Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
(Dark Shadows 1966)
@mediwhumpmay
As soon as Willie woke up, he regretted it.
Every inch of him ached. Stiff and sore. Lying down hurt. Getting up hurt. Might as well get up.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, groaning. His head began to throb. Dawn was just beginning to peek into the room, illuminating the dust and the rot.
Willie looked back to his pillow. A dark red and brown stain lay there. His nose must have bled in the night. He touched his swollen and tender cheek.
The flash of a wolf’s head cane and sharp words.
Willie left the bed and padded over to the mirror on the wall.
He thought about things so far. He thought about the distant past that was a few weeks ago. Before he’d come to Colinsport. Before all of this. Before him.
And nothing had really changed.
And that struck a hollow, empty chord within him.
Willie remembered getting into scraps as a kid. Scraped knees. Busted lip. Talking big only to get hit again. He’d always been covered in scabs and bruises.
When he became an adult, it was the same. The scraps were bigger. Brawls. He just talked bigger and bigger.
The hits got harder.
But he learned how to hit too. And he gave as much as he got.
Willie thought and thought and tried to remember a single moment of this life where he hadn’t been bruised. Or bloody. Or in pain.
He drew level with the mirror, realizing he couldn’t remember.
This was just how it was.
His reflection stared back at him in the dim and cold morning light.
A pattern of cane-bruises marched over his face, dark and thunderous.
Willie’s tongue found a tooth, loosened by the blows to his face. He wiggled it. Opened his mouth. Stuck his fingers in. And ripped the tooth out.
Blood covered his fingers and blotted his lips. He slipped the tooth into his pocket.
Willie smiled at himself, bloody and gap-toothed.
At least his outside now matched his inside.