttle over her body. She didn't even like the thought of decomposing in the ground when she was dead. "From dust you came, and to the dust will you return." Her mother had said that all the time.

But Impi wasn't made from dust. She was made of water, and she planned on returning to the water. A long time ago, she had imagined that she wouldn't be returning for a good while. But things never go according to plan, do they? she thought to herself.

And she accepted it. This acceptance hastened her pace.

It was as if she had been drawn to the water, and in a way, she supposed that she had been, because she was a part of it. She didn't have to have light to know that she had found a small part of her home again, a small part of her. She could hear the rushing, not as proudly as it had been near the beach house, but proud in a smaller, quiet kind of way.

In no time at all, she was kneeling in front of a modest river, silver in the dim light of the stars. Not quite like the steely gray of the ocean, but admirable in a new, different way.

Without thinking, Impi sank her bare feet into the cold river, and although it doesn't sound possible, she swore she saw the ribbon of blood flowing from her feet in the darkness.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She allowed the image to stick in her mind, slowly mixing her blood with the invisible boy's blood until the two images were one.

Her feet were numb. Her body was frozen. She was hollow.

And then she opened her eyes and lifted her feet out of the river. They were wrinkled, pale, and whole.

She liked to imagine that the invisible boy was now that way too.