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Silent Reel
The strange thing about the music that awoke her was its silence. Her ears heard only the ocean as her eyes opened and she stared up at the ceiling, encrusted with grime, but the music was loud and vibrant in her mind. She reached up and brushed the hair from her eyes, and stretched out slowly. Almost instantly her hand flew to her stomach as she realized the pain was harsher than before.
Sile sighed, sitting up and glancing about the room, which was just as dirty and familiar at the ceiling. She looked around now, hoping to find Molly, her rag doll, among the debris on the floor, but then remembered that the doll was perched on her bed at home. Even the thought of the small, twisted doll brought a smile to her face. Molly had been her protector when she was little and had spent so many nights here, in her grandmother’s house.
She moved slightly, with the intent to get out of bed, but noticed that her thighs felt soggy and sticky. She snaked her hand down below the sheets, dreading the possible realization that it was just more blood. Instead, she felt only her skin, prickly from a few days growth of hair. She shuddered and spoke to the empty room. “Great, and now I’m crazy to boot. Grandma would have loved that.”
Her muscles ached, the bone-biting kind of ache that warned against movement and yet punished lethargy with stiffness. She ignored her muscles, pressed her hand to her lower stomach where the pain was just as real and impossible to ignore. She walked to the window and opened it, listening as the sound of the ocean rushed in and battled the imaginary music for control of her senses.
A small spider crawled from beneath the bed and flirted with her big toe. Sile glanced down, noticed the filth she stood in. The floor was brown, covered in the thick coat of loose chunks of drywall, rogue scraps of cloth from the bed and blankets, dirt and sand.
The whole room knew a similar state of disarray. She turned from the window and felt, for the first time in the week she had been sleeping in this room, her stomach turn. Her skin crawled as though a hundred spiders had brought her to this realization, and she suddenly thought that she could not get out of the house quickly enough.
Her feet hit the bottom of the stairs, and then kept heading for the door. She grabbed her purse and keys from where they had been sitting for the last week, and walked outside onto the porch.
She opened the trunk of her car, an old blue Chevy, and threw her suitcase in. As she started the beast it sputtered and coughed a week’s worth of phlegm from its exhaust. She sat, the wheel staring at her impotently. Sand had collected on the windshield. She got out, washed it off, and got back into the car.
She leaned into the door, and stopped short. On the seat where she had been sitting moments before were three, round, fat drops of blood, slowly soaking into the old upholstery. She ran her hands across them, felt that they were still warm, shuddered, and got in anyway. Spotting was usual, or so they told her.
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