This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Coney-IslandQueen on 2024-10-12 22:02:24+00:00.
It was early August in Marren, and the town was still half asleep, but I was awake, and as usual, I was thinking about the dead. I lay belly up in front of a rusting fan doing its decrepit best to fight off the heat. The fan turned painfully slowly, a rickety side to side, like a geriatric old woman crossing the road one agonising, shuffling, step at a time. The creak of the blades rotating cut through all the dead faces crawling around in my head. I thought about throwing it out of the window, ending its suffering, but it was too hot to sacrifice even the tiny breeze it was giving me. I had my legs kicked above my head, resting on the wall that was covered from top to bottom in time-stained polaroids, like a wallpaper print of all the people I loved the most. I slept each night with them watching over me. My celluloid guardian angels, forever watching so I wouldn’t forget their faces. Sweat pooled in my collar bones, and even though the blinds were closed, the sun was relentless as it fought its way through the gaps.
Chrissy came in, footsteps loud and so familiar I didn’t need to look to see if it was her because I knew her from the soles up. From sole to soul, was the way it felt. She threw herself down onto my bed like she had so many times before, shape familiar as my own on the blankets. Her bright pink hair fanned out from her temples like a sunset in late June, a soft and beautiful chemical smear, carrying the whole summer sky on her head.
“Fuck me up the ass and call me Jesus, but it’s hot” she said, throwing her legs up to join mine. Her dusty combat boots hovered against the polaroid wall. Her right boot came to rest in front of a photo of us on the first day of high school. Eyes bright, middle fingers in matching chipped purple polish flipped up at the camera, arms slung around each other. Her left boot fell against a polaroid of me doing a handstand she’d taken at the beach, the year her brother Travis got his license. We spent all Spring just driving out of town as fast as Travis’s truck would go, Chrissy screaming at him to go faster, shaking his headrest, all of us pretending we’d never heard of shitty little place called Marren as the streets disappeared behind the tires in a cloud of dust.
“Well then Jesus, did you bring any lube?” I said. Chrissy grinned and stuck out her tongue as a reply, too lazy in the heat to think of a comeback. We lolled our heads and let them hang off the mattress. The room was now upside down, but Chrissy was still the right way up. That was how things often seemed these days.
“It’s gonna happen again Sadie.” She said, with her eyes closed. The heat pressed in, and outside I could hear a sprinkler starting up. Summer lazed on through the morning, but I was now wide awake, and the dead were loud in my head. Again, again, again.
“Ok.” I sat up. That was all there was to say. No point in questioning the inevitable. “When and where?”
“Don’t know that yet. Don’t even know his name yet. He’s getting hungry.” Her forehead creased. “He’s been dreaming about her.” She shook her head. “Dreamin’ real bad dreams.”
“Just tell me what to do. Where to be. We’ll stop him.” I said. I looked down at her, still the only right thing up in the room. “We always do.” I lay back down.
“I know.” She said, our legs side by side above our heads almost touching, like we were joined at the hip, grown from the same bones. “But I think you’ll have to kill him.”
I side-eyed her, taking her in as she swore at the fan, panting like a dog in the summer heat. I looked at the constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and the small silver bar through her right eyebrow that flashed like a star when it caught the light. Her eyeshadow was dark, smudged like she’d slept in it, and though right now her eyes were closed, I knew them so well that I knew when they opened, they would be deep green like the trees in spring, right before they burst with flower blooms.
I looked at the gaping hole where her jawbone should be on the left side of her face. I could see the rips through the layers of sinew and skin to her cracked teeth, a jagged half moon slicing across her cheek, putting her face in eclipse. The soft curve of her eye socket hung just below her forest green eye. There was loose cartilage hanging round the crush of her brow bone, poking through sharp and white. I looked at the blood that floats gently in small looping tendrils just above the surface of where her skull is caved in. Chrissy is my best friend, and I never get tired of looking at her face.
I guess I should also mention that Chrissy is dead.
To be specific, Chrissy is dead because when we were sixteen years old, a man hunted her down through the woods, bashed her head in with a rock and left her to die after he was done with her body. Chrissy has been dead for 5 years 11 months and 22 days if we’re being really specific.
I started seeing her two weeks after she died. At first, I thought the psych ward was calling my name, grief finally pulling me all the way under. But I’m not crazy, I swear. I’m not lying either. The things I’ve done are very, very real.
Chrissy may be dead, but I can’t imagine life without her. But let me go back a little, to before that sweltering morning in my room in August, before I had to hunt down and kill a hungry man I would later find out was named Amos Everett. Before all the bad, I want to talk about all the good. All the love. There’s always love, and I forget about it sometimes, but it was there, and it’s still here. I carry it.
When we met, I was five, and Chrissy was five. I had blue eyes like a crayola sky and she had green, like apples and grass and four leaf lucky clovers. We loved playing tag in the woods, and daisy chains and ghost stories and glitter. We loved the horses that lived in the field behind the trailer park, would spend hours chasing after them behind the chain link fences, wishing we could keep up, kicking up clouds of dust and grass with our battered sneakers. We loved stealing gummy worms from the gas station and hiding out in the magnolia trees to share our stolen goods, sun-melted sugar on our hands the only evidence left behind. When I fell down, Chrissy would be there, to swipe one curious finger through the bloody scrape on my knee before carefully pressing a pink bandaid on top, pulling me back up with both hands, wiping my eyes and spinning us in circles over and over until I stopped crying and started laughing instead.
When I was seven, Chrissy was seven. We got the training wheels on our bikes off on the same day, out in the yard practicing with her older siblings and her cousins, getting rides to school with them while my mom was in and our of the hospital. Chrissy’s bike was hand-me-down blue with flames painted up the sides by her Dad, and she rode so fast it was like like she was burning up the sidewalks when she pedalled past in a blur of sugar and blonde hair. My bike was the colour of dirt, with butterfly stickers covering up the rust on the handlebars, slapped on with careful application by Chrissy after the other kids laughed at me for my run down ride.
When Chrissy was eight, I was eight. She could run faster than any of the boys in our grade, and I was never far behind, always following on her heels, kicking up dust like a shadow. Sometimes she’d slow her pace a little so we could run side by side in the sun in our white tube socks, matching our strides like we were twins made of muscle and bone. But sometimes there was something in her that just needed to run, and I grew used to the sight of her back as she left me behind, left everything behind, like if she just ran fast enough she would grow wings from her shoulder blades and fly away. She would braid my hair for me on the playground just like her sister Luanna taught her, so we could match, her with blue ribbons and mine with red. We’d listen to anything on her older sister’s busted CD player as long as it was loud, Britney Spears and Sum 41, Tupac and the Backstreet Boys, Avril Lavigne and Willie Nelson, eating peach rings while her mama painted our nails sat on the carpet with us cross-legged, playing we were grown up at the salon. I still slept with a nightlight at home, but whenever I stayed over at Chrissy’s when my mom was getting really bad, the dark in her room didn’t bother me so bad.
When Chrissy was 10, I was 10. I was taller now, and she was mad about it. Chrissy loved beanie babies, and firing her Travis’s BB gun at Bud cans on their back porch while I watched and screamed and cheered her on like a little animal. I loved shiny purple eyeshadow and pretending we were mermaids at the community pool in the summer, and learning dance routines off MTV, which we would practice for hours in my room. We would stay up all night watching the scariest horror movies her Daddy had on VHS, and scream our lungs out at every jump scare and then laugh so hard at each other for being scared we almost pissed our pants. But I was never really scared, when I was with her. On Chrissy’s tenth birthday we stole two of her mama’s Newports and smoked them in secret like we were lighting birthday candles, giggling and choking on the spearmint smoke, side by side crouched in the long grass with our knees touching. We felt like we were fully grown in our denim cutoffs underneath that yawning sky, studded with stars like spilled glitter.
When I was thirteen, Chrissy was th...
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