Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Psychological,
Fantasy,
Contemporary,
Horror,
Women,
Female friendship,
Alabama,
Witnesses,
Schizophrenics,
Abandoned houses,
Birmingham (Ala.)
déjà vu freeze-frame collision of then and now and the singer’s insinuating, dulcet-gentle voice.
We dream of a ship that sails away…
It isn’t real, Nicolan. It isn’t anything that can ever hurt you.
…a thousand miles away.
And a flash of pain through her right hand, spike-steel sharp and electric bright across her stiff and swollen palm, dividing fivefold and racing itself swiftly towards the tips of her cramping fingers. Niki cried out and dropped the mug. It bounced off the table, dumping hot coffee in her lap before it hit the floor and shattered. She tried to stand, but a fresh wave of pain clenched her hand into a tight fist, and she almost slipped on the wet floor, ceramic shards of the broken cup crunching beneath her boots, and she sat right back down again.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” someone asked. “Are you sick or something?” Someone male who sounded scared and confused, and Niki peered out through her watering eyes at a skinny boy with a shaved head and a ring in his lower lip.
…we dream of a ship that sails away…
“My hand, ” she gasped, but her voice too small, breathless, lost in the white fire searing its way greedily up her arm, and the stupid, baffled expression on his face all she needed to know that the boy didn’t understand. Wasting her time because he would never possibly understand any of it, and so she got to her feet again, shoved roughly past him, past other tables and other people. All of them looking at her now, sly and knowing glances from beady, dark eyes, suspicious scowls, and Niki tried desperately to think through the alternating waves of pain and nausea, lightheaded and sick and only trying to remember where the hell the restroom was hidden.
And someone pointed the way, finally, though she didn’t remember asking them, and she stumbled past the counter and down the long hallway, past cardboard boxes of to-go cups and plastic spoons. What if someone’s in there, she thought, but the door was open, the doorknob loose and jiggly in her hand, and she locked it behind her.
…a thousand miles away.
The restroom was hardly even as large as a closet and smelled like disinfectant and mildew, shit and drying urine, and everything too stark in the green-white fluorescent light, too perfectly defined. Niki leaned over the tiny rust-stained sink and twisted the handle marked H , but cold water gushed from the faucet, and there wasn’t time to wait for it to decide to get warm someday. She gritted her teeth, held her hand under the icy water, and stared back at herself from the scratched and streaky mirror hung above the sink.
Her own face in there but almost unrecognizable, pale and sweat-slick junky’s face, puffy, bloodshot eyes and black hair tangled like a rat’s matted nest, and she couldn’t remember if she’d brushed it before leaving the house. That face could belong to almost anyone, anyone lost and insane, anyone damned. Her hand throbbed, and Niki shut off the tap.
“You should have listened to me,” the dead boy behind her admonished, Danny watching her in the mirror. “It’s probably too late now. It’s probably in your blood by now.”
“It’s killing me,” she said, whimpered, and the center of the welt had gone the color of vanilla custard, the fat pustule surrounded by skin so dark it looked as if it had already begun to decay.
“No,” he said. “It won’t kill you. If you’re dead, you’re no good to anyone. This will be worse than dying, Niki.”
Then something seemed to move inside the welt, something larval coiling and uncoiling in its amniotic rot, and the pain doubled and she screamed.
“Shhhhh,” the dead boy hissed and held one cautious finger to his lips. “Hold it down or they’ll hear you, Niki. And then they’ll come to find out what’s wrong in here, and they’ll all see what’s happening to you.”
“Fuck,” she grunted, and spittle flew from her lips and speckled the brown walls, the lower half of the
Connie Willis
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