This world

is hell.

Every day things die and things break. People, relationships, animals. The bit of joy we have will never outweigh the amount of darkness in this world.

The room was dark, an eerie silence hanging over it. Not a trace of light was to be seen, not a sound to be heard but her own thoughts. The girl, Yami was her name, was lying in that very darkness. Along and with half lidded, glassy eyes she stared into the void. Her thoughts were calm, flowing through her head like a river, calm but unceasing, and not leaving space for anything else. She had to think, as every night, about all that she had lost, that was torn from her. But most of all she thought about what she could have done to prevent it. The memories sting, a dull ache that she had become used to already, but still it tore her up every night anew.

‘This place truly is a living hell.’

“And you aren’t making it better.” She shot up, her heart pounding as the low, gravelly voice of her father spoke, tearing her from her thoughts.

“You are making it even worse.” The young voice of her baby brother made every hair of her body stand on end.

The last one was similar to her own, and made her blood freeze on the spot.

“You destroyed all we had.” Her mother spat with a venomous tone.

Yami wanted to talk, to respond, but she could barely even breathe.

“You tore us from our lives and kept yours. It was your selfishness that made us lose everything.” Her father growls through clenched teeth.

“I’ll never grow up, never see the world or have a girlfriend.” Her brother weeps. “Are you happy now?” The crying voice is like a stake to her heart. Of course, she wasn’t happy. She loved her younger brother, never wanted anything but a happy life for him.

“It is your fault.” The three voices all rise in chorus one last time, and Yami could feel the floor giving out below her. She fell. Fell into the eternal dark and the cold below, and her eyes slowly shut.

With a scream, she shot up on her bed, grasping at her aching chest where her heart was still pounding. The noise of the passing train outside of her window had woken her up.

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“Thank you.” She breathed a sigh of relief, thankful for the poor conductor who had to drive this thing in the middle of a winter night. She was drenched in sweat despite her room being cold, almost frigid. The street lights outside were shining some of their cold light into the blank room, clean of all furniture but a bed, a dusty desk and a closet.

She looked out of the window. It was snowing, the white dots lazily falling in the dim light outside. She looked around the dark room. Empty. She sighed relieved before grabbing her phone from the night stand. 1:54 a.m.

She squinted her eyes at a notification, her vision was still blurry from just waking up. It was from… ‘Dad’

“Die” Was all it said. Yami took a breath and closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them again, the message was gone. Her hand, still holding the phone, dropped onto the bed as she let out a tense breath. With her legs under the blanket and her gaze fixed onto the black display, she was thinking. She was restless, all the drowsiness from a moment long gone. There was no way she would fall asleep again now. She decided to get something to drink. But the moment she looked up, her heart stopped for a moment, and she could feel the blood drain from her face. At the end of her bed stood her mother, or rather her flayed corpse, staring at the girl with cold, dead eyes. Yami’s face turned to an expression one could only describe as true primordial horror.

For a moment, they just stared at each other, neither moving a muscle. Yami was looked at her mother, her dead mother. Her clothes were torn all over, burns cover parts of her skin and glass shards were buried in her face.

Yami swallowed, her heart racing, before slowly starting to move out of bed. Carefully she set down first one, then another trembling foot, her gaze not leaving the thing at the end of her bed for even a second. She got up and slowly walked over to the wall, hugging it as she made her way to salvation: the door. She didn’t even dare blink, always looking at her mother, who was still staring at the bed. The door was only a few steps away when her mother’s head slowly turned towards the girl. Her legs were about to give out, but with her last bit of willpower, she manages to bolt the last steps out of the room. She slammed the door shut behind her.

She leaned onto the door and slowly sank down to the floor. Her whole body was shaking, her breath ragged, and her heart refused to stop pounding a mile a minute. A ghostly silence hung in the hallway, only Yami’s unstable breath could be heard. Her law was trembling, but just before she could break out in tears, she heard a scratching on the door. Goosebumps rose all over her skin, the likes of which could not even be causes by a thousand nails run across a blackboard. She scrambles up and walked down the hallway with hasty steps. She was halfway to the front door when the door creaked open behind her. She started into a sprint without even turning to look back. She storms out the house, onto the small square out-front, feeling the frigid air bite into her skin. It was quiet, a fine blanket of snow covered the asphalt. She was standing below the street light, the snow falling around her without a sound. Clouds of vapour came from her throat with every shaky breath as she slowly turned around.

A few meters behind her, she stood, holding out her bloody, burned hand. Silent tears ran down her face as Yami slowly walked towards her mother. Past her house, the fence and onto the train tracks where she was pulled into the cold embrace of her mother and the world got louder and louder.