Trigger Warning: Suicide mention.
All these things we'll one day swallow whole
Word Count: 2042
The water long since cooled to lukewarm. There, under the cold light of splintered crystals, Faustite sunk further beneath the surface. He watched as bony, teenaged knees jutted up awkwardly out of the bathtub's contents, wet with the cooling beads, and every bit as knobby as they've always been. Much of his body looked the same, he discovered, with a measure of consternation and dismay - his chest remained hairless, his hips jutting, his ribs barely coated with the first hints of muscle. Even know, he was all elbows and knees. Even with his eyes and fingers indelibly inked, he looked just as much a boy.
Happy birthday, he thought to himself. Once more he sank, and his nose breached the surface. Exhaling, he watched the water bubble up boisterously. He wanted to laugh, to choke, to cry. He wanted to wrench out his tightening throat and throw it against the rock-hewn wall with all the strength still left in his bones - all the strength bestowed on him by Faustite, the specter who would not cease his haunting. He looked to the ceiling with his eyes of pitch, where crystals stared back at him from above. Happy birthday, he echoed again, and smoke-stricken tears carved their path down sharp cheekbones. They fell through the hollows of his cheeks, and petered down into the clear water with ever-turning rivulets.
Today you'd be getting your license. Today your mother would present you with a cake - red velvet, with cream cheese frosting and a side of glazed strawberries topped with whipped cream. You'd ask for tiramisu and she'd laugh, she'd explain away the red velvet as being for the rest of the guests. You'd ask what guests, but you already knew - she does this every year. That's always been the cue for everyone to shout surprise. The tradition bugs you, but you'd never say so.
Look at all the experiences that politeness has cost you. He started to laugh, still buried in the water, and his sharp intake of breath borrowed a thick shot of it. He choked, coughed, surfaced to sputter out what was ingested, and found it just as dark. He buried palms into his eyes, unwilling to see the black any longer. He wanted none of the sharpened talons the blackened fingers. He wanted nothing of the tinted water. He yearned to wrench his way through the blood and bone of his birdlike chest and tear either heart or starseed from its confines. It mattered not to him which he seized, only that he would finally taste the fading of his life and every misery. Here, he was left in the litter of broken dreams. Scattered shells of dead birds and broken teeth surrounded him. The shells of human beings stared at him with such arrested fascination and derision that he felt all the more like the creature that fell in too deep with the Negaverse.
But it wasn't so, he told himself. It couldn't be so. And yet it was - and yet the irony did not escape him. The low, rasping laugh echoed lightly off of old, crumbling walls and reached him as a voice not his own. He remembered the glee spawned by the cold sword and clutched one of his b*****d hands to his chest, waiting to feel the blade splinter through his sternum. Disappointment followed when nothing came. He smiled through the wretched pain. He smiled, broad with all teeth, and bit down with all force he could manage as he weathered the crushing of his own would-be corpse.
She said there's no turning back from this. That change won't disappear with all the tears, wishes, and penances that I could offer. That I'm forever a Negaverse agent now, branded and burdened in a way that no one wants to see. I am the avatar of what they carry in their hearts, and not one wants to face it. That ugliness, that perversion of the spirit so wretched and vile, they're sick of looking at it. And so am I. It's been only days, but so am I.
So happy birthday, Elex Yorke. You're disgusting now. You're desperate now.
It's easy to call this place hell. Living here in this dull, decrepit husk calls up every one of my mother's nightmares. She wouldn't stand for it. She'd call up every Sovereign she could find to pay out all the vitriol she'd been saving up. She'd scream and scream and scream herself raw, just to paint her point in bloody spittle over their embroidered coats. And she'd stand in their offices, in her ever arrogant way, and tell them she would wait there until they cleaned the place up. Until they reupholstered the chairs, and repainted all the walls. Until her son could bath in a real bathtub for a change. And then she'd demand maids.
But there won't be maids. There won't be Mother. Elex Yorke got emancipated just before he turned sixteen. Now Elex Yorke is dead, another face on the back of a milk carton. Another pretty prom picture posted up on the evening news from all her money paid in grief. She'd panic first, of course. She'd call my cell phone no less than a dozen times and leave a voicemail every time. At first she'd sound calm. She'd ask where I am, when I'm coming home. Then she'd move to anger, and make demands. Come home now, she'd say. This isn't funny anymore.
It was never funny, Mother.
Then all that pain and grief would win over and she'd disappear entirely, she'd curl into herself with a voice unheard of and start pleading with the static silence on the other end. Please come home, Elex. Please be okay. We miss you.
We miss you. Like I'm already dead. Like she heard the truth through the convoluted static of radio waves.
And maybe she did.
Finally she'd break and that awful, wretched sobbing would tear through the speakers, fragmented while she overblows the microphone. There wouldn't be words anymore. Words can't express that kind of grief. Words can't tell anyone what a mother feels when her child dies. Words can't explain what my mother felt when I died. And words can't explain what I feel for her now, trapped in a bathtub twenty thousand leagues under the earth's surface.
So happy birthday, Elex Yorke. You're dead now. You're destitute now.
Father won't think much of it. He'll cajole Mother with the same charming ease that lured her into dating him in the first place. They might even bond over it. He'd call her over for a drink. Tell her a few pretty words, whisper about days gone by. He'd weave sweet nostalgia from old memories and bind it with scotch out of the latticed cupboard. He'd pour their drinks while they talked about when they first met, how Elon would escape from under his own father's watchful eye just to meet her for a kiss in the garden, knowing full well his father expected him to learn the work of the company. He'd say how his father wanted him to take meticulous notes on his last project, the last undertaking from Evan Yorke and all the tradition beholden to that name but, Elon would say, I was only thinking of you. In every margin, I was writing letters to you.
And Mother would laugh in that spellbound way, in that poignant way that only comes about when she forgets herself. She'd taste the smoky scotch on her tongue with every breath. She'd ask him, where did you get this? I don't remember buying such a flavorful malt.
Fauther would sigh wistfully. He'd comb his thumbnail through his moustache while he held his drink in front of his mouth. He'd fish for the words while swallowing down his own grief, but alcohol could never match a pang so sweetly sharp as that. His voice would tighten like the overwrought strings of a violin. I inherited it, he would say.It was delivered to me on the day my dad died.
And with that, the spell would vanish.
But my father preferred the idea of a son over the actuality. The flesh and bones never rose to the concept in his own mind. He wanted a second shot at himself, a second skin that he could direct with better finesse than his father. He wanted a reimagining of his own childhood, and he ended up with twin disappointments. It was my brother he preferred.
But my brother would be lost to the world, missing me while I miss him. He'd taste the air too sharply while he drove through town, looking for me. Calling my name at any black-haired kid he's spotted with their back turned to the street. He'd be the one checking the school, looking through all the nooks and alcoves we've discovered through the city. He'd be the one checking the bridges, the beaches. He'd always find the smallest signs of me. He'd catch a fleeting glimpse of me at every turn. He'd hear my voice just beyond the edges of his hearing. He'd find signs of my haunting in every place he checked.
Erol never worked well with grief. He never learned to feel what he needed to feel - even now. He'd waste as he always did, running too fast and running too far to escape what never moved. All the sympathy at our school would spring up in droves when the news came, and he'd answer all their asks with I'm fine. And he would be - he wouldn't lie. He'd keep himself carefully empty, carefully preserved so he could feel the joy of my return. So he could hug me without tears.
But there's no more Elex Yorke to hug. That canny hope would wane with every day, wasting like a beached whale under the summer heat. He'd hope until it became routine. He'd hope because he wasn't aware he stopped hoping weeks ago. It'd leave him with an insidious emptiness that festered under his own knowing.
Then, on a day like today, they'd find him at the end of his rope.
His eyes would bug out, red with busted blood vessels. Half his fingernails would've splintered and broken. His legs would look bloated with all the blood that stopped pumping through his body. They'd have to cut his shoes off, and they'd leave their fabric impressions over his dead skin. He always dressed for the occasion. He dressed for his own funeral. He dressed for my funeral just the same. But there was always that what-if, eating at the back of his mind. What if Elex comes back tonight? What if this nightmare ends tomorrow? That hope broke his fingernails into that rope. That hope left him twisting, listing, with one shoe off and an ugly look on his face.
But he couldn't unstep off that cliff.
And then I'd have to see it all. The empty grave, the grief, the second burial. Elex Yorke is dead, and I'm just a stranger filling his bones. A stranger with dreams of the coldest shard of black ice, piercing my heart again and again until there's nothing left to puncture. A stranger that spits in the eyes of anyone who claims authority over him. A stranger who holds the weight of a starless night in his eyes. Will I care when I don't mourn anymore? When I can think of my mother without this pain in my throat, will I be the monster that the Negaverse wished for?
Will I be their vessel of dead dreams?
The water rippled faintly as his body wracked with sobs. His bath grew cold and bitter with carbonaceous grief. The Negaverse bared down on him, unflinching, unfeeling, and waited for his every bone to pop and splinter with regret. And it would wait long past the destruction of his mind, the wasting of his body. It would pick through the blackened wreckage in the aftermath, searching ever diligently, until it pulled forth that ever-present memory. Until it wrenched forth that frostbitten sword, wrapped in his disembodied heartstrings.
So happy birthday, Elex Yorke. You're a demon now.
