Flash Before My Eyes

I’m terrified about introducing myself, but I feel I must for the sake of keeping both my story and my head straight. I’m Greg, and I’ve just had my 41st birthday. I was married to my beautiful wife, Karen, who had passed away of health complications just a few years ago. All I had left of her warm memory was my seventeen year old daughter, Amy, who has also passed on, but in a completely different and unnatural way. Her death still haunts me to this day. I’m sorry; I’m getting too far ahead of myself. In order to truly explain to you just how gruesome her death really was, I must start from the beginning. However, I wish I didn’t have to tell you her story in this way.

It was a Saturday about a year, ago as of this day, when the beginning of the end occurred. Yes, I mean to say it was my 40th birthday. It started off like any other day with a teenager usually would, filled with drama and nasty attitudes. “Amy, get out of bed. You need to start on that mound of laundry piling up outside of your room. It’s been there for weeks, and the socks are reeking.” As always, she let out that huffed groan followed by a snide reply. “If it’s really bothering you, why don’t you do it yourself.” I stormed up the stairs and met her at the door of her bedroom. “Amy, I’m not having any of your rude remarks right now. It’s too early in the morning for that. I don’t care if it’s not bothering you. This is my house, and my rules apply. Get busy.” She rolled her eyes at me and shut the door in my face. “Fine, but don’t plan on coming downstairs until you have finished picking up the clothes from out here.”

I continued on throughout the morning working on reading over the edits for the newspaper I work for. I could hear the television in the other room. Figures. I set the edits aside to go tell my bullheaded daughter to go back to her room. When I walked into the living room, Amy held something bulky in her hands. It was an older model of a video camera. She stopped examining the camera and looked up to me with a face that had annoyance written all over it. “You’re not supposed to see this yet,” she said. “Why are you not working on your laundry?” I asked. “For your information, I was hooking up what is to be your birthday present to the television.” She turned away and set the camera down. I was curious. “Who gave you that?” “Tom found it in his basement when he and his dad were cleaning it out. I wanted to see what was on it.” She began to press play. “Okay, but after this is done, you march back up to your room,” I said.

This moment, this one moment, is one of two I’ll never forget. I still can see it when I close my eyes. At first, the screen was black. I guessed that the camera was just too old and worn to be played anymore. I was about to stop the whole thing, when a small neighborhood popped up on the screen. The picture was in black and white, and the movie was silent. A man began to walk across a sidewalk near a street corner in front of an old house. Oddly enough, the man began to pace back and forth, picking up speed each time he turned to walk the other way. Eventually, he stopped pacing and headed into the house. The next scene was inside the old house. The same man continued to pace back and forth, only this time, something was way off about his gait. He began to pace at an inhuman speed. In seconds, he became a mass blur, and then the motion turned into what seemed to be small movie frames flashing before us. Suddenly, he was split limb by limb by an invisible force. His head sat in the middle of the screen and began to speak. No, it didn’t speak. It made an awful whine. The whine became fast and high pitched, still flashing in single frames. Then, silence. The head seemed to freeze and fall over. The screen went blank.

Amy burst out laughing while I stared in disgust at the television. “Wow. Someone has too much free time on their hands. Must not have a life if they came up with this,” she managed to bellow between gasps and giggles. I turned to her, my face tensing up. “That was the sickest thing I’ve ever seen! Who made this? Was it Tom? Start giving me names, now,” I yelled at her. She looked hurt. “What, now you’re going to blame this on my friends? What proof do you have it was him?” she yelled at me. “It was his camera! What other kind evidence do you need? It’s obvious who did it!” I shot back. “It’s nice to know you love to just pin anything on my friends. You don’t even know them! I can’t believe you!” With that, she ran up to her room. “Don’t you ever give me that tone!” I shouted up to her, but she had already slammed the door shut before I could finish.

That night, I stared at the camera, now sitting on top of the television. I still couldn’t believe what I had just seen. Only a twisted person who found humor in filth like that would make the video. I still had Tom in my mind as being the culprit. I decided I was going to call Tom’s parents and have a discussion about it in the morning. I walked up the stairs to go to my room for the night. Before I reached the landing, I heard Amy scream. I raced over to her room and quickly opened the door. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

There, standing in the middle of the room, was Amy. She was stretched out as if a force was pulling her apart, just like in the movie. The lights began to flicker. I heard Amy screaming sharply in pain and fear. As I continued to watch the horror unfold, she began to move closer, but in a way similar to a freeze frame movie and not that of reality. She floated closer and closer with each sharp flash. I slammed the door and backed away in dead silence just as she came a few feet away. I heard a loud thud. The thudding began to come from every direction in her room, the sound echoing through my mind each time. The thudding stopped. “Amy?” I began to call out. “Amy, answer me!” I busted down the door with one heave of my body and hastily looked around for her. What I saw made me puke.

She laid in a tangled mass on the floor, covered in blood. Some of her flesh was ripped away from her arms and legs. She was even missing flesh from her face, leaving her raw jawbone exposed. Her eyes…her horrible eyes! They were bulging from the extreme force that every blow against the wall had inflicted. Her arms and legs were severely deformed. Her mouth hung wide open from the screams that were emitted from her, blood running down her chin and throat. I couldn’t take the sight. I screamed and fled down the stairs, unable to come up with how the neighbors and police would fathom such a horrible truth.

That camera. That cursed camera! That was the death of my baby girl, and in a sense, it was the death of me. A few days later, I came back with all the courage I could gather to remove my belongings from the house. I took the camera and packed it away in a box with other gadgets I don’t use anymore. There was something eerie about it. Even though it was the center of all this evil, it was the last thing my daughter ever gave me. I couldn’t throw that away. So here I am now, left to tell you my worst nightmare. Oh, I almost forgot. I took the camera out of the box earlier today out of curiosity. I hooked it up to my computer to watch the movie one last time before I went to make a decision on where its final location would be. I hit play, expecting to see the quartered man. However, when the movie began, I turned away in terror. This time, it was Amy’s freeze frame murder.

Credit To – Dark-Angel-Girl