Fiction Prompt: Everybody's Fool

     I never was and never will be the picture-perfect portrait of who you thought I’d be. I lean more toward descriptors that lack the colors you wish to see in me. I lack the happy grace of being the little Miss Sunshine I lied about being, by coaxing my dark soul to slumber under chemically induced dreams. Under waves of drowsy daydreaming, the plane of reality and fiction slant to give me a glimpse into an alternate universe. One where normality was an everyday thing, not something I strived for with each pop of a pill and sip of a drink, and hoped my mind would mend or even heal. The same routine day in and day out, one pill after the other, to deal with the reality I feel trapped in while reaching toward what I thought could have been. Like quicksand reaching up my legs, pulling me into the never-ending pit of sorrow laden with the darkness in which I tread.
    They say, “You should smile more. A positive mind does more than the drugs.”
    I can’t help but laugh, a humourous laugh in the faces of people closest to me when my darkness seeps into the not chemically laden existence of seemingly normal people hiding behind smiles like monsters behind masks. Positivity is the mask I shun because no amount of positive reinforcement will heal what others have done. It won't heal the heartbreak of wanting too much and reaching out to people who turned around before I fell to the floor. The drugs calm me enough to see through emotional rose-tinted glasses to the scene left unfiltered and remained unseen.
    If baptism of my soul would wipe my slate clean, I would drown my sorrows in holy water until I awoke from these bad dreams. With a blank slate before me, I’d paint another world where the only mask I would wear was the badge of honor of not being a horror, heart open to love like I’ve been trying to do. But monsters like me have hearts too, and as our broken shards are slashed and impaled, cries become growls deep from wounded souls aching to be soothed. Instead, we love so hard that we scare the weak away, another mask falling into place while trying to line up a new personality for someone to love and not walk away.
    No amount of time will heal the vicious crimes of letting yourself love people more than they love you. You take to self-flagellation to keep your multiple personalities from shattering all at once as they stand lined up in hopes someone sticks. But how long will it take for you to follow through, to stay alone, and not waste your breath? On people who curl their fingers around your upturned throat and choke you out for the nothing you are worth.
    No one needs saving; they only need saving from you.
    Lives would be better if you’d just stay away.
    The mind a powerful bully and killer of self-identity, goading you with words heard when you were a kid. No one is coming to save you from the hauntings of the past that visits in your dreams as fears line the halls that you try to run. No amount of positivity available to shield from attacks from all sides as we search for a private patch of perfection mending the seams.
    We glean perfection from the people that exist only in our heads, our fantasies, and make-believe. They’re stories we tell ourselves in hopes of someone proving our positive delusions right, that maybe there is a batch of “just right people” out there that understood the darkness in which you stood. Humanity selfish in their perusal of understandings; we hail from different universes created inside our heads, movements dictated by an untrustworthy inner narrator set to destroy it all. We starve at the hands of ourselves, grasping for made-up visions in our imaginations left to gestate in the sliver of hope left behind. A seedling we water and watch, waiting tirelessly for the tiniest bit of life to peek through and give us that hope we seem absent of.
    Just one little feeling, not produced by the drugs, one sliver of hope so we don’t end it all, or hope for the warmth of anyone willing to see outside of themselves.
    For once.
    I want someone to stay and love the monster in me. 

Poem: Fall From Grace

​Your hand slipped in my hair

While the other slit my throat

Robbing me of everything

Breath and hope alike

Before I said checkmate

If I had known

Parting my lips

Against cold indifference 

Would cause the cracks

In my unstable facade

To crumble at feet

Bare from the fall

Of

Wordless

Grace

When answers I craved to hear

My name a curse on your lips

When I speak

It’s a hushed, “don’t hurt me”

Never one to mince my words

Each chosen carefully

Intricately 

Yet you took half-heard truths

And turned them into stories

That weighs down my soul

Like anchors to a boat

Lost in strange seas

A survivor left alone

To float

On the last held

Bits

Of

Hope

Short Story: No Safe Spaces

​Life being what it was, a heaping pile of steaming excrement, tonight was the night she was to be rudely assaulted. 

In her own house.

Half lying on the cool cream tile floor, she swiped her short hair behind her ear while she cataloged her ample DVD collection. 

Rearranging by seasons, she started tapping the smooth cases back into place, one by one. She thought about color coding them and creating a rainbow-like the book tok-ers were want to do instead of stuck with the genre. Each case slid smoothly into place until one didn’t, finding it odd when some didn't line up. 

Curious, she thought. 

Going back, she lifted them one at a time and slid them back. Then, all of a sudden, it happened. 

The cockroach came from behind the cases to its teeth. Do roaches have teeth? You would think they did when it landed on her arm, and In one failed swoop, she bounded to her feet and ran.

She ran straight for the kitchen in a panic. She snatched up her broom and wielded its pink sweeping glory like a sword, and she was a knight of Camelot on the heels of her echoed yelp of terror. 

The roach fell to the floor, and she was on it, smacking it until it grasped the bristles and hung on as if life depended on it.

Which it did.

With a fierce, sharp squeal, she hit and hit until it landed on its back, flailing about in sheer panic at the utter chaos the gouging found itself in. Her roommate wasn’t home to save its life; oh no, it would be flushed tonight. Because if it weren’t, it would somehow find its way to hover over her bed and drop from the ceiling like a skilled acrobatic genius and send her straight to the afterlife mid-dream. 

Panting, she stared at the wiggling body before her. Broom held high, bare feet planted wide, ready to fight to the death if she needed to. She looked fierce, like Joan of Arc defending her perch, hair tossed, clothes askew from the untimely skirmish. 

All the while, as the chaos ensues, the feared huntress of fair tortoise colorings lay two feet away on her throne of dirty laundry, wondering what the hell was going on and why the human was messing up her slumber over a tinsy, tiny palmetto bug. Mid lick, their eyes clicked, and they stared a moment longer before both cat and human returned to their doings. The cat returned to its slumber while the human returned to sweeping up the dust and the newly acquired bug carcass. 

Only to be spurred back into a frenzy of hallow whomps and plastic slapping against cheap rental house tile as the bug righted itself and ran. To her utter horror and great disbelief, it was still alive! The sucker was still at it.

"Aack." She sneered, broom smacking down on the poor soul that skittered across her path.

Hunting down a high-heeled shoe came next when the soft bristles harmed only her ego more than the pest. She came around with a wedge-heeled shoe and gave it one last hit, and splat it went! With triumph, she looked at the shoe, a twitch of a leg, and a turning of stomach. She grimaced and tossed it back to the shoe pile inwardly vowing to either clean the shoe or burn it and its mate.

After a brief pause to breathe a sigh of relief and congratulate herself for a job well done, she moved back to the kitchen to right what she had wronged and armed herself with Lysol. Cleaning up the evidence and sanitizing the spot, it was right then, right there, that she knew. As instinct would have it, the ping of knowledge weighed heavy on her now sore shoulders as she wiped, gagged, and tossed away. 

That she had been watching way too many TV shows, listening to podcasts, and reading books about murder. 

She needed to chill.