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"My sister is dead."
Maya's breath hitches on her words, as if trying to hold on to something out of her reach; ground itself, prove its own existence. Her throat is dry but passing by the room with Mia's body to get to the kitchen felt too obscure to even consider.
She runs her tongue over the roof of her mouth, caressing the teeth marks embedded softly in her flesh. The feeling of blood slowly brushing up against her gum like a river after rain, drenching the horizon around it in its own skin, is unmistakable to her. The salty — or sour? — taste has been taken from her, eclipsed by the fact that no one was there to tell her that she should be more careful or she's going to hurt herself.
That Mia isn't there.
If she were alive, she would laugh a bit — refurbish the situation into a running gag, an inside joke — and get Maya a glass of water, but somehow it feels like her tongue will never stop bleeding unless she stops it herself. The river will never stop flowing unless she blocks the current, and Maya will never move on until she is able to walk past the room where Mia died without a single doubt. To sleep in the bed that used to belong to Mia and not feel guilty as if she were an imposter. An intruder interrupting a room that never speaks.
On instinct, Maya turns around, staring over and over at the room back and forth until her head spins and a bout of nausea springs into her system, looking for a person she once knew — in case. Looking for Mia to tell her that they are either both dead or both alive, scouring for a memory of a sister who isn't dead. Searching for a contradiction, a mistake in the evidence.
Looking for a dream.
Once she finds that only her and the tender spirit of her sister's death are in the room, her bloodhound eyes finally settle and she's forced to face something she can't see, but Maya opposes. She chooses to face something she can see instead — the walls.
The walls have ears and eyes that catch onto things as quickly as fleas catching onto a muddy coat of fur on a dirty pet; something deathly putrid and putridly dead is sifting in the air, stewing and boiling over like a pot over the stove. Something ominous is there, and it bears Mia's spirit, wearing Maya's shoes and standing on Maya's bones aptly, like an unwanted house-guest. Not her spirit, but something adjacent or opposite.
If she were alive, Mia would have noticed it — they shared that innate ability to see what was invisible, hear what had never been spoken; touch and cut themselves on the fuzzy edges of spirituality. Naturally, she would open a window to freshen the room up, or offer to go on a walk with her sister to clear their heads of the bad energy. Maya doesn't have the energy to get up — her arms are reaching up for the window handle but her nerves are idle.
The walls. They're painted dark purple, over Mia's old choice of a pale blue — they personalised the place together when Mia first began renting it, and Maya's hideous brushwork has been painted over since — and next to the cracks in the plaster lie little specks of Mia's room smothered over what is now Maya's. It's purple over blue. Purple over blue. Maya over Mia. An unwilling hand covering a screaming mouth. Death over life. On top of that, a few stray torn pieces of floral wallpaper are nuzzled into the skirting board, from the owner before her sister.
If she were alive, Mia would obsess over ripping them out completely (despite Maya objecting, "No one notices that stuff anyway! Besides, if you just tuck it in, then no one can even see it!"). The things that bothered Mia only ever bothered Maya when she died and suddenly, the floral wallpaper was crawling all over the walls like a viral, itchy disease. Suddenly, the few little scraps of innocent paper with tulips and bluebells and chrysanthemums adorned charmingly in their final, watercolour form, needed to be burned without a shred of mercy, and without a shred of paper left behind.
Suddenly, the tulips' sticky shade of magenta was too reminiscent to red to bear, and that only made her think of Mia, slumped oddly against the wall, surrounded by a thick meadow of dark red tulips dripping from her scalp. Bluebells taunted her by memory, too, because of the day Mia received a wondrous bouquet from her boyfriend, and Maya received a voicemail that stretched out to six minutes of her describing the flowers — back when Maya lived in the village, and Mia lived in the city. Chrysanthemums liked to grow near Kurain when autumn arose, and waking up in mid-September to play in the flowers with her sister was a tradition that still clung strangely to her, as if she would wake up in Fey Manor every time the season changed to red and orange and be welcomed by a sea of chrysanthemums.
if she were alive, the chrysanthemums would wrap them up in an embrace and the petals would stroke their soft skin and they would roll around in the grass again and forget death, because no one could die as long as they were laying in their autumn ritual.
The chrysanthemums bloomed a week after she died.
Suddenly the walls were not purple, but blue, Mia's first choice — and viral at that, and covered in red tulips pouring from Mia's rotten corpse, and suddenly leaning on the wall was the bouquet that Maya imagined and wished that she would ever get, with bluebells peeking out shyly from the silky paper that blanketed the flowers, that Mia was so proud about. Suddenly, the window on the wall showed their hometown in Mia's favourite season, and the gorgeous chrysanthemums blossoming from the grass that Mia would never see.
Everything was sudden. Mia had died — what was it? — a little less than a month ago, and every second that Maya remembered a new thing about her sister was another second that she was forgetting, that she was falling backwards into Spring's chrysanthemums with no one there to lie with. Everything was sudden around her and yet she stayed still, as if Mia's death set the world into overdrive, and everything would pass by and leave Maya stuck in the memories of four minute voicemails and her sister's dead body just a few metres below her.
And everyone was standing on top of Mia's bones, and swimming in Mia's blood, and breathing the air she wasn't breathing anymore. Maya was still getting her slipper caught on the loose floorboard that Mia always complained about. The door still shrieks when opened like when Maya was sleeping on the couch of the office, and whenever Mia would wake up in the middle of the night, it would wake her up to. Her bedroom would always be the room Mia slept in, and the office would always be the place Mia died in.
If she were alive—
She's dead.
"Oh."