Fic: A Hole in the World
Title: A Hole in the World
Summary: For liliaeth who requested s4 AU with immediately post-Hell Dean in the hospital with trauma, and for salty_catfish who seconded it. This…is probably not what either of them had in mind. Heh. (OFC, outsider POV.)
Warnings: Tense shifts, weirdness.
Notes: Thanks again to hokuton_punch for her unrelenting awesomeness.
A Hole in the World
-
They’re not in the flight path, but sometimes she can hear the distant roar of an airplane passing overhead, scraping the sky. She’s never been much interested in flying, but sometimes she stands by the window anyway and watches the tiny light, the beautiful reflection of the sun, as it arcs away. Over the horizon.
Sometimes she stays and watches long after it’s gone.
It’s summer, and there are birds in the sky, and soft clouds, and intervals of blue. It’s hot outside, brilliant and heavy, the air and the earth, the dry crackling grass. Life and the aftermath of life, searing in a fire. End of summer. Shadow of a hammer. Winter’s in the wings, but a long way away. There are flowers in the gardens, and under the trees.
There are some people, outside. She doesn’t watch them, much, because they move in circuits like stars, returning. She’s seen time-lapse pictures where the stars make the shape of a wheel in the sky. They’re like that, here. Turning and returning. Making a shape, in the sky.
All of them together make something new.
And him. He’s new. They bandaged his hands and left him for a while, sitting by the wall, near the corner but not in it. She noticed him first because he didn’t move, he wasn’t moving. Yet. In this space. Missing that aimless direction, that dislocated focus. He’ll find it, but not, she thinks, yet.
She looks back out the window. A woman’s come up, is standing looking in. So close the sunlight picks out individual strands of hair, gives her a borrowed radiance. But she’s not. Radiant. Her skin is damaged by the drugs and by time, her eyes are crusted.
The woman is standing in the grass, her feet in the grass, and everyone here is like her. Or will be, someday.
Even newface, over by the wall. If he stays long enough. If nobody comes.
She will, too, though she doesn’t like to think about that.
--
They dragged him out. He punched through the dirt and grasped at nothing and felt the vertigo of a naked world. Made fists involuntarily when fingers closed on his wrist, gripped the bone, and pulled.
Bones make a sound when they grind together. They squeal.
He shut his eyes against the rain of earth and splintering coffin, fought to keep from opening his mouth or gasping for air. His lungs screamed, and his muscles, and deep inside some tiny flame sputtered bright and suddenly afraid.
Don’t. Don’t let me.
Go out.
They hauled him free, with fierce strong hands. Dragged him into a blue curving light, the sun burning in a golden tangle of grass.
He lay on the dry crackling ground, covered in dirt, and the hole in the earth went down down down. He didn’t need to look to see. He could feel it. When hands rolled him over and he was suddenly staring upward into the unforgiving blue abyss, he could feel it. The pit yawning at his feet. Still and patient. Waiting.
It was only a matter of time.
--
He makes the shape of a doorway with his index fingers, pressing them together and drawing them apart, then down. Parallel to each other. Perfect lines. An open space.
Inside is open spaces, and walls. (Only they don’t all come together where they should.) He curls his hands together in his lap. Runs a thumb over the bandages. His lips move, vaguely, not in expression but simply, she thinks, for something to do.
She wouldn’t say much about his face. It would have been pretty, maybe, in another place. Here it’s just a collection of features, disjointed and barely related to each other. But at least he’s not gaunt, like a lot of people that come in nameless and alone. His color is good. His outline is crisp and bright, except for his hands, with the fingers that curl inward, towards his belly. Those are soft, blurred by something, not just the bandages. Something else. They don’t shake, but they should.
She doesn’t spend her time worrying about people. But the shadows here are grey and damp, miserable weepy things that never flee more than a few steps from the sun at any given time. It’s wearying.
She passes by, in front of him, lets a hand drift in the air out toward the mostly empty room. Catching the swell of a wave, warm and soft and far away from the quiet walls and the huge empty room. He doesn’t track the motion. Curls one hand deeper into the cup of the other.
His face is seared. Under the skin, right down to the bone. She can see it, can taste it at the back of her throat. She swallows the sickness of it, the tremble under the skin. His eyes flicker briefly, rapidly, then settle again. A spasm, she thinks. If she knelt down in front of him, if she touched his face, covered his eyes or his mouth with her palm, it would be the same.
It would make no difference.
--
Noise. They pulled him in through huge doors painted on both sides and made of metal. He shuddered at the sound of the hinges, the bang and crash. The sky disappeared, swallowed up by ceilings and rectangular lights. He gulped a breath, squeezed his eyes but couldn’t get his legs to cooperate; shuddered where they had him pinned down. Cold air streamed by on all sides, almost tangible, physical, present.
It didn’t hurt.
He opened his eyes, twisted his head back, pushing against the surface. Trying to see. Noise making noise, at him. Static. Things. Shapes and colors--he jerked an arm, sharply, pulled back his lips.
Out. He got out. That’s what this was. Out. This feeling. A world without-a world missing things. Huge great chunks of things gone missing. The places he’d made for them buckled under the strain of vacuum. He shut his eyes again, pushed that strangling hollowness out through his teeth. Scrabbling at softness, fingers and the heels of his feet. Boots. His throat wouldn’t open--he’d never be able to get air in. Wet leaked from his eyes, from the corner of his mouth. Noise. And blood. His eyes rolled up--he let them. Blood. He pushed. He was pushing back, pushing against, holding everything up. Keeping his guts packed in one place.
“...in a hole, in the ground,” he heard, a swell of noise rising and receding, “In a hole, buried in the ground…”
In the ground. In the ground.
Someone murmured, “And the green grass grows all around, all around.”
And the green grass grows all around.
--
“Be safe out there,” someone says to her, in passing, in the hall. She nods and lifts a hand to whoever it is, but doesn’t look. It might be something, it might not.
They’ve bundled newface off somewhere. A while ago, she guesses. Probably for some tests, maybe to see if they can catch any falling words or other bits of sound. Glass, she thinks. Something like that. Things that shouldn’t come spilling out, bright and rare. Maybe that’s why he keeps his hands just so in his lap.
But he’ll be back. She knows. Licks her thumb and makes a quick shape on the wall, doesn’t stay to watch it dry, fading back into the paint.
People withdraw into their rooms, quietly, fading backwards as the lights go out one by one. She stands in the doorway and watches the dimness spread, watches it turn from the strange softness of twilight to crashing absolute dark. Her eyes will adjust. She draws back as the door is closed, in front of her. She sees the hall light go out. Stands still as night drops into her room. Blinks and lets her eyes adjust, the hard lines of the walls and floor and bed and table becoming more real, visible in the soft radiance seeping through the window.
She sits on the bed, lets the silence sink down on her shoulders and the back of her neck, on her scalp. Lets it drip from the ends of her hair. It’s neither good nor evil. It makes things hollow, though, punches through the soft continuity laid down by daylight and sets all things apart from all other things. Nothing is real but everything is true. She waits in the dark.
Once, years ago, she walked in a park at twilight. Everyone else was long gone and only the sun fading in the grass remained, and the lengthening shadows. She paused by the honeysuckle bushes and the long dry grasses and far away a single awful shriek punctured the air; brief, and inhuman.
She never found out what made a sound like that.
She waits, a while, in her room, and the sound comes again. Not the same, not exactly, but close. Just once, torn from some terrible instance.
Then nothing.
--
He thought maybe there would be places where the walls would fit together. Angles and joins and corners. But there weren’t. They didn’t fit. So there should have been space in between, opened up like viscera, like mouths. But there wasn’t. Open space or closed space. There should have been something, because the world didn’t work like that-there were no places where things didn’t fit together. All pieces in the world fit together. The air fit to the sky and the sky to the ground and there were no spaces between the air and the sky.
But this place was different. There were just walls. And the ceiling. And the angles and the corners of the room and none of the parts had anything to do any of the other parts. Each was a separate piece, unique in all the world, contained in its own universe.
His eyes leaked of their own accord, without him. Water got in his ears. He panted a little, to get air around the thickness of his tongue. They’d left him alone, straining at his bonds. The bones of his wrists twisting.
He was out, he was out, wasn’t he? That’s what had happened-dragged out into the air, shoved in a new box, then strapped down somewhere. But it wasn’t the same. They’d jammed some needles under his skin but no one had started cutting yet, and his skin crawled with the waiting, the expectation. He wanted to say, “Come on, come on already,” but didn’t dare in case someone took him up on it.
Maybe things were more real here. Maybe less. But he didn’t need any new holes. His whole face was leaking as it was.
He bit his tongue, though. It didn’t make much difference, but he felt a little bit better about his skin.
--
She finds him sitting closer to the corner, away from the sun, face turned a little toward the wall. She settles beside the chair, near his legs, but she’s smart enough not to touch him, or think about trying. She draws her knees up, wraps her arms around her legs and clasps her hands.
“They’re stealing my blood,” she tells him, quietly, tilting her head up a little, looking for a reaction. “The men. They come out of the mirror. They take my blood away. From me. I can’t-” she breaks off and presses her lips together. Shuts her eyes, draws air through her nose. “They come out at night. From the mirror. They-they crawl. I’ve seen them. And they. They take things. From me.”
She’s not sure what she’s expecting. But it’s not for his eyes to partly close, whites rolling, or his mouth to open. It’s not the sound that he makes, soft and formless and quietly anguished.
The surface of her skin stills and she tightens her fingers against her legs. He shifts, a little, face turning further toward the wall.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, “I’m-sorry.”
If he hears her she can’t tell. She’ll have to shuffle around on the floor if she wants to see his face, but he’s gone so still.
She draws a breath, and looks away, toward the window and the falling light. Rests her head on her knees and watches the shadows blow through the trees, watches the reflections of people in the glass. Her shoulders and neck are tense; she doesn’t know what to say.
Finally, quietly, she swallows and rubs her fingers together. Says, “I came here because of that. Because…they came for me. I didn’t want to come here but…my Mom, my brother, they wanted….It was them. Their idea.”
She stitches her fingers together. She can’t really tell him what it was like. When she first realized what was happening. The moment when she knew that no matter what she did, she’d never be safe again, not ever. But she talks, for a while. About other things. Pieces of things. Her mother’s face, her brother’s hands. The eyes of the men. The feeling of weakness. When she fell against the window in the dark, when the screen door banged open and shut in the wind of a summer storm. The noise of bats out in the country, diving and clicking as they hurtled blind but aware through the fading sunlight. The color of the star that hangs just to the left of the moon. She smiles a little to herself at some of the memories, and lets her voice slide flat and brisk over others.
The memories and the sound of her voice make a kind of well around her and, maybe, around him too, because he doesn’t move. Goes on sitting with his feet on the floor and his hands in his lap, and it’s only when she looks up that she sees he’s shifted, slightly, turning his head a little toward her, enough that she can see his eyes are closed.
There’s a softness, in the lines of his face, that she hasn’t seen there before. For a moment it brings all of his pieces together and she’s looking at a man, a person, someone with a name and a past and a voice of his own, and a family and people who care about him and hands that aren’t covered with bandages and full of terrifying softness.
For a moment. And she hangs there, in that instant, and watches his lips part softly. Watches him breathe.
She breathes with him.
--
The noise punches through all other sounds, high-pitched and screaming, screaming, pushing higher and louder against the walls and shredding skin and air. Cracks race across the ceiling and down the walls. He can’t even cover his ears and it hurts it hurts and he bites his lip to hold back his own screams but they burst out anyway and he jerks his head up and slams it back down as hard as he can. He makes claws against the bedding, twists against his bonds, restraints too soft and mattress too soft and everything too soft and he can’t feel his body. Not even his head hurts when he smacks it down again and he doesn’t know where he ends and the noise starts, clawing in under his skin and swallowing up pieces of his insides, chunks of heart and lungs and stomach.
It’s making a hole. A hole in the world. He can’t find his head or his hands or his legs, can’t feel his toes or belly. Only where his wrists are bound is he sure of something, sure at least of the pain as he strips away the skin, sure that there’s something left, some part of him.
But they’re making a hole in the world, out of the rest.
--
The air is sick. It shivers over the walls and she cringes. Rolls her head away and worries at her hands, pressing them together, squeezing her fingers. Recoils from the edges of things where the air gathers luminous and toxic. She’s hunched into herself as far as she can and curled up in a corner and is wishing now that her hair was still long and she couldn’t feel the clammy cold on her neck and skittering around her ears like fingers trying to worm inside. She swallows and folds herself smaller, and makes a noise.
They’ve taken so much. She can barely feel her own heartbeat anymore, or the flow of blood through her veins. She’s almost dead already. She’s dying, she’s so close to being dead, she’ll be dead soon. Guts rotting inside her. Honeycombed with decay. Eating her up from the inside. She had dreams about flowers and sweet grass and the rich warm earth.
There won’t be any flowers anymore.
When he touches her, softly, on her hands, she doesn’t look up. His fingertips skitter over the bones of her right hand and she shivers under her skin, in her muscles and sinews. He pulls away and she pushes both hands through her short hair and stares down at the tile floor.
“I’m dying,” she says. “They’re killing me.”
He’s a motionless shadow on the floor. He’s the curving tips of soft shoes.
In a very quiet voice he says, “Sometimes, you come back.”
--
The silences grew larger, pushing out the noise. Vast empty spaces, corridors and rooms, letting in the light. He watched the skins of people walking around, lit from within, like strange translucent lamps.
They’d moved him out of the room with the cracks, and bandaged up his wrists along with his hands. That experience alone was enough to give him pause. When was the last time he’d seen bandages? He pondered the peculiar softness and resisted the urge to scratch, or peel them off entirely. He didn’t want to go back in the restraints. Jesus. He’d had enough of restraints to last…well, however long this lifetime happened to last.
One night he got up out of the bed they’d given him (a conundrum of warmth and easy comfort that left him restless into the early hours) and felt along the walls, half-blind in the dark, just to check. He couldn’t believe the smoothness, but it was all true. Exactly as it seemed. No sharp edges, and no spaces. He found the corner and stuck all four fingers in it and stood with his eyes wide and softness pressing against the planes of his skull because he was sure they should have gone all the way through, and out the other side. Into some open hollow place, some place of….other things. Empty spaces. But there was just the corner, the two walls meeting. Nothing more.
He sat down on the floor and folded his hands against his belly and drew his knees into his chest, and let the softness fill up his head. It was easy, now. Nothing had ever been so easy.
--
When he speaks, his voice is as quiet as his hands, words dropping like soft stones to lie in the grass. He has scars forming on his fingers and the backs of his hands, his knuckles. He doesn’t show her but she catches glimpses when he’s not looking, of fading pink lines, gashes, and deep gouges. She never asks about it.
They sit together in the sun, under a tree with broad leaves. His eyes are open but she knows by his stillness he isn’t really seeing the grass, or the sky, or her. Sometimes he blinks and his eyes run, but his face shows no pain. Shows nothing. Eventually he’ll stir, and come back, she knows. Sometimes shivering all over. Once he crawled away from her and threw up, weakly, with a little noise of despair. She left him alone until after, when he hunched over on the ground and covered his head with one arm, the other limp by his side. Then she rested a hand, gently, on the back of his neck, fingertips soft on his skin.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”
So she waits, now, because if she doesn’t no one will. In the distance other people are moving across the lawns, or sitting or having conversations, sometimes with each other, sometimes not. There isn’t much attention shared, or much mutual perception. She thinks that probably what she sees when she looks at him is not what’s really there, but she’s doing the best she can. She knows he doesn’t really see her. Can barely really see anything, even when his eyes aren’t full of wet.
When he comes back this time it’s with a sharp inhalation and a quick, aborted motion toward his face. She doesn’t flinch. His eyes flicker quickly around the immediate area, take in the trees and grass, the distant line of more trees and the suggestion of fences, the flowers and the bushes and the people like distant stars in their enigmatic circuits through individuated skies. He drops a hand and clutches briefly at the grass.
She doesn’t say, “Hello,” but she thinks about it. Instead she sits calmly and lets his eyes roam over her face, her shoulders and arms and hands as if expecting some motion from her; as if he can’t believe her stillness. Sometimes she thinks he’s expecting her hands to turn sharp, violent. Expects, maybe, that she’ll tear at him, and can’t really believe it when she doesn’t.
She gives a little shrug and half smile. He blinks at her, then looks away.
“What day is it?” he asks, and she has to tell him she doesn’t know. It feels like a personal failure.
He pulls in a breath and gets up, takes a few steps out from the shadow of the tree. She thinks about following him but doesn’t. Knows there’s no place he’ll really go. He’s been getting closer to where she knows he’ll wind up in the end: dislocated, moving without any purpose but unable to stop. Seeking an escape without knowing from what. He’ll wander back in this direction in the end, if not today than some other day. There’s no place else to go.
He needs someone to lift him from this place. Before it’s too late. But she doesn’t think there’s anyone. And she watches him walk toward the trees, and stop, and turn slightly, and stand in the sunlight small and alone, like the beacon of a forgotten ship, broadcasting to no one.
In the end, she gets up and follows.
--
The lights outside exploded.
He wasn’t asleep. He was sitting up on the bed with his back to the wall. Waiting. He’d given up trying to sleep on the soft bed and they wouldn’t let him sleep on the floor, for whatever reason, though he’d tried a couple times. So now he was sitting up and waiting for sleep to physically grab him and yank him under.
When the lights exploded, he forgot to be surprised.
--
There’s a burst of noise and shattering glass, an eruption of light. She flinches from the window and stands, staring wide-eyed out into the night.
It doesn’t come again. She holds herself very still in the hush that follows. Without the artificial radiance on her floor and walls she can’t think where to put her feet, can’t see beyond the faintest outlines of corners and her bed in the moonlight. A rare and beautiful light, that she hasn’t seen in a long long time.
She waits, and the world waits with her. The air is thick with the dark, where it rests on her chest, on her shoulders. She draws breath lightly, with care. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
Her door is closed, and beyond it, someone is walking. Several someones, on bare feet, she thinks. She hears a rustle like the passing of a multitude, voiceless and swift. The pressure of the air increases; her hands fly to her chest, her throat. They are passing by. They are passing by.
And then, they’re gone.
In the morning, so is he.
She isn’t surprised.
--
End
>>Followed by Mirror, Water, Glass
___________________________________
The only music I really listened to on this was, for some reason, Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, and a couple of Leonard Cohen songs. "There's a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." ;)
Summary: For liliaeth who requested s4 AU with immediately post-Hell Dean in the hospital with trauma, and for salty_catfish who seconded it. This…is probably not what either of them had in mind. Heh. (OFC, outsider POV.)
Warnings: Tense shifts, weirdness.
Notes: Thanks again to hokuton_punch for her unrelenting awesomeness.
A Hole in the World
-
They’re not in the flight path, but sometimes she can hear the distant roar of an airplane passing overhead, scraping the sky. She’s never been much interested in flying, but sometimes she stands by the window anyway and watches the tiny light, the beautiful reflection of the sun, as it arcs away. Over the horizon.
Sometimes she stays and watches long after it’s gone.
It’s summer, and there are birds in the sky, and soft clouds, and intervals of blue. It’s hot outside, brilliant and heavy, the air and the earth, the dry crackling grass. Life and the aftermath of life, searing in a fire. End of summer. Shadow of a hammer. Winter’s in the wings, but a long way away. There are flowers in the gardens, and under the trees.
There are some people, outside. She doesn’t watch them, much, because they move in circuits like stars, returning. She’s seen time-lapse pictures where the stars make the shape of a wheel in the sky. They’re like that, here. Turning and returning. Making a shape, in the sky.
All of them together make something new.
And him. He’s new. They bandaged his hands and left him for a while, sitting by the wall, near the corner but not in it. She noticed him first because he didn’t move, he wasn’t moving. Yet. In this space. Missing that aimless direction, that dislocated focus. He’ll find it, but not, she thinks, yet.
She looks back out the window. A woman’s come up, is standing looking in. So close the sunlight picks out individual strands of hair, gives her a borrowed radiance. But she’s not. Radiant. Her skin is damaged by the drugs and by time, her eyes are crusted.
The woman is standing in the grass, her feet in the grass, and everyone here is like her. Or will be, someday.
Even newface, over by the wall. If he stays long enough. If nobody comes.
She will, too, though she doesn’t like to think about that.
--
They dragged him out. He punched through the dirt and grasped at nothing and felt the vertigo of a naked world. Made fists involuntarily when fingers closed on his wrist, gripped the bone, and pulled.
Bones make a sound when they grind together. They squeal.
He shut his eyes against the rain of earth and splintering coffin, fought to keep from opening his mouth or gasping for air. His lungs screamed, and his muscles, and deep inside some tiny flame sputtered bright and suddenly afraid.
Don’t. Don’t let me.
Go out.
They hauled him free, with fierce strong hands. Dragged him into a blue curving light, the sun burning in a golden tangle of grass.
He lay on the dry crackling ground, covered in dirt, and the hole in the earth went down down down. He didn’t need to look to see. He could feel it. When hands rolled him over and he was suddenly staring upward into the unforgiving blue abyss, he could feel it. The pit yawning at his feet. Still and patient. Waiting.
It was only a matter of time.
--
He makes the shape of a doorway with his index fingers, pressing them together and drawing them apart, then down. Parallel to each other. Perfect lines. An open space.
Inside is open spaces, and walls. (Only they don’t all come together where they should.) He curls his hands together in his lap. Runs a thumb over the bandages. His lips move, vaguely, not in expression but simply, she thinks, for something to do.
She wouldn’t say much about his face. It would have been pretty, maybe, in another place. Here it’s just a collection of features, disjointed and barely related to each other. But at least he’s not gaunt, like a lot of people that come in nameless and alone. His color is good. His outline is crisp and bright, except for his hands, with the fingers that curl inward, towards his belly. Those are soft, blurred by something, not just the bandages. Something else. They don’t shake, but they should.
She doesn’t spend her time worrying about people. But the shadows here are grey and damp, miserable weepy things that never flee more than a few steps from the sun at any given time. It’s wearying.
She passes by, in front of him, lets a hand drift in the air out toward the mostly empty room. Catching the swell of a wave, warm and soft and far away from the quiet walls and the huge empty room. He doesn’t track the motion. Curls one hand deeper into the cup of the other.
His face is seared. Under the skin, right down to the bone. She can see it, can taste it at the back of her throat. She swallows the sickness of it, the tremble under the skin. His eyes flicker briefly, rapidly, then settle again. A spasm, she thinks. If she knelt down in front of him, if she touched his face, covered his eyes or his mouth with her palm, it would be the same.
It would make no difference.
--
Noise. They pulled him in through huge doors painted on both sides and made of metal. He shuddered at the sound of the hinges, the bang and crash. The sky disappeared, swallowed up by ceilings and rectangular lights. He gulped a breath, squeezed his eyes but couldn’t get his legs to cooperate; shuddered where they had him pinned down. Cold air streamed by on all sides, almost tangible, physical, present.
It didn’t hurt.
He opened his eyes, twisted his head back, pushing against the surface. Trying to see. Noise making noise, at him. Static. Things. Shapes and colors--he jerked an arm, sharply, pulled back his lips.
Out. He got out. That’s what this was. Out. This feeling. A world without-a world missing things. Huge great chunks of things gone missing. The places he’d made for them buckled under the strain of vacuum. He shut his eyes again, pushed that strangling hollowness out through his teeth. Scrabbling at softness, fingers and the heels of his feet. Boots. His throat wouldn’t open--he’d never be able to get air in. Wet leaked from his eyes, from the corner of his mouth. Noise. And blood. His eyes rolled up--he let them. Blood. He pushed. He was pushing back, pushing against, holding everything up. Keeping his guts packed in one place.
“...in a hole, in the ground,” he heard, a swell of noise rising and receding, “In a hole, buried in the ground…”
In the ground. In the ground.
Someone murmured, “And the green grass grows all around, all around.”
And the green grass grows all around.
--
“Be safe out there,” someone says to her, in passing, in the hall. She nods and lifts a hand to whoever it is, but doesn’t look. It might be something, it might not.
They’ve bundled newface off somewhere. A while ago, she guesses. Probably for some tests, maybe to see if they can catch any falling words or other bits of sound. Glass, she thinks. Something like that. Things that shouldn’t come spilling out, bright and rare. Maybe that’s why he keeps his hands just so in his lap.
But he’ll be back. She knows. Licks her thumb and makes a quick shape on the wall, doesn’t stay to watch it dry, fading back into the paint.
People withdraw into their rooms, quietly, fading backwards as the lights go out one by one. She stands in the doorway and watches the dimness spread, watches it turn from the strange softness of twilight to crashing absolute dark. Her eyes will adjust. She draws back as the door is closed, in front of her. She sees the hall light go out. Stands still as night drops into her room. Blinks and lets her eyes adjust, the hard lines of the walls and floor and bed and table becoming more real, visible in the soft radiance seeping through the window.
She sits on the bed, lets the silence sink down on her shoulders and the back of her neck, on her scalp. Lets it drip from the ends of her hair. It’s neither good nor evil. It makes things hollow, though, punches through the soft continuity laid down by daylight and sets all things apart from all other things. Nothing is real but everything is true. She waits in the dark.
Once, years ago, she walked in a park at twilight. Everyone else was long gone and only the sun fading in the grass remained, and the lengthening shadows. She paused by the honeysuckle bushes and the long dry grasses and far away a single awful shriek punctured the air; brief, and inhuman.
She never found out what made a sound like that.
She waits, a while, in her room, and the sound comes again. Not the same, not exactly, but close. Just once, torn from some terrible instance.
Then nothing.
--
He thought maybe there would be places where the walls would fit together. Angles and joins and corners. But there weren’t. They didn’t fit. So there should have been space in between, opened up like viscera, like mouths. But there wasn’t. Open space or closed space. There should have been something, because the world didn’t work like that-there were no places where things didn’t fit together. All pieces in the world fit together. The air fit to the sky and the sky to the ground and there were no spaces between the air and the sky.
But this place was different. There were just walls. And the ceiling. And the angles and the corners of the room and none of the parts had anything to do any of the other parts. Each was a separate piece, unique in all the world, contained in its own universe.
His eyes leaked of their own accord, without him. Water got in his ears. He panted a little, to get air around the thickness of his tongue. They’d left him alone, straining at his bonds. The bones of his wrists twisting.
He was out, he was out, wasn’t he? That’s what had happened-dragged out into the air, shoved in a new box, then strapped down somewhere. But it wasn’t the same. They’d jammed some needles under his skin but no one had started cutting yet, and his skin crawled with the waiting, the expectation. He wanted to say, “Come on, come on already,” but didn’t dare in case someone took him up on it.
Maybe things were more real here. Maybe less. But he didn’t need any new holes. His whole face was leaking as it was.
He bit his tongue, though. It didn’t make much difference, but he felt a little bit better about his skin.
--
She finds him sitting closer to the corner, away from the sun, face turned a little toward the wall. She settles beside the chair, near his legs, but she’s smart enough not to touch him, or think about trying. She draws her knees up, wraps her arms around her legs and clasps her hands.
“They’re stealing my blood,” she tells him, quietly, tilting her head up a little, looking for a reaction. “The men. They come out of the mirror. They take my blood away. From me. I can’t-” she breaks off and presses her lips together. Shuts her eyes, draws air through her nose. “They come out at night. From the mirror. They-they crawl. I’ve seen them. And they. They take things. From me.”
She’s not sure what she’s expecting. But it’s not for his eyes to partly close, whites rolling, or his mouth to open. It’s not the sound that he makes, soft and formless and quietly anguished.
The surface of her skin stills and she tightens her fingers against her legs. He shifts, a little, face turning further toward the wall.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, “I’m-sorry.”
If he hears her she can’t tell. She’ll have to shuffle around on the floor if she wants to see his face, but he’s gone so still.
She draws a breath, and looks away, toward the window and the falling light. Rests her head on her knees and watches the shadows blow through the trees, watches the reflections of people in the glass. Her shoulders and neck are tense; she doesn’t know what to say.
Finally, quietly, she swallows and rubs her fingers together. Says, “I came here because of that. Because…they came for me. I didn’t want to come here but…my Mom, my brother, they wanted….It was them. Their idea.”
She stitches her fingers together. She can’t really tell him what it was like. When she first realized what was happening. The moment when she knew that no matter what she did, she’d never be safe again, not ever. But she talks, for a while. About other things. Pieces of things. Her mother’s face, her brother’s hands. The eyes of the men. The feeling of weakness. When she fell against the window in the dark, when the screen door banged open and shut in the wind of a summer storm. The noise of bats out in the country, diving and clicking as they hurtled blind but aware through the fading sunlight. The color of the star that hangs just to the left of the moon. She smiles a little to herself at some of the memories, and lets her voice slide flat and brisk over others.
The memories and the sound of her voice make a kind of well around her and, maybe, around him too, because he doesn’t move. Goes on sitting with his feet on the floor and his hands in his lap, and it’s only when she looks up that she sees he’s shifted, slightly, turning his head a little toward her, enough that she can see his eyes are closed.
There’s a softness, in the lines of his face, that she hasn’t seen there before. For a moment it brings all of his pieces together and she’s looking at a man, a person, someone with a name and a past and a voice of his own, and a family and people who care about him and hands that aren’t covered with bandages and full of terrifying softness.
For a moment. And she hangs there, in that instant, and watches his lips part softly. Watches him breathe.
She breathes with him.
--
The noise punches through all other sounds, high-pitched and screaming, screaming, pushing higher and louder against the walls and shredding skin and air. Cracks race across the ceiling and down the walls. He can’t even cover his ears and it hurts it hurts and he bites his lip to hold back his own screams but they burst out anyway and he jerks his head up and slams it back down as hard as he can. He makes claws against the bedding, twists against his bonds, restraints too soft and mattress too soft and everything too soft and he can’t feel his body. Not even his head hurts when he smacks it down again and he doesn’t know where he ends and the noise starts, clawing in under his skin and swallowing up pieces of his insides, chunks of heart and lungs and stomach.
It’s making a hole. A hole in the world. He can’t find his head or his hands or his legs, can’t feel his toes or belly. Only where his wrists are bound is he sure of something, sure at least of the pain as he strips away the skin, sure that there’s something left, some part of him.
But they’re making a hole in the world, out of the rest.
--
The air is sick. It shivers over the walls and she cringes. Rolls her head away and worries at her hands, pressing them together, squeezing her fingers. Recoils from the edges of things where the air gathers luminous and toxic. She’s hunched into herself as far as she can and curled up in a corner and is wishing now that her hair was still long and she couldn’t feel the clammy cold on her neck and skittering around her ears like fingers trying to worm inside. She swallows and folds herself smaller, and makes a noise.
They’ve taken so much. She can barely feel her own heartbeat anymore, or the flow of blood through her veins. She’s almost dead already. She’s dying, she’s so close to being dead, she’ll be dead soon. Guts rotting inside her. Honeycombed with decay. Eating her up from the inside. She had dreams about flowers and sweet grass and the rich warm earth.
There won’t be any flowers anymore.
When he touches her, softly, on her hands, she doesn’t look up. His fingertips skitter over the bones of her right hand and she shivers under her skin, in her muscles and sinews. He pulls away and she pushes both hands through her short hair and stares down at the tile floor.
“I’m dying,” she says. “They’re killing me.”
He’s a motionless shadow on the floor. He’s the curving tips of soft shoes.
In a very quiet voice he says, “Sometimes, you come back.”
--
The silences grew larger, pushing out the noise. Vast empty spaces, corridors and rooms, letting in the light. He watched the skins of people walking around, lit from within, like strange translucent lamps.
They’d moved him out of the room with the cracks, and bandaged up his wrists along with his hands. That experience alone was enough to give him pause. When was the last time he’d seen bandages? He pondered the peculiar softness and resisted the urge to scratch, or peel them off entirely. He didn’t want to go back in the restraints. Jesus. He’d had enough of restraints to last…well, however long this lifetime happened to last.
One night he got up out of the bed they’d given him (a conundrum of warmth and easy comfort that left him restless into the early hours) and felt along the walls, half-blind in the dark, just to check. He couldn’t believe the smoothness, but it was all true. Exactly as it seemed. No sharp edges, and no spaces. He found the corner and stuck all four fingers in it and stood with his eyes wide and softness pressing against the planes of his skull because he was sure they should have gone all the way through, and out the other side. Into some open hollow place, some place of….other things. Empty spaces. But there was just the corner, the two walls meeting. Nothing more.
He sat down on the floor and folded his hands against his belly and drew his knees into his chest, and let the softness fill up his head. It was easy, now. Nothing had ever been so easy.
--
When he speaks, his voice is as quiet as his hands, words dropping like soft stones to lie in the grass. He has scars forming on his fingers and the backs of his hands, his knuckles. He doesn’t show her but she catches glimpses when he’s not looking, of fading pink lines, gashes, and deep gouges. She never asks about it.
They sit together in the sun, under a tree with broad leaves. His eyes are open but she knows by his stillness he isn’t really seeing the grass, or the sky, or her. Sometimes he blinks and his eyes run, but his face shows no pain. Shows nothing. Eventually he’ll stir, and come back, she knows. Sometimes shivering all over. Once he crawled away from her and threw up, weakly, with a little noise of despair. She left him alone until after, when he hunched over on the ground and covered his head with one arm, the other limp by his side. Then she rested a hand, gently, on the back of his neck, fingertips soft on his skin.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”
So she waits, now, because if she doesn’t no one will. In the distance other people are moving across the lawns, or sitting or having conversations, sometimes with each other, sometimes not. There isn’t much attention shared, or much mutual perception. She thinks that probably what she sees when she looks at him is not what’s really there, but she’s doing the best she can. She knows he doesn’t really see her. Can barely really see anything, even when his eyes aren’t full of wet.
When he comes back this time it’s with a sharp inhalation and a quick, aborted motion toward his face. She doesn’t flinch. His eyes flicker quickly around the immediate area, take in the trees and grass, the distant line of more trees and the suggestion of fences, the flowers and the bushes and the people like distant stars in their enigmatic circuits through individuated skies. He drops a hand and clutches briefly at the grass.
She doesn’t say, “Hello,” but she thinks about it. Instead she sits calmly and lets his eyes roam over her face, her shoulders and arms and hands as if expecting some motion from her; as if he can’t believe her stillness. Sometimes she thinks he’s expecting her hands to turn sharp, violent. Expects, maybe, that she’ll tear at him, and can’t really believe it when she doesn’t.
She gives a little shrug and half smile. He blinks at her, then looks away.
“What day is it?” he asks, and she has to tell him she doesn’t know. It feels like a personal failure.
He pulls in a breath and gets up, takes a few steps out from the shadow of the tree. She thinks about following him but doesn’t. Knows there’s no place he’ll really go. He’s been getting closer to where she knows he’ll wind up in the end: dislocated, moving without any purpose but unable to stop. Seeking an escape without knowing from what. He’ll wander back in this direction in the end, if not today than some other day. There’s no place else to go.
He needs someone to lift him from this place. Before it’s too late. But she doesn’t think there’s anyone. And she watches him walk toward the trees, and stop, and turn slightly, and stand in the sunlight small and alone, like the beacon of a forgotten ship, broadcasting to no one.
In the end, she gets up and follows.
--
The lights outside exploded.
He wasn’t asleep. He was sitting up on the bed with his back to the wall. Waiting. He’d given up trying to sleep on the soft bed and they wouldn’t let him sleep on the floor, for whatever reason, though he’d tried a couple times. So now he was sitting up and waiting for sleep to physically grab him and yank him under.
When the lights exploded, he forgot to be surprised.
--
There’s a burst of noise and shattering glass, an eruption of light. She flinches from the window and stands, staring wide-eyed out into the night.
It doesn’t come again. She holds herself very still in the hush that follows. Without the artificial radiance on her floor and walls she can’t think where to put her feet, can’t see beyond the faintest outlines of corners and her bed in the moonlight. A rare and beautiful light, that she hasn’t seen in a long long time.
She waits, and the world waits with her. The air is thick with the dark, where it rests on her chest, on her shoulders. She draws breath lightly, with care. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
Her door is closed, and beyond it, someone is walking. Several someones, on bare feet, she thinks. She hears a rustle like the passing of a multitude, voiceless and swift. The pressure of the air increases; her hands fly to her chest, her throat. They are passing by. They are passing by.
And then, they’re gone.
In the morning, so is he.
She isn’t surprised.
--
End
>>Followed by Mirror, Water, Glass
___________________________________
The only music I really listened to on this was, for some reason, Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, and a couple of Leonard Cohen songs. "There's a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." ;)