Voices in Her Head

by Fehmida Zakeer

A huge dark shadow with angular contours glided to a stop just beyond her second floor balcony. A low buzz crackled through the air, rattling the glass balcony door. Deena hoped the noise would not awaken her parents or her neighbours.

She opened the door quickly. A crack appeared and widened on the face of the cube. When it was wide enough, a tall figure stepped out and walked down a rainbow coloured ramp that progressed in tandem with his steps. He extended his hands as he came nearer.

Deena smoothed her hands down the front of her dress and took a deep breath. Deena had first heard the voices a month back just as she started preparations for her high school final examinations. The voices told her she was wasting her time, that she would never be able to outdo her elder sister, a gold medallist.

She tried to shut them out but it was all in vain. She confided to her mother one day, but Ma, busy as she was with her workshops, and students just looked at her with narrowed eyes, “Hearing voices. Come on, Deena, you are not a small child. You did not study the whole year, and now you are looking for ways to bail yourself out.”

Deena kept quiet after that, even though the voices continued to jeer at her. A week back, she had been sitting at her study table an hour past midnight trying to solve a particularly tricky math problem when suddenly she felt the hairs at the back of her neck stand up.

Deena turned around to see two forms standing behind her. They were attired in long luminescent gowns with high collars. She distinctly remembered one long hand gently taking hers and guiding it towards her book before she sank into a pool of darkness.

In the morning, she got up from her bed and flung back the covers. She rushed to her table and flicked open her book. There it was: the solution to the tough question she had been trying to crack for the past two days recorded neatly in her own writing. The nightly visits continued and by the third night she gathered up enough courage to ask, “Who are you?”

“We are from a galaxy light-years away. We got reports that some of our kind are creating havoc on this planet. We are rounding them up so that they can be dropped into the great black hole from where they cannot escape.”

“You mean the voices in my head...”

“Mischief-mongers from our land trying to create problems,” the taller one confirmed.

“We have been drawing them out little by little from your head,” the other one said.

“We’ve got sophisticated means to siphon them out faster, but you will have to come with us. Do you think you can...?” The tall one left the question hanging.

Deena realized that the voices in her head had indeed tapered down the past few days. She took a deep breath. “Let me think about it.”

Before they left, they assured her that the excursion would take only one earthly night because of the time zone differences. She could go and come back before the sun came up the next day.

She had wondered whether it was all a dream, but the proof was before her now. With a happy smile, she hoisted herself and reached out to clasp the hand extended to her. Then she stepped onto the rainbow-coloured pathway touching the railing of her balcony.

to Challenge 401...