(Episode IX) Sleeping (Stark)

“Please… I get it… Just leav—” Jackie’s jaw proceeded to fall off.

It fell, tumbled into pieces to form the growing—twitching mass that dragged her down by her pelvis.

Her trembling fingers desperately gripped the featureless cliff, only shaped by a chalk outline of a cliff against the black void. Nothing above, nothing below but a mess that will ultimately fall into nothingness.

She felt her fingers slowly, but surely, decay—and watched it with red, dried out eyes. She couldn’t cry anymore if she wanted to.

She looked down to the mass. It was hard to make out, in a sense that looking at it caused one’s vision to blur uncontrollably. But it was black, with a mud-like texture, constantly breathing and expanding.

Various junk was lodged within it, it’s bulging veins pulsing all over dressers, street signs, buildings, and the capital of a major city. All broken down, even breaking further as the hold tightened. There was no way anything could’ve survived this.

She knew she doesn’t have long. She knew that holding on was futile. But going out into the nothingness while still pitifully hanging on was a better end to her life than giving up. Giving in.

Her chest was squeezed, and she coughed. A cough that persisted, a cough that got worse as long as it drew on. A cough that took away strength.

She looked down to her horror.

She was always apart of the growth.

She was a wilting away skeleton, but what was once her closed insides was the growth pulsating within her crumbling ribcage. This colossal meatball withing her chest pumped away, connected with a stringy, meaty trail down to her completely taken over pelvis.

No matter how she stretched it.

No matter how much she denied.

She was always apart of this.

And the saddest truth of all was that it was never beneficial to her in the first place.

She crumpled into dust, body parts turned into pieces, as it freefalled along with the mass. Her skull, what’s left, smashed into the surface—breaking it further with only her eye active. It was subsumed in quick succession.

Jackie was shocked awake, eyes wide as the light overhead assaulted them. Almost like a parting, sick punchline: she only ended up back here.

When her eyes corrected themselves, she caught the person who took them in the act.

She was midway down the stairs, holding a massive white book overhead with her long and eerily spindly arms. Practically on her tippy toes, she remained frozen in place—knowing Jackie was now awake. And despite her eyes being masked with her bangs, Jackie could feel her stare and read the rest of her surprised yet wincing face: she wasn’t supposed to awake.

“…Soooo uh,” the strange girl: Stark Terri said, her voice nasally and thin. “Gonna, um… Gonna blame myself on that one—”

Jackie tried to scurry out of the white, cotton sheets that were thrown ontop of her. She tried shouting, getting up, fucking anything out of adject fear.

Stark Terri tried to say something, but was gibbering out was a collective mess of starts of words, versus the words themselves. She casually jumped and hovered down from the stairs, putting the tome down and raising her—again—abnormally long arms up.

Jackie started to tear up, trembling, and started to shake her head furiously.

“I---” Stark Terri abruptly put her balled fists on the top of her bushy hair. Not banging them on it, but slowly pressing them into the wild mane of hair. Jackie noted in her panic that she couldn’t fear her hidden stare, so maybe she closed her eyes.

“I’m trying… To string my words together,” Stark Terri tried to sound calming, tried to sound normal when there’s no way she of all people ever knew the concept. “Please—go to sleep, just—your friends are still resting and—it’s easy, I’m super sorry—”

Jackie realized that she was in a pile along with the others, covered with the hastily thrown wooly blanket on an enormous, old bed. But that wasn’t the reason why she couldn’t move.

She just couldn’t move period.

Was this it?

Does she know?

Jackie sobbed, “Leave us alone… Just, fucking leave us alone—w-we can’t take any of t-his anymore…!” Her voice was strained, and she huffed in frustration—trying to make herself angry, to make herself strong.

Stark Terri just stood there.

“Whatever fucked up thing you’re planning—you and your family—we’re not fucking worth it…! Damn it--!” Jackie tussled in place, at the point of her veins and her pieces erupted along her body in desperation. “I can’t even fucking talk--!”

Stark Terri winced again, now her hands clutching at her head, standing there but wanting to say or do something.

“There’s no point…! Don’t you get it—didn’t you get it…?! There’s no fucking point… You might as well kill us, whatever you’re going to do…! So fuck you—fuck every single one of you—fuck me who fucked everything up for myself!”

Even when trying her damnest to be strength, all she did was sound small and weak.

She felt her tears flood across her face, and just succumbed to what happened next.

“im such a fucking idiot,” Jackie cried, not only letting the damage done to her but the pain take over. “…threw everything away… and it was worthless in the end… all of it, somehow meaningless compared to…”

She just fell back, openly weeping. She didn’t care at this point. She didn’t care how long it was going to take, or how more pathetic she looked. It was all going to end in an instant, as soon as Stark Terri moved forward and forced her to “sleep”.

…But she kept crying. For what felt like minutes.

Jackie couldn’t lift her head up anymore, pouring all of her energy into that outburst.

The irony wasn’t lost. But the fear of Terri was.

All Jackie saw… Was Stark, on the last step, turned away. As if she was waiting.

She sniffled, feeling the running snot retract into her nose.

And on that dime, Stark quickly slid an old box of tissues at the base of the bed, hitting it, causing it to flip up and land on Jackie’s chest.

The fear returned in that moment. Stark had all the power in that room. She could crush them all with a flick of her wrist and repair the ceiling that she used as ammo.

But Jackie took the tissues, mopping her face up. While the mess was cleaned, the sniffling—hiccuping—the sadness was still retching about.

Stark sat there, again still back towards Jackie, for another five or ten minutes.

Jackie could only guess what she was getting at.

“…I’m…” Jackie began. “I’m fine now…?”

Stark turned toward Jackie, again startling her because not only was she on edge, but Stark’s tempo was so alien. Fast, but careful.

She scooted to the wall, as if to gave Jackie more space. Was that a reaction to the jump…?

With an Athernet-enhanced phone in her hand, she displayed the ArtShare AR message she made, scribbling it on the screen so it can project.

“I was the one that gave your banana back to you”, it said in her sloppy handwriting—and where sloppier drawing of herself giving it to a crying Jackie.

“…Oh,” was all Jackie could say.

The words, the cadence. It all rushed back to her.

She smiled gently, then nodded. All still inhuman, weird… But she was trying.

Stark swiped before her phone, thus clearing the writing and drawing. She quickly got to work, and surprisingly, pumped out the following in a few seconds:

“I actually met you before—well, SAW, and it’s not a thing of being weird! You were on Steppe Ave on that night, you ran—you dropped your banana when you ran and I held onto it!”

Then the memory of the poor boy and father came back, like a lashing flash. Jackie wanted to clutch her head at that horrendous image…before remembering that yes, she felt someone was trying to run after her, so she sprinted faster.

Stark cleared it again, and wrote the following:

“You’re free to think what you think. You clearly went through a lot and I’m not here to earn sympathy. It would be KIIIINDA weird, given you’re the bedridden one… I just want you all to rest. It was my fault, I just wanted to leave something here. Promise.”

Jackie didn’t know how to take this, just sniffling still and staring.

Jackie was scared once again by Stark, as she swiped again and really focused this time with her message. It was the longest two minutes so far in this place.

She displayed it. A picture with a blurb.

It was her, broken in half or bisected. Comical tears streamed from her face as she drew Jackie and the rest of the girls in the pile.

“Besides: how can I kill you all if you guys killed my back first? Haw, haw haw”

A closer inspection, Jackie caught this cartoon Stark said things as she wept. “Ow—ow—ow; not your fault, but ow!”

All of that, in this sloopy, but character driven style.

Stark put away the phone, clearing her throat. “I… It’s hard, y’know? Getting—no, putting words together for me… siVis brain since birth and all that. I’m a boogeyman and even scarer than the guy you saw, and—and I get that? Please… You don’t have to trust me—in fact if it makes you all better: don’t! Don’t trust me at all! …But I want you to rest.”

It was weird. It was all still so weird. But Jackie couldn’t help to let her guard down.

All in time for Maddie to throw a shoe at the weird girl.