My Shattered Soul

Chapter 1

Central Harlem, NYC; May 10th, 2017, Night

Iskandar Johnson was born in her parents' shitty apartment by the park and had spent the vast majority of her young life trapped within its walls. Now she lay in a bloody circle on the dingy old carpet, a two-inch gaping incision on their sternum, caked with clotting blood; the room had filled with the dense, acrid tang of it; but the stagnant smell of alcohol and ash hung heavy just beneath.

The change started slow, but lasted only a matter of minutes: her heart started to beat, the plasma in their veins sluggishly making its way back into each limb at a trickling pace; her muscles began to tense and release, their body slowly becoming aware of itself once more. Alexs' circulatory system was staring again, but she hadn't taken a breath yet.

Their eyes fluttered open, panicked as her stomach lurched painfully; forcing them to fight back the noxious warmth of bile rising in their throat, as a heavy fog settled over her mind.

For a moment, the world faded from view, her back arched off of the ground, and their body pulled upward as if by strings from the ceiling. All she could feel was the acid rolling hot and cold in her stomach like cooling lava.

Her body settled back on the carpet, as sickening nausea gave way to a wave of pain blossoming from their abdomen; her hands flew up to the open wound just below her sternum, running their fingers against the raw flesh. Slowly, she felt the tattered skin pulling itself back together again, weaving itself back into place, until there was nothing but delicate scar tissue beneath her fingers.

She should have been dead, and the harrowing sense of a tragedy barely survived weighed on her consciousness like Benadryl.

'FUCK' she thought; the word sluggish and distorted in the miasma that filled their mind.

She should have been dead; and yet, she could feel her heart beating in their chest; slamming against her ribcage with all the force of a wild stampede.

'breathe.' a gentle voice in her mind whispered; their words delicate and wispy in their head.

She tried to take her first breath; but, the cold icy air instantaneously evaporated all of the moisture in her lungs, racking their body with a violent coughing fit.

Finally, with one sharp inhale of cold murky air, the world crashed back into view around her, revealing the chipped asbestos ceiling, and the filthy beige walls she'd always known.

Suddenly she could feel all the weight of her atrophied limbs dragging her back down into their reality. The reality where they were laying on a carpet soaked in their own blood; the reality where she was trapped in a vessel that felt like it was made out of solid ice and filled with molten lava; the reality where she had seemingly just survived death itself.

Her organs burned, her muscles clenching tightly around their smoldering bodies, spasming violently all across her physical form, as she fought to take a proper breath.

Her body felt electrified; thrumming with familiar manic energy, from all of their systems running on overdrive as if trying to overcompensate for the five minutes they'd spent starved of oxygen; her heart a furnace in her chest.

She took another breath, fighting violently past the aching chill in her lungs.

There was something wrong; she could sense a noxious fragrance hanging heavy in the air. When they couldn't quite make it out underneath the smell of blood and smoke, she closed her eyes and took another deep breath, letting the world fade from view once more as she pulled all her efforts to focus on that strange putrid odor; stagnant and rotten, like flesh in water, decayed and festering. Alex would know it anywhere, the number of times she'd discovered those fancy green grocery store bags sitting in the sink, full of two-day-old shrimp carcasses and day-old water were beyond count.