1. And so it began...

Every story has it's beginning, but none such as this one. What may seem to be fictional to some people, is more real than life itself to others. What is fiction? What is reality?

     The blood oozed out of the small slit in my wrist, even though I had barely grazed the skin with the razor. I hadn’t felt this good in days, maybe months, and I was on the brink of ecstasy. It’s rather funny how when I’m in pain, the only way to relieve it is by more pain.

 “You useless, ungrateful, stupid, ugly, burden of a girl! How dare you talk back to me?” My father’s hateful words echoed through my mind like a broken record. He had had one too many beers, or ‘mind-clearers’ as he liked to call them. Every day when he came home from teaching at the college, he sat down on the couch, got plastered, and then smacked me on the face for no apparent reason. I’d gotten used to it by now, which is the sad part.

     So, razor in hand and worries forgotten, I cleaned off my newest cut and wrapped a bandage around it like I’d done to all the rest. With a satisfactory grin on my face, I laid down under my plain white covers in my plain white bed inside my plain white room and tried to go to sleep. It was barely past eight but cutting myself always made me a bit drowsy.

     The quiet tick-tock of my white wall clock started an annoying rhythm in my head and soon I was humming to it. Most people would find this impossibly idiotic, but I thought it to be quite soothing.

     Downstairs, I heard my father screaming at my nanny, Susanna, like a drunken buffoon. I had never liked my nanny very much, but I felt sorry for her. She was an idiot, but even idiots didn’t deserve that sort of treatment. If I wasn’t such a scaredy-cat, I would have gone downstairs and helped her, but I had already gotten comfortable and decided it was best to stay in my room.

     As I drifted into the meaningless existence that is sleep, I began to think about my past (never a very good idea when you had a family history like mine). I though about my mother (who had only last year been sent to the mental institution because of ‘hallucinations’ as the medics liked to call them. I, for one, wanted to know what exactly was a hallucination, and what was reality? How do any of us know what’s there and what isn’t? Just because some of us can’t see the things others can, that doesn’t mean those people are sane. Maybe they’re just not looking hard enough.

     Soon after my mother’s departure, my father had taken me out of public school and hired Susanna to teach me at home in stead. I didn’t see the point of that, because frankly, if I didn’t pay attention at school, why would I pay attention at home where I had many more things to distract me? So, spending my days sitting at my living room table listening to Susanna’s riveting lectures, I had plenty of time to think. That was all I did most of the time. When I wasn’t thinking, I was daydreaming, and seeing as my mother had gone insane, that wasn’t looked kindly upon by my father.

     The clock went on ticking while the long hand pointed to the twelve mark and the short one pointed to the same one. It was midnight, and I was still awake. Wonderful. Don’t get me wrong, I loved staying up, but not when my father was home, and especially not when he was drunk. I’d have given anything to have an escape. Little did I know, I’d get one soon enough.

     My father’s yelling quieted down in an hour or so, and I was able to doze for a bit, not quite sleep, but close enough. Another hour passed in this awkward fashion, and just as I was about to drift off, I heard a scratching at my window. It was Dinah, my mother’s cat, begging me to let her in. It was raining you see, and Dinah hated rain with all her might. I got out of bed reluctantly and unlatched my window. She jumped in and shook herself violently, spraying cold water all over my bare legs.

     “Stupid cat! Go shake on dad or something, you mangy flee bag!” I grabbed her neck scruff and was about to kick her out of my room (literally speaking), when I saw a shadow flicker in the far corner of the hallway that connected the upstairs rooms. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it made Dinah start up a hissy fit (literally). The stupid cat scratched me and I let go of her. She bolted off toward the shadow, which had long gone disappeared, just as quickly as it had appeared. “What the…?” I muttered, following the enraged feline out of pure curiosity. I had to put on some clothes first, because knowing Dinah, she was going to follow it all the way to the poor critter’s last breath, and that meant that she’d be chasing it outside. In the rain.

     I put on a black sweater, a black t-shirt; my old ripped blue jeans, and a pair of worn converse. My usual outfit? Yes. Then, half willingly, I ran after my cat. Most people would get a couple million dollars or a fancy pearl necklace in their parents’ will, but no, not me. I got my mother’s cat. Not much of a prized possession, if you asked me. But alas, no one ever asked me anything. I had just about as much say around here as a baby about its gender.

     I could barely keep up with Dinah. When she found a suitable animal to use as target practice, she used all of her ‘potential energy’ to take it down. Tonight, it seemed she had more than usual. As she closed in on the poor vermin (this was only an assumption, I hadn’t actually seen what the critter was), I found that we had run all the way to the middle of the forest that surrounded out manor. I had only been in here a couple times, each time staying at the very edge of the menacing woods. My mother used to tell me that there were wolves, mountain lions, and other predatory creatures in there, hungry and waiting for a little blond girl to come by so they could eat me up. I never believed her stories, but I wasn’t one to take risks when it came to my life  (yes, I realize that cutting myself is life threatening).

          I stopped to take a breath. “Dinah, cool your jets for a bit, will you? Mom would hate it if I lost you, and I know that if I let you run off, you’ll never come back.” Unfortunately, the cat was so hell-bent on massacring the poor animal (and whatever other animals she would come across), that she heard none of this and kept running. She finally dove into an unusually large rabbit hole and I hoped this would be the end of our wild goose chase. I was far off.

 

Author's Note

Please ignore grammatical errors, punctuational mistakes, and structural flaws. All will be fixed once, or if, I publish this story.
~CheshireCat

Reviews

[Axcel Y.]

Well written I must say, although I do agree with Ryan that the rabbit hole is a lot like Alice in Wonderland. Great job overall.

[Ryan]

I LOVE THIS. Typically, I have something constructive to say, but in this case I don't. The only thing you might want to fix up is the rabit hole part...too much like Alice in Wonderland. Otherwise, amazing job! I'll read on...