As I turned around to find Jude, sand filled the room. It was a slow torturous pain, immobilizing my legs first. The door to Simon’s room moved as he tried to open it. He screamed for me, “Daddy! Where are you? Why can’t you save me?”
It was above my knees. I couldn’t walk.
Jude’s voice faded.
Simon’s cries became choked, strangled noises of pain as the sand buried him alive.
In an instant, I was alone.
The sand slowed, burying me up to my shoulders, covering my arms, my gun.
As both Jude’s and Simon’s voices died, I tried like all fucking hell to move my fingers. They brushed against the trigger, cold metal against warm flesh a foreign yet familiar feeling. But the weight of the sand, pushing in from all sides, made moving anything beyond impossible.
Trapped in my own fresh hell. The voices of the ones I loved, silenced forever.
The only release, a suicide I couldn’t even commit, well beyond my pathetically paralytic state.
My lungs failed. Everything went numb.
And the room darkened once again, leaving me alone, to live in my pain once and for all.
Shooting upright in bed, I gasped for air. Sarge was at my side immediately, wiggling his wet nose under my hand. His concerned whines helped bring me into the here and now. “Thanks, boy,” I managed as I ran my hand through his soft fur, scratching behind his floppy ears. “That one . . . just really threw me for a fucking loop.” The early morning sun streaked through the curtains, stinging my eyes. That was when I realized the spot next to me was empty, and it was cold, too. “Must’ve gone for a run,” I said to Sarge as he sat with his head in my lap on the bed.
With my heart still pounding wildly in my chest, I rested against the headboard, letting my fingers dance lazily through Sarge’s fur. Visions of my nightmare began to replay in my mind, ratcheting up my anxiety all over again. “What the fuck am I doing?” I asked Sarge, feeling angrier with myself than I ever had in my life. Deciding I needed to call Simon, I reached over to my nightstand and grabbed my cell phone.
The phone only rang once before Delilah picked up. “What do you want?” she spat, obviously less than thrilled to hear from me.
“Hi,” I said sheepishly, immediately regretting my weakness in calling. “I’m sor—”
“Don’t finish that sentence, Micah.” She huffed a frustrated breath into the line. In the background, I heard a door close and it sounded as if she tapped her head on the door before sliding down it. “You and I both know you aren’t sorry.”
“How dare you fucking say that?” I cursed, raising Sarge’s awareness of my mood in less than a second. “You don’t know how I feel.”
Her voice shifted, turning stealth-like and seething. “You’re right,” she asserted. “Turns out I don’t know a fucking thing about you.”
Her words landed like a bullet to the gut, except the actual gunshot wound would have been less painful. And I knew that from actual experience. “Look, Delilah, I just called to talk to Simon. I . . . uh . . . I miss him.”
A cynical bubble of laughter filtered through the line. As if it was actually dancing on my skin, I cringed, realizing what a ridiculous fool I sounded like. “You miss him?” Her words were dripping sarcasm. “That’s fucking rich, Micah.” After taking a deep breath, and puffing it out into the receiver, she added, “You wouldn’t miss him so much if you hadn’t left out of nowhere.”
And then the line went dead.
So did a piece of my heart.
How foolish was I to think I could walk away from my family, do whatever the fuck I wanted for weeks, and just show back up into their lives when it was convenient for me? “Selfish fuck,” I gritted, standing from the bed. As I looked into the mirror, I began hating myself all over again. The anxiety and depression battled it out for the space in my head.
But it didn’t matter—dead, numbness won over all the emotion.
Lifelessly, I went through the motions of the rest of the day. Even dinner at George’s couldn’t pull me out of the depressed abyss into which I’d fallen. And as I closed my eyes that night, with Jude snoring lightly next to me, I wondered when the other shoe would drop.
The week dragged. Day turned to night turned to day all over again, and I felt as if I was stuck in my sand dream for every minute of it. Withdrawing from Jude, I found myself utterly alone with this massive confusion racing through my veins. Barely eating and hardly sleeping, I was a fucking mess.
And so was the house. Not that it had become my task to play housewife and vacuum the place in high heels while Jude was at work, but seeing as he let me stay here without having a way to pay him, I tried my best to help as much as possible. More often than not, dinner was ready and waiting for him when he arrived home, and everything was at least straightened up.
However, in the recent days, the place had come to look more like a frat house than anything else. He literally had to wade through my dirty laundry to get to the couch. By the time Thursday rolled around, Jude had finally had enough. “You stink,” he declared as he sank next to me on the couch. “And I work with sweaty teenagers who play football all day through the Texas heat so I know stink when I smell it and you fucking reek.”
“Tell me how you really feel,” I snapped. Standing from the couch in the same manner a defiant child would, I stalked over to the sink where I put my coffee mug.
“Oh, so you do know where they go,” he said, tipping his head at the sink. “I was really confused when you kept leaving them everywhere but where they belonged.”
