white-rabbit-writes

[white-rabbit-writes]

I Don't Cry

By W. Rabbit, Esq.

I don't cry. Or, that is, I try not to cry. My tears burn. Logic tells me it's the dust. I don't blink often enough, dust and debris lodge in my eyes and the burning is the salt seeping into the microscopic cuts left behind.

When I do cry, I have the overwhelming feeling that if the tears could just fall then the burning would stop. But they never do. The tears pool in my lower lids and they sit there, burning.

The red veins in my eyes swell and I look pitiful.

I try to wipe the tears away, to force them to fall from my lids, but they refuse. They're too thick. A tissue comes away dry and useless. If I wipe with my hands I feel the tears being forced back into my skull. They slice under my retina and cut deep into the flesh of my eyes.

When I first saw my father cry I knew our tears were different. Even young I felt the pain that came with crying. While his tears flowed freely down his face as he hugged me and told me it wasn't my fault, mine cut deep and burned like they were on fire.

At the time, I worried my tears would hurt him as they hurt me. If, by some miracle, they managed to fall they would slice into his shoulder like small daggers. But they never did, and I knew he was safe.

I am too empathetic, I get this from my father. It doesn't take much to form a lump in my throat. For a time I tried to feel nothing, but that day my father held me, he told me feelings were human. That I should allow them to be felt, whatever they might be.

Feelings are Human. I am allowed to Feel.

This is my mantra as I hold my face skyward and breathe through whatever pain I may be feeling. I swallow as hard as I'm able and force the prickly lump that forms when I cry back down my throat. I blink painfully and roll my eyes back and forth, the thick tears slice their way behind my eyes. This gives me a splitting headache and I find my glasses become more useless every time. One day, I fear, there will not be a prescription strong enough to fix the damage my tears cause.

I asked my doctor if my tear ducts could be removed, but he told me tears were important. I told him crying hurts and he laughed. He told me feelings are human. I was reminded of my father. How he told me it wasn't my fault.

The doctor prescribed me eye drops. He told me my eyes looked red and dry. He told me crying was a good thing.

Afterwards, my father asked how the appointment went. I told him. When I spoke he could hear the barb working its way up my throat. With the gentle voice of a loving parent he told me you are allowed to feel. I could hear the struggle in his voice, he always cried when I talked about my eyes. I imagined the tears flowing down his face and I felt jealousy bloom in my chest.

It's not your fault he told me. I hung up.

I stared at the pavement of the clinic parking lot. Jealousy turned to rage, I breathed heavily through my nostrils. My vision began to blur as the tears slid over my pupils. I dropped to my knees and choked. The lump had crawled farther up my throat than ever before. I couldn't see and I couldn't breathe.

I clawed my throat trying to push the lump down with my hands. It didn't work.

I scratched my eyes, trying to pull the tears away. The pain was unbearable.

I hoped the doctor or the nurse at the welcome desk would look outside and see me. No one came. I fell to my side and tucked my knees to my chest. With no breath to hold I continued to struggle for air even after I'd decided that to suffocate was my fate. I closed my eyes with great effort and felt the tears cut the inside of my eyelids. In my mind I repeated my mantra over and over: Feelings are Human. I am allowed to Feel. The comfort it used to bring was drowned out by the sound of screams. For a moment I dared hope it was me. That in my panic the lump had disappeared and my voice had come back without my noticing. But the screaming was I'm my head. I was still choking. The lump was nearly in my mouth now, it crushed my uvula and flattened my tongue. Yet still it crawled, undeterred.

This comforted me, the lump would work its way out and if I was lucky I'd have enough heartbeats left to start breathing again. My mind began to accept this yet I still heard the screaming. Then I realized the sound was coming from my mouth but not my voice.

It was the lump.

Whatever was crawling out of my throat and between my teeth was screaming. The sound reverberated in my skull and I opened my eyes in renewed panic. I strained to see but the tears continued to blind me. My hands released my knees and flew to my mouth. I reached my fingers passed my teeth and felt the barbs of the lump in my throat. They dug into my fingers and seemed to grip of their own accord. I pulled as hard as I could. The lump scratched its way across my tongue until it released my fingers and gripped my teeth.

I rolled onto my stomach and tried to cough with what little air my lungs still possessed. The barbs shot out and covered my lips, using them as leverage to pull itself out. With a sickening shlorp the lump emerged from my mouth, screaming like a newborn. Finally I sucked in a harsh and painful gasp of air before coughing hard and rolling onto my back in exhaustion.

I felt the wetness of the lump still on my face as it crawled up my cheeks. My eyes were wide with pain and terror yet I still couldn’t see beyond the tears. The barbs that had gripped my fingers and teeth pricked my cheeks as it moved towards my eyes. Then the screaming stopped and I felt something new: something rough and warm like a cat's tongue. It lapped around my eyes as if searching before it began licking my open eyes. I tried screaming but my throat was too raw for anything but a shallow rasp. At first the pain which I had become accustomed to in my panic was renewed. It was sharp as the lump's tongue moved my tears across my eyes.

Then the pain began to fade. The lump was drinking my thick painful tears right out of my eyes. A feeling of relief rushed through me and I began to cry again, but instead of pain from my tears I felt soothed as the lump licked them away before they could slice my eyes more.

Slowly, my vision returned. First I saw solid colors, then shapes, then the only thing obscuring my vision was the lump still drinking my tears.

I could see it in full now. It was a harsh black, so dark it seemed like a void. The barbs pricking my skin were thinner than a strand of hair and in abundance all over its surface. It had no eyes but the tongue it licked me with emerged from a wide mouth that seemed more like a large crack in its shell of a body. The cat's tongue it possessed was just as pitch black as its outer surface only it was matte dry while the outside shone with a wetness I assumed came from my saliva.

It was utterly disgusting, but something about the soothing feel of the tongue made me laugh instead of wretch. It started as a soft rumble in my chest that hurt my burning lungs, but within moments I was laughing deliriously. This was the third emotion I'd felt that brought tears to my eyes and the lump never seemed to lack enthusiasm as it cleaned my tears away for me.

Before long I calmed down, my tears stopped welling, and the lump closed its mouth which became imperceptible from the rest of its body.

I stared at it for a while in silence. If it had eyes I'm sure it would've been staring back. Once it became clear to us both that I would not be producing any more tears, the lump opened its mouth and let out a scream, the same painful sound it made as it birthed from my mouth. I flinched and turned my head sharply causing the lump to fall off my face. Its screaming was interrupted by a moment's hesitation before it leaned back, screaming again, and used its barbs to roll away.

I watched in shock as in a confused serpentine pattern it rolled towards the clinic.

The automatic doors opened and the lump rolled in, still screaming. Once the doors closed and I could no longer hear the screams my shock vanished and I quickly got to my feet and ran inside the clinic.

I asked the nurse if she'd seen something roll in screaming but she just looked at me and reached for the emergency landline within her small, windowed office. She pressed the number nine before we both jumped at the sound of a scream. But it wasn't the same scream I'd come to know from the lump, this was a decidedly male scream of terror. We both rushed down the hall towards the sound. It had come from the observing room the doctor had seen me in. Once we reached the threshold the nurse began to scream.

Inside, laying on the floor, was the doctor. The lump was on his face licking the blood that flowed from the sockets that had once held his eyes. Its barbs dug deep into his skull, it scooped and moved aside the flesh it found there like a dog digging for a bone in its yard. I realized, sickly, that my lump was searching for tears to drink.

At the sound of the nurse's scream the lump stopped digging and, quicker than either of us could comprehend, rolled off the corpse of the doctor and made a beeline for the nurse. It used its barbs to grip her scrubs and climbed its way up her body. She screamed louder now and slammed her body back against the open door. She tried swatting at the lump as it crawled up her clothes but the barbs were far too strong and they cut into her hands causing her to bleed.

The lump made its way to her shirt and I grabbed the v-necked collar. I pulled as hard as I could and ripped her shirt down the middle. I spun her around holding the side of the shirt with my lump, pulling the shirt off her arm and wrapping my lump in the fabric. With the scrub shirt fully off her I closed the gap by grabbing the other side of the ripped fabric. The scrubs became like a sling with my lump trapped inside. I swung the sling above my head and brought it down hard on the edge of the computer desk to the side of the door. My lump began screaming so I slammed it again and again against the desk until I heard a wet crunch and the screaming stopped.

I took the bundle to the corner of the room and dropped it in the small, lidded trash can labeled with the red toxic waste sign. I turned to look at the nurse and we stared at each other for a moment, wide eyed and panting before she rushed out of the room and down the hall.

Assuming she was calling the police and accepting my fate as a murdering criminal I stayed put and stared at the marred face that had once been my doctor.

A few moments later the nurse returned, only she was wearing new scrubs and was holding a cigarette lighter. She ran to a cabinet above the desk and pulled out a bottle of Isopropyl Alcohol. She walked up next to me, avoiding looking at the doctor, opened the toxic waste bin, poured some of the alcohol onto the remains of her scrubs, lit the cigarette lighter and dropped it into the bin, igniting it immediately. A shrill squeak emitted from the remains of my lump.

The nurse then kicked the bin over and poured more alcohol onto the floor creating a trail to the corpse of the doctor. She dropped the bottle onto his chest and his body caught flames almost immediately.

I was staring at her. She looked at me, and explained that no one would believe us if we tried. Then, with the gentleness of a nurse who has dealt with patients for many years, she ushered me out of the room, closing the door as we left, down the hall, and out the main doors. We walked together to the parking lot. Once there she pulled out her mobile phone, dialed 911 and told the operator that a fire had started in the clinic and she believed the doctor was trapped.

She then told me to leave, that she would handle it. Her courage and charge of the situation was so far from what I'd expected that I simply did as I was told. I drove home, the image of the doctor's eye-less face burned into my mind, alongside another I struggled to place.

Once I was home and sat in my living room I called my father. I told him what happened, voice harsh, my throat still raw. And as I did so I thought back to the first time I'd seen him cry. My throat had hurt back then too, but in my memories there was no lump in my throat struggling to get out. Just thick, painful tears in my eyes and my father's voice sobbing into my ear; it's not your fault.

It was then, on the phone with my father, who was silent as I recounted the last hour, that I placed the second face I'd seen alongside my doctor's as I drove home. It'd been my mother's, from when I was very young and had no control over my emotions. Back then the lump hadn't scared me. The same as how a child knows to throw up when their stomach hurts without being told I knew, as a child, to let the lump crawl up my throat and lick away my tears. But my mother had not.

She had come into my room after hearing my childhood lump scream. She saw it licking my face and began to scream herself. This scared my lump, it rolled off me and up my mother's clothes. She was powerless to get it off and I was powerless to stop it as its barbs dug out my mother's eyes in front of me and she collapsed dead on my bedroom floor.

My father had arrived, following my mother's screams and my cries, he took one of my children's books and beat my lump to death. Then he held me, sobbing wet streams of hot, human tears onto my back as he held me. All the while saying over and over it's not your fault.

I asked him, while he was on the phone: was it my fault?

Feelings are Human, he told me. You are allowed to Feel.

I do not cry. Not anymore.

End

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If you made it to the end, thank you so much for reading my first story on this page! I hope you enjoyed it!

-W. Rabbit, Esq