12-27-2007, 02:34 PM
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indent A week had passed since the dreams had begun to turn on him. It had become so bad he was often awoken at night, hurled from some nightmarish world. For a week, he had been living in a bizarre waking life—even in the middle of the day he saw the faces of the dead, roaming restlessly through the forests. They weren’t ghosts because he could smell them. They weren’t real because they made no noise. So Ahren did what he long ago learned to do to escape the survivor’s guilt that plagued him each time he saw his son’s face in his dreams; drowned him in a bottle.
indent Alcoholics have a pattern, and few of them ever escape it. Ahren, whose family was laced with addictive behavior, was no exception. The problem was that the bottle was not the only escape. It had been a stupid choice but he had made it. The belt, the needle, and the sweet black abyss that the heroine brought. He knew where to find it, how to make it, how to use it. That was how he had survived many nights alone, shaking in the dark. That had been two days ago. He had lost himself since then, and slept in his dark place for as long as he could.
indent Woken by a powerful sense of dread, as powerful as a thunderclap, he sat up. His right arm ached, but the fur hid all of those track marks, left from years ago, from days ago, from hours ago. There was no smell, no obvious sign—he stunk like whiskey and looked like hell anyway. Rubbing his face and finally looking around, Ahren realized he was in the church again, his mother’s church, and swore. He leaned back against one of the pews, seated on the dirty red carpet, and lit a cigarette. This was pattern. This was nothing new.
indent Alcoholics have a pattern, and few of them ever escape it. Ahren, whose family was laced with addictive behavior, was no exception. The problem was that the bottle was not the only escape. It had been a stupid choice but he had made it. The belt, the needle, and the sweet black abyss that the heroine brought. He knew where to find it, how to make it, how to use it. That was how he had survived many nights alone, shaking in the dark. That had been two days ago. He had lost himself since then, and slept in his dark place for as long as he could.
indent Woken by a powerful sense of dread, as powerful as a thunderclap, he sat up. His right arm ached, but the fur hid all of those track marks, left from years ago, from days ago, from hours ago. There was no smell, no obvious sign—he stunk like whiskey and looked like hell anyway. Rubbing his face and finally looking around, Ahren realized he was in the church again, his mother’s church, and swore. He leaned back against one of the pews, seated on the dirty red carpet, and lit a cigarette. This was pattern. This was nothing new.