Storytime Blog Hop - October 2019 - Traveler

Welcome back to the blog hop! This month’s story turned out a little farther along the dark side of the horror spectrum than I intended, but Happy Halloween anyway!

The AUDIO version of some of our blog hop stories will be on the amazing podcast Alone in a Room with Invisible People, for your listening pleasure.

Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page for links to the other blog hop stories!

Enjoy -

Traveler

Time for Kispara was not safe, not full, not quiet; time ticked like a bad watch with every breath she took, and the cacophony of paused time was even worse with the breath she held.

***

They had cajoled her from her hospital bed, when she was weak and nauseated from her most recent bout of chemo, promising to make her special, promising to make her better, promising to make her happy.

In the fullness of time, she had discovered they had lied.

They had healed her, sort-of, giving her neon-colored I.V. goop that had burned until she gained her appetite and her coordination and her strength back; giving orders with errands to run for them when time stopped between her breaths until she couldn’t remember if she was coming or going; giving her sedatives and locked doors until she finally realized how trapped she was.

Until she held her breath and ran down the corridors through the time-frozen bodies, her lungs burning, her ears bleeding. Until she burst out of the building, gasped, then held her breath and ran again. Until she lost herself in the warren of the bad part of the city where no one noticed the hitch in her stride or the blood on her shirt.

She braved the hollow, screaming space between breaths long enough to steal a black hoodie, then sneak on board a bus bound for the border, choosing a seat next to a dish-water blonde with a shiner and a similar need not to be noticed. They spent a few hours in companionable silence, then escaped each other’s presence for a new slum in a new city.

There, she learned she could steal sandwich meats and pizza slices and the occasional bao if she could hold her breath and ignore the noise long enough, but she couldn’t eat for hours after. She could walk into a pawn shop, scoop up some bracelets, and be gone before they knew, but she couldn’t sell them or trade them because all the fences knew each other, and not her. She could watch any woman she wanted, and dream of their lips touching, but she could never approach one, convinced she might be from the agency that didn’t exist, hunting her.

Most of all, she couldn’t escape herself.

Her guilt that her family thought her dead, and would be endangered if they discovered her alive.

Her regrets that she didn’t have the courage to become more than she was.

Her shame for the choices she’d made.

So Kiss kept breathing, kept surviving, and let time tick on.

It would end soon enough.