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When I was younger, I used to have dreams of my mother's funeral. Night terrors I'd wake up sweating from, certain it’d already happened. I was aware of it in the distant way children are; in unlocked imagination as an untouchable concept until it was close enough to grasp.  

In these dreams, mourners’ chins hung heavy, heads bent in rows, seated in plastic chairs, as if they were the only ones grieving. Clusters of delicate baby’s breath, soft exhalations in the air; violet orchids, more beautiful inside than out; roses, reaching out despite the pain they caused. The fragrance of flowers carried on the wind along with a chorus of voices, a collective grief that rose like smoke. The scene unfolded in an outdoor pavilion surrounded by vibrant bushes and a white gazebo. It was peaceful, if one could call the aftermath of a mother’s death peaceful—filled with whispered prayers and a haze of detached emotion. A speech delivered by a clinical preacher whose words were muffled and indistinct, avoiding eye contact with those who truly knew her. Rows of familiar, unfamiliar, and somewhat familiar faces, their mouths turned down and eyes hollow. They appeared solid yet fuzzy, static figures with barely functioning limbs distorted into outlines of relatives. 

Blurred vignettes of her passing played out like the memory she’d already become, as painless as the God she believed in thought fit. Why it was up to Him, I was too angry to question, but if the He she worshipped were real, He would grant this ending as a show of faith—not for her, but for me, who was, is, skeptical and faithless. 

I wanted it to be easy, just this once. I wanted the universe to be kinder to her than it had ever been. Hadn't it taken enough? Hadn't she given enough? Hadn’t we? When she went, she’d do so quickly, so she didn't have to suffer, and the warm celebration following would make up for the cold expanse her bones left behind. It would be painful, but beautiful; like having her as a mother; like being the daughter she wanted; like reconciling this horrible truth before witnessing it. 

I wish it started like that.  

Instead it started like this: 

I was pulled out of school that day, without warning, the first indication that something was wrong. We never did anything without a plan, thanks to my stepmother's obsessive tendencies. We weren’t the kind of family that thrived on spontaneity or reunions. Our love was built on half-hearted insults and poorly timed jokes. We laughed too loudly at family gatherings and pretended we weren't bothered when tragedy struck. Emotions, sincerity, genuinity didn’t fit into our agenda. That was indication number two: Dad’s rare quietness, my stepmother’s solemn face, a seismic shift in our dynamic. 

The shaking of my foundation was reflected in my sister’s tear tracks and etched into my brother’s tired frame. Nausea churned in my stomach before I even realized why. 

The silent ride home. We were sat down on the old, evergreen couch that wrapped around the living room. Pinched eyebrows, folded hands, the pensive, We need to talk. I've grown familiar with this routine by now; when the family dog died; when the divorced was announced; when my uncle landed himself in prison; anytime a size-eight Earthquake struck and something capital-S Serious happened. These moments were no time for joking, a rarity in our house where everything was taken as such. 

“Your mother is in the hospital,” 

One beat, two beats, reverberating through my body. I floated before snapping back inside myself, wanting to end reality but not being able to disconnect from the weight of the moment. It kept me grounded and I dug my fingers into the holes of my jeans.  

"There was nothing they could do." 

Such carefully chosen words. I think I heard it one time in a Grey’s Anatomy episode. It was out of place in our living room.  

I was aware my mother would pass, but I didn’t understand the impact her absence would have. It was less a question of if, and more a question of when, and more a question of how I was going to survive when she was no longer here. 

December 21, 2017, wrapped its icy tendrils around my heart and squeezed, stopping it and the fantasy I imagined. The nightmares ceased, but only because they were replaced by a reality infinitely worse. 

We were loaded into the car, herded like cows, slow and unsure. Six of us crammed into the white Honda we’d had since 2013, before my brother wrecked it three times and the dents could be seen from the inside. I sat next to my sister and brother, my stepmother in the passenger seat — Malachi was always calling shotgun, much to my dismay, to my parent’s you’ll get it when you’re older, but this time he hadn’t said a word and no one brought it up. Dad drove, like always. Without normal conversation to tide us over, the tension was loud.  

Old trash crammed into the water bottle pockets of the seats and crushed underfoot. Desperation and fear crashed in my head, the music nearly muted pulsing in waves — another rarity. Probably Dad’s music, usually Dad’s music, otherwise 104.9 playing through the speakers, old rock and new rock and not-quite rock. Heat blasting until it was too warm with all those bodies and I pressed my forehead against the glass, watching my breath fog it up before dissipating again.  

We drove until the road grew unfamiliar, a long stretch of darkness that seemed endless. I was convinced we were lost, stranded in the wilderness, surrounded by the unknown, until we pulled up to a Burger King, and the illusion shattered. 

Streetlights lit up the vinyl seating and my knuckles gripping the oh-shit bar. Flickering signs illuminating the letters GER ING. The aroma of greasy fast food drifted through the driver's side windows, floating into my system and twisting with my building nausea. I wasn’t hungry and there was a headache slowly ice-picking it’s way at my temple and I was still reconciling the fact that we were going to a hospital to see my mother — there was nothing they could do, there was nothing they could do, there was nothing they could — but I knew if I didn’t eat, then the moment would suddenly become about me and I didn’t want that. So I picked something unimportant, nuggets and fries because it was small and Sprite because we weren’t allowed to have caffeinated soda. 

Then, we drove again — until we didn’t. 

Out the window, the dark sky bled watercolor onyx to navy, splattered with white stars and flickering airplanes — a backdrop to the hospital’s ominous lean, growing closer. We pulled up to a building I didn’t recognize but had been to before. The birthplace of my sister, a tiny alien baby swaddled in blood and blankets, a memory I wish I could reach as it danced at the edge of my mind. How poetic.  

“We’re here,” someone says. Too quiet for our loud, too loud for the quiet. 

This is it. 

There was nothing they could do. 

No one moved — until we did. 

Collectively, as if the pause was a silent agreement of sorts. We unloaded and made our way across the packed parking lot, past rows of idle cars and painted lines in pavement. My sister brushed her hand against my arm and I couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not, but I brushed it back. I was still waiting for someone to speak but the seal was closed tight, and I was too scared of breaking it to be the first. 

We walked in through the wooden double doors, checked in with the professionally removed nurses, searching for the right room in the endless maze of sterile air and squeaky shoes against tile. The smell of antiseptic clung to my clothes as we entered and stayed when we left. I kept my eyes on the floor, counting how many tiles we passed as we walked before I lost track and restarted — what a horrible Christmas present, why couldn’t this have happened before break so I at least could’ve missed school for this, would kids at school be able to tell that my entire world has been changed — trying to ignore the spiral pulling me all directions. 

I whispered the room number under my breath as we approached, Dad opening the door. I was momentarily frozen at the sight. 

The room was devoid of doctors but filled with strangers — faces I knew but hadn’t seen in years, from my mother’s side of the family. She would’ve appreciated it, if she could’ve seen them, though it was painted with solemn faces too heavy to pretend we weren’t united by tragedy. Hugs were exchanged, pleasantries spoken, but I didn’t hear any of it, my eyes never straying from the bed. 

My mother lay there, a soft blue sheet covering her, the steady beep of a breathing machine the only tether tying her to this Earth. Her body, unmoving except for the rise-fall-rise-fall of the manufactured breath. She was always a force — loud, charismatic, breaking down barriers with her laughter. She wasn’t supposed to be small, chest caving, eyes sunken, curls flattened. 

Here is what I think about now:  

My sister in the hospital, her face pale, sheet-white, glassy eyes, and shaky hands, an empty Benadryl bottle I forgot to take out of my pocket pressing against my thigh. In her face, my mother’s, a reflection of her entirely, including the way the fluorescent lights of the hospital room painted her in stark contrasts. 

Dad with a clip on his finger, the television playing in the background, words like emergency surgery and appendicitis bouncing around in my head. The doctors said that if I hadn’t brought him to the 24-hour clinic, he would’ve died. It would’ve been a double whammy, I joked, in that cruel way, when there’s nothing left to say after the silence. Dad and Rachel laughed, at least. The doctor didn’t. 

But then, all that came to mind was: This is it. This is it. This is it. 

She was so close, within reach if I held out my arm, but she’d never felt so far away. The older I get, the further she drifts, a life raft lost in an endless ocean, drifting, drifting, and now I’d gotten to the center. I was never the anchor she needed, and looking at her now, I wished I could’ve been stronger. 

A clog built up in my throat, my airways jammed. No air. No air. No air. Like instant death, one shot, then silence — surrounded by fake family, relying on a machine to breathe life. 

There were stories exchanged. Things I never knew about my mother but desperately wanted to. Her bleaching her hair only to have it come out orange, her endless stories, her giving up everything for her kids, including her life. These anecdotes were distant, surely not about the mother I knew who couldn’t cook for herself and who had to use a walker. 

They talked – I didn’t, mouth full of cotton, head full of fuzz – about how she would’ve loved a death as peaceful as her life. Which in hindsight, is humorous, considering the chaotic nature of it; five unplanned kids, an illness that invaded her brain, the abrupt end; but if there was one thing about my mother, it was that she loved a lot and she loved hard. The little moments in the too-big ones were what made it worth it for her and she never regretted how it turned out.  

She could’ve passed easily, like Henry Wadsworth’s two ships in the night, there then gone, a ghost on St. Mark’s until dusk’s smearing horizon. A loud entrance, a silent exit. The kind granted to the most fulfilled of souls, the kind that proved that that faithless, Godless belief I still hold could be false, the kind that it the horizon. When she goes, she’ll fade so her essence fills the air before she’s really gone. A peaceful death, a peaceful funeral, for a woman who deserved a peaceful end. 

I wish it ended like that. 

Instead it ended like this: 

A nurse coming in to inform Dad that we needed to say our goodbyes. The chord would be yanked, and then that would be it, one shot, bam you’re dead. There was no saving her, and they needed the extra bed, drunk Christmas accidents and all that. I wondered how many mothers were in the hospital at that moment, if they were any. Could we really be the only kids losing ours tonight? 

"I know it's hard to hear, but there’s not much we can do." 

There was nothing they could do. 

They’d pull the plug. She’d drain away, lifeboat crushed under the ocean, the twisted end to that Grey’s Anatomy episode. Not reality. Not my reality.  

Beep-beep-beeeep, slowing as the nurse asked, “Are you ready?” Are you ready? Are you ready to watch the only person who ever loved you without question cease to love you anymore? Are you ready for the world to end, over and over? 

There wasn’t really an answer before the cutoff, silence wrapping the room in plastic too tight to breathe through. The stillness of her absence was suddenly too real — an endless grief with no end. It stretched on and on, filling the cracks in the tile with black tar, keeping us anchored in the same spot we were when we lost her. 

Now, I’m left with nothing but fragments of unreliable memories, half-made up to comfort myself. I built her into the mother I wanted, not the mother she was, not the mother I needed. I still smell her in the sweet scent of boxed brownie mix, see her in my brother’s untamed hair, hear her when people say, You look so much like her. I carry her in the way I laugh too loudly, speak too fast. Even the parts of me I hate — I know they’re still hers, and I wouldn’t want to lose them. It would be like losing her all over again. 

The pale blue wall holds his attention at a sharp standpoint, the same smooth sight that’s been there since before he was born. The ceiling fan flickers, wavering shadows playing out a vision of his parents dancing and smearing azure paint across each other’s skin. Rolling brushes and Simon and Garfunkel and plastic on furniture, laughter ringing out. A time he doesn’t remember but aches for anyway. 

The pale blue wall holds his attention at a sharp standpoint, the same smooth sight that’s been there since before he was born. The ceiling fan flickers, wavering shadows playing out a vision of his parents dancing and smearing azure paint across each other’s skin. Rolling brushes and Simon and Garfunkel and plastic on furniture, laughter ringing out. A time he doesn’t remember but aches for anyway. 

Soccer trophies line the shelves next to school awards and a family photo. Him, Mother, Father, in their best clothing tastefully arranged on their stairs. They are all smiling, but before, what's unseeable, is that they were all arguing loud enough for the photographer to hear behind the closed door kitchen. If one squints, the premature gray hairs in Mother's hair, the hard lines of Father, and the tightness around Adam’s eyes becomes visible. Adam hates the picture.

The decorations have been standing, unchanging since forever. Besides the addition of his achievements, what Father says is the only thing worth showing off, it is a stranger’s room. Its inhabitant does not belong in it like it does not belong in the house.

He’s never considered changing it, but if he did, he'd make it less… blue. Father doesn’t like the idea. Father, I hate blue; Harhar, since when? ‘Sides, it’s a great color, an honorable color, a real man’s color. 

He’d choose purple, maybe. A dark purple. Royal or plum or hippo or —

The color of a fresh bruise. 

The darkening shade around Jackson’s eye after his fist landed in it, that smudgy sludge green, brackish mess, a bloom of violet crimson.

The sound had been sickening, a whistle of air and then skin against skin. Exhilarating adrenaline coursing through his arm as he pulled back and released before he even realized he lost control. The headspace of that awful rush of power that comes from having of a weaker thing at your mercy.

It was all kind of a blur. 

A slurred word, one too many jeered comments. A slam against the locker, hands curled into the school’s uniform collar, tight around the tie. One yank and he could’ve choked him. 

Close enough to hear his hitched breath, the soft flutter of his eyelashes. 

One hit, two hits, the spurt of vibrant blood from a crooked nose, a shouted curse, and frantic hands pulled him back. 

Only one voice registered in that panicked silence: Don’t — stop, Adam, stop. It’s not worth it, it’s not — 

More hands, more blood, more voices. White-hot anger. 

Then: Mr. Adam! Mr. Jackson! Both of you in my office. Now. Voice stern like his father. 

An acute walk of shame, every pair of eyes on him knowing what happened, waiting for the moment the hallways cleared so they could go back to spilling gossip. In the gray locker, a flicker of his reflection: narrowed, pinpoint eyes, dilated hazel to black, dark eyebrows drawn, mouth tight, a near-mirror image of Father on his worst days. All traces of Mother gone, only the cruelty of anger arranging an even crueler face.

In Jackson’s face, he saw intimate familiarity; bloody and bruised by the hands of a man too broken to love. 

When he got home, sullen silence from Mother emptying the car, reminiscent of the aftermath of stone-cold nights with too much wine and a heavy lifted arm, he didn’t dare let out a breath out of line.

Father had been rightfully pissed, but the straight of his back recalled something like pride. 

Adam spent years scouring over textbooks and bibles and handbooks, looking for a how-to on How To Be The Perfect Son, and the one time, the second time, the third time he gets into a fight, full pot of water filled with boiling rage spilling over and over and over, Father’s expression is the least concealed arrangement of pride he’s ever seen. 

Know what you did was no good, and there’re consequences to your damn actions —  spittle flying and bruises forming and bit-back groans — but if my son knows one thin’, it's howta swing one like a real man. 

I learned it from you, Dad.

The seed of rot has been planted, the roots have grown and knotted together in the dirt of his soul. Like the Apricot trees out on the lawn, blackening from the inside with a bitter swing to the ground and an unsalvageable likeness. A taste of him is already too much before he is spat out into the trash with the lid sealed shut.

It’s too late for him; one bad tree and now the entire grove is poisoned, generations of peeling bark and falling , no matter how often they prayed for redemption. Someone should uproot these trees and destroy them; someone should plow over it until it is nothing but pure again. But it’s stood here far too long thriving in its own ugly and no one has the tools to do it. It will continue to fester, diseased and alive, spreading fruitlessly to whoever dares eat what their branches bear.

Adam’s sins are intrinsic; internal; melded into the metal of his bone and sparked by his father’s hands, crafted into the perfect weapon. 

The blue laughs at him, having known this for years.

In the corner, an oil spill seeps from the creases, running down his wall and swallowing him in a black hole of darkness. The devil lives in these walls and he is staining the foundations. 

Maybe the only way to get rid of it is by praying, to baptize it free of the ever-present evil, and emerge blissfully clean. Wash his hands, rinse the blood off his knuckles, scrub these walls, and find his own.

He presses his hands together in that familiar fold, fingers laced, closing his eyes softly. Grounding, grounding.

Dear God. 

Don’t let me be him, don’t let me be him, don’t let me be him —

the sky bleeds soft baby pink with violet and denim, a cacophony of colors that blend in a quietly bold backdrop.

an old rusty watertower sits at the edge of my periphery, dark highlights like a serrated knife, a sharp contrast to the natural beauty playing behind it.

a laugh carries through the window of my friend’s car, propped feet against the dashboard covers the face of who it belongs to and it’s muffled by the cold glass, but it’s warm from the inside out. 

music fills the space left behind as i wait for her return, staring at the cracked glass tree in the reflection of the tilted side mirror, branches splayed across my reflection.

melted snow drops slow off the gray roof of an ugly sage house, crunch and dirt and wet smeared across brittle grass.

i was told i loved unnaturally and now i can’t look at the little orange construction flags peeking out from beneath hard ground without faltering.

the car is off and i can see my breath; there is leftover warmth and i bask in it, waiting but not lonely.

You leer at me from your cave of a couch, rolling smoke from your worn tobacco pouch. Old Vietnam tapes interrupt the silence, recorded from when your mother only knew violence.

You handle your treasure meticulously, gentle like you never are with me. Your prized possession, weight yours to decide, for I’m only worth something when I’m by your side. 

If I held up a mirror, you’d recoil at the reflection, eyes like hers with that same cruel inflection. Your denial hangs thick like Napalm in smoke onscreen, yellow glinting off a Great White’s teeth sheen.

There’s no rush as you circle me, hungry and slow knowing I’ll come to you with the harsh undertow. A loud boom and a voice over chaotic commotion, sounds that echo all the way out here in the ocean. I’ve crafted an island that awaits my return, a defense to a reality I can no longer discern.  Soldiers scratch SOS, flares bomb the sky, desperate to get attention from up so high. 

Predatory eye tracks me as I flinch to the ground, shoulders in, lips back, like a dog that’s been drowned. I’m a vision of you when we met years ago, before the evil you grew up with infected your ego. Your sharp fingers reach out as if a caress, a mockery of care that leaves a ruined mess. The moment you touch me, the water stains red, a wound staining waves with cruelty you've bled.

You can’t see how you are your mother; you are Napalm, you are the shark, the predator, you are Vietnam. I know how this ends, it's always the same, but the waves still pull me under as you win your game.

I would never take without asking, but you move first and I get lost all over again; you're the only one who can guide me home.

My hands move of their own accord, reaching out to the nearest safety, or maybe just as unresisting to you as ever. Palm pressing slowly against soft skin and hundreds of supernovas explode through me — but for once, I welcome the heat, relishing in the more.

I brush my thumb lightly across the milky way of your cheekbones, dark skin bleeding blush twisting into beauty undiscovered. The freckles dusting your cheeks map the dark surface with constellations, celestial cartography pointing me towards the North Star. I meet identical black holes, my gaze sucked in and swallowed, your touch cosmic. Surrendering is as easy as breathing, and since I no longer do the latter on my own, I let you do the former for me.

When we meet, it's everything I needed and didn't know I wanted. The easy way I fall into you should be a warning, but instead, I allow your gravity to pull me home.

An ache fills the space we leave behind and I'm momentarily untethered, but you don't release me. You never have, not before I'm ready. Even if you weren't holding on, I wouldn't let go. People on Earth are expecting my return and I won't get there without you there.

Outside of myself, I am but a talentless poser. My body can’t translate what I create in my head; my fingers fumble uselessly when they try to grip the plastic of a paintbrush; the lead of my pencil breaks under my harsh ministrations; pastels smear in crude color schemes when I swipe them across the page. Whatever I manage to make is disfigured and lacking, a reflection of its creator. 

My real talent hides beneath the surface, where no one else can see. When I slip into my mind is when my true dexterity reveals itself.  I put to paper physical manifestations of why I hide. Inside, I wander around larger-than-life museums fill with endless exhibits. Impeccable impressionists, magnificent masterpieces, and rows of reverent renditions display themselves in every corner. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you I created them; that I spent hours in my head composing what would rival even the greatest. 

Sometimes my fingers ache with the need to what I imagine into real life. I burst at the seams until I can make it real. My body becomes the canvas; my hands are my tools. They're only steady when I’m focused on making myself the perfect design. I’ve had years of practice. Everything you see is curated to fit the vision of the best me.

I am a sculptor of my own self, molded of carefully controlled clay. Layered to hide the foundations of my core, hiding what’s left of the person underneath. I’ve gotten good at taking out the parts that don’t fit and shaping them until I’m better than before. I smooth out my messy edges and squish myself smaller until I fit in the palms of your hands. I turn the violence I feel against myself into art. I carefully carve straight lines, staining splitting skin red until the surface is unrecognizable. I press bruises into my body, coloring it blotted purples and broken blues. I spread color until I’m beautiful enough to be wrung out and hung in my gallery, another version of me added to my collection. 

Maybe one day I will be brave enough to show you it all when I finally become a spectacle worth seeing. For now, I’ll keep them in the halls of my head, hidden from harsh critics who wouldn’t understand.

Oh, no need to be worried, I only watch you sometimes. When I’m especially lonely and the darkness that suffocates the room presses on all sides. It gets boring down here, with nothing but nothing to keep me company. I’m not technically allowed to cross over into your world, but there’s something special about you that I can’t ignore. 

Please don’t be afraid of me; my residence here is impermanent. I’m only meant to be here as long as you need me. In fact, I may even be afraid of you a little – or rather, what you can do. I imagine the day you’re no longer fueled by the fear fabricated by your feeble mind. When you forget you were ever afraid of me and I eventually fade away into cold-stone loneliness. It’s inevitable with humans, it seems. They can’t help but allow their humanity to harvest their hollow bones and allow their hearts to heal with hope. 

For now, I’ll stay where I belong, where you have no real proof of me. Beneath the hollow, weak excuse-of-a-cave that I’ve built here, curled into myself like you do when you’re asleep. Body following the curve of your spine as you make yourself impossibly smaller until I could swallow you whole. Your imagination might whisper stories of creatures and beasts that linger to kill, but you’ll never really know I’m here. I’ll be your monster under your bed, alone and invisible, as much a victim of you as you are a victim of me.

(V1) I’ve been teaching myself to fly a plane, becoming a pilot in my own head, learning to rise above the pain when my bones are filled with lead, and my teeth clatter in my brain,  I find a way to leave instead

(V2) I can see everything from this view the way my disease ripples around, infecting what it touches through. I am watching, self-bound as baneful black bleeds into blue, staining any beauty found

(CH) Sometimes I think I’m losing control, scared of being up so high. When the weights finally release my soul, I see myself crash and die. 

(V3) Only up here am I free, as my body goes through the motions, moving me mechanically, forced to fake false emotions, as a plastic pretending me.

(B) Above the clouds, seeking peace, is where I’ll finally find release. until I land my plane on the airdrome, and chase the runway all the way home 

My brain plays pieces of snapshots as if it’s all I can ask of it. Details take straining to imagine and even when I can see them in my mind’s eye, I can’t convince myself that it’s me. I see actors playing the parts of the people I love, of me, but their movements are awkward and jerky, like they aren’t ready to perform. The script is wrong and the soundtrack is off and none of it feels right.

As wrong as the scene is, part of me can’t help but find comfort in it. There’s a disconnect between me and the characters. It’s less painful to watch what happened through somebody else than to remember it for yourself.

I can almost feel the gaps in my head, the holes where I’m supposed to be filled in. They didn’t use to be there; I used to know who I was. Now things couldn’t be more different and I’m unsure of everything. How can I be a person when the longer I become one, the less I feel like one? And how much if one can I really be without something to make me me?

I miss the old me the way I miss my memories: with the longing to remember who I am and allow the security it brings. When the end of the street was the end of my world, and I thought I could find the meaning of the universe inside the cocoon of a butterfly.

Skinned knees messily bandaged with a child’s unsteady hands, the moment right before losing balance on a bicycle, the innocent pain that comes from being too naive to understand all the ways the world can hurt you. When reality’s harsh hands come knocking, most of what we thought back then was the worst back then is twisted into something sweet. Things that mattered so much to me then don’t hold as much weight now and the things that matter so much to me now didn’t hold as much weight then. I’ve grown, and with it the burden I carry.

The next moment is silent, still, absent of any suspicion that anything could be alive in the room. The one in control grins — for it is a miraculous thing to be granted this opportunity — and sets down the marker. He picks up the scalpel next to it, both the odd shade of crimson red for different reasons, satisfaction settling in him as it gleams in the Gray Room’s lighting. 

The one in control feels adrenaline from the ends of his fingertips to the heels of his feet as he makes the smooth, red line straight down the subject’s chest. The sharp edge splits the skin and opens it, and the blood immediately rushes out. He watches in morbid fascination as warm rivers of blood flow down to the dip in the stomach, rolling off the ribs with a beautiful vibrancy.

He reaches his hands into the ravine it makes, gloves stained red and blood slicking up his arm and filling the room with that repeating shlck, shlck, shlck. The predictable shiver of pleasure he always gets slithers into his brain and activates something he rarely feels, but in moments like these. He takes a deliberate breath and pulls himself back together not even a second later; he can take care of it later tonight, if he’s lucky enough to be able to remember the feeling.  

He can’t help but wrinkle his nose in disgust at the way the intestines slime together, the familiar squelching of bloody fluids. It always gets everywhere — point in case, disdainfully, as it slips from him when he tries to place it on the plastic covered counter — and the inevitability only adds to his disgust. 

He shudders. In this line of work, very few things truly disgust him. This never fails to. There’s a reason why humans aren’t his favorite subjects. Rabbits, small dogs, even raccoons — they’re the easiest to handle. Humans are… probably the worst.

Regardless, this is what The Master asks for. What The Master Wants, The Master Gets. He will carefully package every part of this precious, beautiful body, from all ten carefully pedicured toenails, to the billions of billions of strands of hair upon the subject’s head. It’s what he’s asked of him. 

Besides, he'd be lying if he said a part of him — a rather large part of him (eight inches, to be exact) — didn’t enjoy it. There was a thrill to the chase. An excitement to the cut. 

I don’t mean to doubt you, but with days spent waiting, I could’ve built my own tower. My own prison within a prison, a physical manifestation of the cage you’ve put me in. I’d stand at the only window and look down, where you’d be on the soft grass of the Earth, breathing in air from the sky. Your favorite hobby is watching me, dangling the carrot with the promise of affection, calling out to me as if you ever really considered saving me. I am helpless, entirely dependent on whether you decide you want me enough to get me out. 

You have rendered me nearly helpless with days spent waiting. I am as isolated as that princess, ignoring others’ affection in favor of your temporary attention. Standing as alone as she in the room with merely the wardrobe and endless ceiling above for company. Just as her, I have no control over my life. I handed it over to you a long time ago, foolishly tripping over my heart to place it into your hands. You wouldn’t dare give it back now. It means too much.

At least I don’t have a Mother Gothel to deal with. 

Only you. 

Only ever you. 

The thought sends a nauseating bout of dread to my stomach. Somehow, that’s not as comforting as it should be. Somehow, that’s so much worse.

Backstage, energy pushes itself to the center of attention. Anticipation hums through the air and thickens the tension, a feeling that might've been familiar if the stakes weren’t so high. Everyone is alright with nerves and excitement, the pride of showing something they’ve worked so hard on mixed with the fear of all the things that could go going wrong. 

Cast members pile themselves together in groups, laughing as loudly as they can before the house opens and they have to fall to a hushed silence. Grease foundation is smeared on their faces, counters, and brushes, highlighter and contour is being exchanged with a natural ease, people sit stock-still, hardly breathing as others help those that need it apply their makeup. 

Tech kids linger in the doorway as they eat what’s left of whatever dinner one of the mom’s brought. They fill the spaces that aren’t taken up with elaborate early-century costumes, bodies soaked in cologne, champagne, and BO, and props that need to be added to the ‘To Be Fixed’ list. 

The fast pace is familiar and you let yourself fall into the easy rhythm. You watch as they too, surrounded by people who are doing the same thing they are with the same kind of reinforced passion. They get ready for their first performance under the lights, with the smell of chalk and light background chatter. 

Opening night is officially a go. Here’s to hoping nothing too monumental happens.