Teanster1 - Student, General Artist | DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Literature

Survivor's Guilt

Some terrible things happen in this world, and I'm one of them. No, I don't mean that. I mean I represent one of them. I began to learn this one night after a check-up at the doctor's. When I woke up to turn over and take a sip of water, the ghost of a little girl my own age, about three or four, was standing in the corner of my bedroom. That was all she did at first: stand and stare. I slept fitfully after that, and on the many occasions when I woke in the night, I heard her voice, a child's whine: 'It's mine.' I told my parents about it in the morning and, predictably, they put it down to a bad dream. I knew better, but as almost everyone knows, you can't tell that to parents. I saw her often after that, not just when I was alone, but no one else did. 'There she is!' I said one night, perhaps a year or so later, when my mother was reading me a bedtime story. She looked where I was pointing, then at me, the lines coming into her brow. I knew those lines well. She and Dad often