With Friends Like You Who Needs Enemies

Content Warning: Descriptions of mental health, violence and self-harm

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I have no control here.

No matter how much I try to move my body, it never works.

Not until it takes what it wants from me.

The forest that I find myself in is familiar. I once knew this forest, played in it. Spending many days here exploring it, finding solitude and safety. That was a long time ago though. What was once lush and full of life is now gone. As if something swallowed the warm colors and wildlife that once roamed freely here,l eaving nothing but faint remains of what it once was. The trees and broken limbs are now hollow, rotten and decayed. Eerie shadows lurk within the twisted and mangled branches, creaking with phantom wind. In the corner of my eye I swear I see twisted figures lurking about. Some skittering to hide, others giggling or whispering. Sometimes I hear the sound of bitter men and women sobbing. I can never quite see them though. My body does not obey me here.

Cold mist drapes over the deformed tree limbs and skeletal remains of bushes and plants. It clings to my bare arms and legs, like a second skin. Shrouding around me, caressing my skin like a lover would. The air is becoming cold and frigid. The blades of decaying grass turn to icicles by my bare feet. Cold penetrates deep in my bones casting an involuntary shiver down my spine. But it’s not from the bitter cold, it’s for what waits for me once I make it to her.

My feet start to walk towards the path it knows so well already. One foot after another walking through rocks and thorny bushes. I can feel the sharp sting as rocks and sharp twigs embed into my feet. Even though the branches claw at my face, gouge at my arms and legs, my feet continue, one excruciating step after another.

Traitorous body. Traitorous feet.

Finally, I stop at the front of an abandoned cottage, a place that was once upon a time all mine. Where I would spend my younger years to escape my misery. It was once my sanctuary but not anymore. Not until I shared my secret hideaway with someone who decided to use anything against me. Someone who is sending me straight to my demise, like a sheep to a slaughterhouse.

My trembling bloodied fingertips reach for the knob; it's cold biting my hand. The door makes a faint creaking sound leading into a room as I twist it open. The stale humid air kisses my cheeks, making me flinch. The warm air is a sharp contrast to the arctic cold that surrounded me a few seconds ago.

This room is no longer as I had once had it. No arranged used furniture that people had discarded only for minor imperfections. No signs of boy band posters, notebooks, books or discarded slushy cups and chapsticks. It is changed now just like the forest. It’s her way of taunting me.

The room is hot and stifling. In the corner a fire crackles, eating away at the dry wood. Clay pots liter around the room and floor and different shapes and sizes. A large wooden table in the middle of the room. Roots, flower petals and decanters filled with mysterious liquids scatter throughout its surface. Small daggers and blades are lodged into the grainy wood. One side of the wall is full of shelves cluttered with different bones, some animal and some human.

I jump as the door swings closed behind me with a loud bang, revealing a petite teenager with ripped jeans and a white baggy t-shirt leaning against the door frame. The teenager brushes brunette bangs away from a heart shaped face. A wild smile is on her lips, making what I once viewed as a sweet smile into a grotesque one. With unnatural speed and strength, she grabs me by my shoulders and slams me against the door. Soft hands crush my cheeks together, squeezing until I can taste blood inside my mouth, where my own teeth have cut against the inside of my cheeks.

“Why do you try to fight it?” She speaks, the voice ancient and guttural, a sharp contrast with the teenager I see before me.

“It hurts my feelings when you do that” She finally releases me, a wounded look across her face. A face of someone that I had once upon a time trusted. I try to spit out the copper taste coating my tongue and teeth, but my body refuses to oblige. I am not its master at the moment. Not until she allows it.

She skips to the table, carelessly grabbing a blade, her head unnaturally snaps back to focus on me. The blade gleams in the light the fire provides, the symbols appearing dark and sinister, as she approaches me again. She swipes the blade across her palm without flinching. Instantly drops of black blood like slick oil seeps out of the wound. Foul odor permeates from the self-inflicted injury, offending my nostrils.

Her bloodied hands reach out for me, waiting. My body obediently complies while I internally scream. My own hand reaches with no hesitation for the sharp blade to slice into my palm.

“Friends forever” she mimics. Her voice and one as myself when I was younger crawl out from her throat, overlapping each other. The sharp blade slices into my palm and she squishes our blood-stained palms together. Her eyes are greedy, staring at our hands, watching as our oath is completed. Drops of our intertwined blood fall between us on the stone floor creating a soft pitter-patter sound that accompanies the roaring fire. Tendrils wrap around our palms, dissipating into the suffocating air.

I stumble and fall as she pushes me away from her. The floor cracks my knees harshly, a throbbing pain coursing through my aching knees and back. Sharp pain pulsing through my palm like my own erratic heartbeat. She has no more use for me tonight. She got what she wanted. I glare at the teenager before me, someone who I had once trusted with my life so many years ago. We had been inseparable once upon a time.

We had met a few days after my thirteenth birthday when I was walking back from treating myself with a jumbo-sized cherry slushy. Trying to avoid the thoughts of how no one really celebrated my birthday. About how my mother in her drunken stupor tossed me a ten-dollar bill as a gift before passing out. No, I wouldn't think about the bruises on my body from one of my mom’s many boyfriends. I could just leave it all behind me. I just needed to muster the courage to run away. I would live out the rest of my days in the broken down cottage that I had claimed as my own a few months ago.

Then she walked by interrupting my thoughts, asking where I had bought my slushy. I was hesitant at first, cautious even, as if some primal part of me knew she was dangerous, sinister. She asked me to walk with her since she was new to our rural town. Linking her arm around mine she chatted away, swiping her too long bangs away from her doe eyes and easy smile. That summer we became inseparable spending all of our summer days together. Eating copious amounts of slushies, running through the woods playing hide and seek. Spending time in the fallen down cottage, sharing whispered secrets and painting on the stone walls. She had given me a false sense of acceptance, of friendship.

She knew I had been so damn desperate, so damn broken. Searching for anyone to free me from my loneliness, my worries, my sad and bitter thoughts that plagued me every day. She knew that I would have done anything for anyone to notice me. That I would have followed anyone to the end of the earth if they only showed a hint of care for me.

So that’s why when she told me she had to leave once summer was over, I didn’t think twice to make a blood oath with her. A promise to each other that we would be best friends forever. She cut her palm with a strange looking blade and then my own. Our blood joined as we made our pact, our fingers intertwined. A symbol that we each carried each other's blood in our veins, bonding us together forever.

That blood oath has led to this. My life is nothing more than a living nightmare. I am trapped night after night, year after year, a never-ending loop of hell where I am forced to do the blood oath over and over again.

I hate myself for never questioning who she really was. How could I have been so damn foolish?! I hated myself for how easily I fell into her trap like a bug to a venus flytrap. How quickly she won me over with her honeyed fake words.

But most of all I hate her. I despise her pulling the strings of my body as if I were her puppet and she my puppet master. How easily her poisonous blood eats away at me little by little. Cut after cut, slice after slice I feel weaker and frailer. Little by little I am becoming nothing more than a ghost of a shadow, a shell of myself.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” I rasp out, my throat scratchy from unuse. I slowly get up, feeling shaky, weak. Spitting out the blood that lingered in my mouth, finally able to control my body.

“Because friends do not break promises Clarissa” She tilts her head, an almost animal-like gesture. Her easy smile slowly slips into confusion at my outburst. Making a mockery of me and who I once thought was my best friend.

“You were never my friend!” I yell spewing my hatred into every word. “Go back to hell you fucking parasite!”

I smack the table with my fist, blood smearing across the tabletop. We both stare at the flowers on the table that I had crushed. At the putrid liquid spilling out of a canter that has tumbled on its side, spilling across the table’s surface.

Her face turns red with anger, body shaking. Her body starts stretching and stretching, growing taller and taller. Bones and tendons crack as it grows, until the room seems suddenly too small for such a creature. The face of who I once saw as my best friend, confidant, starts melting away before my eyes. Pieces of muscle, tissue and hair plop to the ground as if it were made of melted wax. The demon reaches up and wipes the remaining flesh with long spindly fingers of what was once a human face. It splats on top of our puddle of mixed blood. I try not to retch at the sight of gore in front of me. Of the putrid smell of the discarded carnage on the floor.

Sunken milky eyes that seem to swallow the light around it glare at me. Jagged cheekbones protrude out in a grotesque manner. There is no nose, only an overly large mouth with row after row of jagged yellow teeth. Perfect for snapping my neck, crushing my bones.

Any trace of my teenage friend is gone, in its place is an atrocious bloodthirsty monster. A creature that is not meant to roam the earth. A creature that is meant to live in darkness, thrive in chaos and inflict pain.

Its long double-jointed fingers wrap around my throat, talons cut at my skin as I'm lifted off the ground.

“You will never be rid of me” the demon snarls, choking me. I uselessly try to claw at her repulsive hands, my legs kick against her. But the demon doesn't even seem to notice.

“You feel it, don't you Clarissa? How you are slowly fading away, how we are becoming one?” it hisses into my ear. My body writhes in pain as I continue a futile struggle to breathe.

“You have me and I have you just like we promised. And I promise you, I am not going anywhere” She taunts crushing my windpipe.

Tears drip down my face, into the demon's claws. My constricted lungs burn as I try to gulp in air, like a fish out of water. My vision grows darker as my lungs feel about to burst.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t brea-

The sound of someone screaming wakes me up. I struggle to untangle myself from my cotton bed sheet that twists around my neck before realizing it’s me. I scramble and almost knock over my lamp as I turn it on.

I put on my glasses with shaky hands to study my left palm. It remains the same, the pink scar trailing from the bottom of my pinky to across the bottom of my thumb. Despite so many years it never healed well.

I stand up cringing at the pain and weakness in my body. I limp into my small bathroom turning the sink on, hoping the feel of the crisp cold water will wake me up more, make me realize it was all just a nightmare. A recurring nightmare that happens over and over again. Each time more real, more dreadful.

The demon can haunt me in my nightmares, but it cannot get me in real life. I am safe now. The witch, the only one who believed me and my crazy story, made sure of that. I would not let the demon feed upon my weakness, my sorrow, all those little broken parts of me that I once shared with her. All of those little pieces that I hated the most, that she fed on like a fucking leech.

Baggy eyes, purple and swollen eyes stare back at me through my thick rimmed glasses in the mirror. I breathe deeply again, doing my calming exercises. Not in real life, the demon cannot get me in real life. I study my neck in the mirror turning my head left to right seeing that it’s already bruising. This is new. Even when the nightmares felt more and more vivid with each passing day, they never left a mark.

I take off my glasses, scooping up water to splash my face. Trying to wash away the imagined blood and cold sweat. Trying to clean away my fear and terror, trying to calm down my beating heart.

I am now in control.

I am awake and I am in control.

I reach for a towel, feeling more relaxed as its soft texture pats against my wet cheeks. I put my glasses back on, turning back to my bedroom. But something stops me, and I turn around to the mirror.

Right there. There’s a glimpse of something. Sunken milky eyes staring back at me, where my eyes should be. I can feel the demon writhing through my body, tearing at my flesh to get out. I cry out as I watch my own hands claw at my face, my skin being ripped away as my fingers start to elongate. I scream as I-

.

.

.

.

.

.

I study him, from his overly large muscles that look as if they are about to bulge out of his shirt to his cocky smile and green eyes. He sits on the park bench as if it were his throne. He winks at a young woman who jogs past him. She blushes as she gives him a shy wave back. I am not fooled by how he looks. I see past his arrogance and cocky attitude. I can see beyond his handsome features. I can see his sadness, his loneliness - it sings to me. He feels so desperate for anyone to understand, to just listen. I can be that for him. All for a price of course.

I adjust my glasses as I make my way over to him. He looks at me warily for just a second as if unsure as if I am someone that he should be scared of. I smile brightly and that look of hesitation disappears immediately.

I feel a whisper of a tickle on my shoulder and shake it off. Typical Clarissa trying to fight me from within my new body-her body to be precise. We are together forever, just like we promised. I always keep my promises. I shyly sit next to him on the bench.

“Hi, I’m Clarissa”

THE END