published as fiction in Ink Lit Magazine, spring 2023
You are a body. Levitating.
Floating in the hollow dark of your bedroom like a phantom. Leering over the flat, uncovered mattress that’s cradled within the base of your metal bedframe. Your limbs are tied down across your chest like a mummified corpse, wrapped in linen. Your eyes are open, staring at the blank disparity of the ceiling. You feel the gravity pull at your chest, the constant threat prickling the stem of your neck, and squeezing your heart. You feel the contradiction seeping through your pores. Heavy but light as a feather. You feel your stomach dip, hips press into the patterned fabric of the bed. If you pressed hard enough, could you create a tear? A hole big enough to fall through? Could you wedge yourself within the wiry springs? Could you remain forever strung between the spirals? Winding and winding and winding until you snap.
Your door is closed but there is a light that peaks through its bottommost edge. You hear your mother shuffle down the hallway, see her shadow cross the light and still. You hold your breath. She can’t see you like this. She can’t see you float. She’ll see you, possessed. Mad. She’ll exorcise you. Burn you at the stake and curse you in her mother tongue. The language you still can’t understand.
She’ll see through you. You know she will. You’ve always felt it. When you were younger, and you accidentally broke the handle to the antique hutch next to the stairs, filled with delicate holiday glassware. And you snapped it back into place and prayed she wouldn’t notice. But she did. She walked into the kitchen after gardening, set down her gloves on the counter, and peered at the hutch like she had never seen it before, cat-like eyes narrowing. You sat at the dinner table staring at a math problem with blurry eyes and she pulled at the exact knob you broke until it popped out of its chamber. She said nothing, just set the unattached appendage on the table right next to your paper. Your pencil filled hand shook, poking a hole through the paper and creating illegible scribbles.
You can only breathe when you hear the door to the bathroom swing shut and snap close. Still, you wait, tensed, until the toilet resounds its flush and the door opens again. This time, she doesn’t pause. You close your eyes.
Behind the thin coat of your eyelids, you find a forest. You find a forest of millions of jumping colors, blobs of movement. Blurry flowers, running water, and monkeys swinging from vines. You see this and you smile. You smile because you are not in a forest. You are not a forest.
You are a body.
And no matter how hard you try to fly away, you remain. Bound. Trapped. Mummified.
Your tongue is swallowed, and your eyes are closed. Your hands are tied, and your heart is an echoing, lazy beat. Your skin is dry and tight, and your clothes are scattered on the floor so you’re naked, shivering as sweat drips and slides down the crevice of your spine.
You are trying to sleep. But you won’t.
You want to die. But you won’t.
And so, you remain, floating, eyes closed, silent.
Shea Winters 