GRAVESKIES

Chapter 26

Ryujin awoke on the floor, coughing. She clambered up, leaned over and threw up over the table. Tears stung her eyes. She barely heard her own retching over the ringing in her ears. The noise. The light! She turned the projector off, turned the lamps off, the light burned her eyes. The ringing was so loud she wanted to cut her ears off.

After a few hyperventilating attempts, panic overflowing in her chest, Ryu realized the suffocated wails came from her own lips, and not those of an intruder.

Put those emotions away, please. They're too much, and it's not fair to yourself. You're listening to things that don't have a voice. Who do you think you're helping? With a cold, medical tone, there was Storyteller, taking care of her, advising only for the best, fending for her and healing and swallowing every unfortunate thing that would ever lay a finger on her.

It returned with a tour de force, that tight dagger of pain in her throat that she used to get when she was a kid— like everything in her body tried to stop her from crying. Pressure weighed down like a boulder on her collarbones, as though her shoulders were trying to fold in half. She choked, hands hovering uselessly, and for a few seconds she couldn't believe the weak, disgusting sounds that wrenched out of her throat. Her ribs tightened, crushing into themselves; would her lungs pop like balloons? Would she float without wings? There was not enough mercy in the world to forgive Ryujin. Her ego finally failed her.

So this was Dianne Northington's reasoning.

Ryujin suddenly saw everything with a lab coat and a microscope. She saw the man she killed wake up in the morning and do his routine: brush his teeth with discount toothpaste, trim his scruffy beard the way his wife likes it, wash his face with anti-acne soap because he still gets those embarrassing, pesky pimples that give him a pubescent look. She saw him drink his instant coffee and think about his work day; trip over some old box of family photos as he stepped into fake leather office shoes. She'd cut off dozens, perhaps hundreds of routines like this and nothing like this, and she'd be arrogant to narrow all their lives down to routine, they all must've had moments that belong to the realm of the utterly extraordinary. Who was Ryujin Volta to end that?

She felt something lodged up in her throat so she made herself throw up again, overcome with the sudden desperation to be clean. Her fingers grazed the roof of her mouth so harshly she teared up; when retracting them, they were bloody.

Ryujin smacked her own legs mercilessly, positioned herself on the floor to feel as much pain as she could envision. Seven square meters couldn't contain her horror. She slammed herself, left shoulder first, against the closet door. She knew from experience where to hurt herself so that it affected her the least in battle, but for the first time she didn't even care about that. It might be better that way. She'd suffer more. She hit her wrist into the wall until it cracked and bled.

She screamed, she said everything she'd been thinking, spat out all her despicable, dilapidated internal narration, all the words she'd chewed on, all the words she'd carved into her skin in private. "Piece of shit! How dare you, how dare you do this to me? Fuckin' psychopath. I'll fucking kill you, tear you apart limb by limb... crack your skull against these walls... pathetic liar, murderer, murderer..." When angry, she had this habit of despotically addressing her perceived attacker with the insults she herself deserved. Not even her delusional brain could pretend this was Storyteller's fault for long. Her face contorted painfully. "Who the fuck... how could I do this...? God, no, God, no no no..." At first with hesitation and then unrelentingly, she knocked her head against the edge of the table, again and again, and she had the guts, the fucking guts, to cower like she was in pain. Like she was the one suffering.

Heaving, Ryujin roughly grasped the edge of the table, fingernails scratching the faded polish, arms trembling, elbows sticking up, and pushed it until it flipped and broke over Storyteller's old chair.