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Her hair swayed slightly with her sobs.
The reason she was crying didn’t matter to me. Perhaps there was no reason at all. Her tears had that sort of purity.
The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you pounded on it. The screams no one heard. Darkness, hunger, pain. Slow suffocation. One day it occurred to me that I needed to experience the same suffering he had.
But when someone did take notice of her, it seemed she was always apologizing for it—I suppose “apologetic” might be the best word to describe her. “I’m sorry, please ignore me…” You could almost hear her murmur the words, like an incantation, a way of conjuring a still place for herself.
My biological mother had died shortly after giving birth to me. She had scratched a pimple inside her nose and it had become infected. “The nose is close to the brain.” This had been my father’s way of explaining what had happened. “You have to be careful. Germs can get right into the brain through the nose.”
well, that's terrifying.
To be honest, the morgue doesn’t scare me much. I don’t really understand why the other girls are so afraid of it. They see people dying all over the hospital, while they type their reports or eat cream puffs in the lounge. The job is even kind of nice, especially when she’s next to me. She’s as beautiful underground as she is in the office, her face all white and pale.
The beauty of the heart oppressed me, but my hands were steady as I worked. I had managed to make a thing that no one else could have made.
Why was everyone dying? They had all been so alive just yesterday.
I had a friend once who was dumped by her boyfriend because he didn’t like a coat she had bought. It was a very nice cashmere coat, but for some reason it disgusted him to see her wearing it. At least that’s what he told her.
Why are men?
She cut it up, doused it in lighter fluid, and burned it, but her boyfriend never came back. Another girl I know lost her boyfriend for using eyedrops in bed. They were just normal drops, but he said he couldn’t stand seeing her put them in. Strange that a little thing like a coat or an eyedrop can ruin everything.
The fur shimmered in the white snow as I knelt to gather up the scattered bits of the tiger.
“Magnificent indeed,” the man said as he continued to caress the beast. Its black and yellow fur shone in the light filtering down through the trees. The beautiful stripes, the enormous size—everything about the animal was perfect. Even lying prostrate, it seemed to be coiled and ready to attack; the paws looked heavy. The jaw was powerful, and sharp fangs peeked out from its mouth. Every bit of the tiger seemed to have a purpose, to be ideally suited to the hunt.
The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again.
In the days that followed, I had him arrange a “scholarship” to help this boy with his studies. He had been wasting his time with odd jobs to make ends meet, so we came to an agreement.
Then I found myself at the edge of an open field that sloped gently above me—a field covered with boxlike objects. I reached out to touch the nearest one: a refrigerator. Broken refrigerators—some upended, others half crushed, white ones, blue, yellow, big ones, tiny ones, some missing doors, some scrawled with graffiti—every refrigerator imaginable.
It was my body. In this gloomy, cramped box, I had eaten poison plants and died, hidden away from prying eyes. Crouching down at the door, I wept. For my dead self.
whaaaaaaaat?
