Thank you for reminding me, I found a spooky lil short story of my own while cleaning out my phone the other day and haven't known what to do with it, so here:

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There's only so much I can remember that I don't see now. The inside of this Box that I have stared at for hours or days or weeks on end, the lights that flicker around the outside of the Box but never creep in, the voices that speak and laugh and talk with each other but never hear me. My memory only ever reaches that far, besides a few things.

I remember her speaking to me, asking me questions, and waiting for answers I did not know if I was willing to give. She asked lots of things: my name, my age, where I lived, things I had forgotten long before she found me. I stayed quiet. I do not think she liked my silence, but I had no answers to give.

When she saw I would not answer, she would ask me another question, one she knew I knew the answer to. "Why were you there, all alone?" She'd ask.

And every time, it would spark my memory, start my story.

She would wait silently as I fought to make my voice speak again, and for the words of my fading brain to get into line and form a train of thought.

Tick, tick, tick.

My story always started the same. "Mommy was sick."

The sickness changed mommy, and robbed her of her smiles and laughter. Everything turned grey for her, she needed life again. She needed color.

"Mommy loved balloons."

Balloons made Mommy smile. She could see the world in all sorts of colors by looking through them. She could fly into the air with them. Even when a balloon seemed to be all burnt out and began to fall to the ground, she could find a smile in them by opening them up and sucking out the joy they contained inside to make her voice all high and squeaky, in the way she knew made me laugh.

"I wanted Mommy to smile again."

There were only so many words I could say to her, only so much effort I could force out to answer the question, but the three sentences were enough to help her understand my story, understand my mind.

She would ask other things but by then, my voice had given out, and I was a silent specter once again.

There was so little I could say. I had asked to see myself once before. She had shown me then, but she did not understand my request. She showed me a doll, the face of a little porcelain boy staring at me blankly with a smile.

I don't remember what I look like, but I remember what Mommy always said.

Mommy always called me her gorgeous little girl. She always said she loved my big brown eyes and my wavy black hair. The doll looking at me had purple eyes, and the small bit of hair beneath his little cap was bright red.

Every day I asked her: "Show me what I look like." Every day, the image changed. The boy's eyes got darker, and his smile faded slowly. He looked as if he were crying ink, and when I felt the ticklem of a large, black tear that matched the doll's slide down my cheek, I finally understood.

I no longer wanted to be there. My hope had dwindled to its last morsel before she lifted my static porcelain body from its place in front of the mirror and placed me in a room that I recognized, though I did not know why.

It was dark and grey. There were plain white tables everywhere, surrounded by empty chairs. There was also a large wooden box, with a panel pulled from its surface and set to the side just enough to let the slightest sliver of light and oxygen through. In the small space in the box lay a tiny body, a little girl, curled into a ball by a bundle of balloons sitting just outside the box, all different colors waving over her and casting a faint rainbow on the ground. The box's walls held the marks of nails digging into them, trying to get free from the inside in vain.

Seeing her at that moment, I knew a few things:

I knew just how cold the hard, splintered wood was and how itchy it was in the places where the skin had begun to adhere to the floor.

I knew the exhaustion on her mind, and the hunger in her stomach.

I knew the dry, cracked voice trapped within her, begging for the slightest drop of water.

I knew the pain of every shallow breath she took, fighting for the next.

I knew the deep sleep she was stuck in, the dreams she traveled through. Once her dreams had been short and light, full of magic and flying and fun; now they were dark, endless, and foreboding like a trip to Neverland where the sun suddenly disappeared and you realized you could never leave again.

I knew that if I stayed here any longer, Mommy's balloons would run out of joy and fall flat to the ground as colorful clumps of wrinkled rubber.

I knew if I didn't wake up now, those shallow breaths would cease and I wouldn't be in this dark fantasty for much longer.

~CL1