By Kayla Monteiro

You wake up sputtering, choking on the last remnants of a nightmare. The voices fade to a faint buzzing in your ears. The phantoms burn away by the light of day, but the terror lingers—hot and wet and metallic.

You make yourself gulp down the air slow like hot soup—just like the doctors taught you. Only it sinks right through you, leaving you starved and wanting. Tongue probes at the scaling skin of your upper lip—one of many bad habits you can’t seem to kick—only to come back wet with blood. You bite down on the spongy flesh as if you can squeeze out the taste; you cannot. Brain soda pop fizzles.

Touch.

Touch.

Touch.

There’s more of it, so much more of it. Does it ever end? The blood is draped on your hands and shirt like scraps of ribbon—horrifically beautiful.

You don’t dare seek out the rest of it. You can’t bear to touch the truth with your eyes and cement your dread over its corpse. As long as you don’t move, as long as you stay in your room, there’s still a chance that the owner of this blood is still alive.

You aren’t surprised you can’t remember whatever it is you’ve done this time. Your mind had spotted before, left you with words unraveled, and pictures half-drawn, and nothing and no one to help you put back what your brain had stolen. Weren’t sure why your head hid things from your awake now—why it was selective. The answer didn’t matter; you’d never get the memories back anyway.

But this wasn’t like August. There were no bandages on your wrists to lock the life in. No nurses there to tell you they’d keep you safe. This time you weren’t the one in danger. This time you were the bad thing.

Your thoughts had once again run away with themselves. But they hadn’t gone after you this time.

The thing is, you hadn’t wanted to do it in ages. Well, you’d never wanted anything, save for the demon aches to be erased, to have them never licked you with their chaos in the first place. But buried deep beneath your flowerbed of yesterdays and pills, Tartarus, weak as it is, always pulsed in rhythm with your heart.

It started before you began calling yourself harmless, and sometime after you’d learned to keep quiet about your desires. Yours weren’t the digestible kind; yours were supposed to taste foul in your mouth. It was a want the others curse at, stab, burn, electrocute, paint spiraled horns on only to rip them off—cracked and splintered.

The problem hadn’t been accepting the knowledge that your impulses were wrong; you’d change them if you could.

The problem was the bleach.

Holy, absolute, death machine chemical that promised clean. When you first began to itch, you’d tried everything. But the thing that had gotten your hopes up the most was the bleach. You’d seen an advert for it as a child and had hoped it’d be the thing to purify you. But no matter how hard you scrubbed your skin with it, the stain remained, burned itself below your flesh, sunk its teeth into your bones, rotted its way into your muscles, and plucked the strings there.

There’s no getting rid of it; it will always be a part of you.

Sometimes your hands twitched when a stranger’s hair was short enough to expose the soft skin that kissed their scalp. More recently they clenched when the little girl had wandered too close to the train’s tracks. You could practically hear the crack, crunch, silence.

You’d clawed your palms bloody that day.

You tried to tell yourself they were just thoughts, pictures and words, a scary story that you prayed to at night, though surely no god was listening. You weren’t one of his children. How could you be with rot lodged in your teeth and clumped beneath your fingernails? Still, when they were just thoughts you could pretend you weren’t a monster.

There would be no pretending this away.

What are you gonna do? You’re a coward, so that counts out suicide—honesty, too. You can’t run away from what you’ve done, but you can’t stay either.

Fuck!

As reality crouches like a crow on your shoulders, you can’t bring yourself to wilt beneath its weight. All you can do is stare at your hands and pretend they’re stained from the red wine you don’t drink.

Big bang boom.

Door slams open loud as a gunshot. Slaps you awake. Except you’re already awake, but
now you can feel it. And it hurts.

“Jesus, what the hell happened to you?”

You choke on your scream before it can give you away, a rush of air drowning out any remaining thoughts, until all you see is her gray. Your mother is duller than you remember. Or maybe she’d always looked that way—small, thin, and brittle. Somehow, she appears less alive than what you’d pictured her rotting carcass to look like. The thought comes out easier than it should.

“I- I didn’t- ” Your voice is a deflated balloon.

“Did you have a nosebleed?” She sets a tray of pancakes and bacon on the desk beside your door.

The smell of meat wafts over to you. You try to make yourself gag. It does not work.

“I told you to start using the humidifier Grandma got you. The air is far too dry this time of year.”

“You’re-”

“Go take a shower,” she cuts you off. “And soak those clothes in cold water. Otherwise, the stains will never come out.” She shuts the door before you can say anything. As soon as she leaves, the quiet lingers, as if she were never there, air stiff as a tomb’s.

Alive. They are all alive.

The relief is static, so visceral it’s almost uncomfortable. Still, you ride the wave all the way home because your family is alive—safe and sound. You cling to that thought like a bucking bull, resist the real reason you can now breathe easy.

But as you collect your breaths, the truth leaks through your feeble thought-walls, slow at first, like trickling water, but steadily builds until you’re gagging on thought-vomit.

And it’s good to admit that the thought of the world seeing you as the monster you are had scared you shitless, that your family being alive meant there would be no white walls to greet you the next time you wake, no Nurse Ratcheds parading around their sterile smiles—the ones they use to mask their fear of you—no mind numbers or body straps or guilt tumors rotting you from the inside out.

There would be none of that because you are not a bad thing, haven’t hurt anyone save yourself, haven’t caved in to the poison thoughts, maybe never would—

A fresh drop of blood seeps into your mouth; it’s thick and bitter. Despite yourself, you do your best to remember the taste.

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Kayla is a graduating senior. She is majoring in English and minoring in Classical and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Next year she hopes to obtain a job publishing young adult fiction. In her free time, she enjoys reading and writing Beatnik poetry, working on her zine First Thought Best Thought, and making a fool of herself while doing yoga.