Copyright © 2007 James Cheetham
All rights reserved, Wild Child Publishing.
"Rita?" a man's voice asked in her ear.
The line crackled in the form of distant thunderstorms that only existed in her confused mind. She opened her eyes to confirm this was no dream, that all of this, all of the insanity that surrounded her was real, and she existed within it, normal and stable and right with the world. A fine silk line had been spun, separating reality from hellish fraud. Her mind was the web catching both thoughts and memories, both equal in speculation and tangled in perplexity. Nightmares built ritually on fear.
The room around her, painted in the violet shade of early morning, held shadows cast upon the walls. The sun, a faint sliver of blistering orange, painted the tree-line of the horizon outside her bedroom window. Birds remained in silence, and the youthful breeze of spring soughed through the open glass pane. Even without that breeze the curtains would still find life; they trembled as the water inside the room lapped at them in anger.
"I need you, Michael. I'm going crazy." Nothing in her statement was a lie, every word she spoke she meant and felt. Her body wanted to separate, explode into a thousand individual pieces, each one obligated to take a tiny piece of her pain because every night like this one was pure torture. Every night was taunting.
If this is nothing more than a dream then at least let me wake up screaming. Don't just leave me here as always, trapped in a world inspired by my own lack of self-control.
"Soon, I think we will be ready," his voice replied, distant, tunneled and surreal. It was him, of course.
What if he's nothing more than my mind's insistence? What if it's only me wanting him so badly that I've convinced myself it's him? Can I be so brazen in the face of such tragedy? Can my inner world be saved or destroyed by my own self-centered mind?
Rita knew the answer but couldn't bring herself to face such truth, a trait handed down from generation to generation. Heredity based on malfunction some doctor alluded to in a story Grandma secretly clipped from a newspaper some years earlier. Rita found the clipping, and Grandma hastily crumpled it into a ball and discarded it into the burning drum outside.
"You must know how sorry I am. You must realize I was acting out of character." She tried to keep her words true even if they felt sharp upon her own tongue, forced from her throat like a flooded engine. "I slipped up—I admit it, but it wasn't because I didn't love or need you."
There, truth was simple. As simple as the green buds growing on the trees outside her window; and complicated like the process that made them possible. As real as the salt in the corner of her eyes and the water in her underwear that washed over the stinging surface of her skin.
I need him. He must understand that much no matter how silly my past decisions have been.
The telephone shook against her ear. It buzzed. She imagined him then—her husband—lying in a bed somewhere just as she was, in a place she did not recognize. In her mind he was there, the telephone in one hand, a picture of them in the other. The picture would be of her family: him, her, their two children, Zack and Angie. An image of a happier, tightly framed moment captured to prove at least to Rita that she had found the stability that validated her existence. She'd succeeded when the entire world insisted she could not.
That image, that vision of Michael, then dissipated under the deafening crackle of thunder, her wandering mind betraying her once more.
He spoke again.
"It's been a long time..."
Rita released a breath of hope, struggled to keep afloat and listen. She was soaked now, and the source of the water became elemental when his words were interrupted again, not by her own struggle, but by the storm outside her window—her reality, her sleeping mind. Her tongue tickled by the salt upon her lips foretold a predictable conclusion. The moment of hope was lost. She pulled the heavy damp blankets up and around her feet. She longed to be warmed by his promising words, but the guilt rested as frigid as the air above the water. Her private insanity was not the storm outside the window or the voice on the other end of her telephone. No, it was real; a monster with wandering hands and judgmental deathly blue eyes that lay waiting in the water at the end of her bed. Waiting as it did every night, just below the surface of the darkness surrounding the bed.