Waking from the Nightmare

I woke several hours later to my Mother standing over me holding the phone. “Lacey, it’s your friend Jimmy’s roommate, he sounds upset, he said it’s an emergency.” I took the phone, my hands were trembling so badly that I could barely hold it, my entire body ached and certain parts of me burned with some kind of inner fire, I was sure that if I had to withstand another night of that torment that I would die. Slowly I put the phone to my ear, “H… Hello?” There was a long pause then, finally, that deep baritone wove it’s way into my mind, “Hey beautiful, I have to switch hotels, somethin’s wrong, did you tell anyone?” He spoke in a hoarse whisper, his voice shook as if he were frightened. I could feel my heart skip several beats, taking several deep breaths to calm myself I whispered back, “N…No of course I didn’t tell anyone, what’s wrong? What’s going on?” It was almost a full minute before he answered with simply, “I’ll call you back tonight, someone called the fucking cops.” The line went dead.

Sitting there on the edge of my bed all I could do was stare off into space, replaying the last two nights over in my mind. What had truly happened? Had a neighbor heard my muffled crying and called the authorities? What’s going to happen now? Will he show up? I decided to wait for his call, I don’t believe that I moved from the edge of my bed for a full hour. Finally I dragged myself away from my bed and into the restroom, the shower was scalding hot but it felt wonderful to scrub the stink and dirt from the night before off my body, despite the pain. I resolved to go about my day as if nothing had happened, putting the incident out of my mind, even though I jumped every time the phone rang.

After several hours and no word I began to calm down, curling up in my favorite chair in front of the big screen television in the basement. I watched Cinderella and thankfully this time my viewing of it wasn’t interrupted by my mother darting into the room to mimic the voices of the little mice, a habit she had that usually proved more irritating than amusing. Dinner time rolled around and I ate with the family, no one bothered to ask why I kept shifting in my chair, in truth I would have given my left hand to be able to retrieve a pillow from my bedroom and set it on my chair. But I refrained from saying anything lest they ask why I needed it.