Stacey's Best Friend

[Amalia]

I felt hands -- MANY HANDS -- groping and fondling me. I felt as if I could feel each distinct texture and grip of each of the muliple palms and fingers as if if I stopped to identify each hand, I could give each his or her own first name just by tactile sensing. As I tried to adjust my eyes to my surroundings by opening them real big, all I could see is darkness and the darker incessantly moving inward bulges encompassing me from head to toe as if I was in a cocoon on a conveyer belt being paseed through a kneading machine. I could certainly identify who were the perverts and who weren't. The only solace I can take from this experience is that my cocoon was almost positively a blanket just because of the feel of the fabric. I'm not sure what the material of the blanket was but if you've slept under the covers of one for your entire life like I have, you've slept under all of them. It reminded me of home.

OOF! I just landed from a modestly higher elevation. My butt, upper back and elbows

[Amalia]

took the initial brunt snapping my head back causing the back of my head to bounce off of the hard surface that I fell on my back on. I'm on my back. At least, I THINK I'm laying down. I feel horizontal.
I then hear the elongated creak of hinges as a lid crash-closes and locks in one fluid motion directly above me. Eeerr. Pfffp. Click.
As I get my bearings, I realize that I'm in an encasement and the shape is VERY rectangular and confining.
I hear the loud crying of a baby. It's very close. My breath catches -- is it me? I slide a hand up to my face and hover it over my mouth. I'm just breathing normally -- maybe slightly more rapid than in my daily life because of the current situation -- but normal, nonetheless.
I thrust a foot outward and it meets the cold hard surface of thick metal. I kicked the lid too. Both metal. My eardrums are now sore from the ricocheting sound from those impacts.
Darn.
Realizing that I was leaning my head forward, I laid it back down so that I could look

[Amalia]

straight up above me to face the near-ness of my cage's roof, to see if I could see through the stitching of my blanket -- probably it's actually a bag seeing as how I can't shake free from it at all -- and face my predicament.
My predicament! As soon as my attention settled on that thought, it started to slowly suffuse over my mind like an expanding ink splotch.
As my thought-ink splotch expanded to take over a larger and larger surface area, outlying sections of it started peeling away from each other forming a central body with tentacles separating from each other creating space between each other like a large single-colored spider distinguishing each individual leg from each other more and more.
Then light started piercing through between those legs causing me to switch attention towards a focus towards my surroundings. As I did, I started to attempt to prop myself up on my elbows. But as I did, I felt that my arms and hands were not where I thought they were as if I had gone to the

[Amalia]

place that I remembered leaving them at but finding them not there. I went to move my arms again and found that as I did so, the sizes of the sections of light shifted. I started to attempt to move them again and the sizes of those light sections fluctuated more drastically. Then I went full steam ahead and sat up on my elbows. And as I did, I realized that I just slid my hands off of almost-entirely covering my eyes undoing the one-overlapping-the-other embrace that they were previously positioned in.
Doing that revealed a lit room in its entirety. I looked over to the source and saw a lamp on a table. I looked around and saw that this was MY room.
Suddenly the crying of the baby returned. Had the crying stopped and then restarted again? Or had it been going on the whole time and my notice of it just went in and out, and now in?
But the crying was muffled this time. And it was coming from a metal box in front of me -- eerily just large enough to fit a full-grown

[Amalia]

teenager lying flat. The lock had been broken. And as I started to go to it, the greatest feeling of unencumbered-ness coursed through my body. I wasn't in that bag or whatever it was or in that metal prison anymore! I just checked. Fueled by my excitement of freedom, I rushed to the metal box and flung open the lid. As I did, the crying stopped immediately like a poof. Inside was a baby in a diaper . . . without its head!
I screamed. And right then three police officers burst through my bedroom door pointing guns in my face.
"FREEZE! HANDS UP!"
I immediately did what I was told. They handcuffed me.
As we were walking out of my front door, I asked them what I had done wrong. A cop with a pointed expression on his face came up from behind me and held up the headless baby.
"I DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THAT! I yelled. "I DIDN'T KILL THAT BABY!"
"Shut up," one of the cops said.
"NO. MOMMY!" I screamed. "MOMMY! I WANT MY MOMMY!"
A hand reached over holding a fist-full of cloth and stuffed it in

[Amalia]

my mouth. Followed by another two hands that wrapped duct tape around my head to secure it before I could spit it back out. Before I could start kicking and thrash my arms around, two baseball bats crashed hard against each of my shins. Two blistering paths of pain shot up my entire body. From it, I felt myself crumble to the ground. And as I did, I saw an erected gallows in the middle of Elm Street. I then resigned myself to my fate.
I don't know if I passed out or not but from this juncture on, I shut off my attention from the world.
The next thing I remember feeling was a small wreath around my neck. I felt every single fiber of the noose that touched my skin -- prickly. I glossed my eyes over the scenery of the audience that came to witness this macabre event with their macabre minds. Amidst the hazy look of the crowd, I saw the glint from something shiny. It was a huge smile with huge perfect teeth, which encompassed all of the facial features that were shown, amid a cowled frame.

[Amalia]

The person's clothing was indistinct from the shadows of the crowd. Then there was a sudden hard upward lurch followed by a snap that happened to me. And I bet that smile didn't even flinch.
I opened my eyes fluttering them waking up from a horrible nightmare. I sat up in my bed feeling damp all over. My bottom lip was squirming like a thick worm. I ran to Claudia's room to tell her about the nightmare hoping to relieve the anxieties I have from it.
I pushed open her door.
"Cla --" I started to say.
Claudia and Ethan were in bed together with the sheets up to their shoulders though nonetheless it was obvious that they were completely naked underneath.
"Claaud?" I said, my mind swooning.
There was an awkward pause as both they and I strove to re-compose ourselves. I was the first to recover and saw a glimpse of Ethan sporting a gawking, mouth-gaped-open expression ossified on his face.

[Amalia]

Yet, he spoke first unleashing a quick burst of a torrent: "YEAH, how does it FEEL, Stace? How does it FEEL? sleeper!!"
I froze . . . caught tongue-tied. Then my gaze gravitated to Claudia. She wore a curious look, screwing up her face. She was staring a pinpoint stare very hard at something. I followed her gaze like following the trajectory of two thin laser beams and looked behind me to gather what she might have been looking at or spotted.
While my back was turned, I heard a drawer quickly open and slam shut. I heard the cocking back of a gun sounding exactly like how it sounds in some movies I've seen.
I swiveled back around facing him -- them!
"Die cheater," Ethan said in the most loathe-filled, menacing and calculating drawn-out low-voice I have ever heard. "I put enough poison in you to kill a horse."
"What are you . . ." I started to say.
"Your arm," Claudia informed me dismissively. "We did it last night."

[Amalia]

"Wha --," I started to say as I followed Claudia's gaze to my left arm and caught sight of a syringe-hole in my forearm . . . and just as I did,I died instantly.
For the record, I DID NOT CHEAT on my beloved Ethan. Now if there was just some way to communicate that to him.
. . . Maybe through his dreams . . .
I feel as if I could, seeing as it seems that I'm still on this earthly realm . . . as a floating mind? This feels weird.