Silent Pantomime

Chapter 30 | Buckets of blood

Chapter 30🌌:

Hell's bells and buckets of blood.

My mind was a mixture of comfort and pain, all wrapped up in this package that wasn't mine. Everything normal felt so out of touch, as if my head was swirling around in my stomach and my heart was rising into my throat. I didn't know if I was still wandering the streets, I didn't know if I was back in my dad's house - I just didn't know. All of my anger had subsided, my wrath had burned out. Instead, I was scared.

I felt like one of those black and white photos people post everywhere. You know what I mean? A ragged girl, who was dripping mascara and had scars on her wrist, with a cut out over her mouth that looked like it was from a book saying "I'm scared of myself". I didn't think I would have had the power to destroy myself, because I thought only people's attention being wrenched from me could have caused that. Yet in that moment, I was more scared of myself than the world. In the swaying waters of my mind, that were increasingly getting more and more unsettled, all I could think of was the darkness that I was capable of. I was lost and it killed me inside.

My mum had always said to me when I was younger, "Hell's bells and buckets of blood," which was replaying in my ears to the point where my ear drums might well have burst. It was her way of blaspheming, instead of saying 'Oh my God' or 'Jesus Christ'. I'm pretty sure that the only reason her old catchphrase was running through my veins was because it felt like my thoughts were hell's bells; a secret song that could kill, and that my entire body felt like it was drowning in buckets of blood. Blood is thicker than water after all.

The only thing that eventually broke into my mind was the sound of sirens. The sound heresies were smacking my brain with bricks, as I crawled along the ever-growing pall of darkness that extinguished any forms of light, or in this case, hope. It had started off as a low buzz but soon built up, so the blaring sirens shook with such an idiosyncratic and icy tone, that I could feel it creep right to my very essence.

Sirens were strange things in my opinion anyway, why were they named after a creature that were known to lure the heartbroken to death? The real myths of sirens, that today's children would call 'mermaids', were beings that sang with such loving sombre that they could grant anything impediment. Her call would be able to mirror the pain and heartache of these blackened souls, and then drown them in euphoric darkness. That was why I was one of yesterday's children, I questioned things instead of sugarcoated it. Why were sirens named after man-killing and man-eating beautiful beasts? And why was I hearing them?

Annika's sickening cackle had been drowned out for a long time, as if it had too been drowned in the blood buckets and then subsided by the monsters of my head. I was desperately trying to think of what had happened, but every time I got close to thinking, the sirens would get too loud for me to bare. I wanted to shoot a flare up into the sky to ask for help. But if I sent a flare into the night sky, the world might have been blinded by the light - then I would have been back to square one.

I remembered being angry, extremely angry. After hearing the comment about my mum, the only thing that my sense could see were the heels of my wrath. I remembered my screams mixed with the sound of an alarm that resembled agonised battle cries, and I remembered a reddish liquid trickling down from too many parts of my body to count. However, no pain came, just the brutal sound of it.

After that, I don't remember much. Just snippets.

The prodigy of Satan had let out a insufferable laugh, that soon twisted into a hysteria of horror; the word 'wrath' had been scratched onto the ground in the same reddish liquid; and the letter in my pocket was just the extra weight of being an inanimate paradox. Apart from that, absolutely nothing was allowed to enter the slim canal of memories.

It was as though God was up there somewhere, telling the world not to judge my state, as she was forcing me to walk through a storm. I just hoped it was nearly night, as stars were my own, special religion and they would have got me out of this mess. I could only rely on the stars to save me from myself. I didn't know if I was crazy, experiencing some extreme cerebral disease, or even dead - but either way, I was being my own worst enemy and was screeching to get out of my own head.

The problem with people being alone for long periods of time is that they can go insane. The problem with me is that I wasn't most people, and could lose any sanity much quicker if I was stripped from the bounds of my life source. Which I was. Luckily for me though, insanity is relative.

So I screamed.

The thing about screaming is that it is awful for your voice, but can do wonders for your heart. My head overruled my heart though, so it could do wonders psychologically too. Just screaming, it can save you. Sure I got a massive headache, but you have to fight fire with fire
- even if that causes a huge conflagration in your head.

Eventually the blackness danced away in a trance, following my own personal siren.

As soon as I let out a massive breath, beads of sweat rolled down my forehead and my heart rate sped up with a deathly manifestation. The flares of sirens didn't decrease though, it just combined with the sounds of my heavy breathing. I groggily stood up, and from the half-glimpse of the scene I saw, I realised that instead of waking up from my regular bed, I had risen from my death bed.

I had been lying on the concrete, in the same exact place I had remembered feeling the point of beyond anger. My entire body was quivering with the sheer bitterness of the cold weather, and I couldn't tell if my hands were blue from potential frostbite or the whirling lights surrounding me.

My mouth let out an uncontrolled whimper as I turned around to look at the absolute carnage of the street. The metallic taste of blood exploded in my mouth, as I had bitten too hard on my cheek at the shock of the situation. Police cars, ambulances, sirens - and I was in the middle of it all.

I looked down next to me, at first appalled by the sight I saw, and had most likely caused. However, instead of feeling a single sense of worry or panic, I wanted to laugh. You would've been disgusted with me if you knew what I had seen, and even more disgusted that it had sent me into a hysteric fit of laughter.

However, someone thinking I'm twisted is someone just spending an extreme emotion on me, and therefore attention; which is exactly what I wanted. So I just stared up at the sky, smiling about the chaos I had no reminiscence of causing.

As I had said before, insanity is relative.

But the stars had come out.