Painted smiles

Nerezza Selve

I woke to green light and purple shadows. The air was heavy and humid, wrapping around me like a blanket. A faint buzzing irritated my ears. Fear gripped me. They would be coming soon. Coming with their sharp silver instruments and whispered promises that they were "just trying to fix you. It'll be over soon." Ignoring my screams. Looking down on me with painted smiles. I close my hand around the glass shard. Not today.
They come on time, painted smiles bright red today. Their eyes flash, mine gleam and red drips down my face. Taking a life leaves me buzzing wit adrenaline. I turn. I run. I am free.
Years of imprisonment in my own mind, in my own body, cannot prepare me for the absolute bliss, the euphoria that comes with the stretching of my muscles, the lengthening of my breath. I am hypnotized by the pounding of my feet on the hard, black road. Alone in the room, I put everything I have into driving each step forward. Rushing air has dried the blood on my face, sticking my eyelashes together in clumps.
At the top of the incline, I pause. Far, far behind me my prison is a speck between golden hills outlined by the rays of the rising sun. Red tendrils shoot up into the sky, banishing the inky black night. In flash of light, orange, pink and blue rip the sky in half. I am blinded for a moment. It is in that one, precious moment that a sound drifts up to me from the bowels of the valley that chills me to the bone.
A dog's howl.

I am crashing through the thicket, branches and thorns tearing at me face, my hands, my hair, dragging me down as if I was running through knee high syrup. The beauty of the world is lost on me. I am consumed by one need and one need only: to get away, to escape.
Suddenly, I am free, falling down, down into a ditch. Mud squelches between my fingers, soaks my clothing, sucking me in. Exhaustion presses me into the mud. I watch, fascinated, as my blood mixed with the brown muck. It is cool and strangely soothing to lie here. I turn to watch the sunrise. It is the last thing I see before the hounds swarm, like death itself, down the hill towards me. I await them with open arms, laughing as pain becomes the only existence I know.