ON YOUR LAST BREATH | Mike Schmidt ✔️

chapter five .. ripping bandaids off

CHAPTER FIVE —    " ripping bandaids off "

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          AN ATTEMPT TO QUIETLY RETURN to Abby her comfort teddy bear early in the morning, minutes before it was time for her to get up for school, led instead to Haley being coerced by the sleepy kid to lay down next to her and escape the coldness of the house under her perfectly heavy blanket. Abby pulled it over until both of them were completely hidden underneath its shelter. Morning light, shyly seeping into the room, illuminated the colorful patches of the blanket and made everything that happened beneath it be draped in both warmth and mystical lighting.

It was silent at first, something Haley didn't mind in the slightest. In fact, she didn't care to even wonder why Abby requested of her to join in on this hiding routine, she was simply glad that she had the privilege of doing so. Only when the persistence of silence took Abby's eyes from a resilient sleepiness to a lightly concerned haze that she took out through fidgeting her hands on her returned teddy bear did Haley finally realize there was a reason to this after all, and it was not just a good moment behind which she could leave the happenings of yesterday like some bad storm that had all but passed.

"What's wrong?"

Abby looked down at the teddy bear, sniffling at first before giving in to a long sigh, "I had a nightmare."

"Oh, sweetie," Haley's expression scrunched into that distinct place between pity and and concern, where it was clear as day she felt incredibly bad that such injustice as nightmares in the mind of a child were a thing. She's had her fair share of nightmares and the worst part about them was that truly, they never actually left. "It's okay now. The nightmares can't get you while your brother and I are here." A mere second after she opened up her arms, Abby shifted forward, crushing her teddy bear between her and Haley while she fully indulged in the embrace of safety.

"I wish you and Mike were in my dream instead," Abby confessed. "But it's always them and... they used to be my friends, but now they look weird."

Though Haley had plenty of questions in regards to what Abby was explaining to have been her nightmare, she happily retorted to simply listening to the child close enough to her chest to be subjected to that uneven heartbeat of hers. As much as Abby was willing to say was enough for Haley.

"Their faces," Abby shuddered just a little closer. "Their faces were completely gone in this dream. I didn't tell Mike I still saw them, because it used to be fun to go back to the same dream and play together in the pizzeria. But they stopped playing a while back. All they do now is draw and talk. How can someone without a face to either?"

"My father used to say dreams cannot really be dreams without a droplet of impossible in them," before she could stop herself, those words came out, leaving Haley startled that she could even recall so vividly what her old man told her when, after a string of four nights since the incident passed with her waking up screaming and blabbering, he had to sit next to her through the night. She missed him. If there was one part of her childhood that she missed, he was it.

"And they draw the most horrible things too," Abby admitted next, stringing Haley's attention back to what now turned out to be a truly concerning confession.

Haley wanted to ask 'Like what?' but abstained her curiosity — it was better not to push on this precious trust between them.