What's The Worst... Chapter 10

He couldn’t remember how he had come to be sat on the bench.

He remembered the voices, whispering and the laughing, the way that it had made him feel, angry and alone, but now he felt tired.

He thought he remembered screaming, but he wasn’t sure; in fact he wasn’t very sure of anything at the moment.

His chest was hurting, every time he breathed in or out; he tried holding his breath, but that hurt too; it made him think of blood on his palm, he looked down and saw that it was still there; this made him feel uneasy.

As he looked further, beyond the palm of his hand, he could see one or two people off in the distance; he let his gaze fall back to the ground around his feet. As he stared down an eddy of wind swirled around his legs, gently driving various bits of rubbish before it. He was reminded of a film he saw once, a very long time ago.

In the film another young man had videoed a plastic bag being blown by the wind; he’d described it as one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

There was no plastic here, just yellowed leaves, dust and shredded paper... and a bus ticket; this caught his eye.

For a moment he followed the motion of the length of paper as it tried to lift itself from the ground, twisted and fell back, over and over again. Every now and then the bus company logo would be face up, before turning back over and beginning the cycle again.

He couldn’t understand why this should be fascinating but he did recognise that for a few seconds there were no voices...

The scream came suddenly and as it did the ticket seemed to flare, brighten and grow.

In one swift, violent motion he stamped on the ticket and clapped his hands to his ears. His boot twisted back and forth grinding the paper into the paving, shredding the remnants. The scream passed.

He sagged back onto the bench, dropping his hands to his side, letting his head sag forward as he slouched backward, his chin coming to rest on his chest.

The whispering had begun again; he could only ever pick out fragments, “worthless...”, “no good...”, “selfish...”, “failure...”, and always the laughing, not for joy, but the sound of the hyena, the magpie and the raven.

He could feel the heat of his fury rise; in the house such a thing could never happen, could never be allowed to happen; in the world he never dared let it happen... he tried again to breathe deeply, to calm himself, but it hurt and the more he tried to control the worse the pain, and the pain fanned the embers of the fury...

He swallowed hard, the bitterness in his throat stinging like acid. He brought his arms across his stomach, clasping palm to elbow, rocking slightly as he pressed inward.

“Leave Me Alone!!!”, the words echoed in his head, “LEAVE ME ALONE!!!”, reverberating, an unvoiced bellow.

He wanted to cry; he wanted to scream out loud; he wanted to... he rolled over onto his side, drawing his feet up onto the bench he curled into a foetal position, still slightly, gently rocking.

Around him a ring of light dust and tiny stone chips fell a few millimetres back to the ground.

High above him, a shadow circled, a dark, dark shadow...