Read Nature's Revenge: Between Heaven and Hell :: Part 4

I woke up screaming.

“Robin! Robin!” Asher’s hand was on my cheek and he was kissing my forehead—bringing me back to reality.

I panted and gulped. “It was so real…”

Asher knew I was talking about the well, and he didn’t prompt me further. He gathered me up in his arm and I breathed heavily for a few more moments.

“You’re alright…” He calmed me.

The nightmares were becoming frequenter and frequenter for the both of us, but I would never let neither myself nor Asher speak of them.

I wiped my eyes and hung my legs off the side of the bed—needing to cool off after having such a wicked dream that drenched me in sweat.

“What time is it?” I asked him.

He grinned coyly. “You still have an hour to sleep. Come back to bed.”

“I can’t. I’m already up.” I could rarely go back to sleep once I was up. “I’ll make us some pancakes.”

I grabbed the remote and switched on the TV hanging on the wall in front of the bed.

Asher and I went dead silent as the news reporter commented on an increasing amount of people dying from melancholia.

The statistics got worse and worse with each passing year.

Asher and I kept seeing more and more bodies on the street throughout the years, too.

Asher had consistently tried to broach the subject about the well with me, but it would always end in and ugly argument, so he withheld from mentioning it as much as possible.

I grabbed a dress from the closet and headed to the bathroom.

I smiled before stepping into the shower. I took a long look at my wedding ring and felt my heart thumping with joy when I remembered I was someone’s wife.

I leaned against the wall for a moment and delighted in my many memories in which my husband had made me the princess I had always wanted to be.

Then I glanced in the mirror and turned my nose up at the parts of my body that would never match who I wanted to be.

I want nothing to do with devils.

I showered and lithely tip-toed downstairs where I cooked me and Asher up a couple of pancakes and made us both coffee.

Our house was beautiful, and I felt a little guilty living in it because I did so little to pay for it.

We decided we liked yellow walls and white carpets; to balance the colorful walls, we decided on neutral, black and white, striped, furniture. Asher told me he wanted to give his princess a castle, so he even hired people to decorate the house for us to make it as lovely as possible.

I returned to our bedroom and saw that the bed was empty.

I heard the shower being turned on and knew he had gotten up.

I sat on our bedside with a plate full of pancakes for him and felt a little guilty for getting him up early--one of my favorite things to do was serving him pancakes in bed, after all.

I glanced over at our bookshelf pushed up against the upper left corner of the room and a gentle smile came to my face.

I stood up and grabbed a book bound in a red cover called The Ugly Princess.

Asher had made a fortune off the book—it sold so many copies that he got a movie deal--and he made no secret when I pressed him that it was about me. At first, I was angry about it, but I couldn’t be when I bothered to read the book and he had depicted me in such a flattering, but realistic light.

I’d been so wrong about him.

In the months leading up to our wedding, I kept bringing up our combined lack of money.

“I don’t know how we’re going to make this work,” I would tell Asher often. “We have no money between us.”

I had moved into his apartment at this point and I was despairing on our bed.

Asher was silent as he thought of how to assuage my completely practical fears. “We don’t have to get a house right away, and we don’t have to spend a lot of money on the wedding. Don’t worry, we can do this.”

Pong.

I finally snapped at Asher, “do you plan to support us with your… Your worthless creative writing degree?”

There was a solid minute of dead air between us until Asher just shook his head silently with a disappointed expression.

“You always do this. You always try to push me away.” He murmured.

I watched him climb out of bed, pull on a jacket, and then leave in silence.

He had recently quit his job as a receptionist to finish his book unencumbered while I had been working tirelessly in waitressing.

I hugged my knees and felt like I was being consumed by that well.

My misty eyes fell on a paragraph that had always deeply touched me as I reminisced.

The people around her never saw it, and maybe they never would, but she knew she was beautiful because she had come to that conclusion by herself.

I suddenly felt an arm wrap around my torso and I felt lips brush the back of my neck. “What are you doing?” Asher asked.

I giggled. “Perusing the work of a great artist.”

His hand travelled lower and I squealed melodramatically—backing away from him. “I’m about to go to work!”

He winked. “Then I bet you can’t wait to come home! Especially since it’s your Birthday!”

I can’t wait to go home.

Sweat poured down my forehead at that sentence as it always would.

It should have felt like I was home; I had the man of my dreams, after all.

I had worked as a nurse for a few years only to find out that I hated it. I traded that job in for a job as a teacher when Asher made his fortune. I taught first graders how to work with numbers, read, and write—there wasn’t a job out there that could make me happier.

I was going through the motions with my lesson plan. I delighted in the happy, smiling faces of the children and loved the questions they asked which could vary from precise to entirely random.

How I wanted a child of my own… But because of nature’s prank, I would never have one.

At first, as I taught my classes, I managed to push that desire out of my mind.

But, as the day dragged on and I was on my third class, I was suddenly in that familiar well of misery about it.

A child clicked their pencil. It echoed.

The child did it repeatedly, and suddenly, it was all I could hear.

The wall was casting a winding shadow on the colorful rug beneath the children’s chairs.

Shrieking wind was howling in my ears.

My face froze in unblinking terror.

The shadow seemed to be worming closer to me as it morphed into a slithering creature.

Hiss…

I backed up against the wall; the children disappeared.

It was just me and the shadow.

All I could hear was infernal clicking on my way home.

I wiped endless tears from my eyes as every shadow, cloud, and building, became a monster and followed me as I drove.

I parked by the sidewalk and dashed up the driveway.

The monsters pursued me under the setting sun.

Shhk, shhk, shhk.

I could hear it behind me even as I jiggled my key with sweaty palms in the key hole.

I dropped them.

I heard metal dragging on the concrete path behind me.

I slammed my fists on the door and screamed, “Asher! Asher help me!”

I sank to my knees and dared not look behind me.

I felt something sharp digging into my shoulder.

Asher didn’t even have time to ask me what was wrong as I threw myself into his arm.

I had what would have been a glorious birthday dinner with Chinese food and a cake in the shape of a castle if not for the monsters earlier.

I could see that Asher wanted to broach the subject of the well as he always did, but he also didn’t want to ruin my birthday.

He gave me three wonderful gifts; a hair clip in the shape of a butterfly, a new dress, and…

A plaid ribbon.

“As a kid, you always told me you wanted one like my mom had because my home felt more like a home than yours did. Well, now you can always feel like you’re at home.” Asher explained.

I cried tears of joy until it felt like I was drowning in them.

I felt the safest I had in my entire life.

I sniffled and said to him, “you’re the best husband ever. I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

Suddenly, I was home.