Do you remember?
Well I do.
I remember how the sky turned dark, and how the light seemed to fade from everyone’s eyes. Everything turned black and white; there was no more color left to be had in the world. Sound disappeared; I was no longer allowed to enjoy the lyrics of the crunch of autumn leaves, or the sweet melody of wind rushing through the trees. The touch of a hand on my arm was no longer warm, but ice cold. Taste no longer had any place in my life, as everything that touched my tongue had fewer flavors than sand, and to smell was merely a memory. There was no sense left, for that was the day my life became chaos confined into one tiny cell called my mind.
There was such a sudden change, in that small, infinitesimal moment. The pulse rushed out of his body that lay in my arms, and somehow rushed into me. I had two pulses now. One was my own bodily, natural one. The other was the pulse of the gifted curse.
~~~~~
He was the youngest of his family. His father had died a few years before on the ocean, never to be heard from, with a body that was never to be properly buried. He didn’t know the man, however, so it was of little concern to him. It was only when his mother cried that he really paid attention. To see her tears was something a child should not have to see. By the time of his death however, his death in my arms, the tears had slowed. They would quickly reach their peak again with that news, though.
He was only seven years old.
She had held the young Jacob in her arms after he had been shot down in a massacre. To her, he had been the little annoyance that had lived with her and been the bane of her existence, that got caught up in her skirts as he ran past with a piece of fruit in his small hand. He probably had never figured it out.
Her own family had gone on the same trip as his, landing in the new Caribbean island of Port Royal. She had been a young girl, only three years of age. In her mind was the faint first memory of waves rocking the boat harshly from side to side, making her small body slam against the wall of the ship. She had crawled over to her mother in the darkness of the storm, but the woman was breathing heavily, and a sweat had broken out over her brow. The little girl had cried out of fear and tried to cuddle into her mom’s arms, and the loose grip was comforting in her terror.
By the time they reached Port Royal, her mother was dead.
Her father worked hard as a servant to a man who owned sugar crops on the island. There was little payoff, and little time for him to pay attention to his lonely daughter, but he did what he could. After a long day in the fields, he would come to his home, a little shack on the edges of the field, sunburnt and sore, yet try to listen to her tales of the boy that had pulled her pigtails or how she had run faster than the wind when playing with Mama Hartley.
Eventually, when she was twelve years old, Emma Hartley and her father married, not out of love, but convenience. Emma had a child of her own, young Jacob, a three year old boy that, similar to her and her mother, had never truly known his father. It was much simpler for both families to consolidate their lives. This was how life was for the next few years.
Then one day, the skies darkened suddenly to a sickening, menacing green. The entire town seemed to stare up at the skies and watch the change with fear in their eyes. What was this happening to their town? Thunder and lightning came unnaturally from the Caribbean Sea, and that seemed to be the cue for everyone to begin scattering. Townspeople abandoned whatever jobs they were doing and fled into homes and stores, slamming doors and windows, fearing the possibilities that waited for them outside. Men grabbed their guns, and women gathered their children close to them.
“Darinda!” The girl, turned towards the small, high voice of a boy not yet near manhood. The dark head of Jason bolted towards her as fast as his small legs could carry him, his hands covered in mud and his knees scraped from where he had likely fallen in his escapades through the day. It was clear why he was running faster than in any race between children. Behind him, skeletons, demons from the depths of the earth, followed.
Her eyes widened in terror at the sight of the ghastly shapes. As she stared at them, one raised a rotted hand, a pistol positioned at the end of the arm. Before she could even think of doing something, the creaking finger had pulled the trigger, the smoke and bullet had burst from the barrel, and Jason fell to the ground at her feet. She stood there in stunned silence, looking down at what had been the bane of her existence. Now it was a shell.
The exposed teeth of the skeleton somehow shaped themselves into a grin as they looked at the body. Grimy and cracked bones of its hand rose again to shoot the gun at her, and she was afraid to feel that piece of lead pierce her skin, but just before the trigger was pulled, a sword came out of nowhere and slashed the skeleton to pieces. The animated bones fell with a crackle to the ground, and men stepped over them and crunched them into dust. Who could have ever thought that pirates would save her?
The danger now over for her, she fell next to the small boy she had helped raise. His pulse was slowing by the second, and his breathing was almost nonexistent. She took his small form into her arms and felt tears running down her face. His eyes weakly turned to her face, and he began opening his mouth, as if to say something. Blood trickled out of the corner. Before words could escape him he took in one last shallow breath, and died.
“Jacob,” she whispered, tears running down her face. She laid her head on his chest, letting the tears fall fast, yet silent. As her head rest there, right over his heart, she felt a change come over her. It was as if something from the small boy’s body was slowly going into her own, some sort of unidentifiable substance. She felt it invading, but found that she could not move her body from him, nor release herself from the grasp of whatever it was she was feeling. It had trapped her, identifying itself as a part of herself.
When she finally lifted herself up, everything was somehow… different. Port Royal had been bleary before, but now it seemed even darker. She shook her head, blinking rapidly as if that would bring color back to her world, but everything stayed the same. All that had been covered in a green tint before was merely a shade of grey. There was no time to worry about that now, though. She told herself it was just an offset of the shock, and picked Jason up to take the news back to her family.
His mother started crying the moment she entered the house and saw the prone body of the boy. The sounds were oddly muted, though, as if the true feeling of them did not reach her ears. She lay him down on the old wooden table in the center of the two room house. Emma slowly walked over to him, standing over him like a weeping angel of death. She stared down at her son, the only biological member of her family left, and slowly reached a hand over to close his eyes. Her wet orbs slowly rose from her son and met those of the girl across from her, then flicked over to the doorway of the other room.
The girl’s gaze travelled with the older woman’s, and in her black and white haze, she walked to the small bedroom. There, laying down with deep, heaving breaths, was her father. In a daze, she travelled to his side, and tired eyes looked down at her. “Darinda…” the man whispered. A weak hand rose from his stomach to touch her face, and she felt something wet smear across her cheek. When she reached up to feel the substance, her hand came away in the shade of grey she knew was once red. She gasped and looked down at her father’s stomach. Tightly covering it was a white cloth that was slowly being soaked through with blood. For the second time that night, tears ran down her face, washing away the streak of blood that her father had left across it. She laid her head on the bed next to him, and closed her eyes to sleep.
~~~~~
I seemed to wake up that night, but it was different. All of my senses had returned to normal. But when I looked over to my father, the only color I could see was red. His eyes were open and bloodshot, but there was no life, no sparkle in them. The bandages on his stomach hadn’t helped at all, and red liquid coated it. I gasped, and lurched backwards away from it. My head hit the bedside table, knocking over a vase. It cut my arm open, and the red returned; the blood. I felt no pain from it, though.
It was then that my eyes truly opened. Everything happened as I had just seen, only with the absence of my senses. Instead of red, it was all black and white, but it was exact. There was no pain but in my own mind.
I knew at that moment what had happened, why I had been trapped the moment Jacob had died. Something in him had transferred to me, but the boy was so young that he had probably never experienced it, or if he had, he hadn’t realized what it had meant. But I knew.
I fled at that moment, sneaking aboard a ship just leaving port. Mama Hartley never heard me leave. I knew that I couldn’t stay here with what I had, though. Some irrational part of my mind told me that this would go away if I went away. There was nothing left for me in Port Royal anyway.
I was found on the ship just a few days into the voyage, but the captain took pity on me. He saw my distraught state and allowed me to stay, giving me some food and a job aboard the ship; a swabbie. It was thankless work, cleaning the decks day in and day out, but it was also thoughtless. I fell asleep exhausted each night, and no odd dreams with dank smells or red blood came to me.
But one day, the work wasn’t quite as hard. I fell asleep lightly in my hammock, with a small smile on my face. Despite not being able to feel anything, it had been a good day. My eyes fluttered closed, and my mind shut down. That was my mistake.
With my mind weak, a vision sped at me, hitting me like a rough club to my stomach. Actually, that is exactly what I felt. My eyes opened, and my vision was blurred, but the yellow of a nearby lamp glowed into my eyes. I knew at once this was a vision before my head snapped back as a punch met my jaw. A glance down at my body told me exactly what I needed to know about this vision.
I had turned into Emma Hartley, and I was slowly being beaten to death.
I couldn’t escape the torment of it. This was the first pain I had felt in ages, and all I wanted was to get away from it. I had dreamed of just feeling something again, but the suddenness of this had taken me off guard. Punch after punch, pain after pain, and there was nothing I could do, because I had no control.
I woke up suddenly, tears coating my face, my breathing harsh. What was the point of having this, I thought. What was the point of living if there was nothing you could do about all of this pain? I flung myself out of my hammock, and ran to the upper deck. There was no thought in my mind other than escape. I charged at the railing and jumped over it, knowing the water would greet me below.
I did not get what I wanted. When I hit the water, I fell unconscious, but I still awoke to a world without color, without music, without feeling. It was an uninhabited island, except for the occasional skeleton, but they left me alone for some reason. Their grey armor would usually be called yellow and red by others, but not me.
There is nothing left for me in this world. I stay on this island, living off of bushes, and living from vision to vision. My yellow hair is dirty and stained, and though I am young, I walk bent over like a crone. My blue eyes no longer sparkle with life. I’m stranded, but I wish there was something I could do with this. Someday… maybe someday.
My name is Darinda Loraine, and I can See.