NOT GUILTY - Preview
-----ROBYN----- It's happening again. I'm awakening somewhere in a thick fog bank, groggy and disoriented. I don’t know where I am, but I know what's happening. I've relived this swirling cloud of confusion many times. And I can't stop it this time, either. I'm on my back, my body rocking rhythmically and pain surges and surges, matching repeated compressing weights assaulting me from toes to chest. Absurdly, I dimly hear a male voice counting cadence. "Hut, one. Hut, two, Hut, hut, hut, hut. Hut, one. Hut, two." Do I know that voice? Another voice grunts and exhales in my ears, his foul breath fills my universe. A disembodied man's face drifts toward me and retreats into the fog. He is smiling. And counting. "Hut, one..." Do I know him? Multiple brilliant lights momentarily sear through my closed eye-lids. Camera flashes? The mocking face emerges again from the fog. I try to twist or roll away but I can't. I'm as confined as if in a casket, claustrophobia imprisoning me in panic. I feel like I'm screaming but I can't hear myself. And I know no one else hears me, either. I know I'm reliving what happened but I can't stop the attack, the dream, the hallucination, this assault as razor sharp as the first one, indistinguishable from the first time. And the endless times in the eternity since. I feel myself bobbing to the surface of consciousness, a brilliantly white-clad angel hovering above my flickering eyes, saying something to me, then morphing into Beverly, the night nurse I remember giving me something to swallow…minutes ago…or hours or yesterday? "Robyn. Robyn. You're awake now. Everything's going to be okay." NOT OKAY! IT WILL NEVER BE OKAY! I WILL NEVER BE ME AGAIN!
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