Red August.

Thump, thump, thump.
The sound of my heart was tearing my eardrums in my nightmare plagued sleep. It had been 3 days since my failed attempt of taking my own life. 3 days of tubes violating and crawling in my broken body, 3 days of my heartbeat shaking the very walls of my shattered mind, 3 days of idiot doctors poking and prodding at my callous skin, 3 days of Nurses dragging themselves through another day to a job they hate, secretly loathing me, 3 days of children’s pleas left hanging in the air, from their pain, 3 days of nurses cramming pills and medicine down my throat, forcing me into a world of relentless nightmares.

I could not tell you how much pain I was in, I could not tell you how many times I endured it. Cancer. That’s what I can best describe it. It was eating away at me. Eating away at my flesh, eating away at my mind.

The dreams have radically changed since I’ve endured this place of torture. The same dream etched into the depths of my mind. The darkness would consume my mind, and like a fiery firm hand from god, would drag me into a place of torture. I had lost count on how many times I tossed and turned throughout those nights. Although my body ached for sleep, I couldn’t bear to do it, because I knew what would happen if I did.

How many times must I be ripped apart in front of the faces of my enemies, Their manic laughter filling their lungs, driving me to utter madness, their green eyes glinting bloodlust as my heart pumps out a final pint of my cold blood. Must I watch the nurses’ faces through a cloud smoke bleed and decay? Must my eyes be unmoving as they watch my mother being beaten to death by my neurotic father? The thought had occurred it might be the drugs morphing my brain into a terrifying hell, but it seemed too much real to be a simple drug induced hypnosis of the mind.

These days are filled with never-ending paranoia. From the moment when the moon hangs to the minute the sky turns into an unbearable blue, I would hear whispers teasing me softly until it’s screaming for me to just end it. And no matter how many drugs are rattling in my brain, I still felt my father’s snake like eyes behind my shoulder.

Darkness fell over the sky, and the light in my room was flickering furiously, as I watched sick children’s mothers and fathers pass by my cubicle with cheerful balloons and toys clutched in their eager hands. No one had visited me today, and the drugs flowing through me made me weaker than I already was. They had placed a tray of guck that they were meant to call food, from which I had no intention of eating because the mere sight of it repulsed me.

Though my stomach was begging for food, the guck just sat there on its tray while small flies hummed around it. They had given me a fork too. I didn’t use it. I had no means of using it ever.

I heard wrenching noises as a small river of water crawled into my space. I realised that the nurses were probably scrubbing whatever made it on the tiles.

I thought of my parents, of where they were. I then left myself with my deductions.
My father undoubtedly went to a bar and my mother must of had wandered off deep into the hell over an hour ago. I chuckled to myself. I wouldn’t be surprised if the hospital staff mistook her for a patient. She wasn’t, of course, but she might as well be. These past few days had put her into some kind of trance. She barely ate, wandered off to strange places and wouldn’t come back until a nurse or a visitor would lead her back. I wondered to myself. What made her this way?

Maybe she was always this way and you were too wrapped into your own problems to see it. a voice said in my mind, Or too selfish to see it.

I jumped to the sound of the clacks of the curtain that played along the lines as the opened the curtain slightly. Terrified of the world seeing me like this, I shielded my hideous appearance from their judging eyes with my cut hands.
My cuts were dry but deep. The cuts weren’t fatal to stop me from doing everyday things. My bruises, however, were. They were vibrant and tense. One had gone on to turn into an infected dirty yellow.

Now a head appeared through the slits of the curtain’s fabric. It was a woman. Although I knew she was a woman, her face itself, seemed almost foreign to me. And I felt as if I had never seen such a thing. Her face was painfully drained of all colours. Her forehead was lined with creases and her beady black eyes peered up at with a false sense of politeness. A tacky bland smile strained across her face.

“Dear, it’s time for your medication.” Her wrinkled cheeks dropped, sagging as she spoke. I could smell very clearly the scent of tobacco and smoke when her mouth opened. Reminding me of another one of my nightmares, I’d dream of the nurses shedding their skin and revealing themselves as dragons. I made a small cough of discomfort.

Her voice truly sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard, and I flinched at the sound of it. I muttered a string of curse words as the nurse opened the curtain further and slipped her body in my cubicle, and she shot me a sceptical look. I saw she was holding two small cups with two small capsules in them in her bony frail hands.

“No.” I gasped softly.

My heart quickened. I knew if I took those pills I would be sucked into my world of nightmares again. I shook my head but she walked closer to me, regardless.

“But, sweetheart, you need these to sleep.” She said in a way that made me think of the fragile school counsellor.

“No!” My chest rose as I said it louder and with such raw emotion it sounded nothing like me. Suddenly, it’s all too much. All those memories flooding back in fragments. Holly….the train….nightmares…”Don’t ever cross me again.”….green eyes….the car crashing. They all hit me as if I had never felt pain ever before in my life.
My hands began instinctively fumbling desperately for something that wasn’t there. Searching for a weapon. I watched as my hands coiled over the fork gently at first, then I watched to see my hands grip onto the fork, and as she grew closer, I pushed the fork’s tip onto her cheek roughly, dug deep into her flesh and slashed at it. It was over before her or I knew what I had done.

I watched as the heavy thread of blood course down her wrinkled cheek then drip lightly onto the tiles. Then the full weight of the thing burst through my veins.
At first, I couldn’t believe it was me who did it. That I had attacked this stranger, who seemed determined to be a nuisance. But as the nurse’s happy-go-lucky feature dissolved into fear, I felt something else that came in as quite a shock. It felt good do it. Because from all I’ve gone through, it finally happened. I struck fear into one of them. Because, suddenly, I wanted to nurse’s bones break, I wanted to see her blood ooze out of her, taste her tears, anything to make her suffer. I’m not sure what made me feel like this.

I seemed like an infant, the way how I seemed somehow fascinated with the blood. The light in the room made the blood have a silvery glow to it, and so it fascinated me all the more. It seemed like the moon itself was bathed in blood.
I then stared at the nurse. Everything seemed so surreal, as if everything had somehow changed, but everything was just as it was a day ago.

The nurse was now desperately finding something to steady herself, but finding nothing, she fell backwards with an astonished face. Despite her lathered skin, the vein on her neck her bulged out clearly. The nurse let out a terrible scream, breaking whatever trance I had been in. And in an instant, doctors rushed to help. The nurses held me down tightly as I kicked and screamed.
“We’re going to have to sedate her.” The doctor spoke firmly.

One of the other doctors gave a slight nod of recognition to the doctor who spoke. His hand fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a needle. He examined it closely underneath the flickering light, and squeezed it just enough let out a thin string of glassy liquid. He seemed to look at me with contempt.

My pleas and cries filled the air around me. I didn’t understand these dark desires swirling around in my head, all I knew was I wanted to do it again. I just wanted to hurt somebody, anybody.

That sensation from that first hit of that needle was absolutely terrifying. I felt the vortex of my nightmares pry open. Sounds became distant, as if I was held underwater, my veins felt like ice, I felt my muscles melt slowly, and then everything was swallowed into darkness as the vortex sucked me in.