Dreams For The Dead [story WIP]

[lykosecho]

What would happen if Earth just suddenly…stopped working? If people began to drop dead, turn to dust, and blow away into an endless desert of nothingness?

Would you care if the pitiful race that we call ‘humans’ died off? If the world decided She was tired of the pollution and the death that the parasites were infecting Her with and began to throw it back at them? At us. Would you cry over loved ones as they died, one by one? You shouldn’t. You’ll be joining them soon enough, in Heaven, or wherever else you go to when your soul leaves the rotting, worm-infested corpse of a shell you once called your body. There is no such thing as Hell. Hell is what we’re living in, what we’re existing in right now, at this very moment.

Answer my question. Would. You. Care?

I wouldn’t.

I would sit and watch and relish the sight of the suffering. Not the deaths, but the suffering all the deaths caused. Emotional suffering leading to scars of the heart. Scars I’ve had to deal with since I was very small. Scars you all deserve. I would sit and I would laugh, laugh into the wind as the humandust blew into my face. I would like to taste your tears if I could reach out that far beyond the gates of this Hellhole.

My name? Envy – or at least that’s what people around here call me. It fits me.

And I think I’ll write the death of this horrible world into the bindings of ink and the once-trees you now call paper.

This will make a good story.

[lykosecho]

Envy sat huddled in the corner of her ‘cell’ – as she preferred to call the small room at BlackThorn Juvenile Orphanage For Troubled Teens. Envy liked to believe she wasn’t a freak like the Biters and the Cutters and the kids like Payton Miller who were in padded rooms with straight jackets, eating from the floor like dogs. No, she considered herself a child merely haunted by her past.

And in that little corner, armed with a pen and a worn, spiral-bound notebook, Envy scribbled furiously, trying to catch the words in her head before they became elusive and jumped away. Normally BlackThorn didn’t allow pens or anything remotely sharp in the room with an occupant, but writing, they found, kept the 10-year-old terror out of trouble.

Besides, she’d never inflicted pain on herself – she just liked to watch others suffer...


“My parents died when I was little, so little that I can’t even remember their faces,” Envy had written in the notebook she kept under her cot, the one that was a journal of sorts. “Maybe if Grandma Julie would’ve taken me in instead of handing me over to Uncle Josh, I’d be better off. Maybe not.

“Josh is the kind of person you don’t want to mess with. I learned that the hard way. When I was old enough to actually work without fumbling or falling down, I was made his own personal slave, the wife he didn’t have. I did laundry, cleaned dishes, swept the house – anything you can think of and then some – and if I refused, I was slapped and wasn’t served dinner. He was also an alcoholic and, when smashed, did sick things...things I won’t even go into. His whole basement was filled with torture devices – or so I thought at the time. I know better now.

“I began to steal things. First it was petty, like rubber balls and chewing gum, as my conscious wouldn’t allow me any room to take anything I couldn’t really pay for. Then came the bigger things. Food was my main priority and, hiding things in my room, I could successfully refuse my uncle’s housework and wouldn’t have to worry about starving. After he figured out he couldn’t use me as a maid any longer by holding food over my head, off to the next home I went.”

***

Envy’s pale-green gaze shot up from her notebook to the camera in her room, the camera she knew was recording her every movement, and then to the door, which had rattled with the task of being unlocked.

It swung open to reveal a mousy-haired woman in her mid-twenties, a girl who used to live here as an occupant herself, a few years before. With close inspection you could make out the scars that lined her wrists – scars she didn’t bother to cover. Not that it mattered to Envy.

“C’mon, Catta,” the woman, Shelby, encouraged with a smile that looked almost honest. Almost.

Catta. Envy glared up at her, dark hair swinging into her face in long tangles. Catta was the name her parents had given to her. The name she was so sickeningly called by her whole life, up until this past year. She hated it with a burning passion. Envy hated a lot of things, but this was one of the worst.

“It’s Envy,” she snarled softly, casting Shelby a devilish grin as she saw the woman’s eyes light up with surprise. A surprised she reveled in. Surprise was near fear and people who feared her were better off than people who dared to defy the young demon-like child.

“Emm...yes. Ca-I mean, Envy. Either way, it’s time for dinner.”

Shelby stood at the door, keys for Corridor One hanging at her belt loop. Envy hopped to her feet quickly, shoving the pen inside her notebook and holding it at her side almost lovingly.

“Envy, you’re not allowed to bring things from your room to the table.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t stab anybody.” She knew this wasn’t the case though – a pen at a table with the ones who felt the need to hurt themselves was a disaster. She’d found that out the last time her escort had overlooked what she’d taken with her. By then, however, it was too late and one of the Cutters had used the sharp tip to rip into the flesh of their wrist. Envy watched them in a sort of dazed satisfaction as the Cutter threw his head back and let out a sigh – of pain or relief, Envy wasn’t sure which – and blood flooded down his arm and onto the table. It was almost as good as watching Miranda’s cat...

Seeing that the aide was refusing to relent, Envy sighed dramatically and tossed her notebook onto her bed, following Shelby out the door and down the hall, into BlackThorn’s kitchen-of-sorts. With a glance, one could note that places where chairs were were spots that could be or, had already been, occupied. At every table was four chairs and those four spots had each a tray of food in front of them.

Envy sat down at her usual spot, directly in the middle of the room. Sliding in, she picked up the rubber spork that was laying on her napkin, then bent it over completely, looking between her table-mates.

McKaila was a silent sixteen-year-old with a past tainted by sexual abuse. She’d been beaten down so hard that she’d split into two separate personalities to try to block the events from her mind. McKaila was a silent, shy girl who didn’t meet your gaze no matter how hard you tried – unless she’d woken up as Morpheus, her alter-ego. Morpheus was a spirited, punk-teen with opinions...and she voiced them whenever she pleased. Her parents were drug-dealers and she was confiscated by Child Services less than a year ago.

[lykosecho]

Edwin, or Win, as he was called, was a bouncy thirteen-year-old who seemed like a perfectly normal kid with ADHD, until he got upset. It took a lot to set the young boy off, but when he became enraged, he was a living cyclone. Envy had seen one of his ‘episodes’ when one of the retarded kids had accidentally run into him on one of his ‘bad days’. Win had spun on his heel and attacked the other boy with fury, ripping at his thrashing, screaming prey with nails and pounding fists. He turned on the aide when she tried to pull them apart, then tore up the room and broke three of his own ribs slamming himself into the wall until he passed out from exertion. When he woke up he didn’t remember a thing. Win and Envy got along well enough, and though Envy liked to pull his strings, she never did so enough to piss him off. She knew better.

And Gem was a lanky male with a sulky attitude. He was one of the only ones she knew in BlackThorn that refused to tell anyone why he was there. Not even the counselors. Envy noticed that he’d been a Cutter, though his scars had paled to a light silver and it was obvious he hadn’t harmed himself in quite a long time. Rumors spread around this place like wildfire and it wasn’t unusual for there to be a few. One was that he was a transsexual and he was dumped here by his alcoholic mother when she’d found him in her closet, wearing her lingerie. Another tale was that he was gay and he’d been caught doing ‘the nasty’ with his boyfriend on his mother’s desk. Gem refused to answer yes or no on truths to these rumors, however, so Envy wasn’t quite sure.

“The rubber spork of doom,” Win giggled as Envy bent hers. “Y’know, rumors are that these sporks are indestructible!”

Gem snorted. “Indestructible by anything here, that is. What would you kill it with? Another spork? A paper plate? Mrs. Turpentine’s baked beans?” He glared down at his bowl of murky beans, prodding at them with his spork.

Envy smirked at him. BlackThorn’s cook, Mrs. Turpentine (her name really being Mrs. Turpen, though her food was so bad, some said it was turpentine) made her ‘special’ baked beans once a week. No one, except for the mentally challenged and herself, actually ate it. The rest went hungry that day. Envy tried them when she’d first arrived, much to Win’s horror, and was sick all night. What did the woman add to it anyhow? It was liquid fire.

“I’m not hungry,” he growled, pushing his plate away and drinking milk out of a paper cup. He nibbled on his rubber spork and looked at Envy, blue eyes nearly empty, though she could tell there was...something...down there in their depths. She wasn’t sure what, but it was something. He was like her, she’d decided when she first met him. He hated the way they treated him here, felt like the world cheated him. He even refused to speak with her for a long while. And he was the only one who’d read her stories that actually believed she wrote them. Everyone else accused her of merely copying another author’s works. How could a 10-year-old write as well as she could? After Gem had read it, he looked her in the eyes and nodded, leaving without another word. Then, in the days following, he threw out ideas for her to add into her ramblings and stories, and she’d give him paper to doodle on as they talked. He didn’t prod into her life, she didn’t prod into his.

“Agreed,” Envy murmured, turning her nose away though her stomach snarled at her for food. “I can wait till breakfast, I s’pose.”

McKaila, who was hiding behind a greasy blond curtain of hair, nodded slowly, pushing her plate to the middle as well without a word.

“Yuck,” came Win’s disgusted reply as he spit a bean across the table. It bounced and landed on the floor and he erupted into giggles.

“Simmer down over there!”

As soon as the dinner plates were picked up, McKaila shuffled back off to her room and a group of kids came over to the table, escorted by an aide, and Win bounced off with them to go play dodgeball. Shelby came up and rested her hand on Envy’s shoulder and the girl twitched under her grasp.

“Do you want to go back to your room, Envy?”

She looked over at Gem, who was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, and shook her head. No, she wanted to stay here and talk to him, but she couldn’t say that exactly.

“How about going into the community room?”

Again, gazing at Gem, this time nodding as he did.