Embraced by Shadows (Their Soul to Keep)

Some little girls have imaginary friends; I had imaginary monsters. I’d try to conjure fluffy unicorns and happy, smiling faeries, but after a brush with Death as a kid, those figments of light seemed beyond my reach. When I say I had a brush with Death, I mean he held me in his arms in the pulsing darkness as doctors and nurses worked to revive my body in a sterile hospital room. And when that darkness began to flicker, life calling me back, he murmured something to me. Something important. Something I couldn’t quite hear over the roar of blood in my ears and the squawking of hospital machinery. Ever since that day, my daydreams and nightmares seemed to collide. Sometimes they seem more substantial than the world around me. But when the shadowy figments of my imagination break through the veil separating dream from reality on the darkest night of my life, I start to wonder if my brush with Death was much more than a hallucination. And maybe I brought more than a touch of darkness back from the brink with me.