Silent Pantomime

Chapter 32 | Choke on red

Chapter 32🌌:

I knew I was dreaming.

The moment I had crawled out of my flashing cab, my mind exploded into colours of sleep. I didn't even get to my room, I had just collapsed up on my stairs as my eyes grew heavier. I felt Pride wrap up like a blanket over me, before my head fully drank the poison to join its own wonderland.

The whirling array of different hues of orange soon dispersed into a clearer picture. There was a couple sat on some dampened-green chairs, both pale and shaken, despite the salience of them both in stature. Visibly the misery was radiating off both of their hidden faces, the speaking silence there just to scream to the world of the despair they were both sharing. Their hands were intertwined with each other, attached with the combined force of them both looking too weak and frail.

The couple were in the middle of a corridor in some kind of ward, sat as if they were waiting for someone to take away the pain from them. Despite people walking past the couple without a second glance, the whole atmosphere of the room was brewing with some unfinished distress.

I walked over to them, sitting on the spare chair next to the shell of a woman. Her lifeless hair was slightly hiding her face, but the inconsistent rise and fall of her chest was enough for me to know she was crying. I still was drowned in blood, yet the women seemed to have more blood on her hands. It looked as though she had been thrown out of a plane without a parachute; the air sucked out of her lungs and only half breathing because she was only half living.

The man sat next to her looked almost exactly the same, with a grave face and broken eyes. His skin was completely drained of all colour, like a hyena had come and torn apart his flesh. He looked like an hourglass - an inevitable countdown, easy to break, time just wasting away.

The man noticed my staring and he slowly turned his head to make eye contact, not even needing to lean over the small frame of the second hourglass. The look he gave me was enough to dispirit the happiest of beings, with an invisible knife scratching deep over his face to draw out blood as a way too revive some life back into him.

Normally my reaction would be to give a small smile at him and use my angel eyes to help him burn some kind of inner flame, yet the shackles of depression seemed to even prevent that. Letting out a hefty sigh, I abruptly turned away to try to think of something to say to either of them, but my condemned mind could only think of one response:

"I'm so sorry."

Neither one of them responded to me, but the woman slowly sat up, allowing her hidden face to cower back out of the curtains. What I had said to break the ice wasn't particularly an educated phrase, because I didn't know anything that was going on except these two people were succumbed in sadness. However, the response to silence was accurate as I was truly sorry for whatever had happened that seemed to let a curse into the closed off corridor.

I knew I was dreaming.

Part of me wanted to run out of the door from the strange ward and force myself to wake up, but the main part of me couldn't imagine that I was actually lying on my stairs, drenched in blood, when I was here...the home of mourning. I was about to speak up again, knowing that I couldn't lose what was going on here, I was interested in what my own head was creating a storyline of. But the woman suddenly sighed and began to speak. Her voice was softly spoken and musical, and if it wasn't laced with the strained tears, it would have been beautiful. She started to recite a poem that I had never heard of, but I still couldn't bring myself to look her in the eyes.

"I used to love the colour red,

Roses and hearts, flowers and art,

Yet now it is the colour I see the most, and I hate that,

Red pumps through my body, and it would have done to hers,

But now she is playing hide and seek with her untold story,

While I sit sick drowned in her unseen memories.

The day I was told her heart stopped beating, I choked on red,

Her home was never meant to be, just lost somewhere in me,

But every time I think of her an angel cries,

And heaven buys my angel a star."

The woman stopped talking and I touched her hand that matched the tone of ice, making me feel that even in my sleep I could catch frostbite. She started to hum a soft made up tune, that somehow managed to ruin the ruin of the room instead of incite some gleam of happiness. The man sat next to her didn't react to her sudden lyric shower and if possible, he grew even graver.

My eyes wondered down to the woman's stomach which was showing a small bump. It was hard for me to comprehend how something was needed up there in the sky, dancing in starlight. She was torn away from life before she could even wrap her fingers around my thumb. I was unaware why she didn't get to smile on the world, which is why I was aware that all the woman could do was choke on red.

"Buy her a star," I whispered to the couple.

I looked the woman dead in the eyes as I could feel my consciousness swim out of the wonderland.

"I'm really sorry Mum."