By Danica M. Rice
It was a standard rest stop bathroom with three stalls, all available. They were all metallic brownish gold in color, quite an ugly color, she considered as she walked in, the paint was peeling, revealing the patchy equally ugly grey underneath. This was undoubtedly from multiple people slamming, thrusting them open or closed, in a sadly desperate hurry to avoid soiling themselves. Then again, it might only be from age and sheer neglect. She paid little to no attention to what appeared to be a standard rest stop bathroom..That was, until she entered the handicapped stall. There, she blindly walked to the toilet, focused more on her impending and urgent need to urinate, rather than the bricks to her right, spanning the entire wall.
However,
there was a particular reason she should have paid attention. Soon, she would
find this out. Busy doing her “business” she started, hearing a strained,
guttural, gravelly voice “Heeeelp us...”
Whipping her head about to the door, convinced some psycho had appeared,
she ran to the door, pants halfway pulled up, and, peering through the cracks,
saw nothing, opened, and again nothing. Slowly, she turned back towards the
toilet, her fingers clutching her pants closed.
From there
it came, her eyes met with a grimy face, or what she could see of one pressed
up against where a brick was missing from that brick wall. The eyes were a
haunting pale blue, the saddest she'd ever seen. Another voice spoke, this one
smooth, a Southern accent, yet tortured, “Please ma'am, you gotta help us...”
her eyes widened as she saw the source five bricks to the left of the first, a
black man, equally dirty, tears sliding a path through the dust and grime
caking his cheeks. Anguished, yet another tore through the silence that had
temporarily lapsed. “I can't DO THIS anymore!! I swear, milord!” She looked up, about ten bricks above the
black man was a gaunt man's face with a pair of broken spectacles hanging from
his nose, his anguished scream now devolving into tortured sobs.
Practically
falling in her scramble to zip her pants, she looked from face to
pitiful face,
horrified, the sobbing, cries, and begging escalated to nothing less of a
cacophany. Bewildered, terrified, utterly panicked, she ran, coward
that she was. She ran. Ran out of the stall as fast as she could,
those poor voices echoing in her mind for the rest of her life.
Gasping,
she sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in a cold sweat.
A dream. Or
was it? It didn't matter. She still heard them. Every night.
Not
surprisingly, she never went near a brick wall again. Nor a rest stop bathroom.
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