garbage

flesh amnesiac, this is your song

"... And Eileen Laurel Hastings, don't you dare slam that—!"

It sounds like a ribcage splintering. That's sort of exactly what the aged wooden frame around the door does— splinter. The wall wavers with the force of Eileen's fury, like she could make it bend or fall to its knees at her grip.

She chokes out a frustrated shriek, whipping around to find a new target in her bedroom. "So fucking stupid!" Eileen snarls, generally directing it at everything in sight. She marches to the corner of the room, where she faces the bed she has slept in since she was ten. She starts ripping into the pillows propped against the headboard with her sage-colored claws, she shreds them through the bloody metallic taste in her mouth from chewing on the inside of her cheeks, red starts to permeate the edges of her vision and that familiar ardor starts to sink its teeth into her core—

Eileen pulls her hands back sharply, forcing them into fists at the base of her sweater. Her eyes fly closed and she shudders an inhale, then an exhale.

Sixty... forty-seven... thirty-four...

Her shoulders slump and her head rolls back. She lets her lashes flutter. Eileen stares at the ceiling while her face slackens.

Twenty-one... eight.

Finally, Eileen feels the tautness of her cheeks melting away. The red at her peripheral is gone, and her chest feels less hot now. She looks to the side. Her eyes catch on her ochre desk, stained from years of use and covered in folders and papers from school. Her mouth twists up to the right in thought for a few moments, and then she decides.

Eileen lets her weight fall onto the chair with an exhausted thud. Of its own accord, her right hand scrabbles across the desk surface, then underneath to pull out a drawer. The notebook she pulls out is a lot like her bedroom; the cover is made of compostable material and is etched with a nature landscape in burgundy and olive hues. Something out of a rugged, woodland fairytale. The quasicabin walls around her echo this sentiment.

Eileen's journal is filled halfway, with stories from this world and the next. This is far from her first— she used to fill out a notebook every month when she was younger, then unsuccessfully attempted to restrict herself to one page per day.

(She wonders why she'd done that, sometimes, cut back on something that made her happy. Maybe she just didn't think she deserved it for a while. Something stupid.)

When Eileen finds her pen, a purple liquid gel whose click will never fade, she throws a bewildered glance toward the door. Silence, then the soft ba-dum of a closing door. Roxanne Hastings is, in fact, not stomping down the hall to give her daughter another ear-bleeding lecture about watching her strength around the house.

Huh.

Eileen looks down at the notebook spread open across the desk, fresh blank pages beckoning for ink. This time, like so many others, she bends with a click.

October 13th 2018
3:30 PM

When I was little, I knew a lot of things. More than I ever let on, but I think that's the case with everyone when they're kids: everyone thinks you know nothing and you live in your own fairytale world.

I knew I was different than the other kids at school. I think I figured it out during the third week of third grade, when I noticed a group of girls laughing giggling about something, huddled at recess. For some reason, my first instinct was to look at their arms. I think I was probably trying to see if they were actually doing anything. I feel like you learn very quickly as a kid that things, energy, action is stored in the arms, the hands.