Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-38762367-20190310005945

I swallowed hard and looked away as the injection pressed into my skin. The nurse said, "All done," and pulled the needle out and away. Vials of blood were spread next to me on the bed. I couldn't understand why they were taking so much of it. "It's for testing, hon. I'm sorry I have to poke you so much."

Accepting that answer, but not entirely satisfied, I tried to relax back against my pillow, but couldn't shake the unease worming its way like an infection through my mind. The room was small, brightly lit, cold. At least I didn't have to share it with someone else. Sounds from the hospital--general clatter, the nurses chatting about their weekend plans--drifted in through the open door, and for a moment, just a moment, I was able to enter a place of normality in my mind. I closed my eyes for a second's breath and then I heard the door slam shut, felt th.e silence prickle at my skin, licking against my head like hungry flames.

It had been mental torture since the moment I'd woken up. I had been involved in a car accident a week ago, but had only awakened about two days prior. I sustained internal injuries and had been laid up in bed, barely able to think, ever since. God, my mind was so loud, it was as though everything outside of me had been blocked out.

The nurses, who were nice enough, appeared and reappeared like clockwork every hour, on the hour. That didn't leave me with much time to sleep, which was something they pushed me to do. Well, I couldn't, plain and simple.

At first I didn't notice her.

The walls were painted the faintest shade of mint green, and that was the color of her dress. She seemed to melt into my room from some distant twilight, some world between worlds, gentle and soft.

The girl in green crossed the room, her heels clacking against tile. She caressed my face. Then she turned her hand, palm facing up, and closed it into a fist. Watching my expression, she released a moth from the clutches of her hand. It drifted toward the light, dancing like a dust mote.

She smiled.

Then she was gone.

Later, when the nurse named Rita stepped into the room to take more blood, I was feeling far more lucid and chalked the strange incident up as being one particularly vivid dream. Or hallucination.

She wandered the distant corridors of my dreams that night, and I knew in those moments that what I'd seen, what I'd felt? It was all real. But everything feels more real in dreaming than in reality, or at least it does to me. I'd always felt like when I slept, I was entering the real world, glad to cast away everything I'd known in my waking life as being fantasy.

I was never that lucky. Not until I met the girl in green.

...

"Mr. Alan, are you feeling all right?"

I blinked against the light, dazed. Staring back at me was Annie, one of the day nurses. She placed her hand on my forehead without warning and I instinctively moved away at her touch. The expression on her face was unreadable. Was she concerned? I couldn't tell.

"I'm, uh--"

"You're sleeping so much now, Mr. Alan. You've got us all worried about you."

I couldn't help it when laughter bubbled through my voice. "Isn't that what you wanted me to do?"

"You're sleeping through injections. I mean, you're barely eating anything at all."

The truth was that I never wanted to leave. I would be perfectly content to exist there forever, my physical body forgotten in favor of spending eternity with the beautiful, magical girl in green. I couldn't answer her. Annie, I mean.

She left the room, and I forced myself back to sleep. There, me and the girl ran through meadows, watched the clouds shift against the bright blue sky. We never spoke. I never asked her name.

And then I realized my first mistake.

She turned to face me. She held me. She closed her eyes and her jaw opened wide, unhinged like a puppet's lifeless maw, her melting flesh dripping down on my skin in fat, wet, bloody drops. I found I couldn't scream. I couldn't move. I couldn't escape.

She didn't like me. She didn't like me at all.

I stayed awake for the rest of the night, eyes wide, staring up at the ceiling, terrified of seeing her coming at me from the walls. The nurses tried to talk to me, tried to ask me what was wrong. I couldn't answer them because the reality of it all was impossible. How was I supposed to tell them that I'd been dreaming to escape the real world with a strange girl who appeared in my hospital room, one that turned out to be some kind of monster?

Days passed.

I regained my physical strength, to an extent, but my mind was weakened. They could tell. The hospital didn't want to let me go. There's nothing I can do now. It's out of my hands. All I can do is try to keep myself awake through coffee and sheer willpower, but I know it won't be long until I begin to hallucinate. When that time comes, I know the girl in green will be waiting for me. Before, I think she was just hungry. Now I know she's more than that.

Now I know she's mad. 