Multiplicity.
I take the mail from the mailbox every day I return home, before I take out the key, before the door unlocks. I say it in passive, as I nearly always never realize it was me doing it. But it was me all along. Of course, I live all alone. And the neighbour smiles and asks hello did you have a good day? and I say yes of course and did you? and she smiles again, nods vigorously and says yes yes indeed. Then I go inside.
Her mouth which reminds me of a zipped-up bag hiding rotting fruit twists itself into socially-acceptable shapes.
She doesn’t know, just like I don’t know her, her life, her children, and her unspeakable acts with her husband that creeps through my wooden door at night, filling the blackened room with her Amazonian screams and mad pounding. She does not know, that I lower my head each moment I step out into the light, but each night the darkness brings them, like fire burning in the black, back, alive.
The roof covers me, and I howl with the anger of a thousand buried personalities. I say nothing, the sort of speech I am capable of producing, and am used to. Always. I am the caterpillar and I think someone used to be the parasitoid that made sure I would be falling apart at some point. I am Emily bleeding Rose with her ghosts.
So which one is me, I wondered idly as I step into the shower, the ones yearning to escape, or the timid, occasionally-speechless soul attempting to keep itself intact, renewing its seams every morning-light.
They are like ghosts. Chinese ghosts who cannot survive the day without a paper umbrella which to lurk and plot under, a dozen Xiao Qians, each more bloody than the next. Now, the umbrella isn’t supposed to engage in a scrimmage, or it would promptly tear its skin and bend its bones.
The water feels like ice. It is supposed to. I think I too fulfill some part in life or hell, one mould specific and large enough for my flesh to curl itself into a perfect fetal formation. And sleep, I think, but no. We do not sleep, not in this city, a city, any city. The lights are still awake, and the neighbours too. So, each one of us assumed individual souls steep in the thick silence, restless like seaweed disturbed, but restless as one body, together in a rhythm that makes up the pulsing, burning through this place.
I want.
I want to tell the person I work for to kill himself. Or I would do it myself. I want to tell him that his mocking laughter sounds like a man scraping two rocks together, that his tie is crooked and his lies are unpracticed but unnoticed, and that I murder him seven times over. (Or more. Yes possibly more.) Daily. And should he know that every time he says he wants some particular thing ‘yesterday’, my mind dreams of him? Of his pelvis bones as a cracked bowl collecting blood.
And then he laughs, and the sound scrapes at my marrow. I want his life to be mine, and then--
Who would be in a fit of giggles then?
Who's laughing now?
Then the phone rings and the thoughts get swallowed up by the drain. I reach for it with hands gleaming under the lamplight and they are locked away and angry once more, like a storm in a locker room. Hello dear, I hear someone leather-textured voice on the line, how was your day? I say Oh, fine! with a ridiculously wide smile on my face, knowing it would bleed through the electricity and sweep everything else away. He, sweetheart as he calls me and I him, knows nothing.
Inspired by Zachary Zezima, and Multiplicity by Rita Carter.
Her mouth which reminds me of a zipped-up bag hiding rotting fruit twists itself into socially-acceptable shapes.
She doesn’t know, just like I don’t know her, her life, her children, and her unspeakable acts with her husband that creeps through my wooden door at night, filling the blackened room with her Amazonian screams and mad pounding. She does not know, that I lower my head each moment I step out into the light, but each night the darkness brings them, like fire burning in the black, back, alive.
The roof covers me, and I howl with the anger of a thousand buried personalities. I say nothing, the sort of speech I am capable of producing, and am used to. Always. I am the caterpillar and I think someone used to be the parasitoid that made sure I would be falling apart at some point. I am Emily bleeding Rose with her ghosts.
So which one is me, I wondered idly as I step into the shower, the ones yearning to escape, or the timid, occasionally-speechless soul attempting to keep itself intact, renewing its seams every morning-light.
They are like ghosts. Chinese ghosts who cannot survive the day without a paper umbrella which to lurk and plot under, a dozen Xiao Qians, each more bloody than the next. Now, the umbrella isn’t supposed to engage in a scrimmage, or it would promptly tear its skin and bend its bones.
The water feels like ice. It is supposed to. I think I too fulfill some part in life or hell, one mould specific and large enough for my flesh to curl itself into a perfect fetal formation. And sleep, I think, but no. We do not sleep, not in this city, a city, any city. The lights are still awake, and the neighbours too. So, each one of us assumed individual souls steep in the thick silence, restless like seaweed disturbed, but restless as one body, together in a rhythm that makes up the pulsing, burning through this place.
I want.
I want to tell the person I work for to kill himself. Or I would do it myself. I want to tell him that his mocking laughter sounds like a man scraping two rocks together, that his tie is crooked and his lies are unpracticed but unnoticed, and that I murder him seven times over. (Or more. Yes possibly more.) Daily. And should he know that every time he says he wants some particular thing ‘yesterday’, my mind dreams of him? Of his pelvis bones as a cracked bowl collecting blood.
And then he laughs, and the sound scrapes at my marrow. I want his life to be mine, and then--
Who would be in a fit of giggles then?
Who's laughing now?
Then the phone rings and the thoughts get swallowed up by the drain. I reach for it with hands gleaming under the lamplight and they are locked away and angry once more, like a storm in a locker room. Hello dear, I hear someone leather-textured voice on the line, how was your day? I say Oh, fine! with a ridiculously wide smile on my face, knowing it would bleed through the electricity and sweep everything else away. He, sweetheart as he calls me and I him, knows nothing.
Inspired by Zachary Zezima, and Multiplicity by Rita Carter.