vitreous / hs. (DISCONTINUED)

we bleed we need

V I T R E O U S - F I V E

atlas

AFTER lunch was over, I got inspected by the same blonde woman whom I hated tremendously, and she hadn't checked my socks. It took a lot of effort not to cheer in triumph as I left the cafeteria.

When I got to my room, I took the pills out of my socks and pushed them to the far end of the bottom drawer in the dresser. Hopefully no one'll find them.

Now I was sat on my bed, in my room, curiously watching Ines continuously pick at her skin. She pinched certain parts, some harder than others, but she never flinched at all.

She had been doing so for almost an hour now, and all I had been doing was watching her. She never looked up, or broke the focus she had on whatever she was doing to her arm.

"Ines," I said, my voice low.

"What," she mumbled without lifting her head, or stopping.

"What are you doing?" I asked her.

She didn't answer, instead she pinched her lips together and frowned a bit as she kept pinching her arm. After a few silent seconds, she stopped.

She lifted her arm, the surface she was pinching pointed towards me so I could see it. I shuffled closer to her on my bed, and craned my neck forwards.

"All done." She sang, smiling.

The whole surface of her left arm was covered in a deep pink, intricate design of a flower. I noticed that she had been making herself bleed to create the ink she needed to draw the flower on her arm.

Psychotic, I thought. Then I remembered I did almost the same, dragging a blade across my skin when I was down.

The flower was very beautiful nonetheless, and she looked to be quite proud of her work.

"That's... lovely." I told her.

She smiled again, turning the surface of her arm towards her face to look at it. "Isn't it?"

I secretly raised my eyebrows, not necessarily concerned as much as I was almost disgusted. She was sick though, and so was I. We're all sick.

"What's your name?" Ines asked me, swinging her legs over the edge of her bed to face me.

"Atlas," I mumbled. She made this sort of confused kitten face, tilting her head to the side with pursed lips. Her chopped blonde hair fell over her dark eyes.

"Like the book," she whispered, talking to herself. She turned back around and faced the wall, leaning her body from side to side.

Frowning, I turned back around and stared at my own wall, noticing small lines and engravings from previous patients, I assumed. They weren't very obvious, but they all told stories.

Some were lines, in groups of five, maybe indicating the number of minutes, hours, or days that the patient had been counting. I saw names, words, and even doodles, some rather gruesome.

I ran my fingers across the surface of the wall, a little in awe at the fact that the patients here managed to engrave things into the concrete wall. Some weren't engravings, more like drawings; drawn on the surface with a pencil. How did they get a pencil?

Further down on the wall, I saw another drawing, drawn in some kind of ink. It was a drawing of a butterfly, and beside it, scrawled in the same ink, was the word FREEDOM.

The longer I looked at it, I soon realized that it hadn't been drawn in ink, it had been drawn in blood.

Feeling rather sick, I backed away from the wall, and shuffled underneath my blanket. It smelled like disinfectant under here, and I hated it. But I didn't want to be near the blood on the wall, or the blood on Ines' arm.

I wanted to be gone.