10:45 am, 5 days before
"Move out."
Kiera hangs up the phone after she says it and leaves me standing in my hallway, a little put out by it. She texts me the same thing, three times:
Move out; Move out; Liv. Move out.
-
11:38 am
A few flats below me lives June, an elderly woman who I think at some point was a painter. She talks a lot about living in Italy, and from time to time she gets visitors.
More than I get.
"You look tired," she says.
I pick up my mail and ignore her, locking my box, and turn, intending to head back upstairs, before he paint flecked hands reach out and still me.
"Maybe you should stop listening to the Twins."
She shakes her head and dips her hand into my hood, removing a dead mouse from between the folds of fabric. She places it in my free empty hand and looks me up and down before closing her own mailbox and leaving. I want to reach out my own non-paint flecked hands and stop her, because no one has called Kiera and Leo the Twins since Leo stopped playing piano and Keira let her hair grow long (and nobody speaks to me anymore, I want her to stay). But I look down and find my hands filled, one with envelopes, the other with a dead mouse, so I can't, and she shuffles off in paint flecked slipper to entertain one of her many guests.
-
2:56 pm
What I don't think she realises is I'm barely listening to Keira and Leo these days anyway.
Two texts:
From: Keira – Move.
From: Leo – Oh Liv.
I delete them both, then block their numbers. If it were important, they'd say it to my face.
-
4:40 pm
Music starts to drift up from a few flats below – it's Elvis, crooning about blue suede shoes as if it isn't 4:40 on a Tuesday.
Something warbles from within my room, and if didn't know any better, I can swear it sounds like it's trying to sing along, groaning it's own tune that would better suit a song about helplessly falling in love, but we make it through his entire discography with playing that particular track.
I venture down two flights of stairs to ask June to stop playing Elvis, but she frowns at me and tells me she wasn't.
-
11:23 pm
Elvis is setting my teeth on edge, and so is the sound of fingernails dragging against my linoleum kitchen floor, stopping only when I look for them.
From under the bed, a clawed hand pushes a blanket, fallen and forgotten from the other night, out towards me , and it's almost as if it's saying 'you look tired'. I lie down on my bed with my hand winging in front of the space between the mattress, and draw the throw up from the floor (drumming with the sounds of hands beating it, thrumming with the sound of someone choking and shaking to the sound of Elvis). I hum my own version of his missing song about fools and wise men, and from under the bed, it warbles along with me.
Keira told me once:
Don't keep the drawings.
Try everything you can.
Read my messages.
Move out.
I never really listened to her, so maybe I should stop altogether.
Talons brush my had, I feel something watch me from behind the door, and, if I squint, I think there is a hand presses against the window.
"Night," I say to them. A chirp and a blink and a quiet tap back, and then I fall asleep to the sound of guitars and another rendition od the blue shoes song, as if we aren't all sick of it already.
-
3:10 am
No head, no limbs, almost nothing. Smooth flesh is a scarred ball, only a crying mouth at its centre, with two rows of teeth and what is possibly an eye, glazed over and staring at nothing.
Keira said: don't keep the drawings.
June said: don't listen to the Twins.
I sit, torn, at my beside table holding the sheet of paper between two fingers, and I almost fold it and file it away, before the stench of dead mouse and manufactured 'fresh' flowers hits me, my stomach turns, and I burn the page in the bathroom sink after heaving my guts up. It flakes into ash and swirls down the drain when I switch the tap on. For good measure, I go and fetch the balled up drawing from the night before as well, still sitting dejectedly on the floor of my room, and commit it to the same process. The scratching and choking from somewhere distant silences.
Something purrs I Can't Help Falling In Love into my side as it curls up next to me, tucking its claws away for the night, venturing out from under the bed, and it's possible June has no clue what she's talking about.
I can't keep the drawings.
I can't.
YOU ARE READING
From Where The Monsters Came
General FictionSometimes there are these nightmares. I only draw what I can remember. Liv, Kiera and Leo are tormented, day in, day out, by the monsters that crawl out of their minds each time they fall asleep. Who can say why they were chosen. Who can say how...
