For The Record

01

01

IF an hour is just a drop in the ocean of time, then the past week has been displaced completely; probably by the stone that weighs so heavy on my heart.

Scything paralysis courses through my veins: a searing numbness that seemed to rake at my body with claws as soft as a fatal whisper in the dead of night--in your mind, telling you to do it now, to reach for the pills gathering dust in the medicine cabinet, brush your fingers against untouched capsules and allow them to drop onto your tongue; droplets of life still lingering on your lips from when you gushed down the water that causes them to slide down your throat, release their compounds and burn you from the inside out.

Her presence is a blizzard in the depths of summer; impossibly thick and suffocating, around my throat and down it, like the blood on the nights where we'd drank too much beneath the full moon--all the while where she was slowly dissipating into the detachment of existence and I never noticed: clinical and faded and depleted of the life that used to flow so freely through her veins.

Missing her now is a wave of nostalgia, like ice scraping at my organs.

My mother embodies that ice; it festers in her steeped-grey gaze, like storm-clouds reflected in a puddle. Her eyes, narrowed into thin slits, follow me around the room, even as I shrug on a jacket at the door.

The day outside is nothing short of sunshine.

My too-tight boots bite at my ankles, and my mother snarls something at my back as a sharp pain shoots through my heels; a small sacrifice for the hard ground beneath my feet, and the glowing warmth that feels a world away from the bitter ice-age raging throughout the house.

The coat over my shoulders soon feels heavy and suffocating, and I shrug it off even as I bypass the street, in search of somewhere, anywhere, that is both close and far from home.

Summer is relentless on my still-covered-up body and there's an insatiable urge in me to tear off my clothes and shed my skin until I feel like me, like Everleigh Rush, and nothing to do with Skylar Miyasaki; nothing to do with anything but merely existing for the rest of my life on a cloud of something numbing and inebriating so that I never have to know anything again.

Even though people are absorbed in their own lives, their stares scorch my skin and leave bullet-holes of singed flesh in their wake. I shudder in their passing shadows, but I don't duck my head nor avoid their watchful gazes.

I've never been one to blend in with the crowd, and in the wake of Skylar's death, I'm not going to start now.

Horizon Cafe was a favourite hangout of ours for years. It beckons me now, with artificial smoke rising from the lips of the decorative volcano where the kitchen resides. Skylar and I always used to get balcony seats, overlooking the action, with the city rumbling on behind us and sparkling with life.

The glass-dome building has watched me in my worst moments, and it continues to observe me now as I collapse into a table beneath the stairs, where all the demons lurk, and switch on my phone.

My brother's sent me several texts, but I pretend not to notice any of them. I connect to the cafe's WiFi, my fingernails tapping against the screen to keep my fingers occupied.

Since I found out, all they've managed to do is claw at the air, as if re-enacting my best friend's last moments before she hit the ground.

TN41G

I slam the password in, hands shaking and knuckles blanched. My mouth feels like the Sahara. Coming here was a bad idea. Skylar always said we'd get jobs here, but I can't do that without her.

But I don't want to feel like I can't do anything without her, either.

Still shaking. Crap. I stab my fingers into the screen for some desperate fling at stability. An array of names comes up: a scrolling list with companies and contacts.

One of them rips out a memory: a ghost of a whisper. It kneads my brain between two hands; I close my eyes to let it surface; to pull me up and force me under with the force of the current.

Ariel Winter.

I memorise the number, and let the name imprint itself into my brain.
The shaking doesn't cease, even as I slam his number into the keypad and wait for it to call.

One ring, then two. Eternity passes in the cramped booth; the isolated passage of time. If things went on like this, maybe I'd find Skylar again, in the booth right opposite me, next to the stars that shimmer in her eyes, ketchup on the corner of her lips and a chip dangling from her mouth as she laughs at a video she's struggling to show me when she's laughing so hard she can't breathe.

I don't have to look round, though, not to remember the silence beside me. She's gone. She's gone, and I don't know why.

But maybe Ariel Winter does. Maybe he has to--because if he doesn't, I'm at another dead end, and this time, there'll be no one left to bury me.

🌙🌙🌙