TW: Blood, violence

    Everything stopped. People stood like statues all around me. People in cars, men on bicycles, babies in carriages all lifeless, frozen in time. I stood on the cracked sidewalk, my heart stuttering in a staccato beat. The world slammed to a halt, jerking unsteadily beneath my worn tennis shoes. The sun darkened drastically, turning Main Street into night. I blinked, suddenly alone by the road; there wasn’t a soul in sight. Only the buzzing of the street lights broke the brittle silence. A burning, slicing pain flared from my stomach, and I felt the front of my shirt grow wet, but my vision was too blurry to focus on the blooming stain. Flashing red and blue lights danced across the wet asphalt, creating strobe lights on storefront windows. Sirens wailed in the distance, shattering the quiet, echoing loudly in the dark alleyways behind the buildings. Fear wrapped it’s cloak around me, but that couldn’t be right. When you’re tough like me you don’t get scared. I wanted to shrug it off, but my knees weakened anyway, and I grabbed the railing of the store steps next to me as I slid down to the cement, pressing the cold metal against my forehead in a futile attempt to keep from throwing up.

    The sirens rang in my ears, filling my brain and drowning the thoughts I had into a murky lake of sound. I lifted my head. I could see the lights behind the sign for the gasoline station. I need to move. I tried to stand, to run, but the ground tilted under me. Keeling over, my stomach heaved, and I puked, splattering all over the sidewalk. My shoulders shivered violently, chills wracking my body. Gasping, I crawled away from the mess, small chips of cement digging into my palms. I slowly leaned back against the railing and closed my eyes, the frosted metal cooling my hot skin. The blood roared in my ears, and my pulse throbbed. What is wrong with me? Something warm lethargically rolled off my abdomen, a dark crimson teardrop stain on the sidewalk. I opened my eyes and watched it spread, dripping thickly like honey, too exhausted to do anything else. 

    Police sirens pierced my eardrums, switchblade sharp. Triggered like a gunshot. I hauled myself to my feet, body weak with urgency.  The cop cars are so close, and drawing closer still…

    I bolted down the street, despite the slashing pain in my stomach. There was an urge inside of me screaming at me to get away as fast as I could, as soon as possible. I couldn’t get caught now. Now when I didn’t even do anything. I swung around the corner of Main and Center, using the street sign to keep from collapsing sideways into the middle of the road. My feet slapped on the cement as I ran, the only sound in my ears as the sirens seemed to fade away.  Déjà vu clouded my vision, distorting my brain….

Slap. A warm trickle slid down my skin, leaving a red trail in its wake. 

Slap. Tommie’s maniacal grin as the blade of his switch flicked out, seven inches of lethal steel that gleamed in the half light.

Slap. Cigarette smoke in a clouded bar, the only sound the rolling of billiard balls across the pool table. 

Slap. Gunshots thudding against the road, a lone figure standing in the rising smoke, silhouetted by street lamps, surrounded by a halo of blinking red and blue lights. 

My shoes stumbled over the sidewalk, catching on broken pieces. My momentum carried me forward, dragging me down, down, down…….

Blackness rolled like spilled ink across my vision, bleeding from my eyes, my nose, my mouth, writing curses across the memories as they tumbled in and out of focus.

A car door slammed behind me. The force jarred me out of my daze. I collided with the brick wall of what must have been the corner store. I blinked rapidly, and the blackness behind my retinas cleared. Looking up, I gazed into the glass window. Distant red and blue lights reflected against the posters advertising for junk food and 75￠coffee. I listened for that piercing scream that always followed them, but I only found endless quiet. Everything moved like a silent movie, a picture frame with black and white edges. No sound came from the world around me. Hollow, I looked closer into the reflection, an empty outline of the life I lived staring desperately back at me. The only thing that was missing was me. 

Footsteps echoed through the choking tranquility, carried on the breeze that ruffled my hair. I couldn’t seem to turn around. I could only watch the midnight dark figure draw closer to me on the glass. 

“James?”

Blood rained onto the ground. My silence broke open and the numbness went away with it. The knife cut that opened my stomach suddenly wrenched with a torture that pushed me to my knees. Buildings swayed sickeningly; the unstable ground reeled. 

“What happened to you?”

I could barely decipher the words. Burning iron hands grabbed my lungs, and pain laced up from my middle. I tried to breath in, but only managed to make a sound like a dying animal.

“Are you alright?” The figure dropped down beside me, placing her hand on my arm. “What happened to you?” she repeated.

I managed to look into her face.

August’s eyes were lined with tears, haunted and scared, as her shoulders shook from the fight to keep calm, to keep from crying. She looked so different that what she usually does, a different person without the happy light in her eyes or the smile on her face. She glanced fleetingly at the blood surrounding me on the sidewalk that shone in the distant yellow light of a street lamp. “Who did this to you?”

“Tommie.” I whispered, my voice barely audible. The agony of speaking nearly made the black wave fall again. “Knife.”

She grabbed my hand, my blood coating her fingers. “What were you-” She broke off. “Look,” she whispered, her voice wavering. “I’m going to go get the police, okay? Just- just stay alive until I come back.” She let out a sob, her words cracking. “Don’t die on me.”

She sprang to her feet and fled into the night, into the haze towards those flashing lights.

I watched my sister go, exhaustion flowing over me with an addicting pull. I wanted to give in to the drug, the murkiness of sleep. But as I watched August’s shadow flit around the corner, I knew I had something to live for. 

Still, the lull of everlasting silence dragged at the edges of my consciousness. Fog pressed at the corners of my eyes. The chill from the concrete seeped up from the sidewalk, sinking into my skin and freezing my bones. I couldn’t hold on, so I just let go.

The ground opened up beneath me and I fell, endless shadows whisking through my fingers as the small shred of indigo sky winked out in the chasm above me. I felt nothing. The hollowness inside me expanded until I was only a shell of the person I used to be. Almost as if I didn’t exist. Like my reflection in the window.

Car horns, the tinkling of bells on bicycles, wails of upset babies, the soothing voices of their mothers, and the crunching of feet on the sidewalk filtered in through the numbing emptiness. Car exhaust overwhelmed my senses, stinging my eyeballs. I blinked fast, holding my breath as the smog wreathed around me. More sounds, scents, and lights slammed down in a perimeter of 360 degrees, surrounding me, grounding me. I allowed myself to open my eyes to the world.

The piercing light that fell from the sky stabbed at my pupils, but the warmth on my skin was a relief after my endless night. Everything started moving again. People in cars, men on bicycles, and babies in carriages all unfroze as their hold melted away. I stood on the cracked sidewalk, my heart beat slowing, lengthening the beats from staccato to legato. The sun hung in the sky, perfect and round and golden. The bustle on Main Street hustled around me with a familiarity I knew by heart. A finger poked my shoulder. There was August, bright and cheery in the sun, her long, dark hair surrounded by a halo of light. How she should look, not scared and haunted. 

She grabbed my hand. Her skin was clean, no traces of red.“Come, on! What are you staring at? We have places to be, you know.” She yanked at my arm, nearly pulling it off as she dragged me down the sidewalk. She glanced quickly back at me, her face a beacon of laughter in the somber faces of the business people and flustered mothers around us. I couldn’t help but to smile, too, as we weaved between the people who gave us looks like we were psychos.

With every footfall, my feet slapped on the cement. But those haunting memories fell away, leaving a new, lighter feeling in their place. With every tug of my sister’s hand pulling me onward, I let go of the fear that used to followed me with a ghostly fashion. I’ve been trying to forget that night for about a month. That night that left me scarred and shattered, that made me wonder if I’d ever be safe. Turning in on myself, shutting everyone else out because I didn’t want to make them feel my pain. But they were, because I never gave them a chance to open the door.

Just now, having a flashback in a flashback, I finally pieced together the memories of what had happened. In that smoky bar, I stood up for another kid who Tommie had been brutally attacking, with words and fists. I hated seeing someone bullied. It’s one of the worst things in the world, so I had so do something about, because no one else was. The room fell silent. Tommie made a shot in his game of pool, the balls gliding across the table, before turning to me with a wicked gleam in his eye. 

“Meet me outside,” was all he said, leaning on his cue. 

I never did, but he cornered me in an alley behind Main Street when I was walking home. I should have known better than to walk alone. He flicked out that lethal switchblade with a cackle, slashing me open so quickly that at first I didn’t even know what happened. Then the blinding pain exploded, and I remember watching the first drop of blood wander down my skin before soaking into the denim of my jeans. He pushed me over before running out into the street, his knife still dripping with my blood. I went limp, sickness and pain sloshing in my stomach. Tommie’s silhouette blazed from the street lights as he crossed the road right in front of a cop car, pointing his knife at the officer like a gun. Gunshots pounded the asphast, and he went down in fire and smoke, maniacal grin and all. 

I wasn’t ever being followed by police. In my delusional mind I thought I was, the agony was so bad. 

August and I reached the corner of Main and Center, gasping for air. Strangely, she started laughing. 

“What’s so funny?” I asked her.

She shrugged, smiling. “Nothing. It just feels good to see you smiling again.”

It did feel good, to let happiness break down the walls that I had built inside of me. August, with her simple optimistic ways and bubbly personality, made me realize living my life, or any life, really, clouded in a somber or negative view shoved away any chance feeling joy. I was so focused on what bad that had happened to me that I forgot about all the good, all the reasons I lived for. And in only one sentence, she spoke of how much she cared. 

Letting go of the past was the only way to make amends with myself. To forget the fear and the blood and the pain of that night and just be grateful that I’m alive, that I got through it. 

I grabbed August’s hand. “We’ve got places to be, remember? Or did you forget?” She pulled her hand out of my grip and raced across the crosswalk, saying “I didn’t forget!”

I chased after her, but when I finally caught up she poured on speed, her light pink skirt billowing around her as her black Converse barely skimmed the ground. I’d forgotten how fast she can be. I somehow managed to match her stride, dodging procrastinating shoppers as they did their last minute holiday shopping. 

Main Street faded behind us as we outran ghostly thoughts of the past, chasing the joy of the moment, forgetting everything but the here and now, and what’s ahead. 

 The only thing on our minds: the future.