Cherub

What lies between you and the lies of eden?

Why hasn't it stopped raining?

I couldn't say how long it's been, not sure I would want to if I did. It started when that thing showed up. No idea where it came from.

It lives with me now; or maybe I live with it?

I can't seem to look at it directly. Not that I would want to, but curiosity is wading in endless black seas, knowing something lurks below. Will I still find my doom looking into the eye of it? I try to look, it shifts from the right corner of my vision to the left. Does it not want to be seen as much as I know in my knotted guts that I shouldn't look upon it? And still;

It never stops staring at me.

I can feel it, eyes burning into the nape of my neck,

the back of my skull.

The rain has been leaking through the windows, cracks in the ceiling. The dripping is nearly as incessant as my intruder tenant.

Am I supposed to ignore it? The flooding water, the burning eyes. The contents of my belly are looking to find their way out through my throat.

I want to know my plague.

I've been trying to use the standing water to catch a glimpse of it. Anything that may satisfy the never ending itch of curiosity slithering in my chest.

I stood at the sink, the unwonting rain created a kind of skin over the window above it. Liquid cascading over the weathered window, finding entrance in the smallest of places. Catching any minuscule light that inevitably found its way into its icy ripples.

An arm's length at most, it loitered.

Distorted in the undulating liquid,

pale body swirling in it.

Drapings of cloth hung from it. They writhed at their ends, as if the cloth was pulled on like a puppet. I couldn't tell how much it was, and how much was the water deceiving my eye, my mind.

It started crying the same day it appeared, like the tears brought the rain. An anomaly in my existence and still my heart hurt for it. It wasn't ever far from me and still, the cries echoed down halls and through doorways like a distant child in the throes of a nightmare.

Innocence shattering within its throat, but still too deep to be an actual child. Still my heart raced along with it. The more I was forced to listen, the more I could hear the breaks in its mimicry, in its cortisol disguise.

It thrummed, in and out of my ear, oscillating.

A murmuring, whispers of people you could never quite make out, and only got more distorted the more you strained to listen.

I very much would like the rain to stop.

I have a gun in my drawer.

Do I grab it?

Would I even be able to look at it long enough to pull the trigger?

Do I use it on myself?

Saving me from continued torment?

Will it stop me? Is that what it wants?

What am I to it? There isn't the physical violence I would expect from a predator. Though the eyes burning into my flesh tell a different story the chemicals within me confuse for what it isn't. What does it gain from making my pulse quicken, making my palms sweat, my knees turn to rotted, soaked lumber.

Why can't it leave me be?

One of us is the host, the other a parasite, I couldn't know which I was.

“Eden”

A word I could decipher in the murmuring malaise it elicited between the bouts of horror I felt move through my blood as icicles.

Such a place hadn't existed to me since before I lost my wonder in sour vomit. Eden was a quiet mind and the smell of home before it soured.

What would I have to do for the rain to stop? It shows no sign of stopping. Did anyone know if I was gone? trapped under storming clouds, flooding gutters, dripping ceilings and the interloper that brought it all in. I will sometimes reach for the phone, to call, to text. I stop when I hear that crying, the near unintelligible “eden” drifting out between the breaths. Would my parents hear it too?

I am not sure which I would fear more,

a world where they didn't,

or did.

Mad, cursed or a mixture of both, I've been steadfast at keeping them within me. Contained in my flooding house. A curse within my genome.

I use the hours I can't sleep staring blankly into the dark. The only time I can look directly at it. Obfuscated by leaking shadow and retreating light caught in the wet globes of nothing that stare right back. I expect it to move in for the kill, every day in fact, I expect it. I feel the anxiety it fosters within my flesh, why wont it kill me? Or is this the mode of my death?

I never hear footsteps.

I don't think it walks, like a wraith it follows me. Every atom within me, screaming that there is something there and my ears getting none of the same information until the crying starts again.

“Between you and Eden." I could hear it more clearly when I held the gun in my hand like a keepsake. A threat? a plea? It looked over my shoulder, I could see it in the shining chrome mirror of the loaded ouija board.

No “yes” or “no”.

Just that crying, that biting crying.

Just here, no Eden.

I'm afraid of it remaining here.

Afraid if it leaves.

What can I do? Become vermin within my own home. Retreat further from my own flesh.

It wont stop raining.

The walls have swelled with dirty water. It wreaks of mold and candles burnt to their ends.

It sometimes smells like iron and salt when the crying reaches a crescendo. When the shining chrome is my silence.

I'll make it stop raining.

Why did it bring me to this place? How could it destroy my home, my body, my mind.

I lifted the gun, and the crying began again. A flash, a shatter of sound.

Then the rain stopped.

If you liked this, check out any of my other fiction.

Photo by Mateusz Butkiewicz on unsplash and edited by me.