Excerpt: The Journals

The room, of course, hadn’t been cleaned. The first thing that attacked her was a mist of dust, or rather a fog of dirt. It seemed to settle well on her skin, but the part that got into her eyes unsettled her. The last thing she wanted to do was enter the room blind.

One had to see what they had set out to see.

So her hands desperately rubbed her eyes, trying to at least save one of them. Then the numb-ing pain came. Upon opening her eyes, she thought she was still blind. The hit was hard. The pictures. The portraits. The frames. The smiles. The eyes. The hands. It was them.

The skeletons of her childhood. The bearers of no sleep and seas of tears. The grim reapers of despair. The harvest was her heart. Her feet sank deep into the dirt. Her eyes were wide through the mist of dust into the air and on her face. Her hands were arrested half-way through the air, as if pointing at nothing.

The room had been intact. Except for the layers of dirt covering everything – the eyes, the smiles, the hands, the faces, everything. The skeletons clattered.

There were only two monsters, but they were in the mirrors, walking like shadows, passing for a fleeting second, but she could see them. She knew those faces, the flimsy limbs and the covered eyes. She knew the smell of the rotting skeletons, rolling around in their graves, their hands reaching for someone to drag down into the ground, where she would lie, not restful but rest-less.