Stories for Midnight

Shatter Me

I sighed at the note my mom had left me as she went to the store. She wanted me to clean my room. I grabbed my phone to listen to music as I cleaned. Plugging it into my iHome I told Siri to play my favorites playlist. She did, and Lindsey Sterling's song Shatter Me came on. I hummed along, sang the chorus, but when the song got about to the halfway point and the chorus began suddenly I was spinning.

Try again, patient clear, three, two...

Twirling quite fast. I don't know why- and now I'm kinda freaked out. I can't stop. What the heck?! What in the world is happening to me?!?! The song grew louder. My spinning was more intense. I had to find a way to at least slow down or I might fall wrong and hurt my ankle. I tried grabbing on to my dresser but the furniture was yanked out of my hand. By now I was panicking.

Patient stabilized. Vitals level.

What the heck is happening to me?! Oh gosh oh gosh... I can feel the strangest feeling on my skin. It is impossible to describe, and even if I tried I could not. It was kind of itchy, like ants were crawling all over me, but they only crawled in lines. It was like this itchiness was separating my skin into sections, almost. But it was not itchy, exactly. As I said I can't describe it. But the feeling scared me the most because I am ok with admitting I have a bit of a phobia of ants since I tripped and fell into a disturbed ant pile as a young child.

Heart rate increased, get over here

You can imagine that i'm glad I don't remember it. But now this fear was coming into play because this feeling of ants all over me again scared me quite a bit. As I spin I was slapping myself trying to get rid of an invisible sensation. I think at that point I began to cry, but I was spinning so fast it's all I remember. The sensation intensified and then I felt cuts forming all over my body. Shallow cuts running across my skin like fault lines, only appearing where I felt the sensation. They were so shallow that none of them bled. But then, as if somebody had taken a knife and cut me up like a fruit, the cuts all became deep. So deep that my blood began to seep out of them.

... I REPEAT, CODE ZERO, GET A RESPIRATOR TO ICU 6, CODE ZERO

They became deeper and deeper as I watched, and eventually blood was pouring out of them. I was going light-headed at the sight of that much of my own blood, and the tears that poured down my face doubled in amount as I grew more and more and more panicked and plagued with anxiety. My crying was making me red in the face. I bet that makes me look really stupid, I think, and even though more pressing things were happening (like deep cuts now exposing muscle) the thought still made my cry even harder. I'm such an idiot. I should know how to stop this!

Remove respirator, patient stabilized

The sight of muscle and bone, now exposed, made my almost faint. I am so confused. But then, as the final chorus of Shatter Me plays, I realize...

I am shattering.

And I have to fight the mind-overtaking pain, even as it shoots up through my arms and along my sides and around my hips and to my brain because unless I want to end up a bloody, cracked, oozing mess I need to stop this right now. But then the song ends, and the final note stretches out into silence. I collapse to the ground, free from my insane spinning, but pain still overtakes my thoughts.

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep...

My feet and arms are covered in blood. Whatever colors my clothes were they are now red. But I scoot myself outside my room, coming close to blacking out because of the pain. Red fuels around the edges of my vision. I scream, as loud as I can, for my mom. She comes up the stairs, and as I hear her I try to scoot closer. I black out.

Lights.

Bright lights.

I am moving.

There is noise all around me, noise of people talking and shouting. I try to move my arm.

In reply something comes to lay on my stomach. A hand. Somebody's hand.

A nurse's hand. This is a hospital. I am still moving, faster now, but my legs aren't moving. The noise and the lights are too much and I go back to sleep.

When I wake back up again, it is fully. My parents are there, sobbing with relief. There are stitches all over my body. They must have stitched me up at the ER when mom must have brought me in. You can tell that they're anxious to make me happy. They're asking what I want for dinner, how i'm feeling, if I want an apple, if I want my phone, if I want music. Before I can say anything they are logging into my phone. They see that Shatter Me was playing, so mom chooses that song. I wish that hadn't played it. The clockwork music at the beginning starts to play.

And then it all happens so much faster.

Before I know it the cuts are reopened and gushing blood, with the ditching ripped apart. I scream in pain and sock and fear, and mom screams for a nurse and frantically runs out into the hallway. They know that something must really be wrong so two run over to me. But by now, my blood has soaked the covers of my hospital bed and my hospital gown is orange.

Then my hand falls of.

It just falls off of the rest of my wrist, and the sight of the stump and loss of blood make my pass out.

I never have a chance to open my eyes again.

As they moved my gurney, they knew it was futile. I had lost too much blood. Then it because a reality. I really had lost too much.

The last view of the world that I left that day was the shattered remains of a glass bowl somebody had knocked over.