Bleeding

   Bleeding, he ran towards the forest, hoping that his attackers wouldn’t follow him there. He didn’t stop moving his legs until he found a place between trees that were too close, a place where he could hide. He sat there and waited. Sure enough, they came rather fast. He even tried not to breathe while they were close. They checked their surroundings but not with enough care. Eventually they stopped looking around and returned to the place they had come from, in town.

 He could breathe again but not the most comfortable way. His clothes were drenched in blood and, when he tried to begin walking again, he almost fell on his face. His legs were not responding properly and his head was spinning, hurting a lot. He tried to gather himself and at least make a plan of what to do next, because he couldn’t stay there in the woods. He came to the conclusion that those people didn’t know much about him and that his home was probably the best hiding place.

 That posed two problems: the first was that his home was in a city two hours away. The other problem was that his attackers had vandalized his car and now he didn’t have anything, including his wallet and house keys. The latter wasn’t an issue as he always left a spare in the pot next to his apartment door but he did need money to get to the city or at least to convince someone of taking him there. Besides, he was bleeding and he didn’t know how bad his injuries actually were.

 He decided to fin the closest road and just risk it. Hopefully someone would take him somewhere, no matter if it were the hospital or his home. The sun was rising far and he soon had enough light on the road to know where he was walking. Finally, he made it to a road and was lucky enough to be picked up by a lovely elderly couple. The good thing was that they were travelling very early to his hometown. The not so good thing was that they didn’t realize that he was injured.

 The wounded man tried to act as if nothing was happening. Maybe it was for the best if they didn’t notice his blood all over his shirt. He just kept talking about all the good things to visit in his town. That, at least, made the journey home less painful in every way possible. When he finally got home, he was about to faint but the voice of the old lady woke him up in the right moment. They left him in front of his building. He thanked them once and twice and then the car left and he walked into his building, took the elevator and went straight home.

 He plunged his hand into the big pot by his door and, in seconds, he found the keys he was looking for. He tried to leave everything as it was, in order for people not to know those keys were there, but his hand was trembling too much, as well as his legs. He opened the door as fast as he could. The first thing he did inside his house was looking for the phone and dialing a number he had recorded a long time ago but had never dialed because the need for that person had never arisen.

 About thirty minutes later, the man arrived. He was called Fred and didn’t look to be very bright in particular. The man had met him once, a long time ago in a job he had to do in a very bad neighborhood. Fred was an unfortunate kid back then, who had been able to educate himself but had never had the fortune to actually go to college and achieve his dream of being a doctor. Instead, he worked as a veterinarian assistant, in the same bad neighborhood they had first met about two years ago,

 Nevertheless, he came running and didn’t ask any questions. After all, they had discussed it a bit back then and he still remembered how any types of questions were not rally welcomed by someone like that man. Young Fred brought something like a purse, filled with many things a veterinarian and a doctor would both use. The man didn’t ask if he was needed at work. Silence was their common language. Fred cleaned the wounds, close what had to be closed and gave the man a paper with things he had to buy to stand the pain.

 When he was about to leave, the man spoke. He said “Fred”. The young man turned around, to see the man pointing at the kitchen counter. There were some bills there, which Fred took before heading to the door and leaving. The truth was that the man would have wanted the young man to stay because he didn’t only feel pain but he also started to feel lonely. After all, there was no one in his life to take care of him or at least to visit him in this, his hour of need. He was alone.

 The man decided to take himself to bed. He walked to the bedroom slowly, trying not to mess up the work Fred had done. In his room, he took off all of his clothes and then entered his bed, covering himself with the various layers of fabric. He felt really cold and his limbs were trembling even more. Through the closed curtain he could see the sun that day was bright and beautiful but he didn’t really care about it. He only cared about resting and just closing his eyes and go somewhere else, somewhere where he could get a life for himself that he liked.

He fell asleep fast and he dreamt for various hours.

Afraid of them

   Each one of them had to be eliminated. There was no point in trying to argue this logic. The fact remained that all of them had been witnessed of something they shouldn’t have and they needed to be killed before they could say a word to anyone. Lucas did a very thorough list where he wrote the name of each person that had seen him move that object with his mind. Every single one of them had to be destroyed unless he considered them to be harmless with that knowledge.

 Actually, he did consider that for a while. After all, it wasn’t like he knew them all personally. All of the opposite, he couldn’t care less about who they were and he did try to convince himself that none of them had seen absolutely anything on that night. But then, someone was stupid enough to tell someone else, maybe as a funny story, and Lucas had to take care of it before it couldn’t expand beyond those two people. His watchful eye had been right then and he concluded it should be a definite answer.

 But, as he planned everything, he thought that probably every single one of those people didn’t really know what they had seen. Maybe they were confused and had decided to deny it or even rejected what their eyes had brought to them because their beliefs did not match any of what was happening with that unique moment in time. It was possible that people weren’t as bad and terrible as he thought they were. But then someone spoke about it and then someone else did and he realized what he had to do.

 A total of one hundred and fifty three people would have to be killed. That was the amount of people that had seen the large explosion he had caused very high in the atmosphere. He had caused that by pushing a bomb that was going to detonate, destroying a whole town. His reaction was to use his mind to push the object as high as he could. That way, the bomb would go off but harming no one. His effort almost caused him to faint but he bomb successfully detonated away from town.

 The problem was that, during that night, the monthly fair of the small town was taking place and, at least, a thousand people were there, eating and enjoying many rides and games. So was he and it was just after winning a plushy on a booth that he discovered the plans of a mad man and had only second to propel the bomb up into the night sky and hope his plan worked. That was why so people had seen his feat and that’s why know he needed to eliminate them all, as they couldn’t be allowed to know what he did, least of all tell anyone else about it.

 For many weeks, he decided to listen to every single person he remembered in the fair. The good thing was that he had a photographic memory and he was able to a complete list of people that had seen the explosion high up in the sky. After that, he followed every single one of them and checked on their lives to see if they had spoken about him at all. This they didn’t know, but he had very good hearing, able to hear a person speaking from many kilometers away, which he used to his advantage.

 He would spend hours hearing what a family talked about during and after dinner. Lucas did that in order to convince himself that maybe some of the people would be able to keep their mouths shut, for the good of the future and because they were afraid to say something out loud that seemed a little bit too crazy. However, that first family finally talked about it almost a week after it had happened. There was no choice in Lucas’s mind. So he entered the house at night and killed them with care.

 The idea was that he didn’t want the police or anyone else to think that someone had silenced those people. Instead, he wanted them to believe that all of these people had died of natural causes. Of course, after the first few, imagination would begin to be much more difficult to harness. But, thankfully, not much of it was needed because no one questioned the first deaths. It was all seen as a coincidence or as tragic ending stories for very happy and, sometimes, very sad stories.

 When he wasn’t doing what he was doing, he punished himself physically for what he did. He did so because it was obvious that he wasn’t killing criminals but all of the other people instead, the good ones, the ones that had families, and something they loved doing and lives that shouldn’t be disruptive of someone who wasn’t able to find another solution for an immediate answer. Lucas blamed himself for not having been able to handle things in a different way, for having to kill.

 Yet, he couldn’t change his plans now that he has started to execute. It wouldn’t make any sense to ignore them and let oust him as what he was. They couldn’t understand what was happening and what had been happening to him since when he was a teenager. Although he had received training, Lucas had never been able to master the complete arts of mind control and everything that had any connection to it. People wouldn’t understand that having those abilities was more of a curse than a blessing. And he couldn’t explain carefully to anyone, it would take much too long.

 Two weeks after his initial decision, only forty-two of the former group was still live. He had killed most of them during their sleep so they could be able to avoid pain and everything related to it. Lucas hated himself every single time he had to do it and would have loved to have a second opinion but there was no one there except him and his plan. He couldn’t be stopped and he honestly regretted that because a good person always wants to be stopped when they do something for the greater good.

 More often than not, the greater good is a way to shield oneself from criticism and understanding. He would have loved all those little children and the adults to understand that he didn’t want to hurt them but that he knew very well, after hearing all of them, that most would like to have his abilities or at least be able to see them in action once more. Once they had seen something so strange, they really wanted to see it again and again, until time came that it made no sense or they decided to be afraid.

 And fear was his number one enemy. Many of them had already planned to speak loud and clear about what they had seen and whom they had seen doing it. Although they felt a little bit of envy, fear was the key in making them move against what had fascinated them at the start. All of those he killed first were that kind of people, thinking they were doing this country a great service by pushing a fellow human into the pool of hungry sharks that was the military or even worse.

No, his powers had to die with him and that was it. He completed his mission almost a year after he had decided that was the only solution. There was no one to recognize that but at least he was in peace, or something close to that, at last. He also decided to never use his powers again, even at home where no one could actually see him. His short run as a powerful man was over. Lucas had so many other things to be worried about and he was glad everything now was on the past.

 But that never actually happened because the death of all those people was on his hands. It doesn’t matter what this intentions were back then, he had killed all of those people in order to protect himself. Every single day, he had to be convinced that what he did was the only choice. But then, months after finishing, a voice appeared in the back of his head and it told him something that he wasn’t expecting: an alternative. His own brain wanted to explain to Lucas how things could have been so different. But at the end of the day, he had to live with what he had learned.

In a second

   When she opened her eyes, she saw directly into the fire. The flames were in front of her, making her face feel warmer than she wanted to. As much as she wanted to move or get away, she just couldn’t move. Her body felt extremely heavy and her head felt really big, turning like crazy as she closed her eyes again and tried to convince herself she was not awake but sleeping, deep into one of her very crazy dreams. But she couldn’t do that either. It was all true. The flames danced in front of her and she could only look at them, feeling almost burned.

 Suddenly, she felt her body being pulled away from the car, which had being turned upside down. It hurt as the asphalt of the road caressed her skin and clothes. But she couldn’t complain. She couldn’t say a word even if she wanted to because of how weak she felt. Also, she was very dizzy and couldn’t quite understand what was happening. However, she kept her eyes opened because she just couldn’t close them anymore. The heat of the flames seemed far now and all she felt was the smell of it all, which was awful.

 Suddenly, the car exploded and several parts rained all over the place. One of them fell a bit too close to her face but she didn’t really mind at all. It was as if she was looking at a movie, at something she wasn’t really involved in. Her eyes were open the whole time and her brain worked so slowly she never really asked herself who had pulled her away from wreckage. She was just too shocked to think of anything. After a while, she felt very tired and decided to close her eyes for a moment. She fell asleep and only woke up many hours later in an ambulance.

 It was for long though. The only thing she saw was a very big needle and some blurry guy holding it. Or maybe it was a woman… She had no idea but she did now that a sudden pain invaded her body and then she was immersed again in the world of slumber. She dreamt about an ice cream shop she had loved as a child. Her father used to take her there in secret, as her mother was not very keen on sweets. They would ask for the ice cream and eat it in under thirty minutes, almost as a challenge to themselves before they had to head home.

 She woke up again many hours later, in a hospital bed. This time, the moment she opened her eyes, she felt the strongest headache she had ever felt. It seemed as if it was going to break her head into two parts. The pain was so awful that she screamed and in seconds two nurses came rushing in and injected what was probably a sedative on her IV. She calmed down but the headache was still there. She tried to tell them, tried to explain to them how much it hurt. But no words came out of her mouth. She couldn’t speak a word.

 When she woke up again, it was a very bright day outside. The light rushed into her room and she felt kind of happy to see the light after so much time spent in her dreams. However, her mind was still working slow, as well as her body. She was thankful because the headache had disappeared and she could at least look at the window without feeling a huge pain in her head. She looked on for a long time, so long in fact that the rays of sunlight changed angles as she stared at the world outside of which she couldn’t see very much.

 Outside, the sky was very blue and just a couple of thin clouds floated high above everything. Aside from that, she could only see some building, all made of bricks. She had no idea where she was or how but she was sure it was a safe place. Although, she did wanted to go back home as soon as possible. So much so, that she tried to get out of bed to have a better view of the window in order to know where in the city she was and if she could maybe walk home. She knew there was a hospital near her house, so maybe that was it.

 But when she attempted to move her legs, they didn’t respond. She attributed it to how slow her mind was running, so she decided to take a deep breath and then try again. But again, nothing happened. She looked at her legs and slowly touched them as much as she could. Her arms were not very long and they felt extremely weak, but she reached down as she could in order to verify what was going on. In that precise moment, a nurse entered the room and saw her. She then rushed back out, yelling someone’s name.

 The woman stopped trying to touch her legs and rested her body against the pillows. She felt exhausted and tried to think about what just happened: she couldn’t feel her legs. She couldn’t move them at all. Why wasn’t she reacting more violently to this revelation? Why didn’t she felt compelled to yell or cry or whatever? Her head felt like a balloon, filled with air that didn’t let her think of anything. She pulled her head back and closed her eyes, trying to get back to her last memory before the hospital. But that seemed to be almost impossible.

 The door opened again and this time it was a man dressed in those mint green uniforms that people often used in hospitals. She looked at him quietly, as he checked the machines around him. A nurse was behind him, taking notes. He then checked his patient by looking at her eyes and then checking her ears and skin. He asked for her to pull out her tongue but she didn’t seem to hear or understand what he had said. He tried again but she didn’t do anything.

 Then, he pulled out a very small bottle from his pocket, along with a syringe. He filled it with the liquid in the bottle and injected it directly into her arm. At first, she didn’t feel a thing. But then, it seemed as if whatever that liquid was, it worked as a way to shake people up in the most violent way possible. She suddenly felt pain and many thought rushed into her head. Everything seemed to be happening so fast. Sounds were loud, maybe too loud and the sunlight felt too bright. She covered her face and cried, trying to control what she was feeling.

 After a while, the pain and awkward feelings went away and she knew exactly where she was and what had happened. She was finally aware of everything and not in some sort of trance. Whatever the doctor had put in her bloodstream, it eliminated all the effects from the other shot she had received. She was no longer a peaceful lamb that couldn’t even think for herself. She was her again, with every single memory and pain possible. But she couldn’t remember why she was there. As much as she tried to remember, it seemed hidden somehow.

 The doctor asked her if she knew her name. The woman said it out loud, hearing her own voice for the first time in a while. Then, he asked if she could remember the reason why she was there. She indicated that she couldn’t and asked him to tell her because she was going mad trying to remember, trying to go back to at least a sound or an image or whatever that could help her remember. The doctor said she had been in a car crash, having been expelled out of the car by the force of the impact. That’s why she had some cuts all over.

 When he said it, she looked at her arms and realized that was true: she had small cuts on her skin. And suddenly she remembered the flames and someone pulling her away from them. She told this to the doctor and he asked her if she knew who had done that. She replied that she couldn’t remember a face but that it had probably been her husband. But then the doctor looked at the ground and got closer. He explained his patient that it was not possible that her husband had done it because he had died instantly in the crash.

 The news hit her hard. She started crying and was held by the doctor for a moment. When they separated, she looked at her legs and realized what had happened. She looked at the doctor and he nodded, words being useless at that point. She cried in silence and the doctor left with the nurse. It was a lot to take for her and she was going to need all the time in the world to adjust to the fact that, in a single second, her whole life had been turned upside down, almost destroying her in the process.

Cheese, bullied

   Every single time she ate cheese, she suffered from stomach ache and the most awful and embarrassing case of gas that anyone could suffer. As many people with the same problem, Lila had learn to ask every time she ate in a restaurant if the meal she was about to ask for had any traces of cheese. Some people did the same with peanuts and others with other types of food, but her problem was with cheese. However, she did have to see cheese ever single day at home as everyone else was able to process it normally, so they ate it.

 She really didn’t like to be a nuisance, a problem of some kind. She knew it was very annoying for other people when she had to ask for traces of cheese. And when people didn’t want to understand what the problem was, it was extremely embarrassing to tell them what would happen if she ate just a small piece of cheese. She would go very red and her voice would tremble and every person would feel awkward because it seemed she was over sharing when she was just explaining how awful it was for her to eat something that could even kill her.

 Lila had discovered her condition in high school. It was one of the worst memories for her to remember. When she was a very little girl, she actually loved cheese and her mother would always put some string cheese on her lunchbox because she knew how much she adored it. Lila would eat it very slowly; enjoying every single piece as if it was some kind of delicacy that only a few people had access to. Her friends always thought it was something very weird but they never said anything about it, at least not back then.

 Years later, when she became a teenager, she still had much love for cheese. But it was one day in high school when they were presented with pasta for lunch and she decided to practically cover her plate with Parmesan cheese. Her friends laugh and she did it partially to be funny. When a teacher noticed what she was doing, he told her she had to eat that whole plate of food if she didn’t want to be taken to the principal’s office for wasting food and playing with it instead of eating like all the rest of the students.

 Lila accepted the challenge and ate the whole plate. The teacher watched her do it as well as her friends that applauded her once she was done. It was one of those really cool moments in school when teacher get served when they’re being impossible and just ridiculous. However, only five minutes after finishing or so, Lila began to feel really bad. She felt as if someone with a knife was cutting her stomach from the inside. It was awful. She tried to resist the pain for a while but she finally asked her teacher for permission to go to the nurse’s office.

 And just as she did so, she farted. It was loud and clear and charged with a foul smell that filled the rather small classroom. Every single person there complained and laughed and booed her. She had to run away, having the door behind her open. Her body had betrayed her in the most awful way possible and, to be honest, she didn’t even think about the nurse when she ran out of the room. She regretted leaving her backpack. What she really wanted to do was to go home and never come back to any of her classes for the rest of the year.

 However, that was not possible. She wandered around school until a teacher saw her. Then, she almost ran to the nurse’s office and told her what had happened. Nurse Holly obviously wanted to laugh but tried not to and instead told Lila to lay down in order to be properly examined. As it was obvious, her stomach was bloated. That and the foul gad indicated she had something to eat that wasn’t very well received by her stomach. The nurse asked her to remember what she had eaten so they could know what it was that caused it.

 Of course, the huge bowl of pasta came to her head fast. Nurse Holly said it could be either the cheese or the pasta because many people in the world weren’t able to eat either of them. So she gave the girl a pill for her ill stomach and told her to remain there for a while until it worked. Then, she could choose going back to class or going home. It was only an hour and a half to go to the end of the school day so there wasn’t much difference, she said. She clearly didn’t know how embarrassed Lila was about had just happened.

 Her mother came to pick her up and she wasn’t very happy about it as classes would finish in only an hour. She told her daughter she could’ve resisted a little bit more and just come on the school bus as every single day. She was obviously not very happy about having to pick her daughter in school because it disrupted her schedule. She was a realtor, selling properties in the area to people that wanted to live in one of the most well taken care of area of the city. She made a very nice living, so her daughter interrupting wasn’t the best thing to happen.

 When Lila arrived home, she quickly ran to her room and closed the door. Her mother didn’t understand how embarrassed and humiliated she felt after what happened. She had tried to explain but her mother was too busy with her things to actually hear her daughter speak for a couple of minutes. So Lila would rather just be alone in her room and suffer her stomachache there without anyone that would make her feel annoyed or underappreciated. After all she was teenager in her most difficult years.

 She didn’t really want to go to school the next day but her parents said that food poisoning was not an excuse to miss more than one day of school. And they were so strict that missing an hour was for them the same thing that missing a full day. So Lila had to hop in the school bus in the morning and from that point on she felt every single look on her. She could even hear the laughs and jokes but she tried hard not to care or, at least, not to be aware of everyone for the rest of the day. She just wanted every class to be fast so the day could finish soon.

 However, that rarely happens in high school. Her first subject was History and, for her, there wasn’t a more boring assignment. She normally wandered off in that class, drawing doodles on her notebook or passing little notes to her friends, normally talking about some boy or mocking the teacher. But this time, she wasn’t included in that activity. She noticed when one of the girls turned around, looked at her as if she was garbage and then passed the note to another girl sitting beside her. That felt even more humiliating that the fart.

 Her social life went in decline since that awful day. So much so than the following week, Lila didn’t have someone to sit with her at lunch. And then, the jokes got meaner and they weren’t whispered anymore but yelled in the hallways and everywhere a large crowd was inspired to laugh at her and imitate the sound of farts with hands and arms and mouths. It was very humiliating. Lila tried to talk with the principal but he dismissed her saying that she was imagining things, as people didn’t get bullied in his school. And then it became clear to her: she wasn’t the only one.

 Many others were bullied in school. Of course, not for the same things as her, but it did happen and more often than the school would admit. They teased a boy for being gay and a girl for not dressing “fashionable” enough. And of course, they teased people for being fat and others for being poor. So Lila decided to punch back and tried to talk with every single one of those who had been insulted, pushed around and called names. She wanted them all to be with her in order to do something that, she thought, would make things change.

 Her mother had sold a house to a very renowned news anchor and she had become friends with him. Lila convinced her mother to let her talk to him and her mother, seeing how insisting she was, accepted. The man thought it was a very important local subject and assigned someone to it. A week after, everyone in the city knew about how bullying was going rampant in schools for the stupidest reasons and how no one was doing anything to help. The report had serious consequences and all because of a plate full of cheese.