It started as a joke, it had to be. There’s no way anyone would really like her, especially Kanaya. She wasn’t worth the trouble. Terezi must have put her up to it. She would enjoy it while it lasted, but she was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Kanaya was waiting too.
Vriska was just teasing her, incessantly. She knew, she had to know that she is- was infatuated with her years ago, and she wouldn’t risk her relationship with Terezi. Would she?
The flirting was black, Terezi would understand, Rose wouldn’t. At least Dave didn’t get it, and they were pretty much siblings. They couldn’t tell anyone, because if one did, the other would jump out and reveal the joke. They would laugh, but neither of them wanted it to end, so it didn’t.
It typically went like this. Dinner, or breakfast, someone would make a quip about time not passing right, usually Dave. Terezi would joke with him and Karkat and Rose would sit ready to intervene, one hand in Kanaya’s. As soon as she did Vriska would say something from across the table about getting a haircut, Kanaya would act interested, waiting for the punchline.
“No, a haircut for you, Kan.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Are you really so deep in the vampire schtick that even your hair has to match?”
“At least I have a theme, lately your style is very…”
“What, fussy-fangs?”
“Like you picked it up from your floor and did a sniff test.”
“That’s Terezi.”
“HEY”
Then Terezi and Vriska would engage. Rose would try to mediate, and Kanaya would be out in the cold again. She could jump in, but she found it’s best to fall back and wait, and look at Vriska.
Roughhousing made all her wild attributes pop. Her hair normally tangled hair fluffed out, her teeth gleamed when she laughed, and when she flexed… well, she went to such great lengths to make sure Kan could see.
She tried to scold down the blush that was rising in her cheeks. This was a joke. She didn’t mean it, couldn’t.
Rose knocked over the salt. She took out her copper piercings and tossed them on the table before jumping into the fray. The copper sparkled like the sun, and the salt the stars. Kanaya pushed back tears and pretended to laugh about all the mess.
Terezi was on a salt kick. She salted everything, including hot cocoa. Dave introduced the cocoa and somehow Terezi grew up without any salt so she was getting her fix. They had to stage an intervention when she started walking into rooms with a bottle full of salt. She even salted her own mouth once before kissing Vriska. She claimed she enjoyed it. Kan didn’t get it.
Rose was newly fixated with copper, and so was Kanaya. The color suited her, and they would talk for hours about its antibacterial properties. Rose would spend hours alchemizing jewelry and playing with copper sheets. She said that she never got to express her inner craftsman at home. All this about aesthetics; Vriska didn’t get it.
Kanaya pulled her aside after dinner / breakfast, her eyes darting left and right. She led her past bedrooms and hallways, no place far enough away for their secret, and settled on a closet in the heart of the meteor.
“Something has to change,” Kanaya didn’t like the way her voice wavered, “this is real, right?”
“Real, I mean-“
“You have to tell me that this isn’t all in my head, that I’m not imagining things because it can’t be, this isn’t-“
“Breathe,” Vriska put her hands on Kan’s shoulders, “breathe.”
They were so close, and the past few months flashed through Kan’s head. Brawls that lasted way too long, inching toward each other at the table, it couldn’t be just a joke, this girl had played with her feelings too many times and if this was one of those times she would rather face the punchline than take one more minute of this. Anything but this.
Vriska was usually the one falling apart, and while the role reversal made her smirk it mostly made her worried. They’d been playing relationship ouija ever since… well ever since they’d met in person for the first time. She was so different in the real world, outside of that little chat box that seemed to rule their lives. Kanaya had needs, and Vriska thought she could fill them in a very very platonic way, but she moved here and she moved there and she didn’t know when they crossed the line but Vriska struggled very hard to shove the very very un-platonic feelings away, but they kept coming back.
Kanaya abhorred what she did, but she was trying to change, and she wanted to help with that. She tried to get her to open up but there was always a barb or a detour to surprise her. She had finally pinned her down in the closet. It felt real, very very real, and being so close was torture and she would never get another chance,
and she would never get another chance, and she went for it
and she went for it.
The kiss was long and deep, violent and passionate. Years of feeling condensed into one long moment. They only stopped when they tasted copper and salt. Vriska’s lip was cut and tears streamed out of her eyes.
“Stop, stop! this will hurt them so bad.” She didn’t recognize the words coming out of her mouth.
“I don’t care.”
She didn’t believe Kanaya either.
She leaned in again, Vriska had to shove her away. Blood was all over her face.
“You don’t care?”
“I, I do, but I didn’t feel it- what did you do to me?!”
“Me?!”
“Yes, you’re influencing me… some how, just get to the punchline Vriska just say I’m the punchline!”
“You thought I was- I thought you-“
“What did we do?!”
Light flooded the closet, neutralizing the soft glow of Kanaya’s skin. She looked away, Vriska didn’t.
“Rose… I can-“
Her expression was obscured by the backlight, but her emotions were clear when the door slammed so hard it rattled the hinges.
Back against the door, Rose struggled to take deep breath. With all her foresight she had neglected to account for this outcome, how? She thought she could see Kanaya so clearly, Vriska not so much. What would Terezi-
“TEREZI”
She dragged a couch in front of the door before running off to collect the other cheat-ee.
Vriska’s eyes adjusted back to the dark and cold. She was used to being cold, but not when just a second ago she was flush with someone so surprisingly warm. Kanaya wouldn’t look at her. She wanted to know what she was thinking so badly, but she was uncertain what she would find, so she went about it in the old fashioned way.
“Would you leave me for Rose?”
“In a heartbeat.”
“Wow Myryam… that’s cruel. Am I rubbing off on you?”
Kanaya wiped the blood off her lip and tasted it.
“You could say so. What about Terezi?”
“I’ve been talking to her about… whatever we are. I need her, ugh, but I think I need you just as much.”
“I have trouble believing that.”
“At least as friends, I mean, aggressive acquaintances, if you really want to go back to that. In a heartbeat.”
“I didn’t mean-” Kanaya sighed “I didn’t mean that I don’t care about you. I meant that you’re… like the stars. Rose is like the sun. Without you I might lose direction, but without Rose…”
A smile pulled at Vriska’s mouth. The way it was, it wasn’t perfect, but it was good. Now it might not be, but she was used to messing everything up. Her very existence seemed to draw in trouble. She never seemed to know when to fight it or accept it. She looked at her hands, the floor, anywhere than the little bit of normal she sacrificed to have just one kiss, just one.
“I get it. I’ll step back.”
She jumped a little when Kanaya squeezed her hand.
Rose found Terezi surrounded by piles and piles of cans, hammering out can town’s constitution with the Mayor.
“Terezi there is a situation in the closet.”
“What?”
“Come see for yourself.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Terezi!”
They both make their way to the closet, Terezi chuckling the entire way. She pushes the couch aside with one hand, and winks with both eyes. Without opening the door she yells,
“WHAT’S GOING ON IN THERE, ARE YOU TWO MAKING OUT?”
“Were.” Kanaya’s voice is hoarse.
“Oh. Hmm…”
Terezi paced back and forth, tapping rhythmically with her cane. She slammed the door back into place when it creaked open. Still tapping her cane, she parsed the situation.
It’s not like she didn’t see this coming. She knew Vriska better than she knew herself, and on top of that she was a terrible liar. Every time she caught the glances between the two the pangs of jealousy only fueled her teasings, but now it was real.
A relatable struggle, but Terezi was better at hiding her true feelings.
Rose only interrupted when the tapping became pounding. Putting one hand on the cane and the other over the hand tapping it, she looked into red eyes and failed to notice the blush spreading over Terezi’s face.
“What do we do?”
“I’m not sure. I mean Vriska’s kind of stupid but I’m not leaving her.”
A muffled HEY made Rose turn.
“You’re not?”
“I don’t see a reason to.”
“But you never see.”
She shrieked with laughter, and Rose couldn’t help but smile. All she was looking for was some sigh that everything was going to be ok, and Terezi’s blood curdling laughter was the same as it ever was.
“I mean, I’m going to punish her somehow, but leaving her would be cruel. What about you and Kanaya?”
“I don’t know,” Rose slumped against the wall “On Earth I would have, but now I’m a god of light and she’s an alien vampire so does anything matter anymore?”
“I guess not. She’s super hot by the way.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Isn’t this what this is about? Keeping secrets?”
“I suppose so.”
“We should talk to them-“
“I’m a moment,” Rose pulled her down so they were both sitting on the ground, “but not yet. I don’t know if I’m ready to see her yet.”
Rose took a moment to breathe. On the other side of the door Kanaya buried her head in her hands and cried. Vriska was her childhood crush, but even then she knew she was a mess. There was something about that wildness that intrigued her. Rose was beautiful, amazing, perfect, and everything she ever thought she wanted. Maybe she was too perfect. She would fuss and fuss but not much could be done without starting a fight or Rose retreating behind another layer of human sarcasm.
Time spend with her felt subdued, their conversations were sparring matches, and while Vriska was no less of a stressful enigma she needed someone, and she needed to be needed. She needed adventure and someone to take her, and she needed to express the feelings she never let slip so long ago, but she needed Rose’s stability even more.
Vriska tried to comfort her, telling her how much of a catch she was, assuring her that she wasn’t horrible, rubbing her back in long, slow circles while telling her to breathe. The role reversal was jarring.
“Sometimes I feel Rose slipping away,” Kanaya said on a long exhale, “on Earth women weren’t supposed to love other women.”
“Yeah I know. Dave talks about it but, Rose never brought it up.”
“I know it bothers her. Sometimes I felt that she was just looking for an excuse to break it off so she wouldn’t have to confront it. I’m worried she’ll freak out.”
“Yeah I think trapping us in a closet constitutes as a freak out Myryam-”
A quick jab shut her up. Unfortunately the silence was killing her. The mumbling from outside drove her crazy, and pressing her ear to the door did nothing.
“Can you… listen in?”
“I can try.”
Vriska took a steadying breath before reaching out with her mind. Terezi’s mind was familiar and comforting, and she often sought out its presence when they were apart. She would never tell her that though. Settling between her ears she began picking up any stray thoughts. Smell, touch, she was playing with the edge of her cane, no sight but- ah! Sound.
What she did pick up was muffled by emotional turmoil. Something gross and mushy around Rose, fear, truth, honesty, tuning like a radio she tried to silence it, but it was no use. She decided to just observe. Tempting as it was to meddle. So tempting…
An idea floated past, she could just, nudge it along. Open the door, come on. Come on.
The door creaked open. Terezi came in first. She walked over to Vriska and slapped her.
“I know what you were doing!”
“You were out there so long I thought I’d die.”
“Fine. If you want this so badly I guess you’ll have it. Come on in Rose.”
There were flames in her eyes. Flames directed at Vriska. She stormed over and gave her another slap.
“What was that for?!”
“I don’t know! Everything’s just always your fault somehow, isn’t it!” Rose pinched the bridge of her nose “Anyway, I have something I wanted to say.
On Earth, this wasn’t something I was supposed to do. I tried so hard to suppress it but it always came out. I thought that because Earth was gone, so was that guilt. I was wrong. I’m scared. This is scary. I found some kind of stability and now it might be gone. A part of me wants to throw it away because it’s not what’s supposed to happen, but it has. Kanaya, I struggle but I’ve felt more right than I ever have in my life with you, and if I’m not doing something right I want to know, please.”
“Rose…” Kanaya rushed over to embrace her “nothing, you’re doing nothing wrong. I love you, and just because I love Vriska doesn’t mean I love you any less.”
“You love her?”
“LOVE ME?! MYRYAM THAT’S GROSS!”
“But I will stop this if that’s what you want.”
“Wow thanks.”
“I will learn how to tolerate Vriska if it will make you happy.”
“I guess it’s just bag on Vriska day huh.”
“I love you Rose.”
“I love you too. I have to say I was a little disappointed when I figured out those flelexing sessions weren’t for me.”
“HA! I KNEW it, everybody is in love with me.”
“Not so fast!”
all eyes shot to Terezi,
she took her time with the suspense,
“Dave isn’t.”
“Babe I never wanted him to be.”
Terezi head-butted her girlfriend “I know.”
“Are you sure you’re alright with this?” She motioned to herself and Kanaya.
“As long as I get PLENTY of attention and you pay a fine of… one million kisses!”
“We’d have to be together for a really long time for that dude.”
“ACCEPTABLE! Well what are you waiting for? Begin your payment.
Oh! And before I forget, Kanaya,”
“Yes?”
“Your girlfriend’s hot. Rose? Your girlfriend. Is. Hot.”
“Did you have to say it in that way?”
“No, but it bugged you didn’t it?”
Terezi let out another demonic shriek and Vriska chuckled against her cheek.
“She really got you there! Why don’t we come out of the closet?”
Rose laughed so hard that she had to lie down. Maybe this would work out just fine.
She didn’t like her name. She hadn’t heard it a lot, she was alone. In a big house she looked around, gaze revealing only grey and shadowless walls. She’d finished all the food that was left, and hunger drove her outside.
There was no sun that day, no shadow. The sky was intact, the ground felt solid beneath her feet, and she could feel herself sway in the breeze. The world hadn’t ended, like her uncle said. She went looking for him.
Beyond the boundaries of separate partitioned plots she knew there was a dangerous place. Her uncle had gone in that direction when he left. He had visited it many times, and always told her about the things he saw. A slope so steep and slippery, oil coating the ground. A drop the size of ten of him in the middle of the street, waiting for passerby. He said there was a place where this world ended and another began. She believed him, she had no choice.
She searched for a long time, although she couldn’t tell how long. The sun wasn’t out, nor the moon, even the stars were absent. Days might have passed, minutes. The sound of hollow houses with high vaulted ceilings echoed in the streets, no one was home.
Her foot fell through the ground.
In panic she clawed at the dirt, carving swaths the size of her clawed fingers. Her kicking feet moved grass and mud forward to break her fall, and she fell right into a grove of trees. She didn’t recognize them, they were different than her uncle said. He said they were high and mighty, that they were light eaters like them who were made of earth and stone. He tried to talk to them once, but didn’t dare once he heard their whispers.
She heard the whispers, and the cries, she kneeled to inspect them. They were much smaller than she imagined, perhaps they were young. She wondered at them, how marvelous. The flesh splitting to reach the sun, ingenious. The leaves curving, always out of the way of the others, weighing the branches to the ground. Her toe collided with one, and it was twisted and contorted by her fall. The responsibility of her actions overwhelmed her, an infant had died. It was not dead yet, its whispering branches cried and moaned still. It was not motionless, or lifeless, but its gnarled roots couldn’t support it anymore.
She gingerly curled her hand around the willow, making sure not to scar it further, and her thoughts were to mercy as she killed it.
The flesh crumbled into her hand, ash falling between her fingers like snow; softly and just as white. A thick residue of pale syrup formed on her palm. She let it drip onto the mud. She stood, and looked around.
Carrie dragged herself to standing. She tried to inspect the house, but couldn’t bring herself past the first room. It was too much. It was too much blood. There was nothing she could do.
All she wanted was to go home, and there were miles and miles of unconquered road in front of home. She got started, the sun rising as she stumbled the whole way home.
Somewhere not very far away, a girl with too long fingernails stepped onto an unkempt lawn. She breathed in the fresh air, and sat among the blades of grass. She imagined what life could be like, outside.
Carrie fell into her door and took a moment to steady herself on the frame. Hand over hand, she made it to the kitchen.
She took only one desperate glance at her vitamins, then slammed open a cabinet that had been closed for a very long time. Something broke in her, something much stronger than a snow globe. She reached for a cigarette, and fumbled with the lighter in the light of the early morning.
He forced his knee into her hip, toppling her, and pushed her along the ground picking up grass and mud to the river. The water was spraying up and she could feel the spray on the back of her head. It was cold, and she looked up to Jack’s face and it was just as cold. There was routine there, and ritual, and entitlement. There was the lasting traces of a person who wanted things for himself, and then there was the need to feed his plants. Or what they stood for. Carrie saw all these things in the face of death, right before he flipped her on her stomach and plunged her face in the water.
There was clawing and biting from her, but all he needed was the steady pressure to keep her under. She didn’t even think to keep in the air, it just bubbled out in an automatic scream. There wasn’t thinking, any close inspection and the game would fall away and her mind would reject the reality so hard she would pass out. To pass the time, the very short time, her conscious mind flipped through the ‘previously on’ for her whole life. The season finale was today, the championship, the final boss. The illusion was dissolving as soon as it was being replaced, but the air was running out and her fingers got clumsier and the burning reached everywhere in her body and soon there wasn’t even enough in her head to keep up the game.
The colors reminded her of a conversation she had with Evelyn. “Don’t hold your breath waiting here,” she had said, “you’ll turn blue before anything happens.”
Carrie stopped struggling. She let her hands slip from Jack’s and into the cold dark water, dragging the sunflower barrette with her. She let herself relax into the space she occupied. Her lungs burned; the last piece of air stuck in them like hot shards of glass, but she waited.
“I guess I’ll just have to turn blue.”
Jack’s hand pulled back, leaving a light push to keep her from floating up to the surface. He looked away, to find the rope, and Carrie used a last push only available to the dying.
She unclipped her barrette, reached up quickly, and drove the sharp end into his wrist. The shock gave her the opportunity to push up and get a breath. She turned and kicked him as hard as she could, fingernails scraping into the mud on the shore. She took Jack’s hand and pulled, hard. He slipped on the damp grass and landed shoulders deep in the river. Carrie seized the back of his head.
She held him there until he died.
She held him there twenty minutes after he had died, because she wasn’t sure.
It was a considerable squeeze, but flesh and bone were nothing in the face of what she imagined. In her mind’s eye she could see the ground drop away from her, and the walls get big enough to have some gravity. She was worried that the oak a little ways away would fall with the ground, to such a depth that if she took the leap she would land but die instantly from the force. Secondly she was worried that the tree would be too far away to reach, but the leaves brushing her back said otherwise.
She felt as if the world was falling apart at the edges and if she closed her eyes the darkness would take it all. So she didn’t blink, not once, while she turned and reached and felt out a branch steady enough to gold her. She didn’t close her eyes when she took the jump, and she didn’t flinch at the noise it made. While edging closer to the trunk using only her hands, she let the pleasant delusion of a game wash over her. She imagined the players and the score, and it comforted her to know that once the game was over she would get to go home, tried and tested, and sleep in her bed. It was a pleasant moment in the day, and she wasn’t about to waste it.
It didn’t last very long.
“It never does,” Carrie sighed. She wished she had a smoke. She wanted so desperately to smoke.
She reached the ground, what next? What could she do? Who took her here? What did they want? The console and the rules and the delusions fell away. Carrie looked to the water, it was visible now, and she felt it pull the light out of the air. She felt her own consciousness reject the scenery it was in, but it had nowhere to go. She imagined seeing her self from a bird’s eye view, she imagined that she was somewhere else, watching. Someone else, watching.
If only I could have warned her sooner. If only I could tell her to turn around-
“GET AWAY FROM ME!”
“Carrie, come on now-“
“No, no stay back,” Carrie aimed the snow globe at Jack, and Jack let a heavy rope fall at his side.
“Carrie,” Jack cooed, “I just brought you here so you could get better.”
Carrie looked him up and down; even in the dim light she could see blood hastily cleaned off of cloth.
“You didn’t bring me here…”
“Well I still want you to be better-“
“Who was it, Jack? Don’t take another step, no, stay back,
I’m warning you-
I can-“
The darkness made it hard to tell, but Jack seemed very close. If she threw the globe now it wouldn’t even hurt him. He was wishing arms reach, and his hands were poised, twitching, in a motion to catch some scared pet that had run away.
She drove the snow globe into his skull. It didn’t break like she expected it to. Instead it bounced off, leaving a darkening circle of bruise and blood where it had been and hands reaching out to pin hers and thumbs and knuckles squeezing the blood out of her wrists and nails digging into skin and her teeth biting into fingers just to make it stop make it stop make it stop.
Carrie sat up in a cold sweat, only to be pushed down. It was a nurse, or maybe a doctor. It looked like she was in a hospital, or something. The nurse was talking, but Carrie couldn’t make out the words. Something about being lucky, that was quite an episode there, and other things. Whoever it was held a glass of water at arms length, but Carrie couldn’t grab it.
She reached out, but her arm was restrained. She was effectively attached to the bed. The whoever it was realized the mistake and carefully leaned closer so Carrie could grab the water.
The cold surprised her more than anything. It took, and took, and her hand was numb. She tried to isolate this feeling but she couldn’t. It climbed her arms and wrapped itself across her wrists, she almost couldn’t move her fingers through the pain.
She caught a fragment of meaning at the edge of her attention; “…it’s a good thing Jack brought you here.”
Carrie spilled the water. Everywhere it landed she felt a whole lot of warmth seeping away, wicked into oblivion. The numbness accelerated. She panicked because she felt more than ever like she had lost control and that she was in danger and the world was against her and it wasn’t fair and the bandages on her hand were coming undone and her wrist was straining against the constraints and new blood rotten and cold spurted up from the cuts and fluorescent light forced its way into her eyes and everything was a game just a game and nothing else, this couldn’t be real this couldn’t be happening it was just a game.
The room spun like on wheel of fortune and she fell kicking backwards into unconsciousness.
She didn’t dream. Instead she woke up in another room, it was night and the chill in the air had climbed in through the windows and settled in without thinking. Her arm was bandaged tighter, and while she was inspecting the bandages she realized that things didn’t smell right.
She didn’t smell the dust in the attic, or her same laundry detergent, or the oily scent from the kitchen that worked its way into the whole house and her clothes and her soul. She realized that she wasn’t at home.
She missed that feeling, and felt intensely the shock paralyzing her entire body. She was lying down in the bed, fingers tightly clenched in the bandages. The fingers numbed too, out of solidarity.
Her heart regained its beat, and she listened for sound in the way prey listens for crunching leaves. She felt every motion in the air, every over-tensed muscle, and the footsteps from downstairs. The wooden floors carried the vibrations, and the panic she was resting on amplified them. She thought she could feel her teeth shaking, only from the sound, although maybe that was just her.
The footsteps were agonizingly far apart, then they echoed as if on a staircase. A staircase. Unconsciousness threatened to take her again but she fought and fought and suddenly the footsteps weren’t giving her any time and the numbness was working against her and it took everything she had just to MOVE.
The muffled sound of gravel splashing put both parties on hold. A car door slammed. The footsteps made their way back downstairs. Carrie could breathe again. Jack’s far away voice constricted it again. There were a thousand reasons for him to be there, but none of them lined up with Carrie’s tilted mindset.
She got off the bed with effort and felt the wooden floor on the soles of her feet. The cracked window gave way slowly, slowly, with as little noise as Carrie could manage. She heard water rushing, but it was too dark to see anything other than a nearby oak, so close that the leaves brushed into the room.
The steps she took were delicate, calculated. First she moved everything from the window sill; if anything broke then Jack would hear. She contemplated taking a snow globe for something to throw, but decided against it. It wouldn’t help if it fell out of her pocket when-
Footsteps. She grabbed a fist sized snow globe and forced her shoulders out the window.
She mimics them, carried away by the feeling in the room. Their stares push her away; she suddenly feels unfit for society, and everything else. The room starts to spin. She runs but the air won’t move for her, she’s dizzy and nothing aligns.
The room starts to roll, unaligned film clipping past reality on the right. She can’t stop to breathe, she’s decided, she won’t stop until she gets home. Where is home? How does she get there? How does she leave the building?
Can she?
The answer is no; she collapses on the threshold of the inside and out, hand bleeding into the dirt. The distress and blood loss did her in. She isn’t dead, just asleep. In her dreams she’s falling, and no matter what she grabs hold of she can’t stop. It feels like she’s going unnaturally fast, choking on dust that gets in the way of her body. I try to help her, but she’s too far away.
Carrie feels the dust rip at her skin, more real than she expected, and she stays still in the moving air. After a few seconds of closing her eyes, she hears a call, over and over, repeated by the walls of the hole she’s falling down;
“fight it.”
The calls get weaker, then snap off. She opens her eyes and sees that there is no bottom. At least no bottom that she can make out. This panic is choked back with almost no effort, she’s finding it difficult to feel things right around now. A few steps echo softly from the top of the pit, followed by a frenzied shout.
“MY NAME IS-“
Carrie plunges into water that tears at her lungs and threatens to swallow her in whole darkness. The last words are cut off.
When she got to her house Carrie almost lost the edge of the day. The calmest of familiar stairs and walls almost put her at ease, but she was still drawn to the kitchen. She had made a plan on her walk, a pact. While promises might be easily forgotten, a pact was far to strong for her to break. She made an attempt, but in the end caved. She grabbed the knife and papers and head out the door.
Marching this time, she set off for the building she had visited so often. Darkness made the very familiar walk into something uncertain. Directions are different in the dark, four lefts doesn’t always make a right.
Everything startled her; stationary things, moving things, things that she would have recognized as harmless in the day were full of harm. Harm permeated the air and worked its way into her lungs and blood. She tightened her grip on the knife and walked faster, before she could waver in her purpose.
The door of the building was left ajar, such poor security, someone might come in. Carrie pushed past the door and off of the grassy dirt into something cold and phosphorescent. The light inside was the same gray light no matter the time, everything inside was as familiar as it ever was. She approached the door that said ‘department.’
It kept saying ‘department.’ Its voice was drawn out and shaky, or that was just her own voice. She said ‘department.’ She said ‘department’ again, and again. She wiggled the knife under one of the hinges and started to pry.
Sound escaped her as the first hinge pin popped up. She didn’t hear the metal slide against metal, the door creaking as the door settled, trying to get stability when so much stability was already taken from it. She started working on the next hinge.
The next two were greased, and came up quickly. The door sat only against the frame and the floor. This last obstacle that dare defy her. A quick check sent the door plummeting into the room.
Shocked people backed away or stayed rooted in their space as Carrie slowly invaded it. She walked lightly to the desk in the center of the room, pushed a few papers off the side, and placed her blood-soaked stack on top. It was coated in blood.
Out of the corner of her eye the word “department” caught her by surprise, and she jumped. Evelyn grabbed her arm, trying to hold her down. Carrie screamed. Evelyn let go, but her hands hovered right over the skin. It reminded Carrie of someone handling an item they didn’t own, yet. Her senses were on edge.
“What are you looking for?” Evelyn asked
“Just, whoever’s in there. You know.”
“They’re not here.” Evelyn said, voice cracking
“Yes they are, I can hear them moving around in there.”
“It’s not what you’re looking for.” Evelyn lurched for Carrie’s hand.
The shock of the situation made Carrie reconsider a small list of all the turning points in her life. She stepped back, wrenching Evelyn’s arm off of her’s and staring.
“What… gives you the right-“
“Nothing.” Evelyn’s eyes welled up with tears
“What?”
“Nothing is right-“
“LET ME IN-“
Carrie pounded on the door. Her eyes wandered once again to the hinges. She thought as she yelled, that it wouldn’t be that hard to pry the whole thing open. It would be just like a bad habit, going at it with such ferocity that nothing could stand up to her. She needed to conquer something, and soon, she feared that her empire was slipping away.
The confrontation spawned noises, clattering from far away, and Carrie became aware that other people could see her. Security cameras were on, and watching. The noise must have reached the second floor. Evelyn had already fled.
Carrie followed suit.
She ran out of the building in a blur, dashing past anything that might be in her way. She didn’t see Jack outside, or anyone else. It was dark, and every path was clear.
After a while of running her legs cramped up and her lungs made her stop. She walked instead. It seemed extraordinarily difficult to breathe the still air; if she wanted to move it she would have to do so herself. The effort showed on her face and flushed skin and she had to stop for a while.
Streetlights stretched on in every direction, laying out a grid that held the city down. The wires wrapped around buildings made of glass and cold concrete, strangling them with weight. For a moment she was worried they would drown in the asphalt, dragged down by the wires into dark chilled waters. For a moment she felt that she was underwater, her feet the only thing poking up out of the surface.
She wandered in between the beams of light, feeling abandoned and alone. It felt like the world had gone out for the night and left a note: will be back by morning, dinner’s in the fridge.
Does it really matter what she said? She wouldn’t remember it later. Those conversations you participate in to get something, or pass the time, you usually remember something of those. Carrie wouldn’t remember any of this. Her world was pushing itself to a point, shifting everything forward and down, but she didn’t even know she was falling. She even liked the change in perspective. She thought it was doing her good.
She passed the threshold of the building in a blur. She wandered to the door that said “department” and knocked on it, shocked by how solid the wood was. No one answered. Nothing moved behind the door. The cold in the room was seeping its way into her skin through the tiles at her feet and the air all around. Heat pressed against it from the inside and it felt like a fever. A patchwork of temperature worked its way in combat across her arms and legs, forehead and chest. She looked at the hinges of the door, and briefly thought about forcing them up and open but discarded that thought quickly. She wasn’t that kind of person. A lever would do it, though, something like a crowbar or a screwdriver or a knife- “Hello.”
“OH MY God, it’s,” Carrie choked a few words back as she stumbled around to face, “oh it’s you, Evelyn.” “Yes…” her upper lip twitched open to reveal her teeth, approximating a smile while leaving the rest of the face unchanged.
“I didn’t see you yesterday…”
Evelyn curled her arms slightly and balled and un-balled her hands in fists. She looked blankly at the space in front of her, trying to reconstruct in words what she was trying to say through her meaningless gestures.
“It’s because I wasn’t here.”
“Yeah I… assumed that.”
“I don’t think you’re that kind of person.”
“What?”
“Not yet, anyways.” “Are you talking to me?”
“I’m…”
Her voice squeaked and she couldn’t look Carrie in the eye, or in her face, she couldn’t look at Carrie. Her entire demeanor was of someone who was about to do something, caught in the middle of fight or fight.
There was harm in the air.
The sensation of lost cigarettes drew against her from all sides, and her pupils dilated. Her chest hurt, not because of the impulse, but because there wasn’t any sign of nicotine around. It was just her, wanting something she wouldn’t have, and that hadn’t happened for a long time.
Nothing carried malice in the air, but everywhere there was harm. There was harm in her mind, seeking to find its way out through her fingertips. There was harm in the sky, the overwhelming sun melting skin so slowly that it would burn instead. There was harm in the strangers, in the delicate tools like pens and pencils, and there was even harm in the compressible ground; somewhere underground she was being pressured by heat and moisture and opportunity to un-become herself.
Carrie pushed these thoughts to the back of her mind and compacted them tight enough to stand on. From her soapbox she could see the world. It was empty and cold. In the distance the building came into view and she could sense the presence of Jack before she even saw him. The sense threatened to upend her soapbox but she kneeled down and fastened it tighter around the ground.
Jack was a pretty boy. Someone had warned her about pretty boys. This prescription for thought bounced around in her mind as she struggled to explain her anxiety. There was nothing wrong, in fact the sun was shining. The world was drowning in the bright blue sky.
Sickly pale flowers pushed their way around the dirt, blue garden shears trimmed the orange petals, the pasty green stems. The cuts forced out a yellow tear from the dripping pieces. She was lost in thought, staring at the flowers, when Jack spoke to her.
“Hello, Carrie.”
“I- Hi, Jack. Where were you yesterday?”
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah, when I came by yesterday you weren’t anywhere I could see.”
“Oh, I was at a funeral.”
“Oh I’m so sorry, who-“
“No one special.”
“…Oh. I hope you…
feel better.”
Jack stared at her for a moment. The moment passed.
The edges of the ground seemed to soften with that over with. The blades of the trimmer closed and the flowers seemed to blur. The colors everywhere bled into each other like an impressionist painting and everything was art and song. The way Jack moved his fingertips, the still air curling around the corners of her mouth, the warmth of the sun, all conducted and were wrapped up in a daylight lullaby.
Things settled in place harder than usual for Carrie. Her vision snapped to a grid, corrected for its tilt. Jack was in the center, radial patterns arranged themselves around him. An image that evoked rows of farm soil and a green smell took Carrie by surprise. She didn’t want to run. She didn’t want to scream. She didn’t do anything.
Do you ever feel like you’re moving fast, in a dream? Like you’re moving so impossibly fast? Like you’re moving so fast that you know you could never move this quickly so it must be a dream or some other altered reality? When you're moving so fast, the breeze is at your heels and the mountains so quickly pass you and the ground breaks away so it doesn’t hold you back. When the air swirling about you is suggesting that it could be real and you could be real and that everything and anything is possible.
And yet, you know in a shade of a corner in the back of your mind that it isn’t real and the moment you look at the ground you’ll see that you're standing still and nothing is moving at all. So you don’t open your eyes so the feeling keeps on being felt and the wind keeps rushing and you are caught between impossible realities and you don’t open your eyes.
You don’t open your eyes.
Don’t open your eyes.
Carrie woke up. She didn’t remember any of her dreams, or any aspirations. She woke up grey and missing pieces of the world. She walked out of her house without any recollection of routine or thoroughness.
When she got to wherever her feet took her she realized that so many little things were missing, that she might as well turn back and go home and weather out this off day.
Then she got on the lawn, and the sun was shining, and the sky was friendly blue, and nothing around seemed to promise death or destruction, so she stayed in the storm.
Jack was no where to be found. Not that she was looking.
Evelyn was missing too, although Carrie definitely wasn’t looking for her.
The little missing things didn’t hinder her too much. She went about her day doing the things she liked and the things she had to do, with little overlap. Existing was always a sport to Carrie. When things got hard she took comfort in the abstraction and the distance it provided her. She had been looking forward to attending the needs of the day in person, but she couldn’t help but feel she was a step behind whatever she saw. In the short window between here and there she usually liked to tabulate possible solutions for the existential haze, but seeing nothing wrong, so she couldn’t.
She wandered through the day like this, and let the day bleed into twilight like cut wrists in water. The rose in the air wasn’t beautiful, in her mind she filtered through all the words that could have fit on her walk home. Violent; it fit perfectly.
Twilight wasn’t meant long for this world. It diluted in a stream and the clouds no longer reflected hints of gold and orange, the fire fled from the sky leaving particulate ash and a black burned sky. The daily wildfire set things right for Carrie, who lost that sideways tilt of everything once the blue and the orange had left her sight. Sunsets had always been a favorite of hers, but she never considered the night to be of any importance. Now she saw it was beautiful. Absence and relief was something she could get behind.
She dreamed. She wouldn’t remember the dream but she dreamed. When she woke up the dream flashed in fragments and broke apart in her hands. Sand through fingers, burning iron filings and molten glass scared her fingertips and the world was calibrated to a level as her waking mind set everything right. She didn’t remember the call, the message, anything about the dream. By the time she left her home she forgot she dreamt at all. The glass and iron filings faded molten into the floor, cooled, and cleared up. Why would she listen to me, after all,
She went about her day, or whatever remained of it, and tried not to take note of all the little things that piled up in the corner of her mind. They tilted her vision, weighted it to one side, and sunk it slightly like a glass in water. Something prejudicial was working its way into the way she saw everyone around her.
The people suddenly had traces of traits from Evelyn and Jack. They were popping up everywhere, and it was all she could do to keep from accusing others of spending time with them.
Despite her best efforts, Carrie was on edge. She took a walk to take her mind off things.
The road was paved ahead of her, behind her it lay conquered. She claimed a couple of miles from the day and then had mercy. She let it live on for a little while before going to sleep, stood watching the night be young and foolish. The warm coffee in her hands seeped into her stomach and ribs. She dug the bottom of the mug into a rotting slat of the fence and waited to see what impression it made. She could smell cigarette smoke nearby, close enough that the nicotine made itself felt in her blood and her nose and her mouth. Writhing feeling drew sharp against her skin from all sides, the grey smell bringing up memories of particulate ash and green. She took a sip of coffee, and pretended that the caffeine was responsible for all of this. In that moment, her body believed her.
Walking inside, she glided a hand over the alphabet of vitamins spanning spice racks and bait boxes. A control board to vanquish whatever ailed her. With trained accuracy she popped the child safe lids off of a couple of bottles and poured herself a cocktail of E’s and B’s and other things. One was empty, then another, and soon she tallied five vitamins completely missing from her collection. She took the remains of her magic potion and resolved to pick up the others tomorrow.
She fell asleep in a haze of summer nights and forgotten laundry lists.
Carrie walks outside, past the regular pale lights and the slick tiled floors. She can’t help but feel put off; the walls, the doors, the lifeless metal everywhere she looked, everything was so cold. She felt her body trying to warm up the place all on its own.
Outside there was a boy with unkempt shirts kneeling over, shifting around. His elbows moved up and down, but Carrie couldn’t see what was working on. He caught her staring.
He motioned her over.
“Don’t be shy, don’t be shy; I’m just gardening.”
He waved around a pair of blue shears and then motioned at a watering can.
“What’s your name? Mine is Jack.”
“Carrie.”
“Are you a plant enthusiast, Carrie?”
“I’m not sure,” she laughed, trying to avoid his gaze, “those are really pretty, though.”
“Aren’t they? Here are some I just planted, here,” he moved the watering can into her hands, “you try.”
“I’m not sure-“
“Go ahead.”
Carrie poured out some sweet smelling water for a bed of dirt. She’s not sure what’s underneath. Seeds.
“You’re a natural!”
“I guess I’m like my mom-“ she catches herself, “what did I just water?”
“Seeds.”
“No, I meant what are the seeds for?”
“Nothing, at the moment.”
“I don’t follow-“
“They might be something later, but first they’re seeds. Then the air and the water and the warmth takes that away from them and they become something else.”
It’s a sacrifice of identity.
“It’s very…” Jack lets his eyes flick through a hundred mental dictionaries, “violent.”
“I thought you were going to say beautiful.”
“No,” he thought of something, and then thought better of it, “what were you doing in there?”
“Just trying to get these papers through the door.”
“Well, good luck.”
Carrie ran a mental check on everything her mother warned her about men. The resulting tally wasn’t high enough to arouse suspicion, so she filed Jack away as a pleasant acquaintance. The details were a little disconcerting. She would overlook them, just for now.
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