Then something inside of me snaps and I do something I never thought I’d be capable of doing. I grab the barrel of the shot gun with shaking fingers and bloody hands. I shove on it with so much force that the butt whacks Daddy in the jaw and he stumbles backward.
Daddy palms his chin.
Drops the gun.
I act quickly, slipping through a puddle of my blood and snatch the gun from the floor. I let out the loudest, painful, and heart-wrenching shriek of my entire life.
I aim.
Place my finger on the trigger.
I pause.
Then I fire and shoot the bastard in the left knee cap.
~ ~ ~
Sometimes I wonder how dreams can feel so real.
I feel like I’m falling.
I feel like I’m falling into a pit.
The strange thing is, the pit is never-ending.
I just keep falling and falling and falling and waiting, preparing myself for the blunt force when I snap my neck on the cold, hard ground.
But it never happens.
I never hit rock bottom.
The worst part is, it feels like my eyelids have been super-glued shut because the darkness is so black and so thick that I can’t see through it. I need help, I know this and I try to yell for it, but when I do my mouth opens but no sound comes out. My heart hammers against my ribcage. My stomach bottoms out. There’s a weightless yet a surging spike of adrenaline pumping through me.
I try to scream again, “Help! Help!” But once again no sound leaves my throat. I strain to make out any kind of noise, but the only thing I can hear is the wind whooshing against my ears.
I reach out, with flailing arms and grab a fist full of nothing and at the same time, I feel like the darkness surrounding me cuffs around my wrists and ankles turning my body into a parachute.
My body jerks.
Arches up.
Then relaxes.
Suddenly I feel like a feather and it’s as if my downward free fall has turned into a peaceful float. I imagine that I’m outdoors. That’s the sun is stinging my skin with warmth. I imagine that I am a raft without a person lying on top of me and I’m floating and drifting on top of crystalline blue waters. Now, I feel calm. My nerves crawl back into their hiding places. The uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach settles.
The whooshing sound filling my ears dies down and I swear I can hear the voice of a man. He’s calling my name. “Adelaide!” There’s a pause and the second time he says my name his voice goes up an octave. “Adelaide!” He sounds frantic and urgent and worried.
I try to answer him, but still nothing comes out.
Then his voice begins to fade away, dying and echoing all around me as tears of desperation well up in my eyes.
My mind screams.
Help me.
Please help me.
I still don’t know where I am or what is happening and those thoughts plague my mind. I still wonder if I’ll ever be able to clearly see my surroundings and still hope that at some point that I’ll stop falling. And there’s huge part of me that thinks at some point during this fall that I’m going to die.