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The human body has 1.5x10^28 electrons. She doesn’t know how she knows that; it’s knowledge that just swims around in the vague nebulous memory that she tentatively calls hers.
Her memory.
Her electrons.
The pieces of atomic stardust that coalesce in the unique “she.”
And yet, as she looks at herself in the mirror and sees the she-ness, it is as foreign to her as the memory fragments that boil to the surface of her consciousness. She can feel the absence of herself, a physical departure from the fleshy housing that stands in the fluorescent light, shivering as the air con kicks on.
The humming air moves across her, pimpling her skin, which is sickly white in the half light of the toilet. Whiter still against the red hair lying in straight strands down her chest.
It looks like the blood, she thinks. And then, as swiftly as that thought comes, it is replaced by the wondering follow up, what blood?
Her mind reaches, grasping at the tendrils of the fleeing trace of she-ness that skitters back into the dark corners.
There was blood, pooling blood, slipping, spilling blood, coming out and her hands—
My hands?
My hands in the blood, of the blood, were my hands ever anything but blood?
Her chest is heaving now, breath gushing in and out, in and out, and the light in the toilet is dimming to tiny pinpricks.
Where did the blood go, where’d it all go?
Her hands grip the edge of the sink, fingers clinging, knuckles popping and she knows that any second her feet will give out beneath her and she’ll be back in that dark pool, shining blood, spilling farther out, reaching the toes of those slick black shoes…
Shoes, whose shoes?
His shoes. This “he” as nebulous as her “she,” but it’s enough to hold onto, to steady her feet beneath her and slow her breathing.
1.5x10^28. The atoms that make her are the atoms that make him and the blood between them, and if she can remember that, surely the rest will come.
There’s a knock at the toilet door, soft, but jarringly intrusive.
“Sweetling, it’s me. It’s Petyr.”