Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  I missed him, I missed all of them. My heart was breaking but not quick, not like a band-aid that has to come off a cut quickly so you don't feel your skin being yanked by the adhesive. It broke slow, careful, as if it wanted to make sure it was doing the job right, breaking with perfection.

  Before I knew it, the blade was dragged across my skin, my one forearm nursing the blood coming out, the blade, angled as my father had always done it, in my other hand, the razor waiting for my decision on what to do next.

  CHAPTER 61

  I hold the razor with the dried blood, staring at myself again. Thinking about the time I had used this on myself. The path this put me on, the woman that I’m haunted by now was born on that date. I know she’s taken time to evolve, her eyes have seen darker things than what I showed her that day. She’s shown me nightmares I could never imagine, most of them I’ll never forget.

  I drove myself to do it, but she was there to nurture me. To walk me through the pain she knew I wanted to feel. That I wanted to taste because to me, in my world, nothing felt real any longer.

  My eyes wander down to the scars leftover from her time when she had control over my life. What I had given her and what she had given back to me. I had handed over something so precious and noble and she had given me something diseased and destroyed in return for that generosity.

  The blade between my fingers closes and I put it back into my pocket, saving it for some strange reason. I don't want her to win but I can feel her insistence in my head. Using the same words she’d used before to convince me to hand myself over. To give up because everything was too strong for me to get through. I wanted to fight her, but I knew this is what she did, she was the gatekeeper to the darkness inside of me that I barely knew but she was born from.

  I want out of here, out of the house, out of this memory because I can’t be in here any longer.

  I scream, at the top of my lungs. Hard enough that my throat is cut raw, my eyes pinch shut, tears swim out of them, and my stomach collapses to supply my body with enough force for the shout.

  Standing there, alone, in the house that killed my parents, in the hall that leads to their bedroom on one end, mine and my brothers on the other, I wait. My voice dies the second it leaves my mouth, no echo carries it, even with the lack of furniture downstairs, my voice sounds enclosed, trapped.

  I look down the hall, toward the room my parents shared. The room I would crawl into late at night, when I couldn't sleep, when I had nightmares, to get into bed with them, slide in between the two of them and feel safe. Protected from whatever drove me to their room in the first place. That’s where she stands now. Guarding, protecting from me getting in there.

  She stands there, hands at her side, her head leaned back, her eyes rolled somewhere in the back of her skull. I can hear the cough of moan that oozes out of her, like she’s something dead, forgotten, and abandoned. Adapted to some way of life I can’t even predict. She’s always there, having decided never to leave me. A guardian I’m stuck with because I’ve invited her in, and she’ll never forget the way to me.

  I look ahead of me, seeing the walls of the hall and feel them and wonder how she could extract memories out of me that are so real. How this PTSD is so intimate it can put me back here, and I look at her again and see she has a strength that I can't understand.

  The sound of the screaming plays again. The very sound that left me is now replaying itself inside my eardrums. Louder than the scream that I shouted, over and over again, back into me, directly into my mind.

  My hands grab at my ears again to stop the pain. To try and figure out some way to contain it. I fall off my feet, hitting the ground hard.

  I can’t hear anything but the shrieks, but I can feel the footsteps walking toward me. Deliberate and patient with each step as she gets nearer. Creeping one eye open, just barely against the percussion of sound, I can see her dead eye, a hand stained with old, antique blood coming down to me and pressing two fingers on my forehead. It’s like she’s sent acid into my mind.

  CHAPTER 62

  My eyes open, I’m on the floor but I quickly realize it’s not the floor of my old home. I’m on the lab floor. My hands and arms are tingling like they’ve been asleep for hours. I can feel the impression the floor has impressed on my cheek and temple. A moan slides out of me as my eyes open, realizing I've been asleep for some time on the ground.

  When my eyes open enough for my vision to regain some clarity, I see splatters of blood on the floor where my mouth rested. I know it came out of me, clear as if it had my name embossed on it. I can taste the sour, bitter metal flavors in my mouth, blood that flowed and dried against the moisture of my cheek and gums.

  For more time then I can count, I have to be careful getting to my feet, my balance is off, my vision is blurry. It takes a second to deal with the incoming headrush, that gust of blood flowing to the head faster than the mind can control the traffic.

  I’ve been on the floor so long the tile is no longer cold but rather warm from where my body heat had time to soak into it. I go to stand, finding objects to brace my balance, to hold me, something that can support my weight if all my balance decides to abandon me.

  I look at the time on the wall, the red indicators of the digital display that for some reason or another always display military time.

  I look around, unsure if that time can be accurate. The lights are off except for the ones that never turn off so the camera in the middle of the night can see if something happens since the system was never updated to infrared. It’s enough for the camera to catch precise images, all the motion that goes on after hours.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the doorway. The silver doors that connect my lab with the highway of halls on the other side. The lights are dark on the other end of the window plate.

  My eyes squint as I try to see, I think there's something moving in the shadows of the other room. Some silhouette standing there, eying what's inside the laboratory, watching the moves that I make, curious about me as I try to find if there is, in fact, someone there.

  I go to it, pressing my hand hard on the door to try and push it open but it’s locked, locked from the outside.

  I drive my shoulder into it, smack the door with my open palm, again and again, excited by the giving that it has when I drive my body weight into it but aggravated when I see that the lock prevails. It won't let me out, I'm stuck in here.

  My breath heaves inside my chest. Large gusts of wind fall out of me as I try and recover the breath that I lost exerting myself trying to push my weight through a steel deadbolt.

  My hand goes to my temple massaging away the headache that’s brewing in the depths of my mind, threatening to come forward at a time when I could really use a break.

  I catch sight of the security cameras—the room being consumed by the series of lenses scattered throughout the lab.

  My arms wave high over my head, drastically fanning around me to grab someone's attention. I've seen the security station, there are men there, posted overnight

  I let out a scream, hoping that if they see me that they can hear me, too. That something brings them to me. To get me out of the room I’m locked into.

  CHAPTER 63

  I give up after a few minutes. There’s no light that goes off, no one comes to my aid letting me out of the lab. Tears are spilling down my eyes, my mind is in a panic, and I don’t know how to calm it down any longer.

  Quickly, I look around at anything I can use to get me out of this room. Stepping over to the phone, I lift it to hear nothing back on the other end, the line is dead despite the receiver being still hooked directly into the wall.

  “Please,” I say as I put it back down on the receiver and pick it up again, hoping for some difference. Hoping to hear that dull tone yell back at me. I slam the phone down when I don’t hear it.

  I rub at my hair and my face, trying to keep the sweat and the tears from distracting me. I have to think, think of anything that can get m
e out of here.

  Turning, I look at the room, taking the entire scene at large at once, to see if there is anything I can use. My eye catches a fire ax, buried behind a sheet of breakaway glass that I push my elbow through splintering the plastic glass that covers it. Unhinging the ax off the mount that props it to the wall, I slide my hands against its handle, balancing the weight in my tired fingers.

  I look at it up and down, feel the weight press down on me as I try to imagine that it can break through a solid steel deadbolt. Cleaning the bar in my hands, I walk it over to the door and line up the head of the ax with how I prepare to swing it. Trusting the weight and what strength is left in my arms.

  Thrusting the ax backward, its weight tries to drag me away with it, but I stop it and push the weight of the momentum back down on the door plating. The steel sparks as it's hit with a dull metal that dents the door but does nothing for the deadbolt or to break it so I can set myself free. Get out of here to anywhere.

  Eventually, the blade slides out of my hands. My palms are bleeding, callused, torn from the friction of the wood against delicate skin. My arms feel like they weigh a thousand pounds, and I can’t close my hands while the throbbing pain runs through my fingers.

  I’m out of breath, laying there against the wall. Moans slip out of me, desperate sounds of a woman who’s realized that something is wrong beyond what she can control. That my mind is so lost that she may not get it back.

  “I’m not a survivor,” she told herself, thinking of all those words and poems that she was supposed to remember. The lyrics that were meant to help me with the grief, assist me when it all got too complicated for me. When my moments of strength had vanished, when the depression came back.

  I almost want her to find me. That shell of the woman I was—to be inside this room with me. To know that I’m here and I have nowhere to go. Have her come back and reclaim what she’s always wanted. A body to fit inside, a life to ruin, something pure that she can destroy at will because the woman that she holds simply doesn’t care anymore. That’s what she’s been after. My mind projects her there for me because it knows of all the paths that I could take, there is only one that I want. The path that leads to me giving up, the one that tells me I don’t have a choice any longer.

  I think about all the effort I've put in, what I'm willing to part with because my faith and my strength have evaporated. I know there are no more reasons to fight. This ugliness inside of me has prevailed against all the odds I've stacked against it, without trying, without even really knowing it was in a fight.

  I look up and see her, in the shadows of the far side of the room. I don’t smile, I don’t frown, but rather I accept whatever this is, I can deal with whatever resolution comes out of this. “Come and get me,” I tell her. “Please.”

  CHAPTER 64

  It’s not her I see in the shadows. My eyes had played a trick on me. I know it’s not her because the second the figure steps back into the light, I see it’s my father walking toward me.

  My heart skips and then jumps, and I’m excited to see him. The depression for a moment doesn’t slide away but rather recoils for a time, giving me a chance to understand and explore whatever emotions I have left. Whichever ones decided to not leave me just yet.

  His face is put together, he wears what he wore to work every day, a flannel shirt, blue jeans, construction boots. He hasn't put on his belt just yet, his clothes are still in a good shape, clean and free of whatever they'll inherit throughout the day on the job site. The wood chips and sawdust that make me sneeze when he would come home, and I would hug him.

  He smiles at me, I smile back. I'm at a loss for words because I just don't know what to say. It's been years since I've seen him, the last time he said his goodbyes to me, even at that age, I knew that he had saved my life.

  For a long time, I thought about what that man might've done to me if I was the last one left alive in that house. A man in search of drugs will do almost anything when they're desperate. They forget the basic rules of humanity. They follow their own rules and listen to the justice of their hunger.

  When my daddy killed him, he saved my life, the tradeoff was that I would have to live the rest of my life alone. I was okay with that because I knew what he had done, for a time I believed that. That I could be okay with a decision that was made with no notice and through pure reflex and adrenaline. That I could trust his intuition, when in reality, I hated him for it. If he was smarter, if he had acted quicker, I might still have one or two people left instead of nothing. Instead of being alone. Living life in isolation from anything happy or giving.

  "Hey, Princess," he says to me. He hasn't called me that since I was a child, since he was alive.

  He scoots down next to me and puts a heavy arm around me, sliding his arm across the back of my neck and pulling me close to him to hug me. I want to feel a connection, but I don't. I don’t know if whatever it was has dried up, or there is no reason for it to be there. It’s like I’m next to an inanimate object, something that has no value in my heart whatsoever.

  "Hey, daddy," I say back to him, looking into his eyes, studying what looks he gives back to me. Trying to find the humanity in his gaze, trying to find something to make me believe that this has really happened. My mind is so broken, it's taking this at face value. It's ignoring my pleas that this is some illusion, that my mind is trying to force me to realize how bad a shape it’s really in. That the tightrope I've been walking through life is finally starting to fray on the other end.

  CHAPTER 65

  Despite what I try to see in him, buried in the eyes of a man who I thought I lost years ago, I realize that there is more there. Signals coming from him that I don't want to read, inflections that dance over his features. I see that he’s judging me, judging who I am, judging what I’ve become.

  I ignore it, for the sake of how this can remedy me, hoping this conversation, whatever it may be, a truth, a trick of my mind, a play that my depression is trying to make me whole so it can rip me apart again. I’m not certain that I care at all.

  “Why have you done this?” he says to me, looking down at my arms, his finger tracing the lines on my skin. “Why did you ruin yourself?” he asks me.

  I’m not sure how to respond. I don’t want to think about that. Not while he’s here next to me. I want my thoughts pure, not tarnished like bringing those memories back would do.

  For a second I look around the room and think she has to be looking at me. Lurking somewhere in the shadows watching and feeling what this is doing to me. Tasting my sanity as it drips down below the bowl that’s supposed to hold it in place. Watching me as I unravel the protections I've found myself with, to survive something so deep and twisted that part of me believes I never should've made it out.

  “I had to, daddy,” I tell him, words I don’t want to use but words that come out all the same.

  “I didn’t save your life for you to fuck it up,” he says, his voice is stern, serious, the one that he used when he was grounding me or my brother. I look up at him, see the ice in his eyes and the thin pursed lips that he took on when he was angry.

  “It was hard living without any of you,” I plead to him, forcing a memory to try and understand. I’m not convinced he’s real, he’s some figment, some puppet of my depression.

  “You could’ve killed yourself. You cut too deep, the wrong direction, the wrong angle, you’d bleed out before anyone got there to stop it.”

  I look at him, my eyes are soft, tears are building in them and I know they’re going to collapse given enough time. He’s holding me like I’m his little girl again, the last time that we laid eyes on one another, that’s exactly what I was. I wasn’t this grieved woman, destroyed by a past that had happened. I was a little girl with an entire future ahead of her, bright and open before all those doors closed in my face.

  Again, he traces the lines on me, his calloused fingers riding along the raised flesh of the ridges that I’ve carved into myself ove
r the years and as he does, I see the seams splitting again. Tearing open at the gentlest touch of his harsh fingertip. “You see, honey,” he says to me. “If you can’t stop it, it’ll kill you before you have a chance to change your mind.”

  “What if I didn’t want to?” I ask him.

  CHAPTER 66

  My dad looks at me again, not with confusion or with disdain, but with caution, as if I’ve said something he wants to hear, but he’s not entirely sure that I said it. It’s almost like pride that flutters in his eyes as his fingers keep drawing lines into me, staining his fingers with what comes out after his touch passes over my skin.

  “You’d want to end it?” he asks me, a smile doesn’t quite form on his face, it’s more of a grin, passive but charming as his lips flutter.

  “I thought about it a lot, that I couldn't lose these memories, no matter how hard I tried to.”

  “They are strong, they won’t just disappear because you want them to.”

  “I know,” I agree with him.

  “You did the right thing. You have to cut them out of you,” he says to me while he leans in and kisses me on my forehead. A soft, gentle kiss, the same one he used to use to kiss me goodnight when it was my bedtime. He’d sit there, at the edge of my bed and pull the covers up to my chin making sure he checked for monsters, making sure my feet are hidden in sheet and blanket. Then he would kiss me.

  I look down at the pool of blood that’s there, that’s formed, that’s still falling over me, onto him, onto me, dressing both of us with this shimmering red. I can see my skin losing tone, becoming paler than it was before. I can feel dizzy, my stomach is starting to ache, my body is already fighting, trying desperately to save a woman that isn’t entirely sure that she wants to live.

  “Why don’t you do it baby?” he asks me.

  “Do what daddy?”

  “Finish it off,” he says, his hand reaches into my lab coat, tarnished with old blood and new soaking into its starched fabric. He pulls out the single edge blade I took from his bathroom. That I had snatched from a dream. The object that shouldn’t exist.