Flash Fiction: Daymare

It is not every day you come back from school and find your father with a knife in his right hand and your mother, lying in the pool of her blood,  unmoving as though she were a big slab of stone. But here I am, staring daggered but fearful eyes at a carnivore clothed in human skin and his victim punctured by his long slender talons.

I think to scream but every whimper boxes themselves into my throat and still I remain, staring hard, attempting to transmute the whole scene into a dream. Silently, I try to pinch myself several times but the scene remains static, like an halted video; something in semblance to the  picture frame hanging a few inches on a wall from where Mother lies.

In this picture, everyone in it is wearing a glistening smile revealing their dents as par the photographer’s instructions. Father is holding Mother tightly as though she were a prize he had won and you could almost tell with his admiring eyes, he thought himself lucky to have a woman with such exquisite beauty to call his own. The one he had professed love to a night in a garden littered by rays of light from the tiny fissures in the sky.

I wanted to ask him if those promises were mere fictional dialogues for him. If his constant battering was the only way he could remind her how much he loved her. If the scars he etched on her skin with his khaki leathered belts was his closest way of splattering her face with red dewed kisses. But my lips remained silent as though something had clipped them.

I blinked and a teardrop slowly traipse down the sheet of my cheek. The second time I blinked again, my father’s body was in my hands,  lifeless like a stone and my hands was stained with blood. I was bemused too, not knowing what the heck to do. After you kill someone, do you just run away or hide the body or keep staring. What was I supposed to do?

I thought of hiding the bodies in the kitchen for the meantime till I could figure out what to do. Hours passed and I was still at sea. Their corpse had began to give a awful foul smell. I closed the windows to prevent the scent from diffusing into the air outside but enclosing myself only made the scent seemed fouler.

I tried to rid the bad odour with Dad’s perfume which had being lying on the Television rack but the stench remained unbearable.

Suddenly, the worst thing that could have ever happened occurred, someone knocked the door and realizing I had not locked the door, it was creaked open. It was Mother. My eyes fell on my mother’s face and she muttered some words I considered very strange. She was calling me a sleepyhead and telling me to get up from my bed. I was confused and thought I was hallucinating.

Alas, I was dreaming all along and Mother had just come to wake up. I was so happy that what I thought to have occurred never happened. I jumped out  my bed, something I rarely do because I’m mostly sluggish an lazy in waking up. I rushed to her, hugged her tightly and told her several times I loved her and will never want to lose her.

Of course, she didn’t understand what I was saying so she just affirmed with a nod and a kiss to my forehead. She said breakfast was ready and I should come to the dinning table after I had bathed. I took my bath hurriedly , barely washing my back and legs. I was overwhelmed with joy that everything had been a dream all this while. 

I dashed to the dinning room but no one was there yet neither was there any prepared meal. I called out Mum’s name several times ,she didn’t respond. I called out Dad’s name, he didn’t respond either. It was then the foul scent of the house caught my nose and I saw a trail of  blood leading from the sitting room to the kitchen.

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