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Two

My eyes skittered across surfaces and the walls seemed to move in on me. They loomed, moving too fast for me to track, until I realized that the only thing moving was my eyes and my head as I tried to find a space to belong, somewhere in the space I already occupied. The off-white color of the painted brick was streaked with blacks and reds and grays. What looked like scorch marks and blood met up with grime and soot, the mixtures working to coat the walls as completely as they could. I felt sick just looking at it, my stomach starting to churn as fast as my eyes had moved. Suddenly a single thought came to me out of the depth of sickness and lurching: I wasn’t sure how I had gotten here. I thought I knew where I sat, my back against another wall just gazing across the hallway to study the mosaic of wrongness. The corridor felt familiar, but that was wrong too. The lights didn’t flicker so much as they had gone out and occasionally forgot, coming back on for a harsh fluorescent burst of stark relief driving me into fits of blinking and head turning.

I curled my legs up, tucking my knees under my chin, and just stared blankly at the wall, trying to piece it together, trying to come together. Things had, obviously, gotten worse. Had I caused it? Was this all my fault after everything? I didn’t know, I didn’t have the tools to process and I ached for them, I really wanted to rent them or lease them perhaps from some higher being, just for long enough to understand what was going on. I shook my head and tried to fit everything together like a puzzle of a kitten hanging onto a tree: thousands of little cardboard shapes, each one a mystery by itself. I couldn’t find an edge piece at all.

I had been taken back to the room. I had that piece right in my grasp when I reached for it. I had it and lost it again. I dug until I located myself, remembering what felt like a key day, a while back. The sun shone brightly then, brighter than it did now, but maybe it had always been dimmer in reality and simply more stunning in memory. A lot of things seemed to sparkle in retrospect.

I stood, shakily, and put a hand against the wall behind me, palm down. I wrenched it away quickly, almost too quickly, causing myself to stumble. A sticky wet sensation slid against my flesh. Biting my lip, I turned around to confirm what my skin made me think: the wall I stood against was as bad as the one I looked at. What must the rest of the place look like?

Was she ok?

The thought burned through my mind, charring its way up to my consciousness like a comet falling in reverse, making my stomach lurch again.

Was she alive, injured, lost, trapped, worse?

The possibilities pounded at me, reminding me of how I felt, back at the beginning. If it could be called a beginning. If it had happened. If this was—no! It was too easy to get lost in the thought train, too quick a trap to spring on my mind. Thinking along those paths would squelch me down and reduce me to uselessness. I didn’t have to be useless anymore.

I walked down the hallway, wincing and squinting as the lights gave another show of luminescent force. Realizing that I was walking down the hallway towards the dining room I let instinct take over, gratefully only half noticing the signs that were a combination of pried and burnt off the walls. My bare feet scraped against grit and small sharp debris from the walls and, I confirmed by looking up, ceiling. When had my feet become bare? Footwear should rank near the least of my worries, I knew. I repeated it to myself until I could, if not believe it, accept the concept. Then I stepped on something that gave a bit as my foot came down on it, something that felt like flesh. I went still, debating the sense of bothering to look, for a few seconds. I found I could hear a crackle and hiss from the dining room in front of me in the silence created by my lack of movement, and closed my eyes in a weak attempt to block everything out, not just sound. It didn’t work. I hadn’t thought it would.

I moved my foot and looked down, seeing a severed finger on the ruined linoleum floor, half on a black tile and half on a white one. Strange the details that chaos imparts. The crystal clear excerpts of order that leak into your brain, or at least into mine. I felt dizzy and sat down, just outside of the closed dining room. I couldn’t face it yet. It felt too big for me. Everything started there, after all, if it had happened and if it had ever truly begun. I closed my eyes again and lost myself, willingly this time, in the past.

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Crazy Little Thing is copyright Adam P. Knave.