Excerpt: A Fine Line

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but rather a mystery to be lived." ~ Unknown

"Sometimes when you lose you're way, it's really just as well, because that's when you find yourself." ~Brad Paisley, Find Yourself

"Look in the mirror. ...deep breath. Realize, you’re just a face. Another face in the crowd. Look around and see that we are all faces. A mere image of who we will once meet..." ~ TJ Collins, Faces

Vivian’s eyes opened almost the second the hand clamped down on her mouth. The room she was in was dark, and panic quickly seized her. She began to fight the hand, flailing and struggling against its strength, but no matter how hard she fought, it seemed to move with her. She yelled and swore against it, but its grip was so tight, she hardly made a sound. Finally, in a last ditch effort, she licked it, before rolling her eyes and dropping her head back onto her pillow. She let her hand slide off her mouth and down to the bed before wiping it on the sheets.
“Viv, girl, you have got to stop doing this to yourself,” she muttered, before crawling across the bed and pulling a small notebook off the desk at the end. Before long she was under the covers, writing by the light of her cell phone.
*I woke up muffling my own screams again,* she wrote. *And of course, like last night, I panicked. I can’t keep doing this every night, I’m beginning to feel it in the day. Even the pills don’t keep me out through the night.* She heard someone shift in the bed across from hers and clicked her cell phone off. When she thought it was okay to continue, she turned it back on.
*I was with someone this time. He had seen the murder, too, had reacted very violently. Hera locked us away somewhere… somewhere dark. There were monsters in the darkness.*
She paused and read over this sentence a number of times. It sounded childish, but she couldn’t help that. There was no other way to say it… there really had been monsters in the darkness.
*They were laughing at us, taunting us.*
*“The great Eros, stuck with the Titans,” they would say. “Look at him cower.” …he wasn’t cowering. Only I could see that he was praying, begging for death. Begging to join… I didn’t catch her name. One of them touched me. That’s when I woke up, why I woke up screaming. It felt like*
She quickly scratched out the last three words, and began chewing on the end of her pen. Did she really want to write that down? Did she want to admit it? She stared at the page, at the three scratched out words, chewing on her pen.
“I don’t want to, but I need to,” she finally whispered.
*It felt like something actually grabbed me.* Blue eyes looked up from the page, toward the foot of her bed, as if she expected to see something there. Of course there was nothing, and she swore at herself for thinking otherwise. She let her eyes fall back on the page, taking in the words that lay before her. It seemed sufficient. Not too much detail, but enough to recall what she had dreamed. She moved to close the notebook, but remembered something. She scribbled it down, then put the notebook away, turned off her cell phone, and laid back down. Her arms folded underneath her pillow as she stared at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to take her once more.
She had done this enough times to no longer be annoyed by it. It became a type of ritual for her, and she had no problem going through the motions. What bothered her most was the fact that her body knew to cover her mouth, but her mind didn’t. Waking up screaming from a nightmare was normal. Waking up panicked because you thought you were being kidnapped? Not so much. She stared into the darkness, her eyes adjusting and starting to make out dark shapes in the room. And then she felt it. The fear that what she was dreaming was more important than she thought; the fear that bad things could be coming. She felt a smile prick at the corners of her mouth.
“Something wicked this way comes,” she said quietly, chuckling slightly as she did. She let her eyelids fall shut, the familiar tug of sleep laying heavily on them. And as it was every night – along with the fact that she was frightened, or annoyed; along with the fact that her heart was still beating like a drum – she was worried. Worried by the words she had scribbled down in her notebook at the last second, the words he had spoken… worried by the tone of Eros’ voice when he said it.
*“Take away love,”* he had said, *“and our Earth is an empty tomb.”*