Wind of voices

The first thing I see are my black jeans. My black shirt. My black sneakers. I hold up my hands. They are dirty. I don't need a mirror to guess that my face is probably just as soiled.

Something about ferns... They are everywhere. I see a few HDB blocks but even those are not as many as the fern trees. They are growing everywhere, I could die strangled by their leaves.

I see a family pass me by, looking at one another like they were the most wonderful things each has ever seen. They look happy to be together; they don't even realise I'm standing there and practically walk right through me.

One of the daughters picks up a fern leaf, spins around while letting it go. I watch the fern float higher and higher until it is gone into the clouds.

When I look back down from the sky, I see a boy staring at me. He grins and runs off, and I find myself chasing after him. I've never seen him before, yet he has the aura of something familiar, as if I've been intimate with him in my past life.

I lose him for a moment, fern trees breathing down my neck and pulling my ankles wherever I go. I stand on a lift lobby, very sure I've lost him, when there he is in the distance.

He holds another girl in his arms, she with her long wavy dark hair. They stand in a space that is surrounded by the playground, embracing each other. Occasionally he looks over her shoulder and gives a secret smile at me.

My stomach wants to lurch and my throat wants to throw itself out my mouth. People are gathered around them, filling up the playground and watching and cooing at them, I believe admiring how cute they are together.

I see his eyes on me still, how longingly they look at me. I almost see him reaching his hand out to me, but I turn away when I notice how she looks completely in love with him.

I can't ruin that, can't ruin the show that everyone is enjoying.

I hide at the back of the playground, making sure I don't see them anymore. I sit in the shadows of the audience, sobbing until a soldier comes over to me. A soldier, with a patch over his left eye and a wooden leg. He looks like a pirate in these parts, yet I identify him as a soldier because the rest of him looks that way.

He has a huge gun slung over his chest, while he holds a chain whip. He tells me not to cry, comparing my heartbreak to his past. He tells me he's lost an eye and a leg in the war, and yet he never cries.

"That's your story, this is my story, and I want to cry as and when I feel sad. I don't care about your past!" I argue. He continues demanding I stop crying, that I just suck it up unless I lose a leg and an eye myself, then I can cry. The bastard!

I glare at him, and that is when he whips me with his chain. I don't see it coming, and even if I did, he moves fast. It tears through my jeans and even my skin; I catch a glimpse of my bone through the hole his chain has made. My bone looks burnt, as if the chain is made of fire.

He tells me to stop crying, while he holds his chain up, ready for another beating. I turn to run instead, into the lift I was standing by earlier. A silhouette that resembles the Grim Reaper is the last thing I see before the doors close on me.

As the lift takes me up to the highest floor, I drop to my knees and bury my face in my hands. The whispering in my ears grow more and more intense the higher I go.

The door finally opens after what seems like forever; in front of me is nothing but a straight lane. Neither doors nor windows decorate its dirty walls. I don't see where it ends.

I begin walking to the end, and that is when the whispers become shouts. I can't make out what they're saying, but the voices act like wind blowing against me. The louder they get, the harder it gets for me to walk forward. My injured leg doesn't help.

My desire to jump to my death is what keeps me alive, to the extent that my walks become crawls. I try to get up, but I hear the crack of a bone. I look down and watch in horror as the bottom of my leg breaks away from my thigh. I fall on the remaining of my leg, and watch the rest fly back to where I came from.

I make out a little of what some of the voices are saying: I hear "red and blue", "Fernvale", "die with a Ghost". I hear the name of the boy, and the girl he was hugging. It's almost too much for me to bear.

I think I almost reach the end, and the voices become sharp as knives, cutting into every part of my face. The Grim Reaper stands before me; he lifts his cloak to reveal the soldier from before.

I can't run anymore. I let his chain cut through my every bone, as he whips at me again and again. It is made of fire, it burns me yet it doesn't hurt me. In fact, I seem to enjoy the heat. It's solace compared to the cold of the voices and the wind.

He cuts me into pieces, each part of my body flying off to where the lift door stands. He cuts off my ears and finally I hear nothing but silence, as my head lifts from the ground and floats back to wherever the wind of the voices takes me.

I am finally in oblivion.

It is my last thought before I wake up from the nightmare.