Eshel - Seven of Spades

again, not collum, short story, hate new storywrite bring back old one.
in a nutshell for you.

Eshel sat, alone, staring straight ahead. Sitting in the car. Alone, again. It never really bothered her much, at least not when she was thinking about it.
The drive home was uneventful having the orange streetlights cast their shadowed glow across the dashboard before they disappeared behind her to be replaced again and again.
Like stripes of a tiger constantly moving, constantly shifting across Eshel’s face.
It was dark now and Eshel wasn’t looking forward to getting home it would be cold.
In her haste to leave the flat she had forgotten to turn the heating on.
She turned the radio on to distract her from the mind numbing similarity of the drive home from the hospital and classical music flooded out. She tried to listen for a few minutes before she realised she had been happier with the silence and the hum of the engine.
The flat was cold as she stepped through the door, as she had predicted, she was never wrong. It seemed to have acquired the same drowsiness that she had had in the car. The mood of the room was one of constantly shifting tiger stripes.
She dumped her satchel dismissively onto the kitchen table without turning on the lights, she hardly ever turned them on, there was no need.
The cat was pretending to sleep on the windowsill.
He had never realised that there was no point. Eshel could tell.
‘Good evening’ she swiped the cat off the sill with her arm and sat there herself.
‘Less of the good, thank you’ he replied, in a bored and sarcastic fashion. Annoyed at the idea that he would have been so rudely been awakened if he had been asleep. Not that anyone but Eshel had heard it.
‘I had the most awful day and now your arrival home in one piece has snuffed my last hope of a prolonged life and happiness’ he stalked bitterly about her ankles. ‘I guess there is always tomorrow’ he added.
Eshel kicked him, he didn’t mind, she’d miss anyway.
Eshel didn’t know how long she had sat on this windows sill. She would have been interested to find out how much time she had spent all together sat at the same window, looking out at the same street.
Too long.
‘Fetch the cards would you?’ she asked the cat
‘Do I look like a slave to you?’ he replied in disgust and in his usual off hand manor muttered ‘Get them yourself’ before turning his back to her.
Closing her eyes, she sighed and discharged with no joy.
‘your looking more like a hat every second’
he had never even considered not going to get them for her, he just wanted to see what she would have said if he had refused.
‘how do you know, you don’t even have your eyes open’

No more was said the cat got the pack of cards and as he had many times before, leapt up and sat opposite Eshel. Placing the deck in a neat face down pile between them both.
Eshel closed her eyes…
‘7 of spades’. The cat flipped the card over off the top of the deck so it landed face up in front of them.
It was the 7 of spades.

‘Oh look no hands’ the cat mentioned in an exhausted fashion, an uninterested attempt at a joke.
He would have been more surprised if she had laughed.
The night carried on until the deck had been shuffled and run through eight times and the cat had this time in truth fallen asleep. He wasn’t pretending, and she was never wrong.
The dream would come again tonight.
Eshel knew, she knew that it would come and there was no way of hiding no matter how fast she ran, how well she hid.
She couldn’t stay awake forever, even if she thought she was immortal, she still had to sleep.
It would come.
Eshel tried to stop it, but it had been thirteen days and the lack of it had made her sluggish.
She had to sleep. To sleep, sleep….forever, just once.


***

The landscape was dark, dirty and scorching hot.
So dry it burnt Eshel’s mouth to breath. The very air stole what little moisture she had saved under her tounge and between her teeth.
There was nothing to break the skyline, nothing to show that anything existed in this world.
Apart from Eshel.
It began slowly, effecting the parts of her body with the most liquid.
Already the mucus in her nose was solid, and she could feel her gums peeling back from the roots of her teeth. Making them loose in their holdings. She could not feel anything with her tongue. It had dried to a rough lump in her mouth and in a matter of what was always seconds, she couldn’t even scream for help. Her eyeballs itched and her vision blurred as tears congealed over her lashes into a thick crust. Her eyes like old wet leather began to wrinkle at the edges and the blood in the smaller veins first and then the bigger shortly after turned the flaky brown that meant all of the blood had dried. Her skin turned red and began to steam. The sweat didn’t even have time to form on her skin before it evaporated into nothing on the hellish air. Despite her tongue being dead flesh in her mouth Eshel tried to scream. The instant she opened her jaws, her lips crackedt in seven different places, a brown sludge attempted to imitate blood oozed out of a particularly deep split. That too was taken. And her throat crackled and split before the noise was even born.
Bubbles erupted under her arms and hands and face. She clawed at them but her nails snapped of her very fingers and turned to dust brittle and burnt.
The bubbles burst spewing out puss that boiled the moment it was exposed to the air.
But it wasn’t air any more it was fire, living breathing fire suddenly all around her in an inferno that flew down her throat and turned her insides to ash.
She collapsed onto the ground and flames lept to swallow her up running across her backing flesh.
Until there was nothing, nothing apart from the burning pain, the relentless burning…pain of the firestorm within her.

Then the ice flooded across the ground stopping the flames as they rose, but not the burning.
Eshel’s body became whole again, but the pain kept on and on.
Her blood spilt over the ice spreading and pooling about her.
Turning pink as it froze. It surrounded her and froze to her, anchoring her fast to the ice, if she didn’t move she would bleed herself an icy prison all of her own.
Eshel tried to cry but the tears stuck in her eyes blinding her swelling pushing on her eyeballs till they burst. They jelly had no way of getting out, it leaked into her brain and seeped down her throat.
Again she screamed but the moisture in her breath froze in her gullet thick as a block chocking her she couldn’t breath. she was chocking on the ice that poured down her throat.
She tried to get up but her skin was frozen to the ice she struggled and writhed like a fish out of water pathetically flapping about waiting for the killing blow. Panic consumed her and if she could she would have sobbed and the snot would have come running and dribbled down her face as she screamed for help. But her nose had turned a vile blue grey as the frost bite took its first victim. Panic gave her strength and finally there was the wet sound of ripping flesh as she tour her skin off the ice leaving a ragged bloody layer behind.
She stumbled a few steps forward, forgetting momentarily that her back and left arm and leg were a mess of tattered meat in the shear adrenalin fuelled joy at being free. She promptly vomited, but the block was still wedged in her mouth and deep down her throat. So it clung to that, or slid back down partly frozen sending painful little shards of ice into her stomach. Soon enough the blood managed to reach her shoes, and she way one again welded to were she stood, by her own weeping wounds and bodily fluid.
But it was too late her world blacked out as the ice filled up her lungs.

Eshel…Eshel…I've found you, you cant hide Eshel there is no place I cant find you…
‘Bite me’ she screamed into the blackness but the shadows held no answer.

The figure stood over her surrounded by blinding light.
‘Why are doing this’
Eshel whispered
‘What have I done’?
This time the tears fell splashing down her face she didn’t care, it was a novelty for them to fall freely.
‘Why?’ she questioned her head lolling about staring limply down into her scared hands. Exhaustion, fear and pain had rendered her fire cold and melted her ice. Her vocabulary could be outstripped by a ten year old and her intelligence had been replaced by the insanity needed to keep her sane. To get her through that pain. The figure did not reply it just stood over her. Watching. waiting.
Eshel waited for the blow that she knew would be next to come. She looked up as it came in a last attempt at dignity, or a whim of insanity.
It came with a roar from the figure.
‘YOU DARE QUESTION ME!’ it was a males voice terrible in its fury.
Then the hand came down like the heavens splitting on her brow.
Eshel felt her skull bend before shattering into itself, her cheekbone fragmented into a thousand pieces and sent splinters through her brain and skin cutting it into ribbons. She was kept alive. To live through the pain.
Eshel looked up her face a bloody mess. half of it, caved in with the force of the blow. Some parts of what had been her muscles looked like ground mince, hanging idly off twisted dented and fractured bones. misshapen and bleeding she cried tears still leaking from her one intact eye socket.
The other had been crushed along with her check. White bone glinted were white eye should have been, black congealing blood were clear black pupil would have been and the eyelids had melted into the mass of indistinguishable mangled flesh.

You see Eshel, what he does to you…you see Eshel what he has done…
Go away. She wanted say, to go away, but her torn upper lip and bulbous bruised and swollen lower wouldn’t allow more than a thick jumble of chaotic sounds.
She spat at the voice instead. A tooth came out accompanied by what was more blood than spit.
She was beyond screaming the pain had gone, or hadn’t perhaps it was still there, she couldn’t tell, she couldn’t move, her body was shutting down, after all the torture she was being able to let go.
Finally she could sleep.
No Eshel you will not leave just yet…not…just…yet
Eshel felt the healing begin; she would live, like she had done before.
‘No’ she yelled with fresh lips and a new voice ‘no, let me go, leave me’ her unsullied voice was loud and powerful and lusty. Full of life ‘no no NO!’ she was screaming
‘LET ME GO, LET ME GO!’ with the healing her words came flooding back, and her fire and she let loose a new onslaught
‘YOU BASTARD YOU CANT DO THIS TO ME, I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU! I DON’T CARE WHO YOU ARE! I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND MURDER YOU, AND THEN I WILL MURDER EVERY ONE YOU EVER LOVED, EVERY ONE OF YOUR CHILDEREN! I DON’T CARE IF IT TAKES ME FUCKING FOREVER!’

***

Eshel woke up in a screaming uncontrollable anger. Breathing heavily she reminded herself that it was over, she had survived another dream. Shakily now she looked about, more drained than she had been when she had gone to sleep. The room was dark and the cat had left his place at her feet.
‘I don’t pity you humans’ he was sat on the table looking up from a 99$ skin mag.
‘if all dreams are like that then your welcome to them’ as if he felt that was all that needed to be said he went back to his reading.
‘They’re not all like that’ Eshel reasoned, absentmindedly reaching out for his ear which she brushed lightly with a forefinger. It twitched.
She knew that sleeping next time wouldn’t be so dire.
The other dreams weren’t so bad. Not really. She brushed it again, just the tips of the longest hairs on the very crest of his ear. It twitched.
The cat yawned And shook his head slightly annoyed, ‘if you do that again, I will bite off your hand. And try making a hat without a left hand'
Eshels lips curled briefly, the cat added in a serious matter of fact tone as if a thought of great importance had just struck him. 'I had a friend who tried it once, she said it didn’t work very well' he looked at her in earnest and tilted his head to the side in crule mocking of a bird. 'i suggest you take her advice'. it had been made better, the cat didn't understand what a dream was, so it made it alot easier for him to joke about. Eshel's lips thinned but she stayed smiling.
All had been said until the morning.
Eshel went back to the cards. Thinking happily. She would stay true to her word, because even if it took forever.
Eshel had forever.
Eshel could live for a very long time.