Chapter One

A Chapter by Sasavet

My fingers smell of metal and my fingerprints dye themselves in dark, distinguishable red as I feel the warm rip on the side of my tongue. Quick “Ahs” and “Ems” thrash through the air for split seconds, sandwiched in shields of silence as Sandy’s face changes from colour to dark, to color to dark.

“Hold a damn channel!” Elaina screeches -- her hands trembling as she chokes her moulded pillow.

Sandy’s eyes don’t move.

“Why don’t you snap her neck, Elaina?” Malory cackles from a drooping, pink sofa, her wrinkling, upper nose resembling that of a rodent. Elaina suddenly stands up, her chair tumbling behind her as she does. She takes a few vicious steps towards Malory -- Malory’s eyes take on a fish as Elaina glares from above her.

“I’ll break your goddamn neck if you don’t sew your damn mouth shut! Sew it, sew it, or I’ll tell them where you are.” Malory stares down at her knees, pinching her lips together with her jagged nails, epileptic eyes.

Coral, it’s time for your check up with Dr. Chiflado, it’s Tuesday,” the spider faced woman with stiff hair that are their legs snorts at me, her sagging skin completely still other than her smug, thin lips flapping tensely as I slouch down into the floor chair in the center of the room.

What drives one to work in a mental hospital? I had invented my own little stories of them all, all of the employees -- and that’s who they are. When you’re forced to straddle a city, naked and paralyzed, knowing the shifting chins that the city belongs to is valid. I’m living in a nudist colony.

Mrs. Arachnid spent her childhood being raped by her father, and now she comes here to feel more at home amongst the parallel tornado heads. She still hears her daddy’s voice sometimes; the walls kiss her chest -- the floors clutch her thighs. I stand as she trudges away with a steel spine.

I head towards Dr. Chifaldo’s office, my feet making songs of friction against the stained tiles. An imaginary ball and chain is sewn to my ankles. I open the door.

“Take a seat Ms. Mournal” Dr. Chifaldo says as I cross the immaculate room radiating in an asylum white to the equally white chair. Dr. Chifaldo (Dr. Daft) escaped from the asylum in Memphis, and forged his way into psychiatry in this charade of a hospital. The day he tore through the fluorescent doors of NallBrook Institute and through the barriers of his anti biting mask and straight jacket, no one knew who to look for. They never saw his face. He painted the walls bright white, in nostalgia of where he escaped, but to where he ultimately belongs. He never saw the building’s outside -- he can’t find his way back. He hopes that by helping us escape our minds, we’ll be stricken with the same regret of endings as he, and through that can steal our inner prisons.

“Any progress Coral?” He asks, intertwining his fingers together and wrinkling his forehead inwards.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Movement Coral. Have you undergone any changes in the past week? Even anything small?”

“Small is useless,” I say. He takes off his glasses.

“Small is a start. Please share.”

I exhale slowly, looking at the ceiling that appears to be punched in with a giant triangular fist.

“I dreamed of being a ghost instead of being a vulture, I woke up with a bleeding stomach instead of a bleeding tongue, and I woke up at 3:12 instead of 3:15.”

“What day was this?”

“All days.”

“Well Coral, that’s all at night, all in your unconscious. Do you think that means anything?”

“It’s still blood.”

“I think you’re hiding from something inside your mind, I think you need to come to terms with whatever you’re suppressing.”

He raises his lips now in an upward pucker, tapping his finger to his wedding ring, proud of the purely bullshit discovery he had made. I chuckle inside of myself.

"You’re absolutely right” I say, smiling my perfected plastic smile, and I stand to leave the room in which you can only lie to escape.

My eyes are ears as I walk through the halls of BellSam to reach my room. Silent caves of mouths carve holes in Lucy’s face, and she smells with her vibrating tongue. Crabs welded to tips of arms scuttle and scrape at the tiles, while demons drag Margaret to the stabbing room.

I return to my empty square and plant myself in my empty chair, gaping emptier as I slothfully sit in it.

“What did you tell Dr. Daft?” a yellow blanket from across the room whispers. I don’t have a past for it.

“I told him my sleeping has changed, that my stomach bled instead of my tongue.” Speaking to the web of fibres and fabric always seemed like a reflex, like I had no choice but to pour my thoughts all over its wilting edges. No one else saw it, but here we are all earless.

“Why sleeping?” the floorboards ask.

“It’s more believable for us to make unconscious ‘progress’; He’s not daft enough to buy that we’ve improved on our own.”

“Did he believe you?”

“Of course. It's what he wants to hear anyways, just so he can refill his fake f*****g ego and become even blinder." I scratch the tips of my nails together, filling the cell with the sound of cracking bones.

“There is good in that you know.” I look at my slippers, an identical color of the ear that is speaking, a distraction amongst the dirty flooring.

“I guess. I just wish I could bring on a change, but I can’t make myself. It’s always a bleeding tongue.” My mouth flinches.

“Why tongue?”

“I don’t let myself tell myself the truth. I don’t know.” I never look across the room at it, I only hear -- and hold the awareness that it’s there. I’ve never seen it, but when intuition’s been lost through a hurricane of skin cells, when it speaks to you, you can hear the fabric; you can hear the corner it is suffocating by loafing in it.

“Why’d you tell him your stomach bled?” The corner whimpers through the muffled blockage.

“It’s where the truth started. It’s just moving backwards. He knows that.”

“What’s the truth right now?”

It rolls off my tongue shockingly easily like a snowball.

“I never want to go back like I say. The numb is all I can keep. Moving back is a trap, but so is staying.”

“Things will change, Coral.”

“I know they will. I just wish I’d stop remembering.”

“There’s always something for you to forget, you’ll want to forget this one day, but that’s why they call you all tornado heads. What don’t you want to remember? Tell me, you’re awake. I know of a time when remembering was all you wanted. Speak. Your tongue is safe.”

She tugs at my brain, and I see it as clearly as a dusty moth in a glass, hovering in his wings’ swaying dirt. I don’t speak, but she can hear my mind’s pupils. They can see...

A time when screams didn’t envelop the musty night air, a time when rest wasn’t forced through surges of electricity swimming through my veins -- I’m spiralling back there dangerously fast.

This room shrivels around me, and I can smell my green shack of a house just off the highway, divinely smelling of dog food and vanilla. The tips of my thin, messy blonde hair are crusty in dried cookie dough, and he’s lying on the couch, my husband John, snuggled into his niche of pillows and hockey. I’d never been to BellSam. I bring John a tray of shrimp with oatmeal cookies on the side, his favourite dinner and favourite desert, but my over enthusiastic beam of “It’s your favourite honey!” is responded with a feeble and weak “Thanks.”

He grabs a cookie and lazily opens his mouth to take a bite, but his weakening fingers drop it to the ground, crumbling and cracking. I hurry to pick it up for him, but he sluggishly shakes his head.

“I don’t want it, Coral” he grumbles. He breaths heavily with repeating sighs of regret, and I worry that his spiral into giving up is near its end, as with each day he gives up more.

“But it’s your favourite” I plea, holding it to his face, but he bitterly turns his head the other way. He just lies there, and I wait for him to speak. He needs to think something, to feel something, but I can sense the very essence draining from him, bread lessening to mould, skin sagging to dirt.

“Do you remember January 2^nd, 1998? You came from the snow,” he whispers softly, and his quivering hand is rummaging through the air, and as I sit on the ground next to him, I take it. All he ever wanted was a hand to hold, and my desires shadowed his; we were delighted to live in the dark of companionship. Not love nor lust, just a hand, and that was beautiful. “Lying in a snow angel in the box you wouldn’t leave, ‘memorising the clouds’ formations’ you said. I had to drag you out of your hole.” He doesn’t look at me.

This sudden moment of nostalgia shocks me, and I think of the vast and dragging years we spent without speaking of that day which lies forever engraved in our skulls, and the reason of our dependent reliance on each other -- and why now, at his nearing end of all times, he chose to recall the exact truth that we spent our lives attempting to forget. His finger taps my palm, and I glance down at his trembling hand cradled in my sturdy one, weak in his resistance of rest and comfort. He always craved activity, for it’s in comfort that we face what we’re meant to face, and forgetting removes its blindfold. I squeeze tighter.

“I wanted the memory of before it happened, I just wanted to remember it” I quietly respond, the powdery crumbs of the cookie engraving its marks into the skin of my knee.

“Immortality” he whispers to the prickly and aged fibres of the couch’s fading colours of orange and white. They’re just as vibrant as the first day we saw them -- we’re blinded by the contrast, as we stared at their transition with eyelid-less eyes, unwillingly rendering ourselves immune to change. “Where did I come from?” he mumbles.

- The sky. You said you ‘needed’ to drag me from my hole. You needed to see someone move on, or else you couldn’t.

- Did you move on?

- I went with you, but not with me.

He grabs his chest with a clenched and firming hand, as if suffocating his heart would cause the throbbing punches to readily die down.

“I knew you never changed, I did know. But not until now have I really seen it.” He chokes the words out through gritted teeth and a deteriorating hand, wilting on his chest. “Do you remember how the clouds were?”

I look out our window framing the highway and town below us, and I can see them, the shifting clouds on a forever frozen and rigid sky. They’re the same clouds that have glided above my head for decades, veiled over in the same layer of smog which grows by year, but the growth that eternally lies unnoticed to me. And yet I have endlessly stared at them, determining pinpricks of images -- a mouth on a body, a mermaid with wings, anything that appeared even the slightest bit different than every other cloud I’ve obsessively studied, and I always managed to find the differences... but were the pinpricks in my mind, or truly in the sky? They were her I liked to think. She was sketching the dots and frail lines which only I could see. She had to know I was looking.

“I don’t. They looked gray and full, like a storm was about to emerge. Like so many other days amounting to years at a time. Do you remember?”

He slowly but steadily rotates his head towards me, and his eyes are plastered open to mine, like a startled but anxious owl, trapped in the morning. There’s a deathly glare of jealousy in his eyes, as my plague of forgetting which to him would be a gift had finally been exposed, although its mark was always present, but merely avoided. He looks like he’s in pain, but his hand no longer pinches his chest, his arm no longer quivers; just his eyes as he fearfully sees me, through fresh and fogless air.

“I do.” He doesn’t stop staring, but I can see by the crevices between his eyebrows and the fear resonating in his eyes, that he sees me, and truly sees me, but the fragment of his eye, dusty and unopened until now repels the truth of me, and he’s newly aware. Yet -- his voice remains sturdy and strong, almost as if he’s rehearsed this speech in his mind repeatedly and obsessively, although he never knew it, for it wasn’t him. It was the shadowy man sleeping in his eye, the truth of him -- the truth he did everything to never awake. “I remember every single bloody thing about that day, and I’m still there.”

“Describe it.”

He slides his eyes open even further, and woodenly spits out the memory, pained by the reminiscing to the past rather than future -- the one thing he never wanted, but nevertheless he tells it just so that I can remember -- the one thing I always needed.

“I just got back from work and parked at the end of the driveway because of the fresh pavement, and I heard a faint hum from the backyard. There was no wind. I slowly walked over to where you were lying in your crater of white. A few grains of grass were peeking out of the snow, and I remember thinking that they looked like they were peeping up into the world, as if they could see the spring that was in store for them. They felt like they were waiting for something significant and worth waiting for. I remember feeling like them as soon as you spoke, as if I already saw our lives before us, beautiful and cloning days of the days we’d already spent. I was foolish; I didn’t know what you were about to say.

“You said ‘Move please, I can’t see the clouds,’ and I lay down next to you, but I didn’t make an angel like you did, I just stared at yours. When I asked why you were looking at the clouds with no seeming shapes, you answered slowly ‘I want to remember the moments I would want to remember later, before I reach what I know I’ll want to forget.’ I didn’t know what to think, what you were aiming to forget. You were so mysterious and strange, and I can remember your eyes -- how they mirrored themselves against the snow you were in, and even though I hadn’t seen the colours, just the whites had me in a daze. Although I’d seen your eyes hundreds of times, I felt a stabbing need for you to look at me, to tell me what you were thinking, but you never did. You just darted your eyes across the sky, mumbling to yourself the images you saw that I couldn’t see whatsoever. You said --”

The alarm clock from the kitchen rings, interrupting him. It’s two O’clock.

“Time to feed the dogs” he whispers, sighing a sigh of relief and lowering his restless eyelids at last. I stand and head to the back yard quickly, sceptical as to if I should be eager to return to his remembrance. The memories are coming back now, but I can’t remember any further than his words, and I feel as though I need to return to my portal of the past I clung to so firmly until my mind repelled it, but a hovering sense of fear is there, and whether or not I want to know it anymore is unclear. I grab the giant bag of dog food as I head to the door. Walking into our tiny back yard, I see scraps of it carpeted in ill grass flattened to the soil -- it’s thin, crusty, and yellow. The grass can only be seen through tiny spaces however, as the ground seems to be made up of only our dogs; all twenty six of them, multiplying by the month.

It began with only three, but although I tried to persuade John to get them neutered, he bitterly and coldly felt that halting the growth of life was unnatural and not within our right to decide. As I pour the buckets of dog food in the center of the dogs barely able to breathe amongst their equally suffocated family, those who don’t know they’re family -- I think of the isolation that all the company of each other has caused the dogs, and how limiting the very essence of their togetherness was. I always imagined that crammed company was refreshing, but the dogs seem to frown in a neglected need to move, and I try to ignore it.

I think back to the clouds, and realize how lucky I was that I knew when I’d need to remember, so I could prepare for the dire future ahead. Did the dogs hold the awareness that their own love making and children would take away their very ability to move, to run; to breathe? Would they have indulged in the natural and animalistic act if they knew? Their reflex of life which was to duplicate further life sprung onto me the feeling of forced acts that would only lead to regret, as people begin others, as do they end them, and as I stare at the zoo of hills of dogs, I’m reminded of the land ahead of a visible swamp, with the hills soiled in hidden water, and those growths of land indicate water’s presence, but you can’t see it. Only the sense and knowing is there, and you know that to climb hills means to wet your shoe, like a tempting calling of risk, one that could only end in discomfort. To make life is to end it, and in that moment I wish I was born a dog, to be unaware of the affect my presence had on my family, to only think about myself and to do it guiltless, as dogs -- have no family.

They nudge at each other in an attempt to reach the food some wouldn’t get today, and as they do I head back inside, fragmentally hoping John will continue his story. I walk into the living room, and for a second all I see is blackness around me, with the occasional sparkle of silver. I’m in a cloudless, night sky, but I find the light switch. John’s eyes are open again, staring at me.

“What did I say?” I ask him.

“It was your eyes” he whispers desperately, as if wishing I could tell him the story rather than the contrary, and the burden that was never his he had carried for years, but I can’t recite it to him. I can’t recall.

“I couldn’t see them, but your eyes were what said it. It was too quiet, the first day of the year without wind. We always wished for it, but the silence was deafening. I asked you... ‘Where is Noelle?’ but you didn’t answer, you stared at the clouds. I found her, Coral.”

His desperate eyes pivot to a foreign shape, a bulging and wide stare that may only be compared to that of a famished tiger in sight of a lone fly.

“I found her. I found her fragile body, and all the while you were staring at the clouds, wishing for a memory of before it happened. Well how did they look? Do you remember the formations? Do you remember their colours?” He sits up quickly; he doesn’t grab his chest.

“There is no sky in here Coral, and all I want is to see a new one. There is no new one. You tore it from itself with your bare hands, and then you wished on its jagged edges. What did they look like?!” He’s standing, and he’s slowly reaching for me with his shifting and wobbling legs; his ankles are poorly built hinges, but his eyes burn the path between us, his seizing heart left ignored.

“All those years begging for rides darling, you never drove again. That van that’s a rotting gravestone on the lawn, you can hardly see it anymore, can you? It’s a hill with peeking windows, with doors rusted shut. Is her blood still on their tires? Are your tears still on the wheel?” I can feel my throat extending to my stomach; I can feel my breath cling to its walls, and pinpricks of winged children and hanging teenagers plague the clouds now. I can’t remember this; I can feel it drowning me in all the years of denial and ignorance, all the years of thrashed burdens unto others. I try to will myself deaf.

“You look troubled dear, what’s troubling you? The dinner’s undercooked, the bed isn’t made?”

Our noses are a huff away from brushing, and his eyes like cannonballs erupting from his sockets fill the sightings of my own, and all I see is the black within his iris. I can’t see my reflection, I can’t see anything.

“Sing to me honey; sing to me what you sing as you sleep, weeping and moaning, where my smiles hide. Do you remember the words? You don’t, do you? I’ll sing for you, I’ll sing for you, I’ll sing for her new-born and new-dead head.” With startling force he stabs his hand to my back, and his other hand to mine in a violent clasp. He viciously glides me across the kitchen floor, all the while I slink like a wilting flower to the ground, to the unsought of, but his surprising force grudgingly stabilizes me. I stare down at his feet, his grimy and sandy feet. He’s glaring my skull apart.

“Ring around the Rosy, Pocket full of Posy, Husha, husha, we all fall down. Ring around the Rosy, pocket full of posy, ashes, ashes, we all fall DOWN.” He hugs me closer, he caresses my head and kisses my cheek, strands of my hair welding on his tongue and beneath his nails. I feel the moisture on my cheek, but I wish it was dry. I wish it was old. I feel a drum within him; I’m shaking in the vibration of it. I look at his face, but instantly away as in his eyes I glimpse a blanket. There’s a foot peeking out of it, a foot so familiar and forgotten that I collapse to the ground, then he does, and the clock from the table follows us, propelling to the ground and freezing its impatient arms. He stares at it with further widening eyes, the seam of his pants covering his crotch rising in an awaited liberty as he effortlessly releases my hand.

“I’m approaching you to disappear” he squeaks, closing his own eyes, and yet his eyelids remain open.

The faint ticking of the clock which cradled utter silence in the past is dead and broken, preserved to the time whence it stopped running. Everything’s quiet, and the calm and mocking sound of church bells thrashing in my head fills my ears now, and I see him. He looks slightly different.

He stares past the roof with his dull and numbed eyes, but I jerk my gaze downwards, to something less convincingly filtered. His nose. The nostrils don’t flap like feeble curtains anymore, don’t hustle in rusting pants and swimming lungs. The hairs don’t sway in his wind -- they’ve consciously calmed to a stationary forest. Glimpses of what I would later sense in all the cursed lucidity around me mirror themselves in my eyes, and the cramming scent of shrimp layered over in a fog of warm breath, and the darker swamp of gray laying in the fabric drooping from his arm pits sketch out in my mind, in the future I can’t see, but in the future with whom I know I’ll be haunted.

“She has his eyes” my mother said, she had his eyes. The baby I vowed to raise sturdier than I -- the trophy baby who was the mixture of strength and memory I saw to be John and I; her eyes glistened with tears of the new, just like his did when he saw his sprout. Her eyes then reduced to motionless stones, gathering in dust and air. His eyes microscopically slowly shower in aridity, and my mother was right. She has his eyes.

Where has he gone? This isn’t him. This table of flesh blocking the room isn’t John, and as I glance across the room at a stain I spilled on the wall a few weeks ago, I can hardly see it anymore. There’s just a slight discolouring upon the green, only seen with great effort. It’s just on the brink of disappearance. My eyes heat up, and they become a blur. Thimbles of warmth cling to my skin as they slide down, leaving pieces of themselves behind and painting wet pathways, but they feel almost solid when they move on from their spot. And then they dry.

Oh, how they dry, how they fade. I lie next to John, and as I jacket myself with his heavy and lifeless arm, staring into the distance, into the mesh of my smudging vision -- I stain my eyes with the oath of repelling disappearances. I don’t blink, and then I wake up from a sleep which lasted for seven years.

We embraced each other for three days, star gazing into the jagged pimples of the ceiling. We recalled the constellations, and how they never changed in all of their static beauty, and he never let go of my hand. His hand swelled and softened to a bruised peach in my hand, and sagging blisters like popped balloons birthed all over his skin. His neck reminded me of the ocean.

The smell of shrimp and breath slowly became covered with a smell of cheap perfume sprinkled onto cheese by the third cycle of moon, but I broke my sense of smell. He had smiles all over his face; he smiled with his eyes, his ears, his forehead, and his pores. Everything was swimming in glee, and the wrinkles left behind were those of holes and slime. I was drenched in his cold smiles.

Through the days of hearing nothing but his skin’s rustling whispers, I hear a thrash of a tumbling plank, leaving waves of dirt flowing towards us. Sally comes barging through the hole that was a door, licking John’s face and growling. She never did like John. She rips at his hand, and stampedes of the other dogs come roaring through. Their eyes are sagging and dripping in tears of sloshing life. I close the kitchen doors, to drown out the further disturbing smell and the shrill, screeching noise of their hunger for love. They don’t need love; they only need each other, like I need John.

John turns his head towards me, his smiles thinning through his skin.

“The dogs are screaming” he whispers, his cheeks tanned in a strange tone similar to that of the pale green stain that I keep renewing.

“They just want attention. You know you can’t spoil them.” I kiss his cheek, and I feel them on my mouth, epileptic and restless.

“Look at the sky” he says, and as I stare up -- he stares at me.

The sweating stars fade into the sky above it, and I see the clouds. They’re fluffy like forgotten plush toys, and they sprinkle snowflakes onto us, and I feel them. Gifts are being tossed down to us, and no matter how far away they lie from my grasp, I manage to catch them all. New wheels surround us, shrimp and cookies, but not her. I try to catch her, to see her within all the toys and soothers I avoid catching but nevertheless do, but she’s gone. She’s disappeared.

“How they disappear.” I say to him. He nods a motionless nod.

“They disappear...They disappear...They disappear.”

I look at him and touch his face; his skin tickles my hand in its writhing grease.

“You won’t disappear, will you?” He shakes his head in a motionless shake.

“You need a shower; your skin feels like butter.” He doesn’t budge.

“I need to stay here with you, I never want to leave right here” he whispers through his lips which have been dried shut through crumbling paste, crumbling grins.

The sun picks at my face with a thread of gold, let in through the tiny rip of the curtain. I can feel a sleepy sun yawning on my cheek, and its pathway through the air examines the bobbing dust. Johns’ head sluggishly collapses to my shoulder, his neck bent and lazy as a rotting banana.

“Night time approaches” he whispers into my sleeve, his breath moistening and slithering above the barrier of my skin, writhing like fingers. “I was always alone.”

He says it with hopefulness, as if the aftertaste of sorrow lingers along his tongue determinably, until it knowingly reaches his loins.

“Do you remember when you were me? Do you remember when I was you?” I can hardly hear his muffled voice gnawing at my arm.

“When we were adjoined, and through that solitarily alone, and I would see me; I would see my transparent eyes, and you would see you; you would see your fading skin. We became each other, we consumed each other, and through that we saw truth; ourselves.”

The ghost of his palm crawls to mine, pulling my grasp to his. I wanted to be alone, truly alone, as him. Not alongside him. I lift his chin with great force stumbling along his slippery face and stare into his mossy eyes, revelling in the beauty of our loneliness.

“I won’t fade” I whisper, his breathless nose crushing mine.

Staring into his cobweb eyes, I can see the loving and protective tilt of his eye-lids, which always shadowed his suggestive smile. I would never stop memorising his face. His lips join to mine as we inhale loudly through our noses like two cigarettes smoking each other, and his hand grasps loosely at my leg. He feebly pulls me on top of him; his hands limp at his sides, surrendering himself completely to me.

“Watch yourself fade so I can see myself dissolve.” He whispers into my ear as his writhing saliva brushes against my neck. I don’t wipe it off despite the foul smell reeking of tangy silver and swamp. I take off his pants for him and slowly but swiftly become him.

I feel the stabs of pressure inside of me, and I’m a virgin again. I gasp in pain, but his eyes glisten over. They’re blank and crystalline and beautiful. I remember the moment I was born now; the first face I saw beyond the tunnel of blood.

“What does my skin look like?” I huff down at him. He doesn’t answer as he looks not in my eyes, but through them and at the stained wall past them.

This room is the world, and all around it don’t exist. John’s skin fades as he promised mine would. His hands grace my back and we live in a pool of drying meat water. One of his fingernails is trapped in my shirt.

“Your stomach is crying. You need to eat again.” His bronze painted jaw flaps like a lazy pendulum. His voice is louder each day.

“It’s all gone. There’s no more mould.” A yawning weep shuffles against the walls of the world, and the smell of red soaked fur continues to seep through.

“It cries outside now.”

“Not screaming though. He’ll leave our ears.”

John’s arm now looks like a toy I bought years before. It was rubbery and white, but John’s was smooth and shiny, whereas the toy grew dents and holes. It got buried away somewhere " I had contemplated finding it, but John forbade me.

“If something doesn’t want to eat, it won’t. It isn’t real food. It’s fake food,” John said, a backwards summersault of who he’s become.

“He can’t tell the difference” I smiled, holding something heavy in my stomach and feeling it punching the walls of its home.

“Animals know what they want, what they need. If they need it, they’ll find it. No conscience on dogs, but they don’t forget a thing.” John held a smudged rag in his coal painted hand, with the grass-less car outlining his head. His face just shielded the sun from my eyes, and I made sure to hide in his shadow.

“To be an animal. I wish.”

John just smiled, and returned to the car.

His hands share the colour of the parallel coal now, but his prison build couldn’t cast a solid shadow. I close the curtains.

“Eat.” Hearing multiplies, as my nose feels weeded and swollen. My head’s a home to blowfish.

Tiny taps of pins on linoleum scrape outside of us, and the tiny shadow of a shark tooth sneaks in beneath the door crack. In the corner I see an open bag, with rough pellets inside. “Dog Food.”

My stomach shrieks in neglect, although in silence. John is the one who screams.

“Sh John, it’s better this way.”

He doesn’t quiet -- the shrill ringing of his dried corn teeth just envelop the air fogged in reek like a fog horn. I grab the bag. As I feebly chew and swallow each mouth full, the screech gently dies -- as does the fickle claw from the outside. The desolate drip of water against the echoing metal ticks like a clock, ticking only for where no one exists. Only us -- us who were born old and torn, us who’ve never heard of a child.

“Who was it that clawed and cried?” The voice seems to echo in itself.

I had forgotten the blanket was there. I jump at the sudden and then adjusted sound. I don’t answer. “Where is John? What happened that day?”

It’s as if my mouth is welded to another mouth. The inner mouth is sewn shut. I want to say it, but the pocket lips erase its very language.

“I don’t know.”

We sit there as two spirits for hours, minutes, seconds. The walls stain themselves in erased time. The weak scent of meat seeps through the door. Ms. Arachnid’s hook heels stab the tiles in subtle slaps, and she’s walking down the hall, walking down the hall. As she opens the door the room snaps from dirt to white.

“It’s dinner time Coral.” She lingers at the door, the harsh light shading her face in sharp shadows, like a gargoyle statue.

“Coming.”

I don’t glance at the blanket. I know I won’t see it. We walk down the hall, accompanied only by our feet.

The faint sound of symbols creaking like sickly doors crawl over the walls. Music class is beginning.

Dinner.

As I wash the taste of stale meat down with water, I close my eyes, eye balls and toes dancing across my black mind. I squint at the sight. The corn is rotted teeth as I force it down my throat; the salad is his smiles -- and the beings that fed off of them.

Malory flinches with yolk eyes across from me. Her collarbone peeps from behind her skin like a bar behind a sheet. She whispers “Don’T, Don’T”, spitting at the T like she were spitting at a cough.

“Malory, you -- you have to eat.” The new nurse says kindly after a few seconds of awkward wavering in the corner, her blonde bangs hiding her nervous forehead. Malory shakes her quivering neck. Her hair jerks like mouse tails.

“You know what happens if you don’t eat. Just take a deep breath and swallow.” She tries to pat her back.

“I can’T, I can’T!” She sends her dinner flying towards me with a single violent flick, leaving the nurse afraid and stumbling as Malory bolts to her room.

“I’m so sorry” the nurse stammers at my salad masked face, shaking her hand cautiously to wipe it off with a napkin that scratches my cheek. I don’t answer her. I stare at her through the shredded, slimy lettuce, and although she doesn’t see my eyes, her gaze weakens in a look of relieving fear. She backs away to clean the ground.

“It’s not your fault” I whisper, although she’s already gone.

I’m sitting on a sheet of mossy skin while I hear dry spits from outside of the wall -- the outside of the world that’s suctioned to hundreds of others. Malory sounds to spit out herself.

“...GeT, geT!”

I can hear her sand storming hands. The room that’s clawed itself to me over the months howls in its emptiness. I need company. Perhaps I’d frighten Malory’s ghosts away.

My feet knock against the white tiles beneath me, loiter at both doors, and the knocks travel from feet to fists. Huffing pauses.

“Who is it?” Her voice is grimly polite.

“Coral”

“Why?”

“I wanted to talk to you”

“Sorry about the salad”

“It’s okay. Can I come in?”

“Sorry about the salad”

She gasps over her shoulder; I can feel the child who whispers hateful whistles in her ear.

“Sh!” She hopes her way through the cell of silence. “Okay.”

Her room feels just as empty as mine. Her eyes glance at me like a thankful mirror.

“Coral...” her voice naps in the air. “I used to dream of you. When I was a child.”

“You didn’t know me.”

“I knew the rocks. They scraped my feet and brought me back. I looked for mermaids.” Her eyes expect a coincidental response.

“I dreamed of mermaids. No one knew they existed but me,” I reply.

Her room is white, as is her skin. Through the tissue paper cheekbones suctioning to her bones, I feel as if I can see a child: a plump, curious child just learning to learn. I had never been a child. In her eyes I see my reflection -- that of crusty, sharp rocks, ones flowing in scraps of skin from innocent feet. I had been purified in blood, though I was not living.

“Sit down,” Malory says, as if she had just read the bitter thoughts who had tasted my memory. The tongue never found it. I sit.

“Why were you looking for the mermaids?” I ask.

“Because I saw one as a baby, before I drowned.”

“What happened?” My questions are useless, a breeze filler into empty air. She knows what she wants to say. She opens her shiver-less mouth, rests her fidget-less hands, and flows each T out of her lips just as a person who was born from the ground rather than the pavement. Just a sister with a sturdy-mazed head.

“I was two years old. I could just walk, and we lived on the beach. I grabbed your rocks from the shore. I had been hiding them in my room. Mother thought they were dangerous. Pebbles they were, just pebbles -- I thought they were boulders.”

I hear violin music in my head -- mournful and whispering, like a fading farewell. I had never had a rock collection; I had stayed clear of them as if they were an unheard of cautionary tale. I had visions of dull drawings of their wired, whiskered hair, chasing wide-mouthed children with their scissor and fireplace hands.

“I felt the paint of the water on my hands when I took the rocks. They dried, but I felt like I was storing the feeling. Mother was afraid of the ocean. ‘Too vast, too unknown’ she’d say. Father went missing the day I was born she said. No one knew where he’d gone; no one knew who he was. I was addicted to fear as a child, as I had never felt it in its entirety. One night I woke up and I was swimming in the coral, trying to feel the salted water. My skin was pink with streams of red. Mother was crying in the other room. She was not awake. The moon was hidden but the stars supplied its light. I’d never seen the stars as bright as they were then. I stumbled down the shore which looked like mountains with sugar outlining the white top. I dove down knowing that I couldn’t swim. There were freckles of moon all around, but only sides and halves of things were lit. The spots were you.”

We’re inside a whale. I feel the pressure of ocean on my cheeks, my arms, my legs, and the gentle humming of the whale hypnotises me into living the part of Malory that I knew I’d dreamed of witnessing. Malory doesn’t speak, she just stares at her knees as I stare ahead; I’m dreaming and breathing.

A sea foam woman swims by, her eyes glow like a cat’s when she looks at the child; the child I don’t turn to look at. I feel a plummet tunnel of water behind me. I see my jagged edges through the bottoms of my eyes. I feel no tunnel rising after that.

“Did the mermaid save you?” Malory doesn’t move.

“I stopped breathing then, but I could still see. Mother didn’t try to find me. She was too afraid to search.”

The voices from the hallways seem to stiffen now, as if they were never there, as if Malory and I were the only two souls to ever fall from the sky of BellSam.

“The child never leaves me. She wishes she knew how to avoid it.” Malory flinches. “She wore yellow.”

She kicks a tattered square of cardboard under the bed. I see letters. One is circled.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t need it anymore.”

“What is it?” Malory just looks beyond my eyes, as if looking into the wall of the back of my mind. I glance down. There’s a drawing of a fish tail near the edge. The letter T is circled.

“I couldn’t hear them.”

“I thought you never wanted to hear them.”

“I didn’t.”

“Can you hear them now?”

She lightly shakes her head. She looks up at me with wounded and frightened eyes which seem to bulge like rabbits.

“I think I’m better now.”

The plump ghost on her shoulder was never there. She never told me her tale. I stop thinking and float back to my room.

Sleep.

Foreign creatures with furry four legs, soiled noses, smiling breaths -- tiny people with eyelash-less eyes, structure-less faces, soft hair. These animals I have never seen. The furry ones lie next to a door, a door smelling of meat and green. They heap in a pile of flies and sloth. They have chunks missing from the sides of their body, red paste dried over their teeth.

This is not how people speak. This is not how people speak.

I’m one of the small people, I beg my own forgiveness. I awake, my stomach sweating in blood.

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