Soldier

Technically,you’re dying every day. But unlike Mary Smith, you don’t usually realize it the second you open your eyes.

Mary saw the harsh, grey stain on her pillow and it (understandably) set off alarm bells in her brain. ‘Discolored stains, especially near the face, are not often good,’ she thought, and rushed to the bathroom.

She saw herself in the mirror and saw the black substance was coming from her mouth. Only a dribble, though apparently constant enough to stain her pillow fairly badly.

So stunned was she that she didn’t realize her mother was pounding on the door until she burse and wielding a frying pan, ready to bash Mary’s head in.

“Mary, what in God’s name is wrong with you? You KNOW I have to be at work by eight thirty, and here you are, hogging the bathroom like a spoiled brat! What have you got to say?”

Mary waited for the sudden understanding, that thousand-yard-stare at the sight of her own daughter drooling black, oily poison and clearly close to death.

There isn’t a social protocol for these things – at least not one Mary had memorized yet – and mom and daughter stared at each other dumbly.

“MARY!” She shouted, bugging her eyes and waving her hands. “What, the HELL?”

Mary just stood there, waiting for her mother to realize something was seriously wrong with her. Seemed like the right the wait for, about now.

“Explain! Right Goddamn now!” She snapped her fingers in Mary’s face, trying to wake her out of a daze she wasn’t in.

Mary didn’t know what to do. This was the normal order for any and social situations – helplessness. Social skills were thing Mary forced herself to memorize, and eventually practice. Maybe this was just a new kind of interpersonal interaction to which she was completely uneducated. Dying, but being ignored.

Time stretched itself like a rubber band, purely to accentuate her anxiety. She got that familiar sensation, like fire-ants marching across the back of her head and neck. Her heart started to pound, her hands shook, and she started hyperventilating. This was both very typical and very unpleasant.

What was new to the usual terror that overcame her when trying to strictly adhere to the appropriate social protocol, however, was the coughing black. That seemed a good name for it, for now – blackness. It chucked up, spilling from her mouth and staining her shirt the color of the spaces between stars. She clenched her eyes shut, choked and wheezed, and waited for her heart to leap out of her chest. The Blackness seemed centered at the place her lungs met, and was probably seeping into her lungs themselves the more her mother pretended nothing was happening.

“Mary, listen, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but whatever problem you’re having does NOT give you the option to make me late for work! If I’m late for work too many times, do you know what that means? It means we get kicked out of here! Do you want that? Do you wanna end up in the streets, Mary? Get dressed, get out of here, and get to School! NOW!”

Mary knew that she ought to say something, and that there was something obviously seriously wrong with her. Maybe this was some kind of puberty thing the videos left out. Although when she started getting emotional and stomach-pained, her mother was sympathetic.

More of the blackness choked out, seeming to fight her on its way to the sink.

“Mary,” she said, becoming stern for the first time since Mary was nine, “No Excuses! You ever think maybe you’re difficult for people around you, Mary? Your problems are not everything! Get out, go to School. It’ll be easier then.”

Mary didn’t pause to ask, ‘easier for whom?’ On the order of excuses to skip School, dying seemed a good one. But since calling in ‘dying’ was not an option, Mary reacted to this problem the same way she reacted to all others: put one foot in front of the other, and hope for the best.

On the way to the bus stop, she saw the sky swell with clouds, and wondered if it would rain.

She hoped it would. Rain was very soothing, very calming. The Sun was assaultive – it hurt her eyes, gave her headaches. Even if the sky remained the same bleached white – that would be good enough. Please, God, keep the sun at bay. If only for today, keep it away. Things are bad enough as it is.

On the ride to School, Mary decided to sit next to a fat middle-schooler of indeterminable gender with a thoughtless, bovine stare. The least likely to start a conversation, she figured, and thus the least likely to cause an awkward conversation.

The cow-eyed, bulbous probably-girl-but-I’m-not-sure stared out the window placidly, not contemplating the vast expanse of dead trees and wet mud. Mary thought she saw drool at the corner of the girl’s mouth, and wondered if she was disabled in some capacity.

But no time for that. She needed to think about the substance – what was it? Was it psychological? Had the stresses of School and home and the social minefield finally taken her mind? Maybe soon she’d start seeing all kinds of things, which – if not more pleasant – would at least be a new experience.

As a tall, blonde, lithe girl walked by on slim giraffe-legs, Mary caught eyes with her. Even if she reacted in stunned, disgusted Horror, that’d be enough. Please, notice this, she thought at the girl as she advanced.

The girl gave her a predatory glance and Mary hoped and feared if the girl was noticing that something was wrong with her. She’d already wiped the black phlegm onto her sleeve, and for a second she didn’t know if her noticing her severe illness was good or bad.

“Oh my God, that bitch Mary,” the girl began to the one behind her (who would’ve been pretty if not for the pseudo-tribal makeup smeared all over her face like war paint), “Is so fucking stupid, she just sits there and stares, like some kind of fucking drug addict! It’s so, like, fucking, pathetic, or something!”

Mary didn’t know how to react, so she just looked away.

“Yeah, and she looks like she’s dying, like, some gothic emo bitch, or something!”

Their laughter echoed in her head even after they were done laughing, and she coughed up more of the black, thick substance.

“Any more” (cough, cough, cough) “of this, and I’ll need to start” (cough, cough,) “carrying around a” (cough) “handkerchief.”

More people hurled obscenities, which may or may not have been aimed at her. Teenage dialogue seemed to be almost entirely a war of curses and slander, sometimes with other combatants not even present.

Let them fight, Mary thought. I don’t have any stakes in stupid, trivial matters when I’m dying.

She coughed more of the viscous filth onto her now heavily blackening sweater-sleeve.

* * *

In Science, Mary was paired with a tall, shaggy-haired kid named Brett. He knew exactly what to do, and she didn’t. She figured that would mean he could show her what to do, and she tried to act natural. The lab project involved lots and lots of beakers, bottles, hot plates, and lots of complex names of chemicals, fluids and elements. Because Mary forgot each one instantly, and kept confusing the physical liquids and beakers with the wrong names, the tall kid became frustrated and decided to vent on her.

“Are you retarded?” He asked. “I explained to you what to do, why do you keep asking me? Do you not speak English?”

Mary stumbled and her brain sent the panic signals to her mouth, telling her to say something, anything. A vapid stare would make her seem as numb as the girl who’d sat next to her this morning. Say anything, Mary, anything is better than nothing.

She spit out stabbingly awkward gibberish, which was dozens of different kinds of worse than blank, inhuman silence.

While another pair of lab partners giggled like lunatics behind them, Brett looked at her sympathetically. It dawned on her that he pitied her.

Mary coughed again, staining her fist with the same black death as before. The girls behind her stared in bug-eyed awe, before exploding in hysterical laughter. No, Mary, we can’t cook drugs for you with the beakers. Take your meth habit somewhere else.

Brett commandeered the project while she kept her head down, talking to her like a child. Explaining things slowly. Going “We take the glass jar, like this, empty to fluids, like this…”

As the bell rang and everybody left, Mary left last. The girls waited outside for her, their eyes smeared with multicolored glittery makeup and their fish-lips painted like a deranged Taxidermist’s attempt at fashion.

As she left, Brett signaled them to stop, saying something along the lines of “Guys, c’mon now.” As she tried to speed away, she overheard them speaking about how she was ‘probably disabled’ and how she ‘couldn’t help what she was.’

Brett didn’t realize what he’d done, and the next day he’d completely forgotten it and Mary never crossed his mind again.

She left a trail of the shiny, black pollutant on her way to the bathroom, and when she got there she vomited it up in the cracked, silver sink in the bathroom.

People, including teachers and punks in baseball caps and moody Goths, all walked in and out as she emptied more and more of the substance into the sink, staining it like fake blood in a horror film.

The stench was awful. Mary felt like the smell might actually make her throw up her actual breakfast instead of whatever this black shit was.

She looked around, thick stains of onyx down the front of her shirt and dribbling out of her mouth. Her eyes pleaded, milky white and dead-fish wide. Her hands shook like thin, jittering claws.

But even though the bathroom was full of people walking and talking in and out, nobody seemed to notice her at all.

* * *

Mary sat on the red leather bench in the Nurse’s office while four other people in the waiting area kept peeking in to look at her. They all looked very angry with her. One of them, who may have been a boy or a girl or either, shrieked about how important his/her/its business was and how he/she/it needed to get asprin and get to gym class immediately. He/she/it shrieked about how they ‘could NOT believe’ that this Mary freak was holding them up for her make-believe problem.

“Mary, I’m going to talk to you like an adult. Is that okay?”

Mary hacked up another fistful of the black, some of its forcing its way through her nose and coming down in a pair of long, phlegmy strings.

“What’s the real reason you’re here?” The nurse asked.

Mary panted, feeling her lungs shrinking. Or maybe flooding. This wasn’t the typical reaction to awkwardness, this was somehow related to the metallic ink she’d been gurgitating all day.

“I’m dying, that’s my problem!” She wheezed, enough anger to fuel the sun for centuries filling her and making her stick-thin limbs tremble with fury. Even that wasn’t enough to overcome whatever illness was eating her alive, so her face did not get red and tears did not flow. “I’m sick as Hell, I keep shaking and throwing up and…” She collapsed into coughing, the oily liquid scorching her nose and possibly burning out her sense of smell forever.

“Maybe…it’s pneumonia…maybe it’s just…really thick, heavily…discolored pneumonia…” Each break in the sentence was punctuated by coughing mouthfuls of the black substance. Pneumonia was fluid flooding the lungs, so maybe that’s what this was. Pneumonia, but with oil or whatever this was.

“Mary, we both know that being a teenager is tough. I know, even if you find it hard to believe, I was one myself. I don’t know what’s really troubling you, but I’m sure it’s not that bad. Don’t you think, maybe, you’re overreacting? Just a little?”

Mary felt her stomach lurch, and her vision became blurry.

“Mary, look, I don’t know what’s wrong. But I can guarantee you, it’ll pass, alright? It’s not as bad as you think. Now get back to Class, I have other people waiting out there.”

Mary stumbled out, getting tripped by the androgynous fellow (who turned out to be a long-haired freshman with hair dyed green).

They all laughed, and she got up, stumbling away.

When there’s something seriously wrong with you, you tend not to give attention to non-material things. Like, say, the imaginary rules that chain one to school or work, or the social constructs that subcultures invent to bind each other together. Whether they are obligations or enslavements, anybody’s guess – Mary had no answer.

First thing next period, she went to an Assistant Principal she actually had a fairly decent relationship with.

The human mind – when confronted with something it cannot comprehend – either denies it or simply shuts down into numbness or insanity.

Mary’s had been the second one – numbness. It had yet to totally consume her, so she was still aware that there was an issue that needed addressing. She lurched at the foot of the stairs, looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and hacked a ropy black phlegm over the railing. The sound of quite an upset freshmen beneath her helped to move her along rather swiftly. Also, it gave her hope – if that kid noticed, then maybe somebody else would, too. If she could, she’d try to relocate that kid afterwards. Ask if he noticed the poisonous black slime in his hair.

As it happened, he didn’t. He just tried to rub it out with a napkin from the nurse’s office. Didn’t even notice that it took out a chunk of his hair. He just went on with his life, and he never once interacted with Mary.

The Assistant Principal’s office was so typical of School offices that a complete non-description would be the best description.

Mary sat down in the bland, grey chair, and the Assistant Principal asked how she was feeling.

“Mr. Kneller, I’m dying. My stomach feels like it’s dissolving, and I keep puking up this black fluid, it’s like oil or something. My nostrils burn like chlorine, I can’t smell anything. My vision keeps blurring and I can’t see very far very often. I don’t know what to do. I tried bringing it up to people, ignoring it, but nobody can seem to see it but me. Can you see it? Look.”

She held up her sweater sleeve and showed him where the coal-colored patch was.

He looked at it, raised an eyebrow.

“Hm,” he said, thinking.

Please notice, please. Somebody, figure it out, Mary thought.

“Well, that is rather alarming. Have you tried not doing that?”

Mary didn’t know how to react. Because of being emotionally numb, not because that was the single most idiotic thing anyone could’ve said at the time. But if she could feel things, she’d have quite the paradoxical mix of both anger and awe. For about ten seconds, anyways, before she started choking up more liquid night. It came in waves, and that figure of speech brought an image to mind of an ocean made of the stuff, churning without foam or reflecting the sunset or sky.

The smell was unbearable. Like a dead animal, scraped off the road and liquefied and now exploding out of her.

“Mary,” Mr. Kneller said, “I can’t pretend to know what’s bothering you. I’m just not prescient like that. But this is what I say to all my students, no matter their problems: Is there any way you can just – ignore it?”

She choked out words, each one broken by either coughing or the black stuff. “I could……ignore…you…”

It was coming out her nose now, webby and ebon.

“I mean, don’t you kids have these – what’re they called? Ipods, now? Why not just put one in your ears and not care? It’ll only hurt you if you let it, you know. The best reaction is always no reaction.”

She left, swearing at him and spitting the substance at him, painting his face with stripes he didn’t react to. Some of it even got in his eye, pooling there like tears.

Mary went to the door of the School as sixth period bell was ringing, and just walked right out. Home was twenty minutes away through the woods, but this isn’t the kind of thing that seems a problem with death is tapping you on the shoulder and pointing at his watch impatiently.

She had to stop twice to expel more of the black. It sent birds fleeing and a squirrell went up to it, sniffed it and sprinted away into a nearby river where it died instantly. Mary didn’t notice – her tongue was dry as a sandworm and her teeth felt like they were stabbing into her gums. Like they were fleeing the black whenever it came.

She got home at the same time she would have if she’d just taken the bus home, and since her Mom didn’t get home from work until 7:30, she decided to order a pizza. Pizza was her favorite food, and she since she couldn’t enjoy anything else she at least figured pizza would be a pleasant sensation.

Something to get rid of the taste of whatever was finding its way out of her system every hour or so, she figured.

* * *

Two slices of pizza lay in the garbage. One chewed into oblivion, as she’d spit out every bite after she’d chewed it. The other she forced down, wherein it presumably saw what else was inside it and climbed its way back up her throat and into the trashcan to avoid whatever nightmarish fate the fluid had in store.

She went back to her room, found her cheap futon up against the wall, and fell back against it.

She splayed, looking up at the ceiling. There was a hole there, from god knows what. Her blinds were always closed over both windows, even on grey days she liked like this one.

Her Television had another Seinfeld re-run. It was a show she’d always liked. Now, however, all the words seemed to have blended together. It became white noise, all the dialogue that kept her amused as a child now one long unbroken stretch of an annoying, bee-like buzzing, seeming to grow out of the television like a noxious poison of some kind.

She grabbed her remote and turned it off.

She reached up to the thermostat, turning the heat all the way down. She was sweating, all of the moisture in her body seeping away. She wondered if her soul was being drained with it.

Her vision failed and her room ran together like a melting painting. Television, desk, floor lamp, closet and ceiling fan all engulfed in a cold, blank whiteness.

She felt more of the black coming on, and let it out.

She didn’t even wonder why it was happening.

When she awoke, her mother was talking to her through the door. It took some time before she could make out the words. Longer than it should have, as it happens.

“Mary? What’s wrong?”

She knelt down, stroking Mary’s greasy mass of hair and holding her like a child.

Mary opened her mouth to answer, but more of the substance expelled itself from her nose and throat to answer for her. Very eager to answer, it seemed.

“Mom, I can’t breathe. I’m always shaking, I can’t eat and I’m coughing up whatever this black shit is. I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna live, I need help. Now.”

“But why?” Her mother asked, giving her an expression like one would give a wounded cat. “Why are you feeling this way? Why are you doing this? What’s wrong, Mary?”

Mary felt what little emotions she had left sink out of her body, like they’d been drained by a hypodermic needle.

“Mom, I’m sick with something. I don’t know why, I can’t stop it. Please. Take me to a doctor or something, I can’t…” She began coughing, again.

“Mary, I don’t think this is serious enough for you to go to a doctor. I mean, look at you. This would be a ridiculous reason for sending you to a doctor – besides – ” She indicated Mary’s blackened shirt and the pool of onyx besides her bed “ – that, you’re fine. Do you really think that’s a good enough reason to go see a doctor?”

Mary didn’t answer. Only coughed up more of the viscous fluid that was growing inside her and killing her.

“I’m going to have a slice of the pizza you ordered, do you mind?”

Mary would’ve said something, but her coughing and wheezing wouldn’t let her.

* * *

She’d woken up to find a tooth on her pillow. First thought? This was a mafia-esque revenge move by a tooth fairy who was angry about a poor delivery seven or so years back. She actually had stupidity powerful enough to drive her to sweep her hand under her pillow, expecting a small note with something along the lines of ‘THAT TOOTH WAS CHIPPED’ scrawled on the paper in the awkward style of a being which did not normally write with pens designed for humans. Hell, how big were tooth fairies supposed to be? A foot? Six Inches? Surely they wouldn’t be good at using pens almost as long as they were.

When she’d become aware enough of reality to stop entertaining that idiocy, she took it to her mirror and observed it. A second idiotic though emerged in her brain, and she thought that perhaps it wasn’t hers. Indeed, it ended in a point. Like an animal’s tooth, she thought. She checked her canines, the only remotely pointed teeth she had, and saw they were both there. So, clearly, this was not hers.

She only came back to cold, soulless reality when she tried to re-construct the situation that would have led to her having an animal of some kind 1) break into her room without her noticing or the evolutionary advantage of thumbs, 2) place one of its own teeth under her pillow, and 3) escaping to tell the rest of its pack that it had just pulled the sickest prank ever on one of those conceited goddamn humans who thought they were masters of the Earth. “THAT’LL TEACH THEM!” The big bag wolf howled, before presumably going off to mope about no longer having pigs to de-house and kill.

It also struck her that tooth roots were pointed, and she was holding the tooth upside down.

She finished looking at it and dropped it out of her hand. Not intentionally – her hand was just shaking and sweaty.

She looked in the mirror and saw black bags under her eyes. Her pupils were dilated and too reflective, also like an animal’s. Her lips were bright red and cracked and bleeding in three places.

She bared her teeth again, and saw that her gums were an off-bluish color.

She was losing circulation to them. That was what made the tooth fall out – poor bloodflow.

She couldn’t think. Her ears were ringing. She was shaking. She had only one coherent idea:

The light.

She needed to turn off the light in the bathroom, everywhere. It was burning her eyes like needles.

She smashed her left fist into the wall, shielding her eyes with the right. Clawing, trying to cut out that horrible, blazing glare.

After making too much noise, she took both her hands down and forced herself to stare at the blasphemous, evil brightness.

With a rasping inhuman sound, she formed a fist and pulled back her bony arm as far as it would go. Rearing. Bracing. Preparing.

In the corner, later, nursing her hand with the glass embedded into it and drooling night, she wondered how she would pay for the light bulb when her parents asked her to replace it.

No matter. It wouldn’t be a problem soon.



* * *

That Night, curled up on the floor, she dreamt of a parade of monsters. Not spectalularly ghoulish or grisly ones, but spectacularly silly ones. Like what Dr. Seuss would draw if he were given Tim Burton’s descriptions. Things on thin, striped legs, tentacles and eyes and wacky hairs and spikes and wings. Colored jarringly, clashing yellows and blacks, alarming reds and blues and eye-searing greens and whites. Some were spotted, some were striped, some were bare-skinned and others furry.

Some had collars of spikes, like frills on a lizard. Others had a line of blades down the back. Others still walked on stilt-like legs and looked around with three eyes on tentacled heads.

And each one simply passed her by, stopping to glance at her and then moving along. Some glanced down, some glanced up, as the case may be. Some extended their legs or tendrils or whatever walking organs they had to reach eye-level with her. Others craned snaky or birdlike necks.

But all of them passed her by.

When the last one – one that walked on a single leg and balanced on long fangs when lifting its foot – had passed her by, she sat there in the dark, alone and unable to see anything but the insides of her eyelids.

* * *

Her parents had contacted the School’s social worker and told him to find out whatever in God’s name was wrong with her.

He was a man in his thirties, already going bald, bearded and lithe and long-faced. He wore a clashing tie and mismatched shoes, likely in some half-assed attempt at getting kids to see him as ‘wacky’ and ‘endearing’. When you make a living condescending to people, as all too many people in the field of ‘child psychology’ do, you need to be inventive about lies.

He had only beanbag chairs in his office, so Mary chose to stand.

“So, Mary, your parents have told me that they’re concerned about you.” He said. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, I’ve told her that already. I’m not at all comfortable with this room. It looks like the playroom in a goddamn Kindergarten.”

He raised his eyebrows at her.

“Mary, don’t curse at me. You’re being hostile right now and you need to calm down.”

She reached for a tissue and stained it reddish tinge. Her nose had started bleeding along with the black. “I’m calm right now, I’m not yelling. So I don’t know what the Hell you’re talking about.”

“You’re cursing.”

“Because I’m angry. You’re making me angrier. Pretending my problems aren’t there and talking to me like I’m fucking five, I find that offensive. In fact, everybody is making me angry lately, and for some reason they can’t see why.”

His mouth was agape in mock-comic horror.

“My ears, Mary! My ears!”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Mary, you’re at an age where your brain is still developing. You’re not ready yet for the real world, and I think maybe your problem is your frustration with all the new issues of High School. Is that true?”

“No, Goddamnit!” She hissed at him. Just talking had caused her to cough up more of the reflective slime, glistening like the sea under the night sky. “I’m sad because I’m goddamn dying! Isn’t it obvious? Jesus, look at me! Look at this!”

She held up the tissue, which looked as though it had been used to crush a giant slug that had also been possessed by the devil.

He shook his head, looking at her uncomprehendingly.

“Look, Mary, are you upset because of something somebody else did? Are you being bullied? Is that it? You know, you can tell on them, and we’ll take care of it. Do you want that, Mary? Eh?”

She couldn’t answer. She was almost choking, death seeping out of her.

“When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be ready to listen. O.K?”

She shook violently, the heat seeping out of her body. Her fingers were numb.

After convulsing for about twenty minutes or so, she left without saying a word.

* * *

“Mary, you’re being a goddamn child! You’re like a toddler! And I don’t think – ”

Mary began to vomit. It came out in long, chunky streams, blood and undistilled black ooze pouring out of her. She seized the nearby trashbin and continued to expel whatever was killing her. Her Dad’s noise continued to torture her, seeming to piss off the internal pollution so much that it wanted to flee. If it wasn’t in Mary’s body, it wouldn’t have the cursing and screaming directed at it, so no matter how much she threw up – it wasn’t done.

Her mother had called in her Dad to ‘talk some sense’ into her, which was going as well as you’d expect when the senseless person is trying to do the sense-talking.

“Fine! Sit here and rot! I don’t give a damn. You wanna sprawl out and feel sorry for no reason, go ahead. I don’t care. Come back to me when you grow up.”

By the time he was done screaming, she was shaking uncontrollably. All of her senses were melting together and failing. All sounds were scratchy, static-riddled sounds like bad reception on a cell phone or a radio. Or the warbled, pseudo-demonic shrieking of a cracked record run backwards on a phonograph. All sights were moving like salmon in a stream. Darkened shapes that may or may not have been there sliding in and out of vision, around each other, taunting her. Jeering her. Laughing at her.

Mucus seeped out of her nostrils, her scent organs overpowered by the burning sulfurous smell of the filth that kept emerging. Her own smell, sweat and grease and body oils making her sick.

Her stomach lurched, as if the digestive acids were now dissolving the tissue. Herself eating herself eating herself until there would be nothing left.

* * *

In a tortured sleep that tugged and pulled at her like vultures she dreamt of going to School and seeing the other kids as Hideous Monsters. They all had leathery, shiny grey skins and lidless milk-white eyes. They gibbered and spit and hissed through jagged, red teeth set loose in black, loose gums. Their ragged, gash-like lips didn’t form any words. Some of them licked their mouths with pimpled, yellow tongues and others licked their hands, using the saliva to comb their tentacle-like hair as though they were all flies. The ‘girls’ all had jagged spikes emerging from the tips of their fingers. Some of them scratched their faces, necks or scalps, opening black and necrotic wounds that didn’t bleed.

She sat in class and a monster teacher with no hair and exposed bones gibbered and gurgled at her. When she tried to answer with English it got angier, slashing at her and spitting at her while the other monster-kids laughed like demons. It was as though everything here was a counterpart for the real world, only in this world these creatures had been given all too many aeons to be driven insane with fury and self-loathing.

They sat around, cackled, jeered. They seemed not to notice her afterwards.

When she woke up, she was drenched in sweat and her hair was ropy and stuck to her face. Her lips had dried to the point of being stone-solid. She ran to the bathroom, ran her lips under a faucet. It didn’t help. They cracked and bled in three places when she moved them.

She noticed, in the mirror, how gaunt she was. Her cheekbones were more prominent, her skin almost grey. Her eyes were becoming more and more sunken as the days wore on relentlessly.

She spat the substance into the sink and watched one of those truly horrific-looking, red centipedes with the hair-like legs go up to it. It probed with its feeling structures, dove in, and then struggled to get out.

Within a minute it was dead.

She forced herself out of the bathroom and to the fridge, where she grabbed a bottle of Seltzer. She drank it all, without stopping, and fell on the kitchen floor with her practically muscle-less legs spread out.

“To the Park,” she said to herself. “I’m going to the Park tomorrow.”

She lay down on the living room couch and did not sleep, awaiting the sun and hating the room she was in.





* * *

She got up, as was the deal every Saturday, and took a two hour shower. She tried to expulse most of the onyx poison while there, but it ended up clogging the damn drain and she just tried to toilet instead.

Downstairs, she sat at the counter and made a cup of coffee. She put in milk and sugar because the color of pure coffee disgusted her for the first time in her life.

Her mother entered in sometime later, confused by Mary’s zombie-like stare.

“Mary? Honeybuns?” She was trying the sickeningly sweet tactic now, attempting to jar whatever was wrong with her out. “You ready to tell me what’s wrong?”

Mary glared at her. She felt the substance pooling in her mouth and tried to hold it back. She realized she couldn’t and decided to spite her oblivious goddamn mother by letting it just seep through her teeth.

“Mary, you do know some people have it much worse than you do, right? There are people starving, people without houses, and people without anybody to turn to? Do you realize how lucky you are to have a house and parents who love you? Can you imagine how much worse your life could be?”

She stopped staring, put her head down. Tried to taste the coffee, failed.

“Mom,” she said. “I’m puking this shit, it’s killing me, whatever it is. Why can’t you see it? What the Hell’s wrong with you? With everybody? Nobody’s noticed it yet, but I can’t breathe. I lay there coughing and choking and nobody cares. What the Hell am I supposed to do? Tapdance? I think if I tried to move too quickly – or, Hell, even just more than one foot off the ground – I’d trip, collapse and puke up more of whatever the Hell this iron-tasting poison is!”

“You know this is childish, what you’re doing. You know that, don’t you?”

She spit in the sink, a mouthful of black oozing down into the drain and probably clogging it.

“Mary, you know I love you, right?”

Mary nodded.

“Yes, I love you too, Mom.” She sounded like a monster now, her voice dry and scratchy. Her lips broke at every word.

She put on the filthy green hoodie and well-worn black jeans and walked out the door.

At the park, the sun burned her eyes. The pine trees were a sickening green color, a shade that made her want to vomit all that she was holding back down. She drooled a little, barely noticing. Thoughtlessly shifting mucus up and down her throat. The dead trees seemed to reach into the sky to try and pull it down, which they would never do.

She sat down at a bench, the wind blowing in her direction. Ruffling her greasy hair, chilling her skin to numbness and drying her lips and eyes out even more.

Crows talked to each other in their own way, conversing and socializing madly like ravenous Star Wars Fans.

“Hey,” she heard. It came in like a dim radio station, almost totally drowned out by the scratchings and grindings of the speaker.

She didn’t react. Didn’t realize she was being spoke to – the other sounds, the wind and crows and pigeons and cars passing on the street all blurred together. A cacophony of madness, surrounding her. Devouring her.

“Hey,” the voice said again.

Mary turned.

A boy stood there, one she recognized from School. He had short, black hair maybe two inches long, frayed and uncombed. He wore a red jacket and a pair of jeans. She looked down, saw his shoes were red.

“Is red your favorite color?” She asked.

He looked at her weird, which Mary decided was fitting because she was weird.

“I just ask…because, your shoes, jacket, all of it’s…”

“Oh, right! Yeah, it kinda is.”

He sat down and Mary’s heart started to beat in stabbingly awkward strikes against her ribcage. It was like an insane prisoner, trying to slam against the bars in a fit of psychosis.

“I recognize you from School,” he said. “People don’t come by here often, especially when it’s cold. What brings you by?”

She looked at him, trying to make a sympathetic face. Since she didn’t hold a mirror up twenty-four-seven, she didn’t know if she was making the right face or not. She imagined herself shrugging her shoulders, but her body remained stiff as brick walls.

“I just felt like getting out of the house, is all.” She said.

There was silence, and Mary couldn’t tell if it was natural or awkward.

“Yep,” he said. “I like it here, it’s calm.”

She made no reaction.

“You never really talk much in School,” he said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is.”

Without knowing it, she arched her eyebrow. Wondering if he’d made some kind of faux-pas, the boy was swift to try and cover it up as teenagers are wont to do.

“Well, at least, it seems that way to other people. I don’t mind it, but people wonder when you don’t talk. It doesn’t seem…”

He made that motion with his hand that people make when they’re looking for a word, but can’t find it. He stopped talking, as people usually do, expecting the other person to finish the sentence.

Mary got annoyed.

“It doesn’t seem what?” She asked, angry.

“Normal.”

“It seems crazy, doesn’t it?” Mary lobbed a wad of the black substance into the snow, where it melted through like acid immediately.

“Well, I dunno about that,” he said, “But I just wonder what you think, since you never talk.”

Mary shook her head, closed her eyes.

“I wonder what other people think, when I tell them things. I wonder if it makes sense when they hear it or if maybe I’m just insane. That’s how insanity works, it makes things that don’t make sense seem like reality to you. But that’s how everyone else sounds to me and I’ve never been a good judge of what’s crazy or not.”

She coughed up more of the substance. She knew he couldn’t see it, didn’t care anymore.

“Whatever it is, it’s bad. Whenever I try to take my mind off it, it comes back – the harder I try, the worse it is. I try to watch my favorite shows, they just turn into random colors and shapes and horrible sounds. Awful sounds, really, like people screaming and chanting. I put on Seinfeld the other day, and I saw random shapes and colors like an animated abstract painting. Whatever this stuff is…” She indicated the hole in the snow. “…it got angry, like, really pissed off, when that happened. I tried to tell somebody about what was wrong and they couldn’t see. I was shaking like a heroin addict and coughing it all up right in front of them, and they couldn’t see. I try to live like everyone else, learning useless information to no end and just going on with the normal shit and wondering if I ever really got the chance to live.”

The boy next to her – whose name was Devin – said she was creepy, and weird. Not with words, but with that gentle nodding and a blank stare. The way in which normal people patronize people they consider disturbed. Had he thrown in the word ‘interesting’, the statement would have been clenched.

He left quickly, thanking her for the ‘interesting’ time, and Mary coughed and choked alone for nobody to hear.

* * *

She lay in the dark, no longer aware of whatever it was that was happening to her. Even though the night was the same shade as the substance she was practically exhaling, she had some sense of where she was. The room was spinning, but it was hers. She could see her books, her television set, furniture. She wondered why these things had come to wish her goodbye in her final night. Did they care about her? Were these her friends, wishing her well on the way to the next world? Would she remember them, or would all her thoughts and feelings and everything she was evaporate upon the instant she died? If some part of her lived on without her personality, would it still be her? If she lived, but lost all of her brain function and was stuck drooling in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, would that mean she was a breathing corpse? Would the true her, everything she was and ever would be, move on without whatever was keeping her body breathing and eating?

Her personality, everything that was her, was the result of a million different things. Her upbringing, the books she read and movies she saw, the interactions she had with others. All of it put together different parts of her, like randomly connected puzzle pieces. She wondered if all of the would stay stuck together after she died or if the pieces would all fall apart and either disappear or be put into other puzzles.

Would all the different aspects of her personality move in separate directions, incarnated into other people or beings? Would they just wander around, waiting to realize Mary was no more?

What had her life been? Other people got so many things. They got to fall in love with somebody of their dreams, then have their heart shattered into a million pieces when that somebody left. This repeated itself until they found the right person, sometimes. But she wouldn’t get that.

Other people learned how to drive. How have a family, in some cases – maybe most. She would never get to be a mom, or see another rainy day. Her life wasn’t even half over – in sixteen years, she probably didn’t get to meet her best friend, hear her favorite musician or see her favorite television show. She hadn’t figured out what she wanted to do with her life, or lived alone. She wondered if she ever even truly got to live.

She closed her eyes and couldn’t tell the difference between her eyelid insides and her room.

Maybe this was destiny, her living for sixteen years and dying. Maybe this was fate pulling another random life for no sane reason at all. Maybe this was some combination thereof, Order and Chaos tugging at her and Chaos winning.

She wondered where all these thoughts would go when she died.

She thought, again, of the Hellishly cartoon monsters that had marched past her in that dream of hers.

Where did they all go? Did they de-materialize into nothing after she forgot about them?

Maybe they would go where she went.

For the first time since life had begun to seep out of her, she smiled, one so big it stretched across her face. She hadn’t smiled this big since she was five.

Yes, she thought. Yes, indeed. That would be nice. I’ll go where monsters are, and be part of some kid’s imagination. Maybe that’s where I was meant to be, a place where everything is as warped as people think I am. That’s where I belong. In that place.

She exhaled more of the black without noticing. No matter.

She had only thoughts for the night that surrounded her. The night that would be hers, forever.

* * *

It was very bright when she opened her eyes.

She was in a Hospital bed.

Outside the door, both her parents were crying. Her father and Aunt and Uncle, having driven to Maine all the way from Ohio. Her father was holding his ex-wife. Her brother, eighteen, and with her dad. All of them, devastated, speaking to a doctor.

Besides her were a pair of buckets, filled to near spilling by the opaque oils. She sat up, her throat scratchy and her eyes puffy and dry.

She felt a soreness in her abdominal region and saw, on her upper stomach just below the ribcage, there was a bluish-black scar. She felt along it, wondering if she’d been split in half and drained of the poison.

But no. The scarring stopped a little past her sides.

She motioned to the people outside the door. Like always, they were gleefully keeping up a conversation (likely derogatory) about her when they thought she could not hear.

“Guys,” she said, her voice more faint and weak-willed than Winnie the Pooh. “Guys,” she tried, louder.

She eventually got their attention by slamming her hands against the sides of the bed.

They turned, stunned, and both her parents went to her and held her. It gave her the uncomfortable sensation that she was being restrained.

“Oh my God, Mary!” Her mother said, crying. “Oh my God, I thought we lost you!”

Her father was sobbing, generic parent-statements like “My baby Girl” and fluff like that. Both of them devastated that their daughter almost died.

“Mary, why didn’t you tell us anything?” Her father said, sounding angry his daughter was still alive. “We love you! How could you do this to us?”

She lay there, puzzled and without words.

“Jesus, Orville, leave her alone! She’s been through enough as it is!”

He nodded, apologized, and the both of them kept holding onto her and made it hard for her to breathe.

“Guys, stop, you’ll give me a panic attack.”

They backed off. Thank god.

The doctor went on and on about a make-believe disease, saying she was hiding it and that ‘that was typical of children with such an illness’.

After all was said and done, her father and brother called her every weekend. Her mother let her be, not patronizing of hurting her but generally getting along with her pretty well.

Her first day back at School, Devin found her and himself expelled stabbingly awkward nonsense, since there is no good way to explain to somebody that you’re happy they’re not dead.

So he spoke to himself after she'd gone.

"Mary," he said. "My Soldier."

The social worker walked by, stone-faced, on his way past her in the halls, completely ignoring her death-glare.

All the Teachers pretended they were glad to see her, fake smiles fixed on stiff bodies.

That was the only downside to that particular day.