The Picture People

[Comma]

Hadn't done anything original in a while when I came up with my idea for this. This wouldn't be part of the actual story--more than anything, it was just a character exercise with the father. Writing a summary of some of the main events in my mind from his point of view. I like pinpointing characters before I write them. Just a thing.

So this is just a narrative character development exercise. Figured I'd post it. Nothing much better to do with it.

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It wasn’t long after the accident that little Alan started talking about them. He never told me who they were, he would only mention them occasionally in passing and then not say anything else. I guess I figured that whatever it was, it was normal, just some way of coping with it. We both guessed that it had to do with the family in the other car, the ones who… well, there really isn’t really any reason to go over it, I suppose. Not a huge deal. What’s done is done, and it can’t be undone, not ever, and getting emotional over it would only make it worse. We’ve been forgiven, it was neither of our faults. End of story.

It wasn’t until Alan began waking up in the middle of the night screaming that they were there with him, in his room, that we got worried. He still wouldn’t tell Brenda or me who they were—or, on the contrary, what they were—but it was getting serious. I started spending nights in his room with him on the floor to make sure that he was all right. And even then, after I would fall asleep, he would wake up, screaming about them like he always did.

A few times, I swear I had seen a shadow dart across the wall and disappear at the window when I woke up to his screams. Overactive imagination—it was all just getting to me… that was all. I wanted to believe it, I really did. I just couldn’t. There was never any evidence of anyone breaking in. I never considered it might be because whoever or whatever it was, was actually in the house with us. I never considered any of the stranger possibilities, and I never considered before that it might actually be a what, rather than a who.

Regardless of what it was, I loved my son and I wanted nothing more than to help him. No eight year old should have to lose sleep over recurring dreams about something that was beyond our control. The psychologist diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, something perfectly normal, apparently. I’m not sure of what it is, as he gave us a lot of scientific terms and more or less just bored me with most of them—Brenda would probably know it better. I did know that it occurred after a trauma of some kind, and symptoms included reliving the event over and over, whether having recurring dreams or flashbacks during the day.

He was put on a very mild dosage of a drug like Prozac, and it seemed to help him for a little while. He was definitely sleeping better, which was a plus. Those dreams, whatever they were about, whoever they were about, weren’t there quite as often anymore, or at least he slept through them and they didn’t wake him up. Things were going normal for a few days. We thought they were, at least. Oh, we thought they were.

He had been taking the pills for three days at the time, so the time span wasn’t too long. You see, he was taking a bath when we heard the scream—Brenda and I both went running, and found him staring in the mirror at himself. There was some kind of peculiar rash on his chest when we found him, and he was crying, wailing about how badly it hurt. We immediately thought of the medication and looked up the side effects, but there was nothing like this.

Brenda was saying that it looked like burn marks, and fresh ones at that, but I couldn’t even begin to comprehend how he could have gotten a burn that huge without feeling it before now, and he refused to talk about it. Alan refused to talk at all—he was scared out of his mind, his eyes a couple of white, blue, and black orbs. He just clung to Brenda, let her clean the rash (or burn) and get it bandaged, and clung to her again while I tried to see if I could make an appointment with the family doctor.

That was when Brenda said it was growing.

By the time we reached the ER, it encompassed his entire chest and his abdomen—it had, however, stopped spreading. The first thing we asked was if it could be some sort of rare allergic reaction, and we were told immediately that it wasn’t—they had never seen anything like this before that had no logical explanation. It was definitely a burn mark, but how it had gotten there was questionable. I don’t know if they believed us or not when we told them what happened, but we never had social services called on us, so I suppose they must have. I give them my sincere thanks, as I definitely wouldn’t have believed it. I hardly believed it even having witnessed it myself.

We got a call from the doctor that had seen him in the ER the next day. The panic had faded since, and he told us quite calmly that there was every possibility it had only been an allergic reaction, some strange type of rash that they simply hadn’t seen before. New medical conditions were coined all the time, and even medications that were thoroughly tested before being prescribed had side-effects that would only effect a very, very few people. We were left a bit more consoled after that, I guess. I was still on edge, and maybe Brenda was too, but I didn’t want to say anything. Everything so far had a perfectly logical explanation.

He was prescribed a different medication, and after another peaceful week, he began waking up in the middle of the night screaming again, every night.
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Yeah... if you couldn't tell, I haven't finished it ^_^' But I figured I'd pot what I had. Just for the heck of it.