Elixor.

There is a tiny, blond four year old girl tied to a bed. Her porcelain features are tear streaked and gaunt, the pale ghost of exhaustion replacing the smile lines that used to twinkle around the corners of her mouth. But she is fighting for her life behind thin, closed eyelids.

He cut into her young flesh yesterday, a blunt utensil ripping into the back of her head and scooping at her insides. Merciful blackness had already taken her so she felt nothing but a knife piercing into her dreams. She awoke screaming, a tiny, tender, vulnerable jewel torn from her home, stretched to her limits, alone as she knew it, in a raging swell of chaos, surrounded by morbid, gruesome, bleeding fellow victims.

But she was not alone. Her father had found her and rushed up the stairs, calling her precious name, blinking back the horror so she would not see it. He burst through a blurry doorway, and she watched him rush to her side anxiously; but he was just another stranger in a world of monsters. She did not recognize him.

She screamed her throat red raw and her bloodshot eyes to sleep, a grasping, snatching sleep filled with voracious, clutching hands lashing at her from the darkness, and a stabbing pain in her head.

They slit into her again that night because she was dying and they had to. They reopened the scabbing wound as she stiffened and her eyes rolled back in her head. A gleaming scythe of terror furiously hacking at the skeleton thread her life was hanging by. They removed the festering devil inside of her brain as the seconds of her life counted down and her panicked heart burrowed into her chest. They pumped as much invigorating blood into her as she could stand till she bloated and engorged with the infusion.

And then they set her gently into the white and sterile hospital bed, both her flogged and wrung out parents at her side. They tied her little hands to the edges so she could not upset the wires and tubes going in and out of her, and they left her to rest in a velvet stupor of blackness.

Her name is Carisa. And we need your prayers.

Joe.