"Antephialtic" drabbles by Samantha Grace Bishop

The Room

Antephialtic #3

Never looking ahead.
In this room. There are no windows. No ceiling. No floor.
Only doors. All locked.
A dismal bleak space, full of blood. As if from the womb.
The walls ooze with slime, pus white, full of maggots and blisters.

I'm stuck here. And the feeling of terror is overwhelming.
Washing over me like fulminating rain. My breathing hitches in gasps.
Claustrophobia. Nauseas. Bile rising in my throat like venom.
I see myself. Sometimes as the little girl I once was.
Sometimes as the little girl I am now.
Tumbling over my useless limbs. My broken ragdoll body.

The Little Girl

Antephialtic #2

Seizing my dreaming hand, I am soaked from the dizzying black rain. Coating everything in coal ash. My long black hair covering my face like a curtain. I cannot contain my horror. I've run so long. Running from the Medusa. And now I cannot let go, or I will drown.

I pull myself up, but I find that I am lost again. The girl I once was. I keep trying to lose. The pain of that is too much. I cannot continue. I must sever myself away.

Mostly I dream of locked doors. And open windows.
And never looking back.

The Medusa

Antephialtic #1

Symptoms of my dreaming brain. If I'd continued with my therapist, she'd have told me to write it all down. Sometimes I can't find the words to write it all down. Sometimes the crushing weight of my dreams is more than I can bare.

The Medusa coiled in alabaster green, her head engulfed in flames. Satan's snakes slithering from between her legs, lapping at her dripping crotch. Her breasts heavy with milky blood for the begotten bastards.

When she gazed at me, my mind shattered in hebephrenic tremors beneath a cold black rain. Seizing my hand was a little girl.