out a breath. Bad sign. Most people don’t wake up from lithium comas, and even if they do, the brain damage ruins them.
“They said…she’s dying. So if you want to see her, you’ll have to leave first thing.”
“Dying,” she said. In her mind she rearranged. She placed dishes atop one another, stacked papers and topiaries and engraved mourning walls. (How many dead over the years, the centuries? They piled and piled, the ghosts of this world. There weren’t enough living to mourn them.)
“Yeah. That’s what they said.”
In her mind, she repeated all the things he’d told her, and heard him. Her mother and best friend had tried to kill herself.
It was then that her thoughts kaleidoscoped into discrete segments of shock, pretty and fragile as stained glass. She looked around the room, and like a compound-eyed insect, saw each shard clearly:
There was the green Parkside Plaza, whose design was too cold. For the first time, she understood why she’d never liked the feel of grass between her toes, or dogs, or countertop clutter; she was frightened of them because they were unpredictable, like her mother.
There was yellow Jayne, who’d played cheerful for so long now to mask her sorrow that even she could not distinguish the woman from the act.
There was blue Saraub, holding her hand. Like her mother had predicted so many years ago, she’d broken the heart of a man she hadn’t wanted.
There was the black Breviary, which she knew right then, without doubt, was haunted.
The center of the kaleidoscope was red, and in it she saw weeping Betty Lucas. An abandoned wretch in a backless hospital gown, no family save the daughter who never called.
The kaleidoscope narrowed until there was only Betty, and for a moment everything around her went red, too. The air, the floors, Saraub’s shirt, Jayne’s gauze bandage. All like blood.
Saraub knelt at her chair. “It’s okay,” he said, with his lips so close to her ear that she could feel their warmth. The sound of his voice echoed at first, then went dead, like something in the walls was stealing his words as they reverberated. She knew in that moment that Edgardo and the movers had been right. She was too emotional. Her heartbreak, first from Saraub, and now this, had roused something terrible.
Her grief made all these things clear, and fleeting. They existed as a distraction, flitting about the memories of Betty that were too painful to bear.
Her eyes watered, and to steel herself from a crying jag, she thought about the broken promise Betty had made to her, so many years ago. That lost photo. Thought about the lines on her wrists, unacknowledged. Those bullshit coveralls with holes in all the wrong places.
Her eyes dried, and in the place of tears, a slithering thing radiated from her stomach to the edges of her skin. It unfurled as it grew like a vine. Black spores of rot in berry clusters hung from its branches. It filled first her chest, then her limbs, and the space between her ears, and then her eyes, so that she lost the knowledge of color, and finally, her mouth, so that even her appetites were gone. The spores of fury were dry and bitter. They shriveled her insides, smaller and smaller.
“A nurse found her early this morning,” Saraub said. “I called all day…I came to your apartment before, too. But you weren’t home yet.”
She thought of Betty in a bed, all by herself. One moment an angel, the next, a villain. And the thing is, do you blame the sickness, or its host?
The spores thickened. The mold overtook her until she was dry and bitter, too. There were others trapped here with her. Four children and a woman. They opened their eyes, cornflower blue that coalesced, like running ink, into black. Their mouths opened, too.
Build the door a voice whispered. The man in the three-piece suit. Did they hear him, too?
She turned a cold eye on her visitors. Drunk, ugly Jayne, who reeked of cigarettes and stupid decisions. Saraub, a doormat. He’d told her she was a ghost, and she wondered at the irony, if she slit his throat right now and trapped him here forever.
Would you like that, Breviary? She wondered as she watched them. Shall I cut them for you?
In her mind she covered them with mold. It grew over and inside them, through their mouths and ears and noses, until all was black. Until the vine wore their skin, and used them dry, and