The therapist sat across the table from Aisha, a legal pad in front of her, one hand holding a pen and the other a glowing cigarette. Aisha glanced up at the ceiling, squinting in the harsh light. No smoke detector. Unusual.
“So,” the therapist began with a smile, tapping the legal pad with her pen. “How have you been this week, Miss Daring?”
“Mm.”
The therapist waited for elaboration, but when none was forthcoming, she smiled again. It looked somehow out of place on her. “Any highs or lows you want to talk about?” she prodded. “Good days? Bad days? Things you’d like a second opinion on?”
Once again, Aisha declined to answer. The really odd thing, now that Aisha noticed, was that the room didn’t seem to have any doors or windows. How had she gotten in? And, more importantly, how would she get out?
Almost before the thought had entered her mind, the left wall revealed a door, as if it had always been there. The therapist didn’t look at it, but her dark eyes narrowed and grew colder. “Miss Daring,” she tried once more.
“Who are you?” Aisha interrupted. “Where are we?”
The therapist let out a light sigh. “My dear woman,” she said, her voice growing thick with sugary condescension. “I would have thought you, of all people, would recognise me.”
Aisha tried to focus on the woman’s face. Her skin was dark, her nose wide and straight, her long hair thinly dreaded. She looked extraordinarily familiar, painfully so, but the last tumbler of recognition refused to fall into place. Then, before her eyes, everything Aisha saw began to peel like charring paper. The woman’s professional pencil skirt and cardigan burned away to reveal an elaborate formal gown of black and gold. The table between them crumbled to nothing. The blank walls of the room vanished, replaced with a flat, white void that cast no shadows, leaving Aisha with a vertiginous feeling of two-dimensionality.
“Better?” asked the woman, lounging as if supported by an invisible lawn chair.
Aisha stared at her, brow furrowed.
The woman took a drag from her cigarette. “Not much of a conversationalist, are you?” she said. The smoke blew towards Aisha, a cloud of menthol and cherry flavor. It reminded her more of Ben than Piper. “Well, that’s alright. I’m quite used to entertaining myself at the expense of others.” She tapped ash into the air, and it disappeared. “Although I’m sure you know all about that.”
Aisha felt the barb like a physical sting in her gut. “Who are you?” she repeated.
“You and I are already quite well acquainted,” said the woman, her smile becoming an insincere pout. “I knew your friends wouldn’t get it until later, but I thought for sure you would see. I’m almost a little hurt.”
It wasn’t anyone she’d worked with. Aisha had a very good memory for the faces of her contacts and clients, anyone who could be a future problem. Unless it was someone from her childhood - perhaps a relative? Aisha’s scalp prickled, growing warm. This woman could be her mother and Aisha still wouldn’t trust herself to have the slightest clue.
The woman let out a sudden, lilting laugh, touching her hand to her mouth. “Oh, you should have seen your face!” she said. “I’d recreate it for you, but it wouldn’t be as good without twenty-nine years of stoicism behind it.”
“I don’t… understand,” Aisha mumbled. She couldn’t seem to get her bearings, in the conversation or in the surroundings. The stranger didn’t seem to intend her harm, or if she did, it was in a way too obscure for Aisha to predict.
“No, we’ve established that already,” said the woman, flowing to her feet. She crossed the distance between them without seeming to have moved at all. Aisha was well used to others towering over her, but this was different.
“Now, what I’ve done with your cohorts is,” she continued, “I created a hypothetical scenario perfectly tailored to their heart of hearts and watched as their irrational subconscious did the rest.” She straightened one of Aisha’s dreadlocks over her forehead with an almost motherly touch. “But that won’t work with you, will it? You’re much too… self-aware.”
Aisha opened her mouth to respond, but all that came to mind was another I don’t understand. She closed her mouth again.
“And so, here’s what we’ll do, my dear,” the woman went on, clapping once. “We’ll simply go on a little trip, you and I. Back through our shared history. How does that sound?”
“Shared history,” Aisha repeated.
“Yes,” she said. “Do try to keep up, darling — you’ll remember me soon enough.” She took Aisha’s face in her hands, and before Aisha could react, everything shifted.
Her pet rat crawled slowly over the treadmill of her circling hands. Stacks of books stood around her in the dusty debris, all closed save for the one she kept just to the side of her crossed legs. It was little more than a folder of loose papers torn from a handful of different volumes, a distillation of the only information she felt she could trust, and she still couldn’t be sure it would work.
The rat ran over her palm, and she took it by the throat, her thumb pinching its jaw so it couldn’t turn its teeth on her. It felt so large in her young fingers. Her father’s pocketknife clicked open in her other hand. Oh, she thought. I understand, now.
The rat’s blood cooled quickly as it ran over her hand and onto the decrepit barn floor with a dull splash. She watched as if it were happening to someone else. Slowly, she knelt on the cement. Pressed her knuckles to the small pool of blood, rat’s body still in hand.
The blood shot out in a series of ever-entangling designs like a thicket of brambles, darkening as it went until it seemed to suck the light from the air around her. The temperature began to fall. Her rapid breath clouded in an almost constant stream. She hadn’t known, back then, what was coming. Not really.
Night-black smoke erupted from the spell, enveloping her in a cylinder of darkness. She choked, sharp ozone heavy in her lungs, her blood thundering in her ears. No, she hadn’t known what she was doing. What she would do. But if she had… would it have made any difference?
Another sudden shift put her heart in her mouth. Her hair was rough and matted against her neck and shoulders, threaded with old braids and half-formed dreadlocks. It was cold, the dead of winter, but it didn’t bother Aisha. She was perched on a streetlight like a cat on a fencepost, staring down at the road. Her entire body felt hollow, the sensation of months without food or sleep still horribly familiar - it was almost comforting, in a twisted sort of way. Like bones popping back out of place after adjustment.
No, she thought. A man stumbled down the sidewalk below. No. No. No. Not again. Not again.
The man was tall and corpse-thin, middle-aged, and smelled like wood alcohol. Aisha knew long before he got within a hundred feet of her. She’d told Piper once that it was impossible to remember everyone she’d killed, and it had been mostly honest - but only as far as the ones whose faces she’d never seen.
She dismounted. A hundred and seventy pounds dropped on him from two dozen feet above had the man as good as dead even before his head hit the cement with a sickening thunk. Just to make sure, Aisha turned him over with her foot, touched her fingers lightly to the side of his neck. The skin opened up in a perfectly straight, laser-thin line to the other side, and blood seeped out to join the already considerable puddle under his skull.
Aisha sensed an alien satisfaction from the darkness around her. She, herself, felt absolutely nothing.
Another shift set her head spinning. She held a large pair of shears in one hand and a three-foot-long clump of black hair in the other, blood still drying on both it and the hand that held it. Red streaked the filthy sink in front of her - she’d tried to wash it off, to no avail. The lights of the bathroom were bright around her, casting stark shadows that made her double take at every creak. The smell of gasoline and mildew permeated the air.
With hands that shivered so much she could barely operate the shears, she chopped up the hair into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet. No more, she thought. No more.
She sat down on the toilet seat. Without them, she’d have to start living like a normal person again. Eating, sleeping, talking. She’d have to work, and learn, and meet people — she tried to remember the last time she’d actually spoken to a human being. Months. Years, probably. She wasn’t sure she even remembered how to do it. She did remember enough to know that, if she tried, everyone would be able to tell that something was very wrong with her. Humans were supposed to be good at that sort of thing.
Her breath came out in an unsteady sigh. Her stomach suddenly seized up with four years’ worth of suppressed hunger, and when she managed to come back to her senses, she knew the exhaustion couldn’t be far behind. She needed to get out of the bathroom, find somewhere safe to spend the night, decide on a plan of action. She couldn’t go back home. She’d missed most of middle and high school, and she had no resources. She’d have to find a life outside of the system, at least until she was old enough to—
The tears came came so unexpectedly, she didn’t have any breath to spare for them, and her body forced out a hoarse wheeze before sucking in air for a bout of soul-wracking sobs. She hadn’t cried for longer even than she hadn’t eaten, and the depth of her sudden suffering terrified her.
“I can’t,” she gasped, her voice an atrophied croak. She muttered it again and again until the letters scrambled and lost their meaning.
She couldn’t face life like this. A shambling, blood-clotted teenager with a sixth grade education and the social skills of a praying mantis. No money. No family. No future.
The lights flickered, and she startled, looking around so fast her neck protested. Nothing. They still hadn’t found her. The only thing moving in the room was her reflection, and—
She froze.
The girl in the mirror smirked, waving her fingers.
Aisha’s knife was in her hand before her eyes were fully open, bedsheets pulled off and feet halfway off the mattress. She stared into the moonlit shadows, her breath coming in ragged heaves, until she convinced herself that it had only been a dream. One more vivid than anything she had ever experienced before, even in her worst flashbacks — but only a dream. She was twenty-nine. She’d been a real person for over a decade. That was her real life.
She dissolved into the darkness and reappeared in the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water. It would all seem, if not silly, at least less material in the morning.
The knife shot back out as she saw something in the kitchen window. The dark glass reflected the room back to itself, a ghost of a face hovering near the edge. One she’d recognised only in the last moment before waking, and couldn’t understand why it had taken so long.
The nightmare woman was herself.
Of course.
