white knuckles [10stare]

The shapes never showed themselves in the day. Oskar was free in the daylight, when he watched the shadows retreat into their corners, knowing he had a few more hours of mindspace before they would creep back in. On the assembly line the fluorescent lamps kept them at bay, but by the time he left work each day it was dark outside, and he always hated the walk home. In the dim alleyway he could feel them on his heels and glimpse them in the corners of his eyes. Black, hulking shapes, like large dogs, that disappeared as soon as he’d turn to look. Worse, he’d forgotten his umbrella.

He’d picked up the extra job to help his mother pay the bills; lately, she hadn’t been making enough money in her laundry business to support the two of them. She used to paint, when his dad was home--or never home, rather, since he used to spend long nights at work putting prototypes together. Oskar had always felt lucky to have those paintings hanging in the house. It was something better to look at than the Games reruns, or the dingy neighborhood outside the windows. Landscape scenes, with pastures and glimmering lakes and towering mountains, places he’d never be able to find outside of the frames. Ripred knows how she made them look so real, having never seen them in person. He only wished she still had the time and the vision to paint them. When his dad left, she’d made the choice between her dreamscapes and their empty bellies, and who could blame her?

Hurrying through the brick-paved street, Oskar decided that this weather was the polar opposite of his mother’s paintings. The misting rain soaked into his shoulders and flattened his black hair against his cheeks. Thick fog hovered over the ground so he could hardly see five yards in front of him. On the back of his neck, hair stood upwards, signaling the argument that always began in his mind on the way home.

You’re being followed, a voice warned.

There was a familiar prickling in his stomach. Oskar wiped the rain from his forehead and kept walking, focusing on the light of the street lamps. It was that hurried feeling he used to get in his guts each time he’d have to go down in the basement to get something for his mother at night. He was too old now to be afraid of the dark, but his voices didn’t seem to think so.

I walk this way every day, and nothing bad has ever happened to me, he reasoned with himself. Recently he'd gotten better at it, but the rain made it harder tonight.

The black shapes hunched closer, and he pulled his jacket collar tighter to his neck, his steps quickening. As much as he tried to calm himself down, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. He heard footsteps that he knew weren’t there. A puddle splashed onto the back of his ankles, and he assured himself he was the one splashing them. Rain soaked into his bones. A chill ran down his spine.

A pair of hands wrapped around his throat.

The shadows pulled him into an alley, and a sharp pain in his jaw sent him spinning to the wet pavement. A scream rang from his throat and was swallowed by the rain; he tried to curl himself into a ball but he was stopped by a blunt force to his ribs. They were surrounding him now; he pulled his arms up over his eyes and closed them tight, telling himself it was all in his mind, and if he just counted each breath and thought of home, they would go away.

But he couldn't catch his breath, let alone count it. As their black arms reached towards him, pulling all the life from his body, all he could do was sob into his rain-soaked knees and wait for the end. 

Oh, how he prayed to escape his mind.