The stairwell is stained with ghosts, yellow and blue afterimages imprinted on the chipping plaster. She traces their last moments with her eyes, fingertips still oily from the last time she dipped into the wet chill buried in the discolouration.
Most of them are in motion, feet permanently searching for the next step, hands glancing off the memory of a metal handrail. But the platforms remain still. They stand in quiet rows, organs failing in the hitches of catching their breaths, tissues eviscerated in the pale blue glow of cracked phone screens.
Some are sitting in the corners. Resignation growing heavier in their chests with every blink that fuzzed the world a little bit paler. Too tired to move, never exhausted enough for the mercy of vanishing in a blink.
And then there's the Woman, blue stain licked red hot at the edges, spilling from the center of the platform down the steps, coveting nearly an entire flight.
She steps along its edges gingerly, tamping down a grimace as half-coagulated blood slinks into her veins. The remnants cling and coddle the residents they exist beside, hooking into their lower lids, weaving themselves into braids between their ribs, replacing atrophied muscles with the faint iridescent sheen of memories layered over top one another until they collapse under their own weight.
Very few people take the stairs anymore.
When she steps outside, the sunlight glares down with a vengeance. It scorches rather than warms, stewing in its own hate. All around, people stubbornly carry themselves forward. Staggering towards cramped desks stained brown from some unidentifiable spill. Limping to open construction sites, counting down the grinds of bone and cartilage until they can finally lie down. Drifting towards stone-box schools, lesson plans dripping behind their eyes, and pooling thick and iron at the backs of throats.
Souls cling to them, faded watercolour wings curling around hunched spines and broken hearts like a good hug could crack the vertebrae back into position.
She smooths her skirt down and steps in beside them, holding her breath for just a minute like the stench of death would fade that quick.
The sky is grey with sullen clouds, and she breathes shallowly, sucking cold damp air through her teeth, even when they start hurting. A murmur tours the crowd, someone sighs and flickers like a dying lightbulb, their neighbor lets out a strangled sob in the vaccum left behind.
The rest of them politely don't notice.
Her desk partner has removed his name tag.
She glances over periodically, working him into her rotation of screen, desk, open notebook, and now, deskmate.
He is holding it - a slim metal clip engraved with who he is, last, then first, and an initial for any middle names - with the pointer and thumb of each hand, close enough to his face for her to go cross-eyed.
She glances at her computer screen again, the words of the document blur in her peripherals as she focuses on the clock.
He has been staring for 30 minutes, probably longer.
The etched name evades her. Its memory is bubblegum pink, burning up the same colour as the suit her boss had been wearing when she introduced him. A 'J' floats through pale ash, formerly the edges, and warbles in her ears with the soft pop of lips smacking.
Wheels catch on the tangled carpet fibers, her wooden desk seeps ice into her hips as she leans over the frosted glass towards him. Her mouth forms a soft 'hello' without any substance, neck craning to peer at his face.
The greeting gets caught in the milky fog obscuring his eyes. Dark lashes flutter in time with the twitch and roll of pale grey irises, pupils the smudge of half-erased graphite. A wrinkle has gouged itself in his brow. It trembles faintly as his lips twist around letters that keep floating off the metal plate and getting lost in rain-laden clouds.
The chair creaks as she settles back down and nudges her computer further in front of him.
She doesn't look at him again.
Lunch has become tedious, the repetitive grind of chewing echoes like her heartbeat through a meat processor, and all her food has slowly but surely decayed into sawdust. Swallowing takes two or three tries to get that wet choking mass of paper shreds down. Still, she opens the small containers, alone at a round table, and dutifully runs a nail over the deep red skin of an apple she doesn't remember cutting.
Conversations float on stale air. Old gossip bubbles under layers of paint and sinks into fresher ears, passes along younger vocal cords, born anew on the same dead audio waves. She tunes out the melted words. There's nothing left in the break room she hasn't already heard, hated, and lost interest in.
The apple smells sharper than it should. It stings like vinegar. She scrapes at the wrinkled skin and tries to push her memory back past the silt that's started to settle into a wall atop her spine. 'I only cut the fruit a few weeks ago, no? How long do apples last?'
The sound of her name shatters her train of thought, and reality hits sideways like cold water as she blinks through the sudden fuzz.
"Hello? Everything okay?"
A coworker stands there, weight resting heavily on her left leg, arms crossed tight across her chest to keep the organs under her skin from falling out. Long manicured nails tap quickly against a cream suit.
And she has been sitting here too long.
Coworker frowns and looks away. Discomfort pulls at her lips as she sneaks glances from underneath lowered lids.
"Do you know where Jacob is? He's not at his desk."
'Oh.' She's forgotten by now that anybody in the office still talked to each other.
"Oh. He died earlier today."
The words hang in the air as her coworker stares blank-eyed. The old gossip descends like vultures, tearing off pieces of the words to smuggle back, each gloating over their spoils with too much glee to make any threat of secrecy real.
'Have I?' The spaces between his death and lunch have snuck off somewhere.
Coworker walks off, none too subtly sneaking pitiful looks over her shoulder. She packs up the old apple, making a mental note to toss it away at home, to avoid listening to the fading footsteps. The break room settles without any drama to gnaw at, drifting into an uncomfortably swollen sleep punctuated periodically with restless dreams of long dead conversations.
Her organs ache in the silence.
Only three hours left until she can leave.
The thought hurts physically, something wet and heavy snaps inside her chest and crushes her ribs into her lungs with its embrace. She bites at her lips to keep inane laughter from bubbling out of the sludge smoldering under her skin. The thought of going home to her empty apartment, falling asleep in thin bedsheets still tangled from her restless nights, makes her want to rip her hair out strand by strand.
She heads back to her desk. She sits in front of the blinding computer screen. She stares at the silly letters traipsing their ways across emails and documents, headed somewhere better she hopes.
She sits there for 3 hours.
She grows more and more annoyed at the stupid little words, singing their foolish songs. She deletes three drafts for an email with no recipient. She feels the urge to cry shift into uncontrollable laughter and back again. She notices how her blinks grow louder as her eyelids begin sticking to the tacky sheen over bloodshot eyeballs.
She stands up and goes home.
She ignores the three people that die on the train beside her, staring blindly at the houses that rot before her eyes as their people vanish silently from the exhausted halls. She lies down on her couch, face growing hot with the rush of blood pooling in her skull. She wonders if she locked her door.
She finds she doesn't really care.
Tropical clouds melt into the palid grey of twilight between shallow breaths, and she re-memorizes her name to the tick of the clock counting down the seconds. The sky is bruised black when she crawls into the bathroom, with its flickering yellow light and wheezing fan that exhales dust like a smoker.
The air sits grimy and thick in her lungs as she squeezes toothpast from a wringed-clean tube, hands shaking only slightly. Mint burns against her tongue, even after she spits and rinses. She straightens carefully, head tilting up to the buzzing yellow light before her body uncurls itself into the view of the mirror.
The mirror is cracked. Dark pit boring out from the center, far-flung tendrils slowly pulling whatever beast lies within there to the surface. The shards of glass that used to keep it sealed sit in an otherwise empty cupboard in her kitchen. They chime cheerfully, mockingly, every time she accidentally opens and immediately slams it shut. What's left on the wall likes to show her images of a familiar woman, her eyes obscured by a thick grey smoke.
She fumbles around for her phone, clumsy against the slick porcelain, and flicks the bathroom light off before leaving.
Her apartment is quiet, the faint buzz of traffic seems so far away, muffled by the heavy dark she tiptoes through. Dry hands map the familiar scratches in the plaster walls until she stands in front of the yawning mouth that is her bedroom door.
Her bed is familiar. The scent of illness clings to it like it does her. The faint but persistent twinge of sweat mixes with a sickly sweet thickness. Its mattress sags where she curls, and her body aches even in the comfort. The thin sheets are clammy no matter how she washes them, sticking to her skin like misplaced grafts growing where they're not welcomed.
She closes her eyes, tension relocating itself from her shoulders to a place that will make her hurt the most tomorrow, her hips maybe.
Ouside, the world drags by in smears of watercolour. People blend into one another, features interchangeable between those carrying the same exhausted anger on the verge of burning out.
The stars are murky behind smog-laden clouds and the layers of broken dreams from those who no longer pray to them. She lets herself be pitiful in the pitch black, too thick to see through, and cries until her eyes are swollen and her pillow case is soaked through.
Something in her apartment rots. She hopes it's not her.
A new series has begun!! I'm really excited for this one, I've been thinking about its concepts a lot.
I hope you enjoyed!! - Ghost