Sunshine Yellow

Chapter 3

I bolt up with a start as I always do, the sleep-suctions forcing me awake  without warning or choice. The clock sounds seven times in the background, and the lamplight flickers on with the start of a new day. As I pull free of my sleep-suctions, I hear breathing to my right—Alice, of course. They’re labored breaths, the kind she gets after running through the pipes. Obviously sleeping doesn’t require that much effort, which can only mean one thing where Alice is concerned.

           “More pictures?” I whisper.

            She nods, chest rising and falling at a shaky, uneven rate.   

            “Bad ones?”

            Her head bobs up and down repeatedly. A small sob escapes her lips.

            “Shh,” I say. I take off her sleep-suctions and begin combing through her hair with my fingers, pausing often to untangle the many knots she’s earned from tossing and turning. “Shh,” I say again. “Nothing can happen to you here. You’re okay, right?” 

            Alice does a quick once-over of her entire body before breathing out an answer: “Fine.”

            “See? They can hurt you in your sleep, but not for real,” I tell her. “You’re safe here with me.”

            She winces as I tug too harshly on a knot, and then begins to cry, this little ounce of pain all she had needed to overflow. I place a hand on her back and pull her against me, letting her bury her face in my grey nightgown. I barely catch a glimpse of her eyes before they disappear into the fabric. Wide and glazed over with tears.

            “But—but it was r—real,” she says between gasps. “They ch—chased me. I know they did.” Another heaving sob. “I ran real fast. As fast as I could go.”

            She’s shaking now. I let her wrap her arms around me, rubbing small circles on her back as she grabs fistfuls of my clothes. She has to hang on to something, I think, or she’ll fall apart.

            “But I tripped,” she says weakly, and clutches my nightgown even tighter. “I tripped, Cass. And they got me.”

            Her small screams vibrate through me as she lets them out into my nightgown. I shh her and rock her back and forth and smooth down her hair and untangle more knots, but the tears keep flowing. The pictures have never had this much of an effect on her before, have never made her come undone like this.

            Not knowing what else to do, I lean down to put my lips to her ear. “Live without fear,” I tell her. It’s a sort of nationwide motto that Mother taught me when I was young.  She had explained to me what it means, how Those are working to eliminate everything we’re afraid of so that we can live without fear. Even when I understood it, I still didn’t find the same spark in it that she did.  I’ve always found it an empty saying, but I desperately whisper it to Alice over and over in the hope that she might find comfort in it.

            Once her sobs and screams have dimmed to whimpers and moans, I ask softly, “Who chased you, Alice?”

            Alice sniffles and looks up at me. Her face is striped with the trails her tears have taken down her cheeks. “They did.”

            “Who’s ‘they’?”

            “The ones who want to h—hurt me.”

            “But what did they look like?” I demand. “Try to remember, Alice. What were their names? What did they do to you?”

            “I don’t know!” she cries. “Just stop, please!”