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I feel the sun splitting bright rectangles of spoiled light across the wet floor, tiles damp with crimson. A stain never to be washed away, neither the lies. I see dolls lined in every color, every row, watching me with their sickly pale eyes. Spiderwebs in the corners, adorning every line of tensed shapes with silver chantilly laces of wear. But no spiders to call them home–the varnish here is stained with a deep burrowing sorrow that remains as quiet as one gets once the warmth drains out of their throats, the geography here is confusing to say the least.
I can also fear, feel, the sun burrowing down on me, God’s eyes awatching, awatching, awatching me. I can almost hear the clock, the hands on them practically torn apart–but still beating with it’s own heartbeat, eyes lingering on the gaze of the hands. My own beginning to move without much use. A song for the dead.
I stand, awaiting, awaiting, awaiting again. Once more, I stand awaiting, awaiting, awaiting father’s return. And so I stand, is he real? Is he even coming back? Oh, well hard to say now. But even so, why does he remain a mystery, a shadow of silky strands of ink–falling into the tear tracks beneath my wide doe eyes.
Flames reflecting through my lens, a burning radiant hue of smoky red and orange. As my legs are tangled in ashes, as I await, I await again. I fear–I feel–all of the weight of it coming down on me as I struggle to move forward, hands curling at my sides, black inky hair afalling, down my shoulders. I sense another presence. So I move.
I walk, I walk, I walk again, looping through old varnished rooms of stained yellow–a deep faded color ripped from the walls, the covers on the beds strangled as if someone fought out of them. Some missing sheets completely while others have red blooming in the grooves of their tongue.
Pooling blood, becoming darker with time, a russet brown staring back at me through my mirror as I wander into another room. I fear–I feel that presence once more as I open the door, hand locked onto the doorknob unable to move any further in as I struggle to comprehend what I am staring back at, eyes awide and glowing with an odd green.
I step back out with all the sense of slowness I could muster, closing the door shut not with my hands but with the metaphorical sense as–with my eyes as well, internalizingly forgetting that moment as I inhale a deep breath, dragging it through my lungs like burning water as I walk onwards through the sickly halls.
Sterile scent, sterile footfalls, sterile hands, I recall.
Doesn’t matter now, as I keep my eyes on the lanterns hung high upon the left and right of the walls, the walls here an ugly red, deep and violent with it’s expression, doors ajar and wide, a parallel to my own lens. So I continue on.
And there within the back left far corner, stands a crooked tall man. His smile off center and off putting, in a vile uncanny way. I can hear the thudding rhythm of his heart, a tiny monstrous sound that bounces off of the ruins of the hallway walls–I can hear that split crack of his neck rotating into a tilt as his shadowless eyes land onto me, mine wide as the sun–his wide as the moon.
Now I can feel it, that sudden pulse, not within my heart but behind my eyes, at the back of my teeth, in my gums, and in the warmth of my fingertips–
The walls breath inwards, I swear they do.
A slow contracting motion that begins to move with a dizzying motion, the wallpaper already chipped and painted an ugly color begins to tighten tautly like wet skin against pulled bones. Lanterlights flickering and spasming with an violent motion, the light sliding cooly against his taut flesh. Of what I could make of it, at least.
I fear–feel that this may be it, in the same moment I don’t feel the terrible vacancy of fear but rather the terrible vacany of anticipation ahead of me as my soles drag like angry weighted things against sickly sticky flesh upon the ground, as I turn my head–bowing it and peering down at the pink gummy like texture I’ve been wandering about the whole time.
Making me almost gag, as though something was attempting to cut through my innermost softness into something sharp and dulled, an aching bit of longing deep within my orbs–the lens a wet sickly thing.
He moves, and I look quick, up, a sudden swift bit of shiftment that causes me to fixate on him even more, with sudden focus. I fear that at this rate there is nothing else I could say to him, not that I had even said anything to him at all–but within this ugly truth sits the bear fact that within everything that has happened so far I fear that this could just but be my destiny, because why else would I be here? In this ruin of a hallway? In this mess of a mansion?
And with that moment a onset of a lingering thought reoccurs once more, one I kept ignoring and pleaing to forget with my life through the whole time, this had been.
Run–it whispers curtly,
Run–it screams in wails,
Run–It says in a cacophony of noise.
Run I say, with a voice so small it hurts.
Run.
But another thing–
But another quieter much more calmer thing remains here,
A rooted thing.
Another quieter thing–
Keeps me rooted here with dreadful curiosity.
Because I swear that I know him.
I knew him, I thought.
I must have, right?
Why else would I be here, even now, after this all?
Why?
I don’t know anymore, I can’t find the equation or the answer to the geography of this wondering, or the feverish pitch that remains high and steady no matter how much I fail to stay still.
Or maybe, I knew him once.
Maybe.
Something familiar hangs from his rotted body–his silhouette–like old clothing refusing to rot away.
Father?
The thought enters through my bloodstream, violently. Not spoken, nor was it breathed in, through the lungs of mine, it was but implanted. Implanted strangely into the vacant hollow carving of my heart, right where the blood pumps aggressively with adreniline and fear.
Father.
He’s back.
Father.
-M.