Twisted

I flinched but didn’t let a sound leave my lips. It had to be another hallucination; it wasn’t normal for a knife to hover in the air. If anyone was around me, I didn’t want them to see me freak out. Although I guess it was weird already, with me on the ground, but they would see a girl in distress rather than an insane lunatic. I jumped up from the ground anyway, and stumbled backwards – I never knew it’d be this hard to walk when you couldn’t see anything.

As soon as my feet grew steady, the moving and the blurriness disappeared. I could see again. And with my vision back, I realised I was in front of an empty stretch of grass – I recognised it almost instantly. It was where my old home once stood, the home I lived most of my childhood in, the home my parents were murdered in. The town decided to demolish the house after the murders.

I turned my back on the lonely space and shock jolted through me when I saw someone behind me. My first thought was honestly Beautiful. Then I actually took him in and saw he had bright green eyes – less bright than mine, of course – and black hair that fell slightly too long. He drew a half smile onto his face and softly said, “Be careful.” That was it, nothing else, and before I could ask just what he meant, he turned away and left.

I stared after him. Something struck me as familiar, something about his black hair and green eyes.

My eyes widened and I knew where I’d seen him: in my hallucination, the one with the trees and the men with whispers that creaked. Millions of questions blurred my thoughts into train tracks that ran into each other. I looked around warily for any more scary hallucinations before I began to walk, the train tracks still riding in my head.

I made my way to my foster parents’ house without realising it, not remembering how the school day hadn’t finished yet. When I reached the front of the house, I shivered and thought I felt coldness cascading off it and coating me as well. I opened the door and stepped inside, calling out, “I’m home!” Usually, I was silent when I returned from school but today, I needed to feel some normalcy, even if it was just from my foster family.

Alexandria – my foster mother – appeared in front of me with an annoyed look in her eyes. “Shouldn’t you be at school? It’s not after three, is it?” Absentmindedly, she glanced at her watch and confirmed that it was only twelve. I bit my lip.

“I-I felt sick, so the nurse sent me home,” I lied quickly. Alexandria rose her eyebrows in a look of disbelief.

“Really? Don’t they call home to tell us first?”

Technically, yes. “Um, usually. But today the nurse was really busy ’cause some guys got in a punch up. So she just sent me home.” The more you lie, they say, the easier it is to see through it.

My foster father, Brian, walked in and regarded Alexandria and I. I crossed my arms and waited for him to say something. I didn’t hate him – he was hypocritical, had a temper that he couldn’t control and he didn’t really care about me, but those were just some bad qualities. I knew he loved Alexandria; in fact, she was the one who wanted to adopt me in the first place and he agreed to it, despite not wanting to. In a way, that was sweet.

“Isn’t she supposed to be at school?” he growled at Alexandria. He didn’t sound like he was in the greatest of moods.

“She says she feels sick.”

He turned his eyes on me and studied my face. “She doesn’t look sick,” he said but his tone was softer. He shrugged his shoulders and left the room, leaving the decision on whether to send me back to school or not on Alexandria’s shoulders.

She glanced at me and shrugged her shoulders as well, imitating her husband. “Either go back to school or go for a walk or something. He’s not very…happy today.” I nodded and was about to leave the house when I spotted the just-forming bruise on her upper arm. I left then, knowing my presence there would just make things worse.


I made my way to the park. Not exactly the most stylish place to be but the little kids were sweet and the weary mothers loved a free babysitter as they gossiped with their friends. However, the park was deserted when I arrived there and I didn’t really mind because I kind of wanted to be alone, to wonder and absorb my thoughts. My mind was still revolving around those hallucinations.

I slumped into a swing with rusty chains and a creak that sounded the second I disturbed it. I pushed my feet against the ground and more creaks fell into the silent air as I began to swing. With most children at school, the streets and especially the park remained silent, save for the occasional walker or car passing by. I liked the silence; it was peaceful and peace was something I needed at that moment.

Distractedly, I rubbed at a bruise on my upper arm, similar to Alexandria’s. Memories of when Brian had grabbed me a little too hard flooded into my brain. I thought of myself as lucky in a way; Brian wasn’t as abusive as he could’ve been and I rarely attained bruises.

I curled a hand around the chain and ignored the uncomfortable feeling it gave me, the rust cutting into my skin. I wondered in a passing thought if they’d ever replace the chains. My feet stirred up the dirt on the ground and I smiled slightly, happy that for just a moment, I could forget about everything and just be here.

I looked up in alarm when I heard a footstep and froze when I saw who had made the sound. Amazement, fear, shock, a number of different emotions stormed through me. My hand released the chain and shakily covered my mouth as I bit down a scream. I blinked and blinked, trying to make her go away but each time my eyelids opened, she was still there.

I lowered my trembling hand. “M-Mum?” I whispered. Even my voice was breaking out in shakes.

She smiled at first, a sweet smile full of the love I’d missed, but then it turned down in a frown. “But isn’t your birthday tomorrow?” she asked. Confusion rushed through the other mixed emotions and I asked her what she meant, what my birthday had to do with anything.

“Everything,” she answered, sorrow stuck to her words like the rust sticking to the chains. Her answer didn’t lessen the confusion; if anything, it increased it.

“Mum,” I whispered, unable to make my voice reach a point higher than that. “Mum, I thought you were dead. I saw your body. You’re dead!”

She lowered herself into the swing next to me and her face sunk into a cloud of concern. “This can’t be happening,” she muttered, talking to herself more than me.

“Are you talking about being dead…or not being dead, or whatever you are now?” I was struggling for words and had no idea what was going on. I wanted her to smile and tell me it’s okay and that nothing’s the matter and that she’s alive after all and that she’s sorry for waiting so long to tell me. Of course that wouldn’t happen. Something like that would only ever happen in a fairy tale.

She shook her head and the confusion in me grew like a plant that had had lots of sun. Talking to herself again, she murmured, “She’s seen. Stupid fire people, I thought they would know the consequences…”

“What?” I asked, feeling stupid but also wondering if my mother was insane. “What are you talking about, Mum?” My question had her eyes cutting towards me and a gaze stronger than a sunbeam shooting through me.

Another sweet smile bloomed on her face. “You don’t know,” she breathed. “It’s alright now. You don’t know.”

“Mum.” Impatience and unbearable confusion rang through my voice as clear as a window after it was cleaned. “What on earth are you talking about and aren’t you supposed to be dead?” My voice rose up near the end of the sentence, on the verge of hysteria. A conclusion suddenly formed in my head: it had to be another hallucination. Disappointment and fear deflated me.

“I’m just a ghost, or at least I guess that’s what you would call me now.” Wistfulness for the life she once had drifts through her tone. “And you don’t need to know what I’m talking about. Not yet.”

I sighed with frustration but since it was just a hallucination, it didn’t really matter what she was talking about. It wasn’t true, whatever she was trying to tell me.

Her ghostly hand reached out from her spot on the swing beside me to touch my arm. Her finger trailed in a circle, three times, around my bruise and slowly, it faded from sight. My mouth fell open in surprise but then I closed it and remembered anything could happen in a hallucination. By the time she was gone, the bruise would be back.

A song whispered from my mother’s lips and I recognised it as the song she used to sing to me to help me fall asleep. The first verse was always sung so quietly, I only caught pieces of it: “…even the devil himself….a wailing that cries…screaming of…distinctly colouring her eyes…but a stench in a beauty….the key…” Even as a little girl, curiosity had burned in me to know what all the words of the first verse were, but whenever I asked my mother to sing louder, she refused.

The second verse, however, was sung loud enough for me to hear most of the lines. By the time I was ten, I knew them off by heart. Mum continued to sing, her voice the only sound in the quiet park. “He, whose eyes betray that he’ll pass on in vain / Shivers in the curse upon those he once trusted / Ages of mysteries fall in flakes around his pain…” The song carried on unbroken.

When the song faded out, a silence fell over me and everything else around me. A moment passed before I looked to the swing beside me and saw that it was empty. Checking my arm, I noticed the bruise was still gone.