GRAVESKIES

Chapter 15

Feather danced against her skin.

Sylvia Sacrinne had known how she'd die ever since she was nine years old.

Chains tighten around a beating heart.

Car crash. How stupid is that?

"What were you searching for?"

Sylvia laughed derisively, head falling on her shoulder, sliding off like a comet. Her throat was full of air, her tongue tasted of arid, plastic honey. Spit dribbled from the corner of her mouth. "So many things..."

She could tell how her tormentors would die, too. But she still

couldn't predict their strikes. Nothing in the world

could accomplish that except for another cursed person such as herself.

Drip, drip, water trickled from the ceiling, it splattered her barren back, again, again, always the same spot, tiny moles of water, was that part of the torture too? She'd observed the shapes of the drops with care, with obsession, they were round at first before they melted and glided low, low on the curve of her shoulder, like pancake dough when you first splash it on a pan and

oh, now that reminds her of

her mom, and she really doesn't want to be thinking about her mom.

How much worse would torture be if they hit you while making you think

of all the traumatizing scumbags in your life? Haha. Now that's a thought. Is she laughing? Is there a way to tell?

She could swear it was intentional because the drops had these perfect round shapes, she could swear that nothing, not even the beatings, made her crazier than the cadenced, repetitive fall of the same icy drop on her skin.

How was it possible to waste this much brainpower on a single drop of water?

It was hard to tell when or if the pain was over. Was it really quiet now? The moments when they hurt her composed a whole other parallel existence and it interlaced with now, now, now didn't feel real, now had no texture, now would be just another moment when a boot enters her skin, her flesh, and never leaves. Their weapons were already a part of her body. She'd assimilated them.

Oh Gods, what if at some point her body just enveloped the foot that struck her, then swallowed the entire leg and just stayed like that? Would she be stuck with a person hanging from her? Would she be a cannibal?

She can only think about herself when she's going crazy. She only feels productive when she's starving. In times like this, it almost feels like she would miss herself.

Oh. Okay. Now they've stopped.

For a while, Sylvia's world was quiet. In moments like these she meekly let her mind wander out of its panic room; she began to ask questions. How long had she been there? Had anyone back in Rakia realized she was missing?

There was undefinable. There was the space of her torture; any person who's been tortured can tell you that there is about five square meters, there is the entire universe. The shared universe of their torture and nothing more, nothing less, plus-minus the way it spins around their head and turns minutes into goo and days into mute witnesses. Sylvia hadn't seen a flicker of the place where she was held, though it was certainly dark and the level of that darkness never deviated.