Whatever This Is

Grey Velvet

It's a wonderful thing to have a place you loved smell like dust.
It means dust coats every surface. Smelling like dust means that that place hasn't been touched for a long time.
Which means, after years of long waiting, that place, your place, is finally belonging to no one by yourself. The things you invested in that place - books, candles, photographs, knickknacks, and memories - they're all old now. They all smell like dust.
Which means, after years of painful time away from them, you get to re-experience your belongings, while having a feeling of nostalgia as you take them back.
It's been such a long time since anyone's been in my place.
It smells like dust.
Small statuettes cover a small shelf. What shape they were has long since been forgotten. What they meant has dissolved into calm sadness and slight joy. Even their color, whether they were clear or opaque, is indeterminable  now.
This place was built in my youth. Now it's high ceilings are bowing, it's floors covered in inches of dust. It settles so thick in the corners that the room is no longer rectangular. The mosaic tiles of the ceilings and floors have been replaced by grey velvet, old and sad in its luxury. My hands rest on the once-red open doors, as if I was frozen by memory as I opened them. My thumbs very slightly touch the dust on the inward faces of the doors, disturbing the long quiet that had rested there.
Carefully, I stepped forward, conflicted. Sad, because I was disturbing the beautiful gray velvet and it's perfectly musty smell. Happy, because I could now remember everything I had missed. Everything that had once faded from my memory was now coated in a curtain of dust.
As my bare foot fell upon the floor, the curtain was drawn.
The dust flew in little flurries away from my toes, moved by the gusts of wind they created.
I couldn't help it; a smile jumped onto my face as I jumped into the dust in front of me. The dust scattered, and soon fled terrified.
Another smile jumped onto my face as I ran further from it in the dust. They were painful, their parasitic teeth, tongues, and lips creating themselves within my skin. I cried out in pain with my own mouth, and the other two cruelly mimicked the sound while smiling with teeth replica to my own. The pain was unimaginable - unbearable - unescapable.
The dust fled from me and my writhing body and my triple smiles, two cruel sets of lips following the curve of each cheekbone.
Now I saw the trick. The gray velvet curtains fled back, and I knew that the place was not as it had been.
The crystalline chandeliers were smashed, corroded, lying on the floors underneath a dusty carpet. Another smile flew to my skin, carving it's way into my flesh.
The figurines on the shelf were not figurines, but odds and ends of the human sort. My place had been desecrated. I was dying and the dust had been trying to warn me all along. It hissed in corners and disappeared into old and broken windows. More smiles burrowed themselves deep inside my skin. I screamed, and I cried, but thousands of gaping smiles licked up my salty tears and screamed louder than I did. Unnerving screams, because they had no vocal cords: raspy, like hands on fabric and wood against wood. I could feel all of them and yet none of them, thanks to the pain. They all tasted blood, savoring the taste quietly. I had not stopped screaming. I doubt I had stopped screaming when my eyes closed in submission.
I woke up in a pristine white room, with my skin wrapped in gauze and the smiles subdued. A nurse focused on the IV she was checking with shifty eyes and nervous hands. "It must have been pretty terrifying, eh?" She asked with a shiver in her voice. I feared speaking, afraid which smile would take the initiative. I nodded. She breathed inward sharply, no doubt imagining the smiles. She wouldn't look at me. "Didn't anyone ever tell you not to return to the temples of your youth?"
She asked quietly, more a breath than a whisper.
It's a wonderful thing to have a place you loved smell like dust. It means someone is watching out for you. Because, as everyone knows, there are only two things that live in the shrines and relics of your past.
Dust and smiles.