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Their fight couldn’t have been all for nothing. This has to be a nightmare. His return is a crime, and his possession of her friend’s body a sin.
“What are you gonna do about it, Red?”
He sneers, and she hates it. He has transformed his body into a pale vessel with bulging, snake-like eyes, and he jerks about on his feet like the most grotesque-looking puppet.
Her hand clenches into a fist. He isn’t supposed to be here. Why isn’t he gone?
The world swirls and bends into blended splotches of sickening colors, and in the center of this distortion, he is there.
“You don’t look so good, Red; like you’re gonna puke all over the floor! Go right ahead, it’ll be a spectacle for the eye!” He jabs a finger up to indicate to the bulging, snake-like eye. “It’s funny ‘cause I usually have one eye, but now I have two ‘cause I’m in Pine Tree’s body!”
He cackles, and it’s not his laugh. His laugh is not full of this cruel malice.
This is not him.
And he is not supposed to be here.
Both her hands have clenched into fists. She grits her teeth. “I hate you…”
“What was that, Red? I couldn’t hear you over your pathetic mumbling.”
She looks directly at him, the centerpiece of her now distorted world.
“I hate you.”
It isn’t until his body lurches back that she realizes she punched him across the face. Her eyes widen in terror, because that’s his body.
He rubs his cheek. The sickening grin on his face widens. “Is that the best you can, Red?” He raises his hands up into mocking fists. “Come at me, Red, show me what you got!”
“Don’t call me that!” she roars, and her body reacts, and she’s swinging another fist at him. It lands across his cheek. His sickening grin is still plastered on his face. Her stomach churns, and she keeps trying to hit him, and she knows that it’s his body, but he is still in there.
She pants, growing tired. Her arms hang limply at her sides; her fists loosen. His cheeks are red, his nose twisted, he has two black eyes, but he is still there.
“Well, that’s all the fun I had here! Thanks for the bruises, by the way!” An ironic understatement.
He lifts up a chair.
“Sweet dreams, Red!”
And before it cracks down onto her head, before the colors of her distorted world are sucked away as though by a vacuum cleaner, she wishes she could draw his body to her chest and say she is sorry for hurting him and reassure him that everything is going to be fine.