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You are in a corner and look down at the space between your fingers (they used to be red, always clenching, always punching; they used to be warm).
There’s cold water trading around your ankles.
(You can not look at your feet. The water is filled with black pearls, they don’t let anything go beyond.)
(Beyond the skin.)
Then you see her, reaching towards you. At first, she has your mother’s face, but at a closer look you discover it’s not your mother; it’s not even a woman, just a child. She doesn’t reach you.
The water climbs up your legs, touching your knees. Is freezing. Another round goes by, now you realize the space between your fingers is occupied with gold dust, dust that shines and moves around your fingernails and what used to be your skin.
When you look up there’s that girl again, and behind her, another one. The new girl has red hair, blue eyes and is crying, screaming. They try to get to you, but the water is too cold and the black pearls are hard and unyielding. It’s no use.
She calls you Billy.
(There used to be a name for you, beyond the blood and the illusions.)
The water is now at your chest. Will it stop its climbing? You don’t think so. It hasn’t gotten warmer and the little you could feel before is gone now. It’s eating you; everything here devours you, gifting you numbness.
(This close, the black pearls look like beetles.)
“Please, take my hand,” someone says above your head, but now you can not move your neck, you can only see the sea beetles swimming around your torso. “Please, Billy.”
“I can’t,” you tell them. Your arms are sleeping, and your legs don’t exist anymore.
“Please” someone cries.
The beetles are in your shoulders, and they’re weighing you down —they’re so heavy, how could you not notice it before?—, they are drowning you. You open your mouth to exhale, and try to look at the sky, at the crying girl floating there. Someone is screaming and it could be you, or it could be the sea devouring you. The beetles are pinching your skin and everything is so heavy. Finally your neck breaks, you hear it —sounds like a wooden crack, feels like bone splitting—, and when you move it your jaw falls open, fractured as well, like a puppet lacking a puppeteer.
After the first waves of pain you focus enough to see, then to feel the tears falling from above. Red and chestnut hair. Both look out of place in this somber world you have discovered yourself in. Words form in your tongue, useless and loud, and your sleepy tongue —numb, like the rest of you— awakens one last time, and in a gasp, you say her name.
“Max.”
A hand touches your forehead. Your eyes explode, the beetles consume you and the water freezes.
(Beyond this cold sea there’s a space between a giant’s fingers, where the dust floats and settles in castles. You know this because you saw it, once. They carved your name in the side of a window, below a song forgotten long ago. Then you knew you were the giant, and those fingers were yours and the throat drowning was your soul. You were in a place where no hand could reach.)
(And yet.)
“Billy!”
When you awake the first thing that you see is green. Then you search for your hands and finds them empty of golden dust, empty of numbness. Between the spaces you see red hair, and following that thread you discover blue eyes, shining with tears.
For the first time in an eternity, you cry. It’s terrifying, how the air expands your chest, which used to be filled with cold water for so long. Your sobbing sounds like a wounded animal, and it hurts when it comes out, when it breaches the world and paints it.
“Billy,” says chestnut hair, breathing loudly, like a horse running and wanting to finish in first place. Her nose is bleeding, and you feel it inside your bones.
(Her blood, your soul; an invisible thread pulled through.)
You look at your hands again: they are red and clenching. They are warm.
(She reached you.)