By Nadia Ashaary
“Who brought you here?”
Who, indeed.
Which do you tell: a lie (you don’t know), or a truth (you don’t know)?
Which, indeed.
Ribcaged inside a city, concrete jungles don’t have it in them to allow freshwater, don’t have the means to afford a healthy diet, so you drown in an artificial lake.
You don’t belong here. Your bones grow janky within these liminal walls, your skin unsettled. You look up at the fluorescents, sky-framing, mind-whiting, and you don’t see them at all, and the longer you stare, the more they glare, shattering, battering, pitter-pattering across the backs of your eyes. You’re not crying but your eyes are wet.
A hand is being held out towards you. Persistent, not a question, because she doesn’t want to know what you’re thinking, she already knows what you want. Her hand is an expectation, like you’re a foregone conclusion. You’re being smiled at, and under the distortion, you fear it might bite you straight through the face.
A grip biting through your face, carving new bleeding mouths bracketing your own mouth, and not one of your three mouths will scream. Teeth planted in your flesh, singing as they bloom into mouths and mouths and mouths under the tender care of that biting grip. They weep like the loneliest whale in the world.
You twist away, veering desperately towards the edge. Over the deep end, you’re far, far, far away from the ground. The too-great vastness encompassing you is familiar, uncomfortable. In the arms of a being ancient and eldritch, you have been here before, your heart has danced this same jig before, your mind has dreamt this same terror. The laceration seizing you by the mouth is almost an inevitability but you strangle on a suppressed scream anyway, the air in your lungs valiantly, vainly clawing its way out of the cavern of your mouth. The sting in your face is a fiery meteor wooed in the embrace of a planetary gravitational field, approaching rock bottom way too incredibly fast.
Then. You crash, seeing stars.
No. That’s not right. They can’t be stars, you can’t see stars this deep in the city. They’re straight, they’re fluorescent—no, you’ve breached. Gasping and heaving and grasping and reaching and grappling and breathing. For now.
There is a hand being held out towards you. “You okay?”
Yes, you mean to say, but that, too, chokes you.
Well. Are you okay? Do you know?
You look up—
—straight into your betrayal, into eyes unravelling the dressings of denial over your wounded defences, into destiny descending upon you. You stop breathing all over again.
What has she seen of this person who refuses her eye—thus, it occurs to you now, much too late—providing a horrifyingly obscene amount of opportunities to watch you unencumbered.
You’re afraid if you look away now you’ll finally see the untwined bandages you’ve been trailing around all this time, wantonly seductive plaything to a wildly spirited cat. You’re afraid if you look, you’ll see untwined bandages retwined neatly around her little finger.
Her fingers, her hands: open, always, like they endeavoured to be untethered. You reckon she needs to reach out; by word, by touch, by God, she will reach, just so her skin feels proper to her. You don’t begrudge her that. With your own nerves constantly skittering all over your teeth unless you lay just the right way, you couldn’t possibly begrudge her that.
She was (is) smiling at you. She was (is) looking right at you. Her hand was (is) being held out towards you.
It makes you want to reach out. When your lungs finally breathe again and your hand finally lifts, untwined bandages and all.
You imagine when her hand ensnares you. Draws you in and holds you down for safekeeping. Consuming like a cresting wave yawning over your toes-knees-shoulders-head, and you shut your eyes tight as you’re swallowed whole. You’re not dying but your body is light. After a blink that’ll last a lifetime, you’ll awaken in a vast numbness. You’ll sense nothing but senseless lulls lying beyond your arm span, nothing but your own heartbeat reverberating amongst the currents. Your skin will press snug against your bones until you can barely hear them rattling. Enveloped inside the crest of a wave. Enwombed.
You think you’ll want to live in her hands.
“You okay?” she asks with a peek of teeth, straight and fluorescent, a blinding laceration. She looks like she could be someone who knows what to do with bloody mouths.
Are you okay?
You don’t think so. Your mouth can’t scream.
But by God, will she reach out. Her hands are loud enough for the both of you and she drops them, sin-easy, sin-heavy, onto any of your limbs unfortunate enough to be within reach. It’s unfair. You can’t scream. Pleasant burns keep branding your skin, and you can do nothing but watch. You don’t look at her but your skin has learned how to watch, hairs rising in tune with her presence, like sunflowers with a star; taking, taking, taking—never giving. Who are you compared to a star? The injustice of it all fans the banked embers between your ribs to stuttering life.
It’s not right. Hands aren’t meant to be welcoming. Burns are not to be craved. You’ve been cold for far too long, you’ve mistaken a fireplace for a blanket. You hold a shard of ember in your mouth until ash coats your tongue, disintegrating all traces of any other flavour but angry bitterness. You’re not okay, and your teeth are nervous.
The lights begin distorting again. Shattering, battering, pitter-pattering—
New bleeding mouths will sing again because the biting is back because birds of a feather flock together because misery loves company. All the way down your arms they’ll sing but not scream, and you’re a boiling rock in the heart of a wave and the longer you stay, the more cacophony you’ll bleed into the ambience, so you have to forget her hand. You can’t let her hear the non-screaming singing.
Forget the eye of the storm.
Don’t think of how there are no fires, only ash.
Encroaching from the horizon, a quietus amplified inside your cavities—
Pulling on your skin—
Raising hairs, hackles, heartbeats—
Electricity in the air, your teeth ringing with the crackle, birds of a feather.
Stretch your limbs, hold out for a miracle—for these storms will betide you.
Storms to lick lips and cool heels over, to face, to hail.
Tendrils of your hair spread out like a pressed flower, your fingers coiled, your mind spinning. They say don’t bite the hand that feeds you but what if the hand bites you? It scrapes down your brow, blackening your eyesight, piercing and tearing the skin of your cheeks to fit its palm skin-tight over your mouth. The floor is very far away and it shouldn’t matter when the body of water is devouring you like heat-death from an exploding star. But it does. You have a long way to go to reach your end. The floor is far away and your mouths are bleeding slow, slow, slowly. You don’t scream. You never scream.
The weight of the water’s embrace blankets gently your limbs as you float, as gentle as the hands cradling. Like a sluggish wash of tea down the sternum, heat without the burn. Fluttering in the ripples like flags in the wind, tendrils of bandages hook around the fingers buried in the crevices above your spine and behind your knees. Fingers that don’t bite. The pores in your scalp feel lighted, like you’ve inhaled the embers on your tongue up to your roots.
You’re breathing again. You believe her, when she’s holding you. You’re okay.
Inhaling, shuddering, you listen as she speaks like she moves, caramel-smooth:
“Who brought you here?”
Here within these liminal walls, where nobody belongs, not even you.
“I don’t know,” you scream.
In the dead of night, with the mouths bracketing your mouth scarred shut and unbleeding, for the first time in your life and in your death, you scream.
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