Nightmares

There is a young girl who sits at the back of room three hundred and two in Miss Sarah’s grade five class and she does not speak. Whenever Miss Sarah makes the vague, hopeless attempt at appointing the girl to answer a question, the girl does not answer with sound but instead with a sad, helpless frown. To the other children in the class, this poor speechless girl was an oddity. They could not grasp the idea that some girl their own age could not use words as they could. To Miss Sarah, the problem lied in the hands of the girl’s parents. She had only met the strange couple once and it had not been a pleasant encounter. The father, a wiry man with a pointed nose equipped with moustache and wart, only grunted whenever Miss Sarah would bring up the topic of his little girl’s problem. The wife, an over-bloated woman wearing too much makeup, glared and snarled at the teacher. So during class time, Miss Sarah felt it her duty to mother the child and make her as comfortable as possible. Her efforts on the other hand, were no help. The girl still wore the blank frown which cloaked her face each day. The girl was a mystery to Miss Sarah and all those around her.
Miss Sarah closed her folder and looked up at the children quietly reading their books all except for the young girl at the back of the room whose dark, emotionless eyes were glued to the window of the classroom. Suddenly the end of the day bell rang and all at once the children arose from their seats and left the classroom. Except for the girl who slowly left the classroom alone, Miss Sarah’s eyes watching worriedly. The girl walked to the cloakroom, took her long black coat and boots, put them on and slowly walked out of the school. Many giddy, laughing children passed in a hurry as the girl walked down the sidewalk, each of them frowning at the dark gothic looking home situated at the top of a winding cobblestone drive. It was at this drive that the little girl stopped at turned, walking up to her gloomy home. She reached the door of the house just as the sun began to creep behind the hills in the distance. As the girl walked into the house and kicked off her boots, she did not bother to call to her parents to let them know she was home. Instead, she walked up the winding staircase to the very top of the tower which was attached to her home and entered her empty room. Sadly, she crept over to her bed, threw off her coat and slid under the sheets just as her room became engulfed in darkness. She laid her eyes wide and awaited the familiar sound of the key turning in the lock of her bedroom door.
The girl’s mother put the key in the pocket of her house coat and scurried down the stairs to the bottom floor of the home where her husband waited in their queen sized bed wearing the same worried face that his wife did. As his wife slid under the sheets of her bed and her husband flicked off the light, both of the little girl’s parents shut their eyes and put their guilt ridden thoughts aside, welcoming their dreamless sleep.
The little girl lay in her bed and stared at the black ceiling of her room, her eye lids heavy and fighting with her mind to close. But she snapped them back open, her fear over powering her fatigue. Eventually though, as it happens every night, the fatigue would win the battle, the little girl’s eyelids would close. And the girl would give herself to the nightmares which take hold of her body each night. And the screams would begin forever parching her throat and taking away the voice which is never heard.