Work Text:
Rose describes herself as emotionally sterile on occasion.
“No, no, no.” You assure her, though you are afraid you lie. You kiss her face, all over, in hopes of making it a truth.
She only sighs. She sighs a lot and she always has and she always will, you figure. She sighs on her tea to cool it, sighs on your shoulder to let you know she’s there. Her being, it seems, is light as air.
You kindly remove yourself from the situation.
*
All of your life is now spent running from your own shadow. It chases admirably. Rose sighs at this, too. Your skittishness.
“A live wire,” She describes. “You’re scarcely more than a bundle of exposed nerve endings, rubbed raw. You run on your own bloody panic, like a drug addict.”
“That is such an ugly thing to say.” You tell her as you look in your mirror. Your image there is more a mirage than a statement. This is going to be one of those shitty days, where you have to build yourself up with lustrous clothes so you can even exist. Existing is…so hard sometimes.
“Oh, not really, not at all. It’s medically fascinating, is what you meant.” Her fingers close on the caps of your rib bones. “These are very nice.”
Maybe not such a shitty day; she’s given you a compliment.
You leave the house and are confronted by your shadow. You shiver and turn away from it. Being afraid of one’s shadow impairs one’s ability to function, you’ve noticed. Depending on the position of the sun, you can’t face certain ways. Your entire life is governed by the stars. You know, the ones you made for this Earth. It’s unfair.
Rose tells you this is psychosis or at very least a precursor to such affairs. You laugh her off.
*
The house you live in is too narrow. It scares you. Everything is tall and spindled. You are as well. Rose is the one thing that doesn’t work there: she’s short and soft. Maybe that’s why you keep her, you sometimes think. To escape the barren, rickety pathways of the home you spent money on.
The narrowness of the house gives you nightmares. You stutter awake some nights, shivering in your slime. You peek over the rim of the recuperacoon and Rose is looking at you from under a mess of quilts. She gets cold easily, needs blanket upon blanket so her fingers stay the color they should.
“More nightmares?” She’ll ask. “It isn’t normal, to be scared by dimensions, you know.”
“Be quiet.” You gasp, squirming deeper into the slime. “You should just be quiet.”
“So moody!”
You grind the sharp bones of your hands into your ears. The anxiety is too great for you to recognize the existence of other living things right now. Your own existence is too much. You wish you could fast forward to morning when you stand in front of your mirror struggling to exist.
Existence is pestilence. It either throws itself upon you, all at once, smothering you in reality, or it leaves a watery purple stain in your being, just enough to anchor you in your body. Then, of course, are the times when the stain is erased completely.
Not existing is nice, in a way. It’s the only time you get to see Rose worry.
*
All the lights are off as you huddle in the cooling bathwater. The soap has long since slimed away, leaving a faint scummy covering over the water, a jaundiced membrane. As you watch cleansing slag wheel about above your knees, melt off of your sharp stomach, you barely breathe. You have skipped out on work once again. You’re expecting to be fired. But how can you work when you can’t even look at your own shadow?
Rose gets home hours later. She turns the lights back on, invites your shadow in. God damn her. She picks the lock on the bathroom door and lets herself in. Turns on the light in there as well. At the sight of you, she tuts in disapproval.
“You need to stop letting this happen.”
“I can’t.” The words slide from your mouth and hit the water in a cold smoke, flattening out and curling at the edges of the bathtub.
“What?”
“I said I can’t.”
She shrugs and leaves you alone.
*
In front of the mirror, you squirm. When did you get this hideous? You pick at the loose, dark skin under your eyes, wincing. It’s time for a transformation, you decide. Too bad you can’t transform so instead you fall asleep on the couch. You wake up with Rose draped over you. She’s sighing again.
Before all else, you wish she would dip her hand down and catch you beneath your chest, pull you out from under your shadow.
“You know,” her mouth is slipping over your neck like oil in a hot pan. But you’re both so cold and solid. “Nobody’s ever won a fight against their own shadow.”
“I know.”
“It just can’t be done.”
“Don’t tell me these things.” You shove her off and sit up. She shifts to the end of the couch and looks at you. There you stay for a long while. She’s still in her work clothes, still has her I.D. card flat against her chest on a lanyard you bought for her. You look at it. In the photo, she smiles. It was taken back when her hair was a little longer, when she first started working at that nut house.
You realize something.
“You brought this.” By this, you mean the sickness, what she calls your psychosis, the thing that lost you your job and eats your motivation and confidence to find a new one. She must have brought it home, strung around her collar or snuggled across her hips. Smashed into her shoes and leeching under her fingernails and it must have exploded from her lungs when she kissed you and strapped itself around your entire brain. It permeated and it eats everything.
“I’m sorry.” She ducks her head. “They didn’t tell me about it in the job description.”
You groan. You wish your eyes would leave your head.
*
Again. The mirror. You open your mouth to observe your teeth and tongue.
In the mirror, you do not recognize a thing. It stares you down so you slink from the room and coil in Rose’s bed, hug her pillows and her menagerie of blankets.
Stretched behind you, your shadow watches.
*
Rose is screaming at you as the backs of your eyes run in news reels. She is very mad over something. It might be you. But you cannot hear her because today is one of those beyond shitty days where the purple stain of existence flitters away, leaving you all but dead. Her screams grow softer and somewhere along the way turn into sobs. She gets nostalgic as she holds you.
It is all you can do to breathe.
Everything disgusts you. This is so private and your shadow leers. It won’t leave you alone even as you make an effort to exist so you can talk to Rose. You distantly applaud her for showing her emotions. This is proof she isn’t too far gone to fix, that she’s just repressed. It’s healthy and she’s the doctor so she should know this.
She calms down as she presses herself into a small, bitter clump on your lap. Sort of like steeped tea leaves. “I miss you.” She mutters. “I miss you a whole fucking lot, okay? I just want you back.” She sounds disgusted with herself for promenading her feelings like this. You start your hand in a repetitive motion down along her spine, not back far enough yet to talk to her. This is going to take a while and as long as your shadow watches you, you don’t know how much you really want to return.
When you finally wrestle yourself back into existence, she is nodding off against you. “I’m sorry.” You tell her. She looks up with her eyes heavy in resignation and shakes her head.
*
“Get out.” You beg your shadow. It has driven you to your knees, your claws scritching furrows into the floorboards. The furrows are stitched in swaths across your shadow, right through its center, and yet it is unaffected. “Get out.” Something deeply internal screeches at you, how ugly you are to be reduced to begging with your own shadow.
“Please just leave me.” You rasp at it.
When Rose gets home she washes the blood and splinters from your hands, puts the doormat over the scratches in the floor. She is looking tired and impatient and worst of all, she is looking scared.
*
After not bathing for three days, not changing your clothes in that time either, scarcely consuming anything to keep your body running, Rose brings a pack of cigarettes into the house. She’s always described herself as a social smoker. Back when you went to parties, if somebody offered cigarettes, she’d take one and puff on it. You, often slightly drunk, would be transfixed by the bobbing ember crackling as she inhaled.
She sits beside you on the floor; you can’t even manage the couch most of these days. She opens the pack, draws a cigarette out—you’ve heard that in England, they call them fags. You still think that this could become a big cultural misunderstanding, and rather embarrassing. She scoops an old lighter from her pocket, the safety removed long ago with scissors.
The cigarette swims in front of your face. “This is the world’s slowest bullet, you know.” She says. And lights it.
*
“I, uh, hope you know that I don’t want this.” You tell her.
“Mm hm.” She is leaned over the kitchen table, doing taxes amidst a pile of receipts and her laptop. You have long since grown comfortable enough around each other to let down appearances. She wears no makeup and no pants and a too-big sweater with Oscar the Grouch on it.
Her fingers punch the keys on the laptop. You watch them and remember that they are one of your favorite things about her. You had never admired human fingers until her. No claw, soft and squishy and weak, so weak that it seems like they are almost desperate to be broken. Human fingers were—are—a sign of weakness. But her fingers were strong, even though they were always so tiny.
You swallow heavily.
After a while she slumps, dribbling down in her chair. For a moment, you see her muscles liquefy around her bones in a sluggish drip to the floor, pulling at her fat and her skin along the way. In the end, her cartilage drops into the puddle and her bones unfurling like old wallpaper. Then you shake your head and she is in her chair and she is talking.
“If you don’t want it then why don’t you try to get rid of it?” She asks.
“It won’t leave.”
“But you haven’t even tried.”
“I don’t know how.”
She walks out after than and locks herself in her bedroom—your bedroom, actually. You politely shut off her laptop.
That night she opens the door and shovels you inside and lays you out on her bed. Her hands grab at your hips and you just barely have the energy to open your mouth for her tongue. She seems smaller than ever, that night.
*
Instead of staring in the mirror, you stare at your shadow. You wish you still existed enough to hate yourself.
Over the course of several days, you dredge up your hatred. It is slow work, the slowest of your life. After a week, you get in a screaming match with Rose. She does most of the screaming, but you’re able to raise your voice enough to egg her on. You both storm away feeling like a bridge has been crossed.
After two weeks you once again eschew the mirror for your shadow. This time, you glare at it.
In detail, you yell at it how it ruined everything for you. With each word it twitches, it grows, until you are brilliantly feverish and have been eaten by your shadow. It invades the spaces in your skull. You become it in what you can only pray is a bad trip (sadly for you, you haven’t done acid for three years). Within it, you watch veins of iron ore paint themselves, you see your pulse twitch your skin into life when the iron flows into your body through your gaping pores. You are draped in a cloth the color of ferns by seraphim to cover the discoloration atop a great limestone edifice. Rose slithers down you, sucking at your stomach and breathing against your thigh, then cascades down the limestone. A jellyfish recognizes you as it sweeps her body into a dustpan, carefully bending her hairs so she doesn’t poke out. When you try to pronounce ‘liquid’, you find yourself quite incapable. So you give up and weep sunflower seeds. Rose picks them up, having reconstituted herself, and cracks them between her fingernails. She slips them between the tiny holes in her ears. She asks you, “Have you ever seen alder trees growing in anything but a straight line along a waterway?”
You claw at the shadow, yell at it, consider that you are having a nervous breakdown, that maybe there isn’t even a shadow in the first place and you’ll become a patient where Rose works.
Finally, exhausted, you sit and you look your sickness, the shadow, in its face. It looks back, extends a hand, and you snap out of it.
Rolling out of bed, you crack your joints and stand. You totter a little, get dizzy, your vision goes splotchy. You do not sit back down.
You walk all day around the narrow house, opening windows. It is a small city house and has barely any windows, but you open all of them anyways. It is still unbearably narrow, it still makes your bones curl into your lungs if you move the wrong way. Opening windows makes it better, slightly.
In the refrigerator, you find a container full of mozzarella balls floating in basil and olive oil. You eat all of them. It takes a very long time. Afterward, you carefully wash your fingers of oil.
“What the hell.” You shrug, and decide to go the full mile. You take a shower, with shampoo and conditioner and everything. Your shadow watches you from the bottom of the bathtub but it doesn’t quite bother you.
As the day wears on, your shadow loses its eyes. They trickle away, under the front door, and you see them run down the front steps, across the street. They mix in puddles of grit and rainwater, sap at car tires as they drive by. But the shadow’s eyes leave and you cry a little, very happy.
That day when Rose gets home, as haggard as you have ever seen her, you dip her in the doorway and kiss her. She is limp with relief.
As you both straighten up, you feel the need to say something for the first time in nearly two months. She beats you to it.
“Good,” she nods, a tad amazed. “Very good.”