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The self shatters into a thousand glinting shards that scatter to the four winds. You’re picking up palmfuls of jagged glass, but all they do is cut, and all you do is bleed. Salt-sharp copper tang in your mouth as you breathe in, but the air never reaches the pit of your lungs, just clots in your throat while you choke.
You want to remember. You want to know.
The pain is electric, clawing up your spine, fraying every nerve raw.
Do you want to remember?
Sterile light glints off round lenses, mirroring an empty stare. No eyes, just a twisted mouthful of teeth and greedy, hungry hands.
Did they take out your heart and put in a stone? Did they take out your lungs and put in a dove that flutters-flutters-flutters—wings beating madly at the cage of your ribs while that wild, free thing drowns in blood?
They rearrange your bones the way they like them. The map of where they were slips-slips-slips out of your desperate fingers. Something throbs, deep inside, some old wound aches.
Fill your pockets with stones and go down to the river. The water runs red.
Bile in your nose, in your mouth, in your eyes, in the fragments of your mausoleum of memory that is carved so hollow.
Do you remember?
Pain rewrites every nerve. Seals your wires up with rubber. There is a panicked, animal impulse to bite, bite your way free. They’ve taken all your teeth. Carved you a new mouth.
Was there ever anything but this?
Raindrops, rolling down a window streaked with soot.
Crimson, rolling down the slick silver sheen of the hand that is yours but is not yours.
There is nowhere to hide. There is only to disappear. Disappear into the darkness, and wake to babies’ blood streaking your palms, embedded in the grooves of your nails, of your bones.
Somewhere in the long empty passage of your mind, somewhere, someone is screaming. There is a deep ache that doesn’t fade. You are not permitted to feel it, but it goes deeper than what you know, deeper than Longing, than Rusted, than—
The dove drowns. You choke on the feathers.
They pry open your rib cage and fish out the soft, rotten core. Agony sparks behind your eyelids, but you do not make a sound. You have no mouth.
You are climbing an endless staircase, only to find that the end is the beginning, and you never went up after all, you never went anywhere at all, you’re still at the bottom, in the darkness, in the murky, bruise-dark depths, crushed by fathoms of pressure until it molds you into a blind, crawling thing, fumbling with fish-white fingers for something, something.
You can’t remember.
The rot has sunken bone-deep. It’s time to carve away the flesh. You peel away your skin, but there’s only the smooth blue shine of ice beneath.
Falling, falling, falling.
Wind whistles in your ears, sucks away your eyes, splits your soul down the middle and sends it up your throat with the rubbery strings of black vomit you hack up.
Bright burst of blood against the snow turns staticky and fuzzes into red geraniums. They are all sharp scent in your nostrils, but that, too, morphs, turns into the chemical reek of antiseptic and sweet-rot stink of the death of self.
Thoughts are water and your mind is a cup with a hole in the bottom. You’re trying to excise a monster with a tin spoon and one whispered name, susurrus-soft in your mouth. The ache swells in the pit of your stomach, and you think maybe it’s leftover, a hand-me-down from the one who wore your mind a lifetime ago, a bruise that runs so deep that not even disassembling you piece by piece and replacing each one could scour you clean of it.
Words and pictures and sounds and smells jumble-jumble-jumble until you’re frothing at the mouth and almost—almost longing for the electric blitz to screel up and down your spine and dance on every synapse until your back arches and your body convulses in a paroxysm of shock and your bones try to leap out of your skin and your heart squeezes into a pulpy red knot of pain because after—after, you can disappear. Fade into the shadows and let the monster pilot your body and only return once the blood is running thick down your arms and wet in your boots.
You have been searching in all the corners of the world, in all the corners of your mind, in all the notches of your sinews and your tendons, but you come up short.
“Got a nickel, Buck?”
Glass in the cup of your palms. All it does is cut.
All you do is bleed.