You - The cure

Sorry for not doing much lately and having a really late post. However I wanted to do this one as well as possible because it is the start of an idea for a much larger story. The challenge was to write  only in the present tense, not quite sure if it worked out well with my 2nd person point of view but I decided to try it. Anyways please enjoy.

This is a story of you. You wake up one morning and the voices start again. Each one does it’s own thing: one berates you, another narrates your life, and one is your dearest friend.  They never leave your side, always watching. You ponder their existence for a brief moment; they slowly came to life one by one. At first the narrator as if in a book, next the insulting one critiquing everything you do and lastly your only friend. You must take the good with the bad. You tolerate the narration; it has its moments. All of it is like having a posse of disembodied voices.

By this time you are down stairs making your morning coffee, black with a speck of chitchat. You haven’t heard from Olivia, your friend, for some time. She is interested in your newest escapades. Which usually means the same old same old; working long hours for a major bank during the week and struggling to fixing up old houses on the weekend. No time for much of anything else and it is getting tiring. It is hard enough to hide your schizophrenic tendencies to the world but essentially working two jobs. Especially one that is more of a hobby than an actual job but with the amount of sweat and tears I put into it might as well be.

This house will be your last. It is time to move on, maybe a new state with a new town, and one with a little more beauty than here. Someplace with green grass and trees with flowering blooms. Scenery is everything when selling, that and being newly renovated to look marvelous. Each house you make is a masterpiece, unique in every way down to the last detail. Your favorite part is the garden secret. It is the cure to your schizophrenia.

First you find an interesting house that could use a facelift. Pretty easy when there are plenty of foreclosed homes because of the recession. You never do the same neighborhood and you use an alias to cover your tracks. You have plenty of money due to your other escapades in less scrupulous manners. Second you draft some plans for the house: new paint, carpet, flooring, and appliances. Third is to hire help, no problem there, you know Spanish and not like they will talk to anyone about strange happenings. Just in case you never hire the same people twice for one house. You practically destroy the house during the week making way for everything that is to come. Friday everything has to be ready, you need the house empty. That night you go out, and find yourself someone lonely and in need of some company. Male, female it doesn’t really matter to you, they never make it to the absent bed. Chloroform makes it easy to restrain them and drag them to the bathroom and then the real fun begins.

The cure to the voices is to spill Innocent Blood. It gets rid of the good and the bad alike, an antidote of sorts for your mental ailment. The treatment only lasts for a while but it is all you need to survive. Lastly you clean up the bathroom and dig a large hole in the backyard and dump the body. Saturday the hired help plants flowers and finishes the bathroom. They do all the grunt work for you. With that you get off free as a bird and are off to the land of the sun, and beaches, California.