Untitled (Project Noelle)

A girl comes back from the dead.

Watching her daughter carry in her single suitcase of belongings made her neck seize up in a strange way. A ray of anxiety radiated from her stomach up into her chest, making sleep painful and next to impossible some nights. She imagined this was the weight of responsibility, pressing outwards instead of downwards. Or maybe this was guilt, in a new form, a shape she never expected or thought could exist.

She coiffed her hair perfectly that morning, put on fresh-pressed clothes scented with citrus, ate a real, nutrient-rich breakfast. The coffee had been spot on. Everything flowed, but the early air was still stifling and thick.  

To Noelle, her parent’s new house may as well have been the hospital. Clinical in its cleanliness, sparkling and deloused, the sheets smelled like disinfectant. The tiles in the bathroom showed no signs of mould or scum, and the fridge was neatly arranged and stocked with freshness. All sense of being human was sucked right out of the place in its metallic gleaming. What they called modern she called dead. 

Outside, she felt slightly more at ease, although it wasn’t by much. The town was fenced in by heavy mountains; in any direction you looked you could see the green peaks rising into mist, and she felt stifled, nervous. Clearly, she had been carried into a trap, and with little say in the matter. Not that she had the strength to say no to a warm, clean house with a bed waiting for her, not in that particular moment.

Her father had picked her up from the hospital, commented quietly on her drawn, pale face and dangling limbs, and they drove together for two hours out of the city, passing by the shrinking suburban houses into the mountainous crests, eclectic jazz padding the wordlessness between them.

She didn’t want to talk, she felt the hot stony shame in her belly ever since she regained consciousness, realized who she was and why she was tucked into thin-threaded hospital sheets. Neither her father nor her mother said anything to suggest it but she could sense it beneath the surface, the awe and the resentment glowed in their eyes, when they looked at what she had grown into.

Three years without words, she didn’t know how to start now. So when she came inside, she gave her mother a timid hug with one arm around the shoulders, told her she was tired from the drive. Demetria nodded, gestured her daughter to her new bedroom on the first floor, and told her she could have some time to settle in.

Noelle set the suitcase on the floor next to the bland bed without unpacking, and went straight outside, to the backyard. A noxious blue pool glimmered and waved invitingly, outlined by a walkway perfectly smooth concrete. The poolside loungers and lamps seemed tailored to the house’s theme of beige and sterling. The contrast of cement, and shining metal, the chemical-laden water, and the lush greenery made her uneasy.

Standing like an obelisk at the far end of the pool, facing the green, overgrown peaks, an easel had been posted. She knew instantly that it had been set up solely for her, it didn’t match the rest of the decor. Underneath it lay an opened set of watercolours and brushes, and she went straight for it, began painting what she saw before her, shutting her mind away for the moment.

With her daughter outside but still within view through the glass walls, Demetria sat herself wearily at her kitchen counter, sipped chai tea, hoped it would unravel some of the soreness inside of her. The house was empty and quiet, her husband had gone upstairs to work in his office, and through all the open windows, she could hear the birds. A car surged by every so often. The world was hushed and calm, it was Sunday afternoon, the apex of harmony in her otherwise breakneck week. She dedicated a wide slot of time every Sunday to unwinding, soaking herself in the tub, losing hours in books, cooking a meal for Irving, taking a long jog with him in the waning light.

She glanced nervously out the windows again. Noelle was still there, arms moving in wide arcs across the canvas. She didn’t give any indication she would bolt, or disappear in a wisp of smoke. 

The mug hovered underneath her mouth as her mind took her, unbidden, into a house she had never been to, to the nightmare vision of her daughter motionless on a stranger’s barren floor, sprawled, vulnerable, breaking apart, veins hollowed and heart dried into a husk. She had been visiting this place often the past few weeks, while waiting to hear when Noelle would be strong enough to leave the hospital.

Tears no longer came as easily as they had at first, much to her great relief. The embarrassment of leaving a meeting to weep into her hands in public washrooms was enough to make her want to quit altogether. 

The stoicism was returning to her, her hands stopped trembling at the wrong moments, but she found her mind devoted more and more minutes - that she could not afford to spare - to retreating off into a blank, insulating distance. She found herself getting sucked into the hazy sunrise, missing crucial bits of conversation, letting coffee get cold; she found herself standing in doorways for too long.

Noelle spent the entire day at the easel, not because it was her gift but because it was separate from the house, open to the air. She could breathe by it. What came out of her efforts was not important. She didn’t feel Demetria watching her, distracted from novels and cups of tea. The sun burned the back of her neck and made the landscape spin pirouettes around her head. She tried to put that into the painting.

When the sun set beyond the ranges and the world around her took on a sunken blue tinge, she noticed the goosebumps on her arms and legs and her stomach moaned. She carefully walked back to the house, pulled the sliding glass door open, and a wave of dread hit her along with the frozen blast of air conditioning. It felt so wrong, like it did not belong with the earth. She worried it would launch her off into space.

The kitchen was empty, which was a mild relief, but on the counter sat a fresh, steaming bowl of soup, thick with vegetables and noodles and beef, as if it had been conjured by her hunger in that very instant. She searched the cabinets for bowls and ladled out a portion, which she decided to take at the counter instead of the long, lustrous glass table in the center of the giant room. There were no partitions to separate the kitchen from the living room from the dining room, it was one huge gaping space that made Noelle want to hide in her stuffy new room.

As she was just beginning to spoon the soup into her mouth, she heard footsteps clicking towards her. Her insides flipped with anticipation, and her father appeared, walking past her, slowing down as he neared but not stopping. They regarded each other cautiously as he went for the communal soup bowl, gathered utensils for himself.

They smiled, though both faces seemed stretched too thin. He paused a moment, holding a full bowl. “Don’t you want to sit at the table? The chairs are more comfortable.” His voice strummed through the cavernous room, settling in every corner.

She swallowed heartily. “I’m okay here.” Was all she could manage, staring fixedly into the menagerie of carrots and celery and sweet potato chunks. The soup was heavy and filling and made her want to sleep. “I think I’m gonna go to bed soon.”

Irving stood limp and silent, afraid, watching her avoid him at all costs, the space around her seemed to fill with gloom. “Okay,” he nodded, and walked past her, careful not to brush shoulders or touch lest she suddenly smash to smithereens. 

Irving sat down at the table, his appetite rushing out and away from him to make space for the dread that had taken up residence in his home along with his daughter. It appeared to him that, while she had been successfully summoned back from the dead, she paid the price of bringing back with her a demon - one that prayed on him and his wife, weakening them into brittle, shaking shadows of selves.

He brought a listless spoonful to his mouth and forced the food in. He could not enjoy the flavours, his back strained with the sense of Noelle sitting mutely behind him.

After what felt like hours, the snap of Demetria’s flats came down the stairs. He didn’t look up at her, continued concentrating on the soup as best he could, trying not to lose his momentum. Behind him he could hear Noelle’s spoon clatter lightly against the empty bottom of her bowl.

Demetria put a hand on Noelle’s back gently, smiled a greeting, but said nothing. Noelle returned the pleasantry, wiped her mouth, cleared her throat lightly, placed her bowl into the dishwasher. As Demetria took the first swallow of her meal, Noelle waved a quick goodnight, and vanished into her bedroom without turning the lights on.

There was a corpulent silence between the two leftover diners. Irving stopped, put his spoon down, crossed his hands in his lap, gazed at Demetria. She was immaculately put together, beyond the style of ordinary people on a Sunday evening. Pearls on her lobes and her black hair in a strained bouffant, the skin of her cheeks taut with unspoken doubts and fears. He watched her in a sad, benumbed way, unable to speak the words that she could not form herself. Instead he sat, still, made tongueless by his misgivings.

The bathroom that was attached to her room contrasted sharply to the wide open agoraphobic space of the rest of the house - a compacted, brightly-lit cubical with faux wood wallpaper and chrome accents on the door, which matched the tub. There were no paintings or plants, nothing to gaze at while you soaked. The window was a tiny slat high up on the wall, completely forgoing its function.

It seemed that no one had ever been here before her, there was no trace of a body in the hyper-hygienic chamber. She didn’t want to use the place at all, but it had been so long since she’d had a proper wash that she had to give in.

She managed to sit for three minutes before the uneasiness sprouted into panic and she rapidly thrust herself under the water, held her head under, struggling against herself, gripping the sides of the tub, screaming with her mouth shut, letting all the air rush out of her nose in a spray of bubbles. Then she shot upright, gasping, coughing, feeling the panic neutralizing, making way for a radiant calm that she took with her to bed. 

She wouldn’t have been able to sleep otherwise. After so many years, she’d forgotten how to fall asleep without that vicious rise and fall. The hundreds of days behind her seemed to fuse into a leaden mass of torture, touchable hatred; pain was a norm, injected multiple times daily into the crook of an arm, between the toes, she once saw in entering a jugular vein right before a deadly seizure at 2AM. She fell asleep at 5AM that morning. She only knew how to sleep after being violently jostled into it.

The room she laid down in was made of dead air. Nothing moved, no savage waves to rock her unconscious. Nearly monotone, the palette shifted softly from tan to mushroom to steel. The bed was full of down, consumed her body the moment she laid down. She slept with the lights on and the windows open, though there was nothing to look at except the empty road swamped with fog, and the blue-green grass that sprawled far into the horizon, across the mountains.

Author's Note

This is an unedited, unread, unfinished (barely even begun), extremely rough draft - it's not meant to be perfect by any means, I'm just interested in feedback - anything you have to say is GREATLY appreciated!