Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 14th Jan 2011 at 4:00 AM
Default A collection of writings.
I read more than books.

I think I first realised it when I was six-years-old. It was 1987, early June. I had been put to bed an hour earlier after a particularly tense dinner with my mother, father and older brother, Mason.
We were used to our parents arguing, screaming at each other and throwing plates and on one occasion, knives at each other.
‘I’m going to kill that bitch!’ My father’s voice was venomous and loud, as though he had screamed the harsh words into my ear. I had jumped at the sudden noise and I sat up in my bed, hugging my ‘He-Man’ duvet to my small trembling body. I remember wondering why Mason hadn’t crept into my room to comfort me. Surely he had heard my father’s booming voice? I couldn’t understand how it had been so loud and failed to wake my brother. It wasn’t until several years after that I realised Mason never heard my father on the night he killed my mother. That I realised I had an unusual gift, that I could read minds.
As a teenager, though my ‘skill’ was unperfected, I had breezed through my GCSE’s with hardly a thought, at least, not any thoughts of my own. I pried into the minds of my smarter classmates and copied their answers. My A Levels were much the same, gaining top marks and bagging student of the year while I was at it. Truth is, at sixteen it was exciting but I quickly grew to be bored of it. It became a repetitive chore. Listen, copy, hand-in. I missed the nausea I felt while waiting for my results, hoping I had passed the test. The thing which had once made my life thrilling had also made it mind-numbing. There was nothing to be excited for anymore because nine out of ten times I already knew. I already knew if Kelly Henshaw would say yes to a date, I already knew that my foster parents would say no to a puppy and I already knew I had passed my BA degree.

____

Insanity.

Sometimes I felt a little insane, perhaps I was being driven to insanity by the beep beep beeping of the heart monitors echoing throughout the hollow hallways, the click clacking of shoes on the plastic coated floors, or the squeaking of wheels on old battered wheelchairs. Those noises had for along time been a chorus of ‘welcome home’s which tickled my heart.
It’s not that I felt crazy all the time, sometimes I told myself if was normal. My therapist thought differently, but don’t they always think differently, isn’t that how they do their job in the first place? She told me I had an illness, a mental condition.
The Orthopaedic Ward was almost a holiday home, they should start charging me rent. It’s a funny thing really, looking back through my childhood memories remembering a time where just the mention of a hospital would send me into a lapse of tears and screaming “I’m fine! Please don’t make me go!”
In the last two years I had broken and rebroken over twelve bones and counting. My friends think I’m clumsy, falling through life struggling not to get myself killed. My family think I have brittle bones, snapping under the smallest of accidents. I don’t think it would be a great idea to explain why my ‘clumsiness’ and my ‘brittle bones’ only became an issue two years ago. I mean, how could they ever understand my sometimes extreme love for Dr Whiteoak.
This time I knew I had taken it a little too far when I awoke already in an assigned hospital bed with no memory of how I’d arrived there. My leg was bound in a thick white cast and a throbbing pain was contained inside my head by an itchy white bandage. The second break to my left leg, this time around it was more painful than I had remembered. It must’ve been a bad break, worse than the first time, worse than any other break. How did it happen and how did I get here? The questions which I should have been trying to find the answers to were hardly a whisper in my ear when I realised that I would be seeing Dr Whiteoak.
The smell of a hospital was comforting. It reminded me of cheap industrial cleaning products and old sweat, mostly though it reminded me of Dr Whiteoak and his beautiful round orbs of brown light.
Maybe only an insane person would break a bone in order to talk to someone they love, but if being insane meant he would gently graze his fingers across my skin and he would bathe me in his assessing gaze then surely being insane wasn’t so bad.
A young doctor wandered through the ward. He held a grim expression on his features. Saddened eyes with darkness hanging from them like heavy carrier bags from a shopper’s hands. A small smile greeted me when he arrived at my side but he said no words. The excitement which had gathered in my chest and expanded painfully against my ribcage began to loosen its grip on my lungs and allowed me to breathe.
“Where’s Dr Whiteoak?” My question was quiet and polite, simply a patient asking for her usual doctor, at least… I could pretend.
“I’m sorry Miss Hayver. Dr Whiteoak passed away when your cars collided on the road last night. My name is Doctor Finnegan and I’ll be your new doctor.”

_____

Some Things Never End.

It was strange seeing him again. His hair was shorter for a start. The long locks of chocolate brown hair that I used to tangle my fingers within, that I used to stroke and tuck behind his ears much to his dismay was lopped off leaving him with only a few inches. The second unquestionable change I saw was the weight. There was no denying it, the man I used to be so in love with, and was so hurt by, got fat.
My lips curled into a smug grin. He got fa-at, he got fa-at. I wanted to sing it in the street. I was over the moon, he looked a fool. Clicking through his Facebook pictures I couldn’t help but feel happy.
The towel which I had used to wrap my hair in after showering began to slip and my hands shot up to capture it and from the movement the computer mouse fell and the button clicked when it hit the ground by my slipper wrapped feet. The picture on the screen changed and illuminated my face in my dark bedroom.
I didn’t feel when the muscles in my arms deadened, or when the towel dropped to the carpet with a thud, or when my cold, wet hair slapped against my cheeks. It was a photograph of him and his newly ex-girlfriend kissing.
It was then that I didn’t feel so smug anymore. He may have gained weight and a silly hair style, but I was the one snooping through my ex-boyfriend’s photographs years after our split, and I was the one that felt my chest hollow at the sight of him with another girl.
I couldn’t understand it, where had this sudden loneliness emitted from? Why was this an unsettling sight? My hands were numb from… From what? Why was it that I was being so strongly affected by one photograph when only moments earlier I had been giggling to myself in delight. Air released from my lungs when I realised I had been holding it too long, and I hurried to switch the computer off.
With a sigh, I fell back, leaning into the chair and allowing a wave of depression to settle over me. I had boyfriends since I broke up with James, a few actually. Not so many that I couldn’t keep count on one hand, but a few nonetheless. I’d had kisses, and after an especially wild night I even had sex with a total stranger - not that I was proud of it mind you.
My eyelids were heavy, slow in their downfall but I didn’t resist. It was sudden, this exhaustion. A need to climb in bed overwhelmed me but I didn’t move, instead my mind wandered to James. I knew I shouldn’t have let myself think about him when I had been so negatively affected by one photograph, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to think of anything else, polar bears, potato peelers, anything other than James.
James was bad for me. I think I knew it when I first met him, but young and foolish as I was I bit the bullet he shot at me, I held on and for a while it was good. It was exciting, but after so long the excitement died, and his harsh but witty humor became nothing but unnecessary and hurtful. I was holding on to the bullet that I had clenched between my teeth, but the thrill of catching it was no longer there, only the fear of letting it go. There was nothing left for us, I knew it almost instantly, and he knew too.
It’d been two years, we could be friends after all this time, couldn’t we? No. I tried to shake my head like they do in the films but it only served to worsen a growing headache. I could at least send him a message, I mean, it couldn’t hurt, no one else would know and it’d be innocent, just a shout to see how he is. Pain spread across the skin of my cheek where I stuck myself. I needed to pull myself together; under no circumstances could I message him. No way. At least not for now.

____

Take me away.

Any professional would tell me the thoughts I had were unhealthy. I would probably end up paying more than I could ever afford twice a week to speak to someone about how I felt. Truth be told I was sick of telling people how I felt. In fact, the last thing I ever want to do is tell people how I feel. Let’s make a rule, no more feelings, ever.
I knew the thoughts I had were drastic, and stupid. The idea was comforting though. Just imagining myself laying in the middle of the road, life slowly releasing from this sack of blood and bones, allowed my worries to escape me for a moment.
My hands gripped the wheel of my car as I drove from the hellish place in which I watched people die every day. Was it sick that I was jealous of these poor souls? No one would understand. Not a single person would, not when I had a nice enough paying job, a well-kept home and someone to hold me at night.
I never wanted to be a nurse, but my mother, a retired nurse herself, would have it no other way. I would either go to university and become a nurse, or I wouldn’t go to university at all, my boyfriend tried to convinced me that my best friends underwear, found in our bed, was actually mine, and my ‘nice enough paying job’ isn’t exactly nicely enough paying enough for me to keep my well-kept home for very much longer.
Bright streetlights trickled into my car and left just as swiftly as I followed them home. Guide me somewhere else, just this once take me away into the night to an exotic paradise.

____

The Long Letter.


Dear Santa,
My name is Evelyn Whitelock and I am 82-years-old. For many decades I have wanted and needed and painstakingly yearned for my wildest dreams to come alive. A new bike when I was twelve, a husband at thirty-six. Forty-two years of my life had passed when my wishes became prayers to God and each night I would fall to my knees and pray beside my bed, even at sixty-eight when the arthritis took over my joints and made the action difficult and painful.
Forty years, Saint Nick. Forty years of struggling to the ground to put my heart and soul into praying to the Lord above. Forty years of unanswered hopes and prayers and here I am, a frail elderly woman writing to you at my writer’s station in hope that this one wish, this one prayer, this one dream will be answered.
Please, Santa, for Christmas I would like a cure.
I won’t lie to you, my belief in the magical world faded long ago, when I was but a child. Sometimes it seems that there is not much other choice for a woman with degrading bones, wrinkled skin and broken faith other than to write. Just write until someone listens, or someone sees this old woman, begging for pity, begging for help, begging for a miracle.
I am a lonely woman. No children. No family. Left to rot in a home for the elderly, nothing to occupy my time but a pack of old cards, ripped, stained, and crumpled in the corners.
You must ask yourself “Why at 82 do you need a cure, for death will be knocking any day now?” To which I would not disagree, I am now far from my youth. I do not hope for a cure for myself, what a waste of a wish. I ask for a cure for someone else. Someone dear to me. Someone who truly needs it. Without a family and without friends you must wonder who it is I fear for.
It isn’t old man Harry, whose grandson regularly visits to play draughts. It isn’t Emily who refused to miss a single rerun of Columbo on the small grainy television in the crowded lounge. It isn’t even Momma-J, real name Jane, with her wheezing caused by the lung cancer she was slowly waiting to expire from.
There were many visitors that strolled into Newarch Home for the Elderly. Family members, friends, work experience students and all the like, but it’s rare for anyone to speak with me. I’m a quiet lady, I’m perfectly happy with my pack of cards. In the years I had lived in this God-forsaken place I had learnt so many rules to so many games that beating me was unspoken of, many had tried and none had won. It wasn’t long before the other elderlies decided to leave me to it, and so I sit, quietly shuffling the deck playing round after round of single player games, no-one hardly batted an eyelash in my direction, that was, until I met Rebecca.

____

Caught in the Act.

Click. Click. Click. The sound of flat white shoes on hard white floors. Click. Click. Click. David could see the size five plimsolls peeking in from underneath the hideous floral curtain which gave him only a tiny amount of privacy. David was almost certain that the designers hadn’t considered him, or any fourteen year old boy, when deciding that a flimsy piece of pastel coloured fabric which could easily be pulled back without notice was the best idea for privacy in a hospital ward.
A loud clank pierced the air followed by a loud scream when David’s bandaged arm hit the metal frame of the hospital bed he had been stuck in for the last day. He fumbled hopelessly with his thin blanket in an attempt to hide his shame. He wouldn’t want a fellow male to see what he had been up to, and he definitely didn’t want the gorgeous nurse with the curvy body which had encouraged the action in the first place to see.
“Is everything okay David?” The nurse asked. Her usual professional tone was drowned out by concern. Unsure if she’d caught him or not David kept quiet with a face as red as beetroot.
“David?”
“I just hit my arm.” He spoke quietly, afraid his tone may indicate risen issues under the blanket.. A warm smile caused the nurse’s cheeks to lift, but it only served to worsen David’s blush.
“Would you like a painkiller?”
“No. No thanks. I’m fine, I think I just need to sleep it off maybe… Yeah.” David fumbled with the blanket once more, feeling exposed and vulnerable whilst alone behind the curtain with the woman of his fantasies.
“Okay, hun. Well I just need to change that bandaging and then I’ll be on my way.” Her voice was soft and humble.
Her fingers were cold, or perhaps he was just too warm, it’d make sense what with the activity he had been partaking in before the nurse had interrupted. Teeth clenched, eyes squinted, muscles tensed. It was similar to that morning when the doctor needed to remove the white wrappings to check the stitches from his elbow surgery.
It almost felt like hours were passing, waiting for the bandages to be removed, waiting for his arm to be washed, waiting for new bandages to be applied. He just wanted the gorgeous blue eyed nurse to finish. Her smell was intoxicating him and no supernatural force would ever make his gaze break from the little bit of cleavage which was visible when she sat slouched on the chair beside him.
“Here we go!” The nurse called before standing with the old bloodied wrappings. She pulled the curtain back, the rings at the top making a high pitched screeching noise on the metal railings. David had begun to sink into the freshly fluffed pillows on the hospital bed when he peaked at the nurse. His eyes quickly shot away when he saw that she’s looked over her shoulder at him.
David couldn’t be sure if he had imagined it, but instead of doubt himself he closed his eyes and replayed the image of the nurse winking over her shoulder while he waited for sleep to swallow him.

____
Advertisement
Test Subject
#2 Old 21st Mar 2011 at 8:25 PM
I love this stuff! I really enjoyed reading these. Thank you for sharing them!
Back to top