This one is short...but sweet... a sort of "in-betweener"
Enjoy
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Willow was in a deep sleep, dreaming of nothing, her body perfectly still. A light breeze blew in through the open window next to her bed, ruffling the curtain and Willow’s soft red hair. It tickled her pale skin, made blue by the moonlight, and soothed her with its gentle caresses.
The sound of the phone ringing next to her bed brought a jarring end to her idyllic rest. She jumped a little at the sound, inhaling sharply. Her hand lashed out in the direction of her nightstand, grabbing blindly at the receiver, finally finding it and grasping it clumsily, pulling it from the cradle and to her ear.
“M’lo?” she mumbled groggily.
“I…I woke you,” said the unmistakably familiar voice on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry… go back to sleep.”
“Na..No..s’okay,” Willow replied, trying to rouse her foggy brain. “Wassup…s’everything okay, Tar?”
“It’s nothing…It’s stupid…I shouldn’t have bothered you…”
“Tar”, Willow stated, her voice was now more alert, though still quite gravelly from sleep, “it’s important enough that you called…what’s wrong?” When Tara gave no answer, the redhead continued questioning, “did you have a bad dream?”
“Yeah…”
“About your mom?”
Willow heard the blonde sigh heavily before answering, “yeah…”
The redhead inhaled through her nose, rubbing her sand-filled eyes a little with her free hand, and exhaling a long breath. “Tell me,” she urged gently.
“I don’t want to think about it…”
“You have to,” Willow explained, “get it out of your system… give it to me…give your dream to me…”
Willow could hear Tara shift in her bed, the sheets rustling, the muffled sound of bending springs, she assumed the blonde was shifting on to her side, pressing her face against the phone, which now sounded as though it was resting nestled in a pillow.
“I just keep going back to that day”, Tara began, “You know…
the day… I keep reliving it over and over….”
“I’m listening,” the redhead encouraged softly.
“I had been watching TV downstairs… some do-it-yourself show…when I heard the wind make this…eerie…noise. I listened to it closely for a moment, thinking about how strange it sounded…kind of like a ghost,” the blonde explained, speaking lowly in a hushed whisper as if to tell it too loudly would make it real again. “And then I realized… it wasn’t the wind…”
“It was your mom,” Willow concluded. She heard Tara swallow a gulp in affirmation.
“I ran upstairs and to her room… the room we’d brought her home to only two days before…and she was…sitting…sitting bolt upright in her bed…,” her voice was starting to break with terrified emotion, “and her eyes were so wide and frightened… and these sounds were coming out of her mouth…these inhuman sounds…”
“Shhh,” Willow calmed her as she almost began to hyperventilate, “Breathe… breathe…”
Tara took a breath in…swallowing again a couple of times, trying to calm her constricting throat muscles as tears silently slipped down her face. “I tried to get her to lie back down…but she wouldn’t move…she had this strength that came out of nowhere…she hadn’t been able to sit up for weeks…but now…I couldn’t get her to lie down… … and she kept screaming… she was in so much pain…and I didn’t know what to do…”
“It’s alright…I’m here,” her friend assured her.
“So… I grabbed the phone and called the…uh… the hospice nurse…and told her what was happening…,” Tara went on with difficulty, “and I remember…she got really quiet…the nurse got really quiet…and she said that my mom’s soul was fighting her body… and there was nothing I could do…except try and make her comfortable for end…” the last word came out strangled as a full blown sob escaped her lips. She inhaled and hiccoughed a little, pulling herself together again, taking another deep breath. “She told me to give her some morphine drops under her tongue to help ease the pain… to make it easier…so I got the dropper out… and… somehow… managed to get some in mom’s mouth…but it didn’t help…she just fell back into her pillows twisting and groaning…” she took in two quick breaths, “and I told her…’it’s okay, mom… you can go…we’ll be okay… you can let go now’... and she screamed out, ‘NO!’… and she was so angry that I’d said that… I felt like I’d betrayed her by telling her not to fight…”
Willow remained silent, letting Tara work through the scene that had haunted her for so long.
“…she just kept moaning in pain… so I finally decided to give her more of the morphine…and… …at last…she calmed down…and stopped making noise…” Tara’s voice and breathing began to settle as she related this part of her memory. She sniffled a little before going on, “and then this sound came out of her chest…like a heavy rattle…and I saw her moving her jaw, like she was trying to say something… but couldn’t shape her lips into words…her eyes were open…staring at nothing in front of her…then finally she let out one long, rasping breath…and her body relaxed…and she was gone…” The last words were like a sigh, let out with relief that it was over.
Willow took in a deep breath, letting it out. “Change channels,” she said.
“Huh?”
“The pillow that you’re lying on”, Willow explained, “turn it over…”
“Why?”
“Trust me…” She listened as Tara shifted again, the rustling sound of her pillow being rotated to its other side. “Did you do it?”
“Yeah,” Tara replied, lying back down again.
“You’ve just changed channels,” said the redhead, “so you can have a different dream…listen and I’ll give you one of mine.” She paused a moment, recalling one of her favorite memories. “When I was six years old,” she began, speaking in a soothing whispered voice, “we lived in Georgia. My dad was teaching at a small university there… I don’t remember what my mom was doing…research, probably… we lived in this little townhouse, in a row with other little townhouses… the backyard looked out over this big field…and beyond the field was the base of a small mountain…not even a mountain…more of a glorified hill… a hill with an ego…” she smiled when she heard the blonde let out a small snort of laughter. “at the edge of the field to the west there was this…tiny…tiny…farm. It was rundown and old…but people still lived there… and they raised chickens…couple cows…some crops…vegetables mostly…they had this rooster that would wake the entire neighborhood at the crack of dawn… and they had a horse…an old plow horse…brown with white splotches… and it was missing an eye…the left one…. I used to walk across that field over to the farm…carrots stuffed in my pockets for that horse…I’d sit on the fence rail, feeding him carrots…looking into his eye that wasn’t there…and asking him to tell me secrets…” Willow paused a moment, feeling her eyes growing heavy…her voice getting lower as fatigue began to set in. “In the fall,” she went on drowsily, “the fog would settle on the earth, and my friends and I would run to the base of the mountain… up through the woods… into the mists… and it was like dancing on clouds…” She let out a long, sleepy breath and listened to the phone. She could hear Tara’s breathing…steady and slow…sound asleep…drifting through the receiver and into her ear.
“I love you,” she said, so softly that even she couldn’t hear it, and drifted off to sleep, not hanging up… not wanting a rude dial-tone to wake her precious friend from what she hoped were now pleasant dreams.
*****
TBC....
"Promise me you'll never be linear." "On my trout."
Edited by: DarkWiccan at: 3/23/04 10:22 pm
Love sammi xx 
And I'm stopping the yapping now. I'm glad you have Ayn. 
