Wishful Writing

A man is haunted by his own characters. And no one believes him.

Wishful Writing

By Gabrielle Esposito

The room was dim. The only light that was able to reach me came from the barred square on the door. Even that was artificial and unsatisfying. I reached my fingers towards the yellow beam. It washed my skin in its luminescence. My flesh gave off a pale glow. I had grown white from lack of contact with the sun in the week I had been there. I missed the warmth on my face, and the sight of the golden orb against the pale blue sky.

Outside my cell, I could hear the screams coming from the other crazies who had been locked up with me. I tried to ignore them. But their cries were so full of pain and riddled with frustration, it kept bringing me back to the night that got me placed in this madhouse. In the ten thousand eight hundred twenty four minutes and forty two seconds I had been in this Godless place, I hadn’t found a way to shut them out.

Maybe if my mind wasn’t so shattered by the loss of my journal I could concentrate on killing the drilling sound of human screams. My entire body ached and bled at the loss of it. Those pages had been my drug, the pen my needle. Each time I pressed the plunger on the writing utensil, I found myself slipping into worlds where everything was possible. Having lost it, I felt a gaping hole in my chest that was filled only with cold desperation. The shock of the frigidness kept me awake most nights.

I turned my back on the door and sat staring at the padded walls of my room. I was beginning to count the stitches on the fabric that had bit into the cloth to hold it to the soft down of the wall when I heard a set of keys jingling close to my door. My head twisted to see who it was. A guard, his hat casting a black shadow over his face, peered in at me.

“Come on, Reimer,” he said. “You’re going to see the doc today.” He opened the door and a flood of light spilled into the cell. It was horribly bright. I had to hide my eyes and turn away like some blood sucking horror.

“Why does he want to see me?” I said. I stood up, my arm still shielding my eyes.

“Have to get you evaluated, ‘cause you’re new.”

“I get to discover what category of crazy I am?” I asked. “How wonderful.” I held out my wrists for the guard. He raised an eyebrow, as if he wasn’t used to people in the madhouse cooperating with him. He pulled out a pair of steel handcuffs and opened them. The grinding of the teeth as he closed the cuffs around my wrists sounded hauntingly final.

The guard pulled me gently in front of him and I started to walk. I would cooperate only

because it meant that I would keep a touch of my dignity. I tried not to look in at the others as I walked, but it was difficult. I felt like I was a at a circus, and had entered the tent of a freak show. The glaring eyes stared at me. Teeth gnawed at the metal bars, letting off a vicious clacking that made my mouth hurt. Some were howling like wolves on the trail of their next meal. But it was worse when I could see a near lifeless figure staring at me from behind the bars. When the cell didn’t speak to me, I knew that the person inside was so far gone that death was more merciful.

    “How come you don’t scream along with them?” said the guard. We had made it through without getting assaulted by anything. I considered myself lucky. We may have been met with cries and insults, but nothing else. The prisoners had a nasty habit of throwing their feces. The floor was stained and slick from it.  

    “Because I am not like them,” I said. “I am not crazy, like they tell me.” The guard gave a smile that I knew was elicited from pity.

    “Come on,” he said. He dragged me by the chain of my handcuffs. The office was just a few feet away. It was clearly placed there for the sole purpose of  meetings with crazies. Its barren decor told me as much. There was simply a stool with a table in front of it and a chair. The two were place a distance apart from one another. I guessed the chair was for me and settled into it.

    The doctor strolled in a few minutes later, and nodded to the guard that he could leave. As he turned to go, the man gave me a small nod. I returned it, already feeling the doctor’s eyes on me, already being analyzed like a bug under the hot and unforgiving light of the microscope. The man settled into the stood and placed a notepad on the table. In his lab coat, he was a speck of white against the otherwise gray backdrop of the room. His hair was still mostly colored black, but there were streaks of white in it.

    “So, Mr. Reimer,” he said, “I hear you are a very interesting character. I don’t usually meet with people so soon, but they told me I would enjoy meeting with you.”

    “That so? Well, I feel honored.” I watched the fog of my breath float away. My hands were already turning numb from the cold atmosphere of the room.

    “How did someone as great an intellect with you manage to fall from grace?” said the doctor.

    “I told you. I’m not crazy. I know what I saw.”

    “As the police tell me, you were ranting about your story coming to life. I believe you published it under Fresh Meat? It was in the New York Times as part of the Halloween special, right? I remember reading it. Gave me chills.”

    “Thank you,” I whispered. I could feel the restlessness setting in. I was growing tired of this game of skirting around the truth. I shifted in my chair, turned my hot gaze towards him like an unforgiving spotlight. “I’m not going to tell you anything that I didn’t tell anyone before. I know what happened. I saw it with my own eyes, and I have never been a man to be dramatic. Yes, I have an imagination. Perhaps mine is more active than others. But I have never been so lost in the realm of story to forget reality.”

    “Are you sure? Maybe you fell so in love with your writing, you wished it could be true and it just sort of happened?” said the man. My eyes flicked towards him. I could feel them burning hot in my head.

    “I don’t appreciate being called a liar, doctor. In fact, I would rather rot in my cell for the rest of my life than have to answer to a man who doesn’t even see that a human is sane. I question the legality of your certification. It is plain to see just how grounded I am.”

    “I don’t mean to insult you Mr. Reimer. Your case is simply intriguing,” he said. But there was no sympathy in his voice. “Can you at least tell me about what happened that night?”

    “You already know everything. At least you come off that way. I don’t want to waste your time with information that you already know. The police seemed to have informed you about me thoroughly. I wouldn’t want to challenge your head with what I have to say about it.”

    He prodded me again with the same question, but my mouth wouldn’t open. I refused to even look at the man. A sick resolution settled in my stomach. I knew that nothing I said would ever undo what everyone else was so convinced of. I wasn’t crazy. I was simply at the brunt of something that no one believed in. The idea of magic was simply written off as the insane conclusion of a man who had lost his mind.

    The doctor called the guard in after many silent minutes of trying to get something out of me.

    “Take him back to his cell. Don’t let him come out unless he talks to me. Bring him his dinner. He is not to interact with anyone aside from you or I,” said the doctor. He pushed past the guard and was gone from the room in a blur of white.

    “Come on then, Mr. Reimer,” said the guard. “I guess we should get you back.”

    “I’m really not insane,” I muttered as I trudged towards him. The guard nodded.

    “Uh-huh. That’s what they all say. Even the killers who decided to paint their walls with their mother’s blood.”

    “I’m not a murderer, the story came to life,” I said. I couldn’t understand why I was telling this to the man who handcuffed me. But the relief I felt when I saw that he was truly listening to me was refreshing like a cool wave washing over my skin after a long day of work.

    “But how? Why?” said the guard. His shoes clicked on the floor as he followed behind me. I stopped in front of the door to let him open it. As he did, a wall of sound struck my ears. My cell mates still hadn’t given up their hopeless ranting.

    “The journal. It brings things to life,” I said. A hollow sigh exited my lips. It sounded strangely desperate in my ears. “And how I hunger for it. I feel like I’m in love with an abusive woman!” I laughed at the idea of it. The act felt odd in my throat. It felt almost wrong.

    Maybe I am going insane.

    “Let’s just get you back to where you belong,” he said. I nodded, allowing myself to be lead back through the hallway. The smell of the corridor that led me back to my cell reeked and made my eyes water. The sound of the insane made my ears hurt.

    “I’ll see you soon,” said the guard. He shoved his handcuffs back into his pocket and walked away, leaving me alone. I curled up on the floor of my cell, feeling the soft padding sink down as I put the weight of my head on it. I closed my eyes. I prayed for the merciful escape of sleep.

    A glowing light killed my slumber. The light made the black of sleep gray from its brilliance, and as soon as I opened eyes, I had to close them again. Black spots continued to dance in front of my vision as I struggled to look through the glow. As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I saw what had made its way into the cell. I scrambled forth and held it in my hands.

    It came back to me, I thought. The journal had a good, familiar weight to it as I held it in my hands. I turned the book, admiring it like I hadn’t seen it in over a year. I touched its leather cover and ran my finger along the thick stands of black string that wound around the edges of the yellow sheets of paper. It still had that rich smell of cowhide that had baked in the sun.

I smiled looking at the cover of it. My fingers traced the outline of the image of a bird taking flight, ran my hand on the circle encompassing the flying creature. My heart leapt for the delicate raven when my eyes reminded me that the circle looked like it was about to swallow the bird. I turned it away from me, unable to bear the idea.

    Already I could feel the power coursing through me. It screamed at me, telling me to open it. My hands itched to write across the surface of its pages, to get the words out of my head and onto the page. I resisted. I tried to fight it. I focused on the sound of rattling cage doors and the splat of vile things being thrown. I shut my eyes and placed the journal on the floor.

    It’s not real. I’m insane, they took it away, they locked it up far away from me.

    A sudden high pitched scream pierced the air and stabbed at my eardrums, making them vibrate against my skull. My eyelids snapped open. The journal was shining and beaming with an unearthly light that bathed the entire room as if it were alive. I could see the thin stripes of black coursing through the dingy white of the fabric.

The sound of the shriek was ragged, cracking and splitting as whoever it was raged on and on. I threw myself at the door, using the ledge of the window to pull myself up.

My eyes pinpointed the spectacle in a matter of minutes. There was a woman standing in the middle of the walkway. Her skin glowed with a bone-white coloration that hurt my eyes. She was clothed in a sheet of thin fabric, and she wore nothing else. I could see her n*****s, hardened from the cold, pressed up against the cloth. Her dark eyes held a blackness that was all too familiar to me. A man stood beside her, bathed in a gut-twisting tone of black. There was a shimmer to it, giving the illusion that it was gray. He held a hammer in his hand. One side was smooth, free of any imperfections. The other side housed over twenty metal spikes that lined the entire surface of its head. I watched in horror as the glowing man raised the hammer above his head. I saw the woman scream and writhe against her bonds. She lay in the grass, kicking and screaming with a desperation that made my heart bleed. Her eyes were open, pointing towards the sky. The man wore a grin on his face that looked more like his cheeks had been pierced with fishhooks and some invisible puppet master was pulling his skin upwards. He watched her with interest, and so did. Her innocent eyes flicked towards her captor. And then to me.

I felt myself spiraling, my head spinning as if were nothing more than a top at the hands of a child. The contents of my room disappeared in a dizzying blur, the starkness suddenly transforming into an image that was more than I could handle. I felt my knees cripple from weakness, driving me to the ground. That ear-splitting scream became louder and louder, as if it were getting closer. It reached inside my skull, shoving out all rational thought, biting into the very matter of my brain. I clapped my hands over my ears as some barrier against it, and then squeezed my eyes shut. At some point I knew I had begun to scream to drown out the sound of the woman because my vocal chords began to burn. Suddenly, the black of my eyelids brightened.

Don’t open them, dear God, give me strength to resist the urge, Jesus make it stop it’s happening again!

But I felt my eyes begin to open as if someone had placed their hands on my face and were prying them open. I tried to fight it, closing my eyes only to have them lifted upwards once again. The woman was so close to me I could smell the fear coming off of her. Her mouth yawned, unleashing that harrowing sound. I caught the quickest glimpse of her pale fingers resting on yellow pages of the journal. The once peaceful cover of the book had been bent open.

There was the quickened pace of steps as the man rushed forward. The silver hammer flashed in his hand. The woman turned her head away, unable to look.

The meat mallet crashed into her hand. That crackle of splintering bone filled my ears. The woman’s blood painted my walls a bright crushing shade of red.

Author's Note

Please feel free to make positive or negative comments. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, as it would further improve my writing. Thank you!

Reviews

[Inject Positivity]

First of all, the descriptions you have given are absolutely brilliant to let the reader feel catchy about the story.....The language is very simple and as a reader i was very happy reading....It was mysterious throughout the whole story....I love how you always manage to show your skills no matter what you are writing....I think you are very much experienced on this genre....Full ratings!!! My hat goes off to you.....God bless you....

[Gabrielle Esposito]

Thank you so much!!! The comment is very appreciated!