This isn't fear. This is the kind of feeling that turns his veins into a nest of snakes, constricting around his bones. This is the feeling that makes it seem as if a hundred dirty, grease-covered hands are clenching his guts and his heart and his lungs in their fists. This is the kind of feeling that you spend a decade unwinding in therapy, only to get hanged by when some stray sparrow brings the memory back in the shadow of its wings.
This is terror.
The only mercy is that he doesn't see Aunamee's face. He doesn't wake to the blood-spattered, semi-manic grin that turned from him to his cowboy rescuer. Instead he wakes to Aunamee's back, his shoulder, but that's all he needs because he remembers being held down, once in life and a million times in dreams, over and over and over ten times a night or more, he remembers the feeling of Aunamee's body when he finds a scream dying on his waking lips. The blankets swampy with sweat, the trashcan ever present for the fifty-fifty chance he's going to try to puke up a dream.
Maybe if he fought he could escape. Maybe. But that means moving, and despite every impulse in his brain screaming to fight back or to run, there's a wall - no, a cliff - of hysteria that can't be passed.
So he's still, perfectly still, and he prays to be dead, too.
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This isn't fear. This is the kind of feeling that turns his veins into a nest of snakes, constricting around his bones. This is the feeling that makes it seem as if a hundred dirty, grease-covered hands are clenching his guts and his heart and his lungs in their fists. This is the kind of feeling that you spend a decade unwinding in therapy, only to get hanged by when some stray sparrow brings the memory back in the shadow of its wings.
This is terror.
The only mercy is that he doesn't see Aunamee's face. He doesn't wake to the blood-spattered, semi-manic grin that turned from him to his cowboy rescuer. Instead he wakes to Aunamee's back, his shoulder, but that's all he needs because he remembers being held down, once in life and a million times in dreams, over and over and over ten times a night or more, he remembers the feeling of Aunamee's body when he finds a scream dying on his waking lips. The blankets swampy with sweat, the trashcan ever present for the fifty-fifty chance he's going to try to puke up a dream.
Maybe if he fought he could escape. Maybe. But that means moving, and despite every impulse in his brain screaming to fight back or to run, there's a wall - no, a cliff - of hysteria that can't be passed.
So he's still, perfectly still, and he prays to be dead, too.