The Sound of Sea Shells

There is pain and there is anguish. There are the sickening moments when she wants to claw her skin. She claws but does not reach. There is no colour, no black and no white.

There is grey. There is no more. The world has ended and she has gone with it. The sound of the seaside echoes in her ear, and she wonders if she is near the sea. Or is someone holding a seashell to her ear? Like her mother used to do when she was a little girl.

“Listen to this,” She would whisper, “if you press it to your ear, you can hear the sea.”

She cannot work out if she is led on a bed, or if she is floating in the clouds. She feels wet on her cheeks, but when she reaches to brush it away, she realises she has no arms, no hands, no fingers.

She is nothing. She has become nothingness. She is the emptiness and she is empty.

She shudders against a warm body. She does not open her eyes but listens closely to the words being spoken to her.

“I’ve got you. Don’t worry, peaches. I’m going to take care of you.”

She wants to push herself into the body, to be so far in them that she sees through their eyes and speaks their soft, accented words.

She can smell blood, she can smell burning flesh and rotting corpses. She can feel people clawing at her skin, at her exposed bones. She feels like a skeleton and she feels as though she is being consumed by fire from the inside out.

It is no longer a body beneath her, but cold stone floor. She can not open her eyes for the lava she knows is flowing over her keeps them stuck together. There is a few more hours of this, they are seconds but she knows really, they are hours and they are days. Her head aches and she wonders where her legs have gone.

She is suddenly flying and she realises she has grown wings. She laughs, because she knows she has grown wings and knows everyone will be so shocked when they see her with wings. But there is no-one, she wants to cry when she remembers there is no-one left.

Everyone has died. The world has been destroyed and the people have gone with it.

She hears the voice again, “they’ll stop if you give them answers, peaches.” A kiss to her temple.

She wants to shake her head, but she doesn’t think she has a head any more.

The black is coming now, like dragons jaws they open wide and then consume what little life was left in her.

~

“Get out of bed.” She wants to blink, to respond to the voice, but she can only lay there and cry. The tears dry up eventually, and she remembers how to open her eyes. When she does, she wishes she hadn’t. The room she is in is white and there is nothing in it but a sink, a toilet in the corner and the bed on which she is spread out on. Even her night gown is white.

She wonders who had spoke soft words to her. She see’s nobody but herself. She pauses for a moment, then allows the realisation that she has invented the voice hit her and she wants to sob – because they have done it, they have cracked her and she is broken.

The door opens, she sits up on the bed and sighs in relief when he enters the room. His skin is still olive and his eyes are still a deep brown.

“Help.” She whispers. It hurts, it has been so long since she has said words – rather than screamed because of the pain – that it pains her now to form the words she needs to say. “When will it all end?”

He moves towards her, takes her face in the palm of his hands and kisses each of her eyes, her nose and finally her mouth.

“It will end when you give them answers, peaches.”

There is pain and there is anguish. There is betrayal and there is hatred.

And then there is the deep nothingness.