Us vs. the Apocalypse
Title: Terrifying, Honest Moments
Word Count: 512
Sometimes, you wake and think that everything will be alright.
It's a fantastical notion and you can usually wash it away in the shower, drown it in an abrasive stream of cold water and the acidic scrub of antibacterial soap. You can hide it under t-shirts and jeans, under your familiar black jacket, under sunglasses and fingerless gloves. But some mornings it lingers like a sheen of sweat, something tactile and uncomfortable on your skin, trickling in a ticklish line down the middle of your back.
It's not so much that you believe, but that you want to believe. You report for duty every morning with the film of dreams on your body and spend your day under the glaring sun with dust kicking around your boots and a fog of cigarette smoke in the cab of your truck.
You'll beg when you see them, the men with the white coats and clipboards, and they'll feed you the same tired lines about your potential, about the future, about hope and dreams. Their lies become a daily mantra of one more, one more, one more, and you believe them because you need to believe in something other than the futility of it all. They'll knot rubber tubes around your arms and scar your elbows like a drug addict, funneling chemicals into your veins so quickly your body forgets how to work.
For a long, blissful, beautiful moment, there is just the dim, sleep-like haze of half-death and the cold steel of the table beneath you, and you pray that maybe this time they won't shuffle you out to join the living, that they'll leave you here, they'll let it be finished.
But then you clock out at the end of the day and it's back to your two room apartment, back to your laundry hamper filled with bloodied clothing and the foul perfume of lives ended a second time, back to showers that can't run cold enough to freeze the fire in your blood. You'll stick your face in a trough of greasy burgers and cheap beer beside people you want to believe you love, and you'll raise your glass to whoever might have fallen, or to whatever pathetic victory you secured in a war that can't possibly end for the better.
And it will itch and sting as the night wears on, the scar that twists the skin of your arm into a tight knot over the bone no matter how many times the doctors cut it away, and the fever will sing in your veins and your vision will blur and you'll pass the dizziness off as drunkenness, the irritability as nicotine fits. You'll stagger into the night with the air tight to your body and the screams will be right there, at the back of your throat, on the tip of your tongue, ready and waiting. And when she curls her naked body against yours, she'll touch the scar and ask you where it came from.
In your most terrifying, honest moments, you're tempted to tell her.
Word Count: 512
Sometimes, you wake and think that everything will be alright.
It's a fantastical notion and you can usually wash it away in the shower, drown it in an abrasive stream of cold water and the acidic scrub of antibacterial soap. You can hide it under t-shirts and jeans, under your familiar black jacket, under sunglasses and fingerless gloves. But some mornings it lingers like a sheen of sweat, something tactile and uncomfortable on your skin, trickling in a ticklish line down the middle of your back.
It's not so much that you believe, but that you want to believe. You report for duty every morning with the film of dreams on your body and spend your day under the glaring sun with dust kicking around your boots and a fog of cigarette smoke in the cab of your truck.
You'll beg when you see them, the men with the white coats and clipboards, and they'll feed you the same tired lines about your potential, about the future, about hope and dreams. Their lies become a daily mantra of one more, one more, one more, and you believe them because you need to believe in something other than the futility of it all. They'll knot rubber tubes around your arms and scar your elbows like a drug addict, funneling chemicals into your veins so quickly your body forgets how to work.
For a long, blissful, beautiful moment, there is just the dim, sleep-like haze of half-death and the cold steel of the table beneath you, and you pray that maybe this time they won't shuffle you out to join the living, that they'll leave you here, they'll let it be finished.
But then you clock out at the end of the day and it's back to your two room apartment, back to your laundry hamper filled with bloodied clothing and the foul perfume of lives ended a second time, back to showers that can't run cold enough to freeze the fire in your blood. You'll stick your face in a trough of greasy burgers and cheap beer beside people you want to believe you love, and you'll raise your glass to whoever might have fallen, or to whatever pathetic victory you secured in a war that can't possibly end for the better.
And it will itch and sting as the night wears on, the scar that twists the skin of your arm into a tight knot over the bone no matter how many times the doctors cut it away, and the fever will sing in your veins and your vision will blur and you'll pass the dizziness off as drunkenness, the irritability as nicotine fits. You'll stagger into the night with the air tight to your body and the screams will be right there, at the back of your throat, on the tip of your tongue, ready and waiting. And when she curls her naked body against yours, she'll touch the scar and ask you where it came from.
In your most terrifying, honest moments, you're tempted to tell her.