CANDLELIGHT.

that’s all it takes.

she studies ghosts and one day she will hunt them down professionally. she knows a lot about this. thesis; there are dead people all around us. anti-thesis; they were once alive.

the truth; we are all just in a perpetual state of dying.

so there’s no point of beating around the bush for her. even here, especially here, the air is ripe with the familiar scent of rot and realization. you can’t cover that up with bleach. it soaks into the crevices and corners, and it remains as a memento mori until the inevitable. you just have to try your best in the mean time.

is that cynical? probably. she takes a sip from her coffee and wonders if it finally cooled or she just lost the ability to tell otherwise. simultaneously, she is there and not there, a human and an apparition, a long-limb specter body looking at him with glowing, reflective eyes. 

“that’s not how favors work.” she notes, dully, carving a loose finger into the rip of her jeans and picking at her skin. she likes the way her nail bites into the flesh. memento mori.

she doesn’t mind putting price-tags on people. society has always been very particular about the worth of individuals, and she likes the excuse that she’s just the product of something bigger and beyond her. “gonna let me know--” she slurs, smiling, drawing circles into her thigh, “how are you gonna let me know, huh?”

“you owe me one, i’ll remember that.”

she doesn’t know what to offer back to him. she’s always been a bare-bones girl, dangling on the edge of things. momma used to say you shouldn’t trust people who don’t smile with their eyes, but she inevitably felt like that notion was too broad to be of any protection. more dangerous, she thought, were the people who could look death in the face and stand still.

there’s one of them at every funeral. she would know.

she chews on her lip, and when that starts feeling raw through the general numbness, she chews on the end of her little plastic cup. “i’m sorry,” she says, finally, looking down at their reflection on the floor. she hopes she sounded like she meant it, but she didn’t, really, and she has a feeling that he wouldn’t care either way.

there’s something left unsaid. she keeps looking at their reflection. his back seems sharp and tight and straight next to the curled up frame of her dainty silhouette. “i hope it’s quick. you know? that he doesn’t have to suffer.” she means that one.

he can pretend not to notice the swelling under the sleeve of her backwards shirt. pretending is not a problem for him.

people like him put her on edge. unmemorable, handsome faces that act needlessly kind always have something to hide. that’s okay. she’s not there to pry under surfaces. she just wants her coffee, and maybe a few more minutes to enjoy the way he talks to her.

after all, she has her own secrets to guard.

her chuckle when he closes his fist comes in the graceless form of a half-snort she tries to play off with a certain level of nonchalance she doesn’t truly possess. her body feels itchy with the serge of last-resort energy that settles at the pit of her stomach when she sways to rest her back against the cool of the display. she bounces her leg impatiently.

beside her, he moves too close. she bumps shoulders with him, listening to the pathetic churns of the machine. “thanks. owe you one.”

his face looks overexposed in this light. she struggles to form a single image and settles for dragging her eyes over selective parts; brows, eyes, nose, mouth. all familiar in a distant way. she licks her cracked lips and bends down to pick up the plastic cup with her left hand, curling the other one in the depths of her empty pockets.

his question sounds harmlessly ambiguous, more of an invite to a conversation than anything else . “something like that,” she says, purposefully vague, arbitrarily blowing on the surface. it’s evident he’s in a much better shape than she is even to her.

they smell like bleach. she thinks a lot about that. bleach and pills and hard lights that make everything seem ugly and very well defined. when she was a little girl her father used to run a dentistry office, which smelt of mint and antiseptic, but it was nothing compared to the kitchen back home.

she remembers, vaguely, momma’s hands, white and flaky. from the bleach. that’s what nari used to say. she loved bleach. hospitals remind her a lot of home in that aspect.

she feels dizzy. the part of her brain that connects logical thoughts has gone astray in the kind of way it always does after six consecutive shots and a handful of painkillers. maybe that’s an over-reaction. she can’t quite seem to remember how she got there, or why, and for a second it crosses her that maybe she’s in the toxicology, but then she wouldn’t feel dizzy, and she wouldn’t be awake.

her fingers trace over the coarse skin of her palm and tug at the seam of a bandage tightly wrapped around the length of her arm, hidden under the protection of the long sleeve of her shirt. that part of her feels numb, and she wonders if they cut the circulation off. in her mind, she could’ve asked them. she has no use for ghost limbs.

accident. she sucks in a breath. her knife had slipped from her grasp, but she knows how it must look.

she’s sober enough to comprehend when she has overstayed her welcome, but not quite to walk a completely straight line into the corridor and recall where the exit is. that’s the bad side of hospitals. everything is one giant maze of florescence and her pupils can’t really take so much of it at once. 

but she’s out, and there’s no turning back now.

does coffee sober you up, or was that just an urban myth alcoholics tell themselves to feel better? she decides she doesn’t have a problem just yet, so she might as well try. her hands are heavy and futile when she presses the colorful neon buttons of the machine with as much strength as she can muster, and come back with no response in turn.

money. right. she hears a lot of static in her ears and it’s very distracting. the pockets of her jeans feel weighted down by bricks, but when she shuffles through them it becomes apparent it was all just a false perception. it doesn’t make it better, but a hasty, muffled “shit.” does uplift her in a spiritual manner.

she just wishes -- fuck -- she just wishes the person behind her would be a bit more patient. his humming makes her eardrums blow. it’s too hot in there. the sound of metal rubbing against metal. the sound of shoes squeaking against the floor. the sound of a little girl--

he speaks. her head goes silent.