The world faded in and out after that. I could hear their whispered voices, but couldn’t decipher words. My brain was disconnected from my body. Still, I held on.
Take Me Home Tonight whispered in the breeze. It was the last noise I heard before Andrew’s car peeled away, leaving me alone to die, unwanted by the world, on an old gravel road.
***
Is this death? I thought. Was I being punished for craving disorder? For breaking my parent’s rigid rules for the first and only time?
Heaven was a place I’d never given much thought. Now, however, faced with death, I wanted it more than ever. Would I be welcomed to asylum or met with the blazes of hell?
A steady cadence resonated in the background. At first I thought it was my heart finding the will to beat again. It couldn’t be, though. The sound was too strong and crescendoed. Maybe it was God coming to claim me?
As it drew closer, I was sure that it was footsteps approaching. Relief struck a chord in my chest. Finally, someone had come to help me. To save me, even.
I wanted to call out to them, or open my eyes to lift a hand and wave them over. And I tried. God, how I tried, but I was just a shell. A mess of thoughts echoing in empty space.
Hints of weathered leather intertwined with those thoughts, like I was alive enough to recognize its presence yet too far gone to experience it.
“My, my,” drew a deep voice. “What have we here?” His words shimmered and waved as if I was under water and he spoke to me above the surface.
His voice washed over me like the morning sun, pulling all of my coldest parts into a benevolent embrace. My heart gave a fighting twinge before the frost loosened from my fingertips.
“Sweet, sweet, Dany,” he whispered, and I felt the lightest touch on my forehead. “Such a shame.”
Help me, I thought.
“What a brilliant light to have been extinguished.”
My heartbeat grew stronger, and heat spread throughout my limbs with every stroke of his finger across my skin. Whoever this man was, he was drawing me from the depths of death and toward the rippling surface of the living world.
“We can reignite it,” he crooned. “Together. I can provide the spark, if only you provide the ember.”
Yes, my words echoed in the dark.I’m not ready to die.
Though I tried to speak, nothing came out other than cracked whimpers.
“Would you like that?”
Yes. Please, hear me, yes!
“Open your eyes.”
I can’t. They’re so heavy.
“If you want to live, I need to see those beautiful eyes, Dany. You have to fight for it. Death is easy, but life? It is a bloody battle that casts you out the moment you slip.”
A tear tickled my cheek on its way down to the pavement.
“Find your anger.”
And I did. Through every aching bruise, scrape, and burn, I recalled their hands on me, their intrusions inside my body, and the right they thought they had to take it for themselves.
What do you want?”
The answer passed my lips before my brain could clear the thought.
“Them,” scraped out. “I want… them… dead.”
“There she is,” he whispered.
