This story is the third-place winner in the Front Page’s first ever Halloween Writing Contest.
By Daniel Butts
I was once human like you; a little girl with the hopes and dreams that one day I could marry into happiness; to be able to provide for my family, to live a happy life with my brother by my side to protect me. Those hopes of happiness are gone now; what I’ve become, what I’ve done are too unbearable for the human mind to comprehend. All I can see now is a world of pitch-black beings and shadowed visages of the buildings that once accepted me. If you could see me now, I think you’d be disappointed.
I never chose to be this way and I never wanted for you to be dragged into this nightmare of my own design. I wished to walk this path alone with my past behind me; but, it’s that past that drives me forward. It’s what’s left of my humanity that lulls me to an everlasting state of dormancy. I fear that should it end that I won’t be able to stop from others seeing what I’ve become. If you were to see me now, you would fall to your knees in awe and serve me in an unwillingness of what human nature dictates. I could destroy your mind, your soul, and your everlasting desires of happiness.
These beings move unnaturally here. Their white soulless eyes are in drastic contrast with the rest of their black featureless bodies. They seem to slip and slither into the buildings; others seem to crawl around on the walls, their thoughts mapped out in a web of lies to the existing people that live on the other side. It’s in this world, this world of dreams and nightmares that I travel through town unseen, unheard, and completely unnoticed by the humans.
At least that’s what I thought to be true until one day someone did notice me. A little boy deep in his own sleep and thoughts, he was a prodigy in the making. He was being talked to by a being of drastic differences to anything I had seen in a long time. It had feminine features and was pure white with conflicting black eyes as she seemed to have him in a trance. I remembered this all too well with my brother. The desires of what anyone would want, the desire that any human had; the one desire that I still clung on to, the desire to be loved beyond family.
It was then that I remembered the whispers in my mind of lies and deceit that urged me towards him. Why I did it beyond those urges are still beyond me but I scared her off, and hurt him. I always forget that I look like the rest of them; she lies I told him, don’t remember what she says. I reached out to touch him and it seemed to leave a lasting impact on him as I watched over him.
This infatuation for him grew to rage, I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be a part of his world, to interact with normal people again to be seen again even if it was with undesirable gazes; at least I could be with him. Yet I knew the answer to join them, to throw away humanity and run to him and hold him in my arms. It would be no use to me though, as I did just that and he was corrupted by something that should never have been, something that should have never existed. I should never have existed and they made it very clear of that. Even without saying anything; their faces, their gasps, their lack of words all told me everything that I needed to hear.
I wished others could feel the way I do, to understand how I felt; and now they do. I spread my so called ‘disease’, that’s what they called it; they don’t know how natural this can be though, that I merely planted a seed that their own emotions grew upon them to bloom into someone similar yet different to what I am now. I was once human like you; a little girl with hopes and dreams to lull me to sleep at night. But now I am something much greater than you. I am a queen, no I am a goddess. My name is Sally, the goddess of depression, the goddess of the inverted world, and it is now that I rise to my ascension over the human race.
