Work Text:
Your mom used to sing to you.
She’d sing whenever you woke up from nightmares of a past life you couldn’t comprehend, or whenever your shadows grew at the corner of your room, watching you with lifeless white eyes.
Don’t go to the lake, for the ghosts will wake.
You ask about your father one day, and she instead tells you stories of her childhood, about a ghost whispering his sweet wish of living again, about her father bearing a child with experiments, about a boy who fell into well and gets out of it several years later, seeking revenge. You believe every word with your childish innocence.
Once you start questioning her stories, she starts closing in. she rarely talks to you, and whenever you do it ends in fights. You move out after a huge fight, and don’t listen to her broken cries, asking you to come back.
The shadows grow longer as the days go by.
You get yourself a parrot named Harvey, you buy colorful dresses that remind you of spring, you go through jobs, you sleep a lot, and you dream a lot, about faceless shadows that press behind your mind, wake up wake up wake up-
Whenever you look in the mirror, all you see is dead eyes, staring at you.
The loneliness is heavy.
You like doing crossword puzzles. You find one in a newspaper, on a page about an institution called Mental Health and Fishing, and it strings a chord inside you, a forgotten melody that you can’t grasp. So you smoke and do the simple puzzle, as the chords go louder and louder in your head, and you remember what your mother used to sing to you, about a lake, about a curse-
“Say the words.”
“Fate.”
It’s too late.