The Terrors of Time – Creative Writing

 

By: Chloe Rudnicki |Opinion Editor

The photograph holds captive an unlined face soft with youth

Warm summer air clinging to tanned skin

Dirt stained feet thudding down the field

Lips stained an eternal rose

A wholeness beholden to a young girl

 

Time is sweet and soft;

Memory an eager prisoner to the innocent face and twinkling eyes.

A memory 11 years, 9 months old.

 

Then the daggers.

One year. All that was good begins to fade.

Two.  Innocence is betrayed.

Three. The mind begins to die.

Four. Then the heart.

The sun wakes and slumbers. The world beneath withers away.

 

The bright-eyed girl four years prior decieves the hurting soul, the empty eyes

 

Fragments of a summer day cut cleanly through the fog

Filling her cavernous stare with the warmth of a feeling long lost

Greedily drinking it in before it fades into the passed years once more

 

The corpses of days passed have robbed her of a smile

Leaving her with a thin cardboard grimace and tight, cold face

Hardened by reclusion, chilled by her hatred for the imperious clock

 

The date, the time on the cursed thing cause new torture with each tick 

They hold her sack of flesh and bones captive in the greyed present

While her poor soul, bewitched, tries to flee in a fit of frenzy

It tears at her wasted frame, it beats her black and blue

A tired life gone mad.

 

In this futile matrimony with days past a battered mind fights in vain

Mutilated by a bliss made insane by the blurring hands 

Thoughts have become mechanical, feelings have become extinct

The girl only a shell living  through a whisper of a memory

 

Summer sun

Thudding feet

Dreams and a rosy smile

All things stolen, all things made evil, by a broken heart and the tyranny of days gone

The past paralyzes

The past rots

It kills, from the inside out.