IVY WRITES
TW: slight gore
A man’s heart burned as the stream water poured out of his lungs. He coughed, the sound scraping up the sides of his throat and coloring the still air with a wheezing urgency. He sat up, grabbing at his neck as he choked out what felt like the last of his breaths. When he opened his eyes he saw only a blurred veil over the forest, the greens and browns and greys blending together seamlessly. His ears rang and his hearing was fogged; the running stream sounded more like the quiet scream of white noise than the simple trickling of water.
He blinked, once, twice. The world tilted, and the man felt himself falling with it until his vision refocused. He reached into the shallow creek to push himself off of the ground, managing to find a standing position and maintaining it by clutching onto a nearby tree.
Something flashed in his mind; a car, a dead man walking.
His hands were caked in a layer of blood, diluted by silvery water.
He leaned down and rinsed his hands in the cold stream, goosebumps crawling up his arms. The running water washed away the blood, revealing no wound. Reaching up to his scalp, he scrubbed and massaged and scraped, trying to soothe his frayed nerves. The ringing in his ears began to fade and his hearing started to return. His sense of touch heightened and he was suddenly jarringly aware of every physical sensation.
He had been in a car. Right? “Honey, look out,” someone had said. A woman. A love.
He rubbed his hands up and down his arms, re-familiarizing his body with itself.
But the buzzing in his skin wouldn’t stop, and soon the friction of his hands against his arms ached.
Flashes of a little girl’s face; her bubbly giggles filled his mind. She flew through the air on a tire swing.
His blood throbbed and his throat burned.
The man held his head in his hands; his pulse beat through his temples. He reached out for anything to hold onto, anything that would reassure him of his place in these spinning woods. His vision doubled, tripled, and soon the pressure on his head shoved him to his knees in the water.
The little girl—his daughter? She began to fade in his mind but he remembered her. His wife…she’d been beside him in the car. A creature had jumped into the road, a dead man with a crumbled face, and he had swerved.
The car had flipped over on its back and rolled off of the road, down a tumbling hill.
He couldn’t remember what had happened to his family.
But the creature had followed them down.
A white hot pain crawled up the man’s skin from somewhere in his middle. He remained on his knees, desperately clawed his shirt over his head, digging his nails into the flesh of his belly. His fingers found the source of his pain—a sunken spot, ripe and gummy.
He looked down to his bare stomach, fighting to keep himself upright. Only when he saw the bloodied silhouette of a set of human teeth did he let himself fall.
When he next stood up, his mind was gone and he walked with a hunger.