Jamison's 2nd Chance

Submitted into Contest #138 in response to: Write about a character who doesn’t want to go to sleep.... view prompt

1 comment

Fiction Horror Mystery

This story contains sensitive content

TRIGGER WARNING: mental illness, substance abuse, gore/physical violence, suicide, and self-harm.

"To sleep is to give in." That's what my grandmother always said. She'd hear voices that would tell her if she went to bed, they'd eat her alive, from the inside out. 3 years, 2 months, and 4 days ago my grandma took her life. Poetically, she overdosed on her sleep medications. I never saw how she could not want to sleep. Sleep is like a peaceful moment where you can stop thinking about the stress of life and dream of endless possibilities. But now, I find myself in the same scenario as her. My granny used to say she heard voices and we'd say she's just senile. I remember when it first started and my mother didn't let me see her, she feared it was contagious or something, that if we were near my grandma, we'd go insane too. Her efforts however were for nothing as now I hear a raspy male voice, he says his name is Jamison, and he whispers terrible things to me. I've heard him every day, he hasn't shut up since my grandmother died, and if he does stop talking, its never for long. He says he's a 492-year-old demon who feasts on the souls of vulnerable humans, he says he lives in my bloodline, and he won't stop until he kills us all off. He describes himself tearing my skin apart and ripping my organs from my body. He terrifies me, he ruins every moment of my days with his endless screams of how the world would be better without me. I hate Jamison, but I'm so scared that if I tell him that, he'll hurt me. He makes me want to hurt myself sometimes, makes me wish I couldn't hear anything at all. He talks a lot about my family's history with hell, he says that in 327 B.C. my family and his family were at war, and my family psychotically murdered all of his, leaving only his father. His father inevitably burned to death in a wildfire, but he had impregnated a woman named Jane. She gave birth to Jamison, and Jamison now thrives to take revenge for his father's death by driving all of my family to death. Thats the main thing he talks about, vivid tales of his uncles and aunts burning to death in the fires which my family lit. "I watched as my Aunt's face melted off her skull, all she could do was scream and cry, begging for the unbearable pain to stop." I told him, I cry and beg for his voice to stop. To miss out on the birds singing in the morning but to never hear his voice again, would be a dream. I took to drinking whiskey and snorting cocaine to suppress his callings but nothing feels better than when I slice my skin open and the pain is released in the form of a dark crimson puddle of despair at my feet. I remember when I was younger, I'd go to my granny's house and we'd make marvelous foods and watch films on her old leather sofa. As I grew older, age 15 or so, that's when she started to lose her sanity. My mother didn't let us go to her house anymore and my granny was eventually put in a psychiatric hospital. Then, when we visited her, she'd cry to us begging for help. I always say her as a crazy old woman but now that I am experiencing the same paranoid delusions that she did, I understand the suffering she went through. I wish I could've helped her, when Jamison goes away, which is never for long, I write her verbose letters about how much I wished Id of helped her. But he always comes back saying in the voice of a smoker, "Your granny, eh? I killed that old hag too. That's a nice sharp pen you got there, be really nice if you stabbed yourself in the face with it," and I'd listen to him because whenever he speaks it's like my hands are in his control. So I stabbed myself in the eye and ended up in the emergency room. They asked so many questions, the doctors and nurses, where are my parents, how did this happen, am I okay, can I hear them, where does it hurt? They wouldn't stop talking, so when Jamison asked me to silence them, I had no choice but to murder 8 nurses and 2 doctors with my bare hands. This wasn't my first time killing someone, however, the last time I killed, they showed up in my dreams. So after I escaped the hospital, even in my daze of blood loss and pain, I ran to my home. And by home I mean my tent under the big red bridge. I collected my cocaine and did 8 or 9 lines of it, my heart began to beat faster as I broke out in tears. It felt like every sweat gland in my body had been opened and was pouring out sweat like a fire hose. My head and heart had synced as I was now worrying about the 10 people I had just murdered in cold blood. What if they had families? What if the cops came and took me away? what if they put me in a ward like they did to my Granny? My thoughts raced like Venturini, but even he was one day taken down my lawsuit. My whole body trembled and shook, I could feel my skin grow cold. My body was frozen yet I sweated like I'd been outside all day on a hot summer day. My heart burned, I remember feeling like this once before when my granny had first died, the first time I tried cocaine. I overdosed and they put me in rehab but I lived. Maybe this was happening again, I doubt if it was that I'd survives a second time. I never really cared for death, why fear the inevitable? What's the point in preventing it either? One way or another, you're going to die one day, and there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it. As I was pondering death, I felt the energy of my body go on a rollercoaster as I fell to the ground and allowed my eyes to shut. I tried to stay awake at first as Jamison was screaming in my ears to stay awake. But even though I didn't want to sleep, I drifted off to sleep. Just as my grandma had done before me, I lost the race to Jamison.

March 20, 2022 21:51

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1 comment

Cecilia Maddison
16:39 Mar 28, 2022

The narrative in this story is so effective at conveying unchecked psychosis. I’m really sad Jamison won!

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