Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  I thought about everything that had gone through my mind today, I could barely trust my own thoughts it seemed like, not in the chaos that it had become. Nothing about today seemed real. This moment that I was waiting on was weighing heavier on me then I’d realized. I knew it was going to be bad and harmful to all the work I’d done to keep myself sane, but I never realized it could come to this level.

  I knew my mind was struggling to gain some ground, that this disease of depression was starting to pick up some steam, gain some weight again. The storm that had moved back through my mind, my body was trying to prepare for it but failed. It barely knew how to deal with this the first time, I didn't know how much I could trust its strength this time around, especially after what I'd seen so far.

  I couldn't trust my past, I couldn't trust my present, I couldn't trust my memories or my mind. All of it seemed to be playing a game with one another where only one could come out on top.

  I thought about Luke then, what was real about what he did, was he there, was my mind just shoveling a fabricated story over because it was in no condition to deal with the trauma of what had happened in that bathroom. How I’d actually gotten out of there, how I was left without a mark, without damage.

  I wondered how long he’d been following me, how long he’d wanted to confront me, knowing that I had ruined his life. Him being so adamant it was my fault, I was the fuck-up, it was my body that had failed us, that he had done nothing of the sort.

  My feeling was that he was going to kill me, that he was going to find me wherever I was because he wasn’t going to stop looking until he’d found an opening, one that he could trust, one that gave him time to prepare, to fulfill this twisted fantasy that has brewed in his mind. His eyes wouldn’t leave me, his body wouldn’t allow him to forget.

  I wanted some version of normalcy back, it just wasn’t coming.

  CHAPTER 47

  Time was moving too quickly, faster than I could prepare. I wanted it to slow down, I begged for it to but it didn’t listen to me.

  I needed to take a second and breathe before it asked something of me I wasn’t comfortable offering. It was going to push me to another ledge and force me to look down, down into a black abyss that almost swallowed me whole the last time I peered into it, the one that has been eyeing me now, hungry and desperate. It wasn’t the same but it was hard not to make the comparison. I was this woman. This woman coming to see her baby, laying there on the metal slab as if his life had little to no meaning, gone because an infection had infected him, one that we didn’t know how to cure, how to treat. The hospital had offered this woman a chance to see her son before the funeral home went to work, before they preserved what was left of his body to put him into the ground.

  I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to look into that woman’s eyes. See every bit of strength that she’d used to hold herself as one suddenly broke right there in front of me. That foundation that was keeping herself going would crash at that moment, dissolve because it wouldn't have the strength to carry on. I knew it would because that was the moment that almost took me with it.

  This woman would go home tonight, carrying the weight of this one moment throughout the rest of her life. It might change everything. This one moment in time might shape her entire life as she followed whatever course it put her on, she’d never be the same. This one night would grow to define her and it would be up to her what route her life went on, I know which way my life nudged me, I didn’t want that to happen to her

  I imagined that she was young. I’d read the file on the baby, no more than a few months old. It was such a shame that his immune system was so weak, outmatched by something smaller, stronger. There were only so many antibiotics his infant body could manage, only so long before he lost the fight against the infections that were attacking him without mercy. It was like he was never meant to last. That virus was his cause of death and the hospital had tried everything. Sometimes, nothing could be done to save even the most precious people that come through it.

  I thought about how she could hold out hope. I knew her face would be a wreck, that there would be tears.

  I wondered if she’d be alone, standing there looking at her son as one person because there was no one else for her to lean on. That she had to endure something this tragic on her own, independent of any support that she might have. The city is notorious for that. Single parents that have to act and be both parents equally because one is simply absent from the picture. It was usually the mother who was forced to stay. For the love of a child, she’d endure without the father even if this broke her.

  That would be a call she had to make, never knowing that she would have to make good on that promise. Never thinking that this baby would pass before she would, that time could do something so cruel. That she would never have the chance to make memories with him, not beyond what she had already. Memories of the hospital visits. I wondered how long he was even home for, how long she got to hold him in the walls of her own home, rather than the walls of the quarantine room, dressed in a smock.

  I’d have to watch that, and I’d have to bear it. As much as I didn’t know what was going on in her mind, only being able to see its result without sound—only sight.

  This woman would never know that on the other side of the glass, the doctor who was standing sentient like a statue at the head of her son, went through something similar. That the woman standing guard over the precious victim of a biological failure that took her flesh and blood from her, was being protected by another failure. A woman who was slowly breaking down from the inside out having to watch her endure because I chose to believe I could do this when I knew well enough I couldn’t.

  CHAPTER 48

  It broke my heart to be there, watching the clock as the hands seemed to skip over their designated intervals driving me to a destination I wasn’t ready to go to. They were insistent just as much as I was defiant, but there was only one voice that could prevail in this argument. My will wasn’t strong enough, time was a superior enemy that no one ever prevailed against.

  As I inched closer to the time beckoning me, I felt a crack in me. Some strange tear in the sheet of skin I wore. A rip where all the joy I’d held in my life was slowly leaking out of my body. I could feel it wandering off, sliding into some river in the air, its current pulling it far away from me as if it were running.

  I didn’t think to get it back, to find what was lost and collect it. It was almost like I was content with living with both the guilt and frustration, the pain and grief that I was holding onto. Those are more important emotions that I had now devoted my body to.

  What was positive was leaving me. Like the heated breath expelled on a cold winter’s day, clouding from my lips as I blow my breath back into the frigid air. I rubbed at my eyes and cradled my face inside my hands and allowed thoughts that were old and classic to fester inside of me.

  My mind was a wasteland, a battlefield of old thoughts and memories that were killing off what was positive. I couldn’t seem to find anything worthy of remembering even though I was trying to. I just needed something positive. Some memory I could fall back onto, just one thing that would catch me when I inevitably fell.

  I thought it was my mind’s creation of this woman that I was, replaying those old memories for me and presenting her to me in the way it did. It was almost as if it resented that woman just as much as I did. I didn’t like to remember that she once existed, that she was once the path that I’d stayed on. That she was the one who had nearly tried to kill me.

  I’d made it through that time of my life knowing that I could place the blame on her. That she was, in fact, someone else, some infection that rotted some vital part of my brain. That it had managed to turn off that safety mechanism that was supposed to control what was allowed and what was dangerous, and she could walk between the two unphased. When I handed over the controls, I had given that permission to a psychopath with every intention to hurt me.

  It wasn’t
unreasonable to think that someone like that became a reality, erupting from my imagination. I had all but begged my brain to produce someone who could inherit this pain from me, to make it go away. I just never thought it would become me. I was looking for a place to shove the thoughts, not to become someone different. That woman who I was had become a stranger to the woman she belonged to.

  Even now, as I looked at the scars and saw the faint strokes that ran over my fair skin, seeing the damage that I had inscribed into myself, it was difficult to believe it was the same woman who was sitting here. Seeing her from an outside point of view struck a nerve in me that was too sensitive and now she was there, free to roam around my memories. Picking apart what she found interesting, infesting what she didn’t.

  As I looked over to the window, I didn’t see the glass and the mesh wiring that hung over it. Instead, I saw nothing but the face of a brick wall. I saw the same thing in the doorway. I was enclosed in a brick box with no way to see the outside world.

  CHAPTER 49

  I thought about what had happened to me and what I’d been through as I head down to the viewing room. The small half circular room that lived on the other end of the viewing glass that would be occupied by a grieving family waiting to see a dead child.

  As I walked into the room, I saw that the orderlies had taken the corpse out for me and dressed it in the teal sheet, draping it over the small body that lay on the surface of the frigid steel table. I could see where the blanket cut off, where it dropped because there wasn’t enough body there to support the entire length of the table.

  I imagined the small figure there, having only briefly glimpsed it myself since it’s time here waiting for this moment, I’d avoided it at all costs. Knowing that I didn’t want to introduce myself to something so horrific prematurely before I thought I could be ready, before I thought that I could handle this. I trusted myself, how far I’ve come, but I knew not to pour gasoline on myself either.

  I walked over to the body, refusing to pull down the sheet until that time called on me. As I looked at the clock hanging overhead, I knew that it was sooner rather than later before that moment was going to come.

  My hand stroked the top of the head of the child that was under there, the layer of sheet and a layer of latex from the gloves strapped to my hand hid any connection between the flesh of the two of us. I just wanted to know that he was under there.

  Tears welled up in my eyes but there was no real reason to fight them. I couldn’t imagine the parents would see me as different or heinous if a few tears spilled out of me during this process. I also couldn’t imagine that I’d be the focus of their attention when that sheet had revealed what it was hiding.

  Walking over to the cabinet, I pulled out one of the drawers and found the surgical masks in there, formed in a neat little pile and I took one. Strapping the strings over my ears, the bulbous mask over my nose and mouth, I breath in the sterile material. It was hiding the shallow curves of my lower lip as the tears which have made themselves known start to gather some strength.

  I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself, took in deep breaths and soothed myself. Not to hide from what was about to happen but rather to at least be able to ride those rapids without losing myself completely, I knew what I was hoping for, how far-fetched that was.

  I knew already my mind was in full conflict with me. It knew how frail I was and how fragile my body was to be introducing something like this, it haad spent the entire day punishing me, building up my downfall. Reminding me of the grotesque life I lived between the news from the doctor and getting better.

  I didn't like to remember those times, but they’d reminded me they hadn’t forgotten quite yet who I am. They were still around no matter how much I liked to forget that they existed, they hadn’t lost their persistence, they’d just learned to allow me to see their evil, their hatred.

  Slowly, I took a deep breath, swallowing it slowly. It paces everything inside of me at least long enough that I could move and function.

  I wheeled the table to the main viewing platform and waited there, my gloved hands in front of me, intertwined with one another.

  When the red light came on I knew they’d come into the room. I had to take in another deep breath to remind myself that this was the time that mattered. That I had to hold myself together for someone who was feeling pain far worse than what was going on through me.

  Sweat beaded down my hands and as I wipe them, I could feel the stretched gauze wrapped around my wrist, but it felt wet, soaked.

  I looked down at my palms, waiting there below the line of the table, below where the grieving mother would be able to see, my arm with the gauze had started to ooze blood again, through the sheeted layers that smothered them. My other arm, my exposed skin, those old marks, had split along the creases of those old scars, shedding blood just as they had done before.

  Then I heard the buzzer sound off all around me.

  CHAPTER 50

  I waited there with patience as the curtain was pulled aside, and I could see the woman on the other end. She was beautiful. Her long brown hair which had a professional look to it had been mangled and mishandled as I was sure she’d been running her hands haphazardly through it, pulling on it, tearing it out.

  Her eyes were severely swollen, her face was so red it looked purple in the dim lighting of both our rooms. I stood there frozen as I was looking at her. Feeling the blood that was trickling down my hands, the splatters on the floor were deafening. It was as if I knew that she could hear it. They were like screams cried into my ear.

  The woman’s head stared at her baby, my eyes watched hers. I watched as her tears slide over her eyelids and down against her crimson cheeks. Her face was mangled from this, her body was hysterical and as I looked down at the cloth to share the same vision that she had, to see her precious child in that state I felt something inside of me dislodge. Like a set of bones crunching out of sequence.

  I studied the cloth that was there, my eyes working frequently back to the mother, standing there alone in the room. No one to console her. Not another human being that could be bothered with joining her today. On a day that real loved ones come out for, to share in a horrific experience like this. It's not a fly-by-night set of company that can take on something so heavy, something so ugly. I know this, it was uncomfortable inside someone who’s seen it. Not just heard the words of the memory, but actually formed one on their own. It didn't go away, not for a long time, if ever.

  But I saw something on the sheet. Some distortion of how the sheet is laying on the body. The piece of cloth is out of rest and for a brief moment, I saw it move. A twitch in the fabric.

  I couldn’t be sure I trusted it, my eyes were getting heavy and my head was getting light from the blood sliding onto the floor, fleeing my body as fast as it could because it was moving out of tunnels that I’d carved into it. Somehow, it had found them, after years of closure and blockade, it’d found the way to fresh air and it was chasing it, despite what it’d do to my body once it left.

  My body hunched, the weight of me has to be more awkwardly distributed as both my vision and balance began to fail me. For a moment, I looked down and saw the pool of red thathas formed from simple drips of my blood, coming from so many angles, it was like a sink tap that was left open, spilling everywhere.

  I looked back at the mother and then back to the table. I saw it again, another reflex action from underneath the sheet that was covering the corpse. My eyes immediately went back to the mother, standing there, her arms wrapped around herself, consoling what little parts of her she could, trying to protect those parts of her she couldn’t, her hand over her mouth.

  My eyes tested hers, to see where she was looking. To gauge whether she’d seen the same movements that I had. If the same strange occurrence had slipped through her perceptions or if I was falling apart fast enough that it was a trick of my own mind playing out in a scene that tormented me. Some playful notion in my brain that was introdu
cing something to me that wasn’t quite real. I couldn’t be sure.

  Then I heard it, a small whine slipped out from underneath the covers. It wasn’t alone, it was joined by another tremor and jolt from beneath the sheet, this time when I look up I see the mother, staring, her mouth has slunk over, her screams attacking the plated glass that hangs as a boundary between the two of us.

  CHAPTER 51

  I peeled the covers back in one quick motion, jerking the sheet out of the way to catch whatever movement I’d seen as they were happening. There was nothing, the baby was not moving. Its skin had gone cold, frigid, and grey still holding onto the small bits of blue that clouded to the surface of his face. Except now, it was just his exposed skin, it was his skin soaked in my blood from when I removed the sheet.

  It has washed over him, this coating of the fluid that runs through me, painted on his tarnished, spoiled flesh.

  I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I tried to swallow but my heart was lodged in my throat and the saliva wouldn’t spill back down into my stomach. I took a step back, woozy, dizzy from what had happened. Blackness crept into my eyes but for the moment, I could fight it back.

  My eyes find the woman’s, there was anger in there, buried alive in that panic-stricken hysterical act that she was doing. I saw her, beating her fists against the glass, the heat of her hate for me crawling through the barrier and settling in my chest. I’d defiled her son, that was exactly how she saw this.

  For a second time, I looked back down at the baby there, the blood on his tiny body so wet and so raw it caught the light, it still held the luster of when it was part of the river of my body.