u/Other-Show-9464

Solitude can be cleansing. That’s what Lena said when I told her about my trip. She told me about Christmases back in Poland, when her father would catch a carp to eat on Christmas Eve. It would hover solemnly for days in the sterile, alien world of a tin bathtub. Fasting, like a monk, the clean water would run through it, flushing out all the filth and bitterness. It would die alone, far from home, but pure.

I had been clean for a year at that point. Whatever poison once ran through my veins had long since left my body. My trip would not be cleansing so much as reaffirming, remembering who I was before the heroin. I was an outdoorsman, a hiker, like my father raised me to be. I climbed mountains, trekked across fjords, challenged myself. This was my natural habitat, and for too long I had been trapped in dirty apartments, on bare mattresses, numb to the world with a needle in my arm. The King’s Road would be the path home.

Two days in, and the pain was a sharp mix of familiar and foreign. I knew the ache in my shoulders, the blisters on my toes. They were almost nostalgic, an old friend welcoming me back. But my boots rubbed against new scars. I, despite all my recovery, was not nearly as strong as I once was, and drastically out of practice. My confidence about doing this hike was chiefly fuelled by some poetic fervour. My own personal pilgrimage, walking myself back to purity. A saner man would start off smaller, work his way up to a week-long hike. I was never that man.

I was in a valley when I heard it. Steep, jagged walls of grey rock and stubborn ferns to my left, a dense forest of native spruce plummeting down to my right. Above me, a hateful sun, below me, the road. The sound hit me like a cool breeze, rang through my whole body. Clear like the tone of struck crystal. Singing. 

It was coming from the woods. The summer heat bore down on me, and the shade below the spruce trees appeared like cool water on my burning skin. I had been stacking good miles, I could afford a break. I stepped from the path and scrambled down the mountainside, into the valley. I followed the singing into the trees. I didn’t recognise the song, some ancient mountain lullaby. The shade was blissful, and after days of hard footpaths, the soft spruce needles felt like walking on clouds. I lulled forward, my body suddenly tired and limp. I had only been on the trail a few hours at that point.

I came across her in a clearing. She squatted by an old canvas teepee over a gentle fire with a copper kettle steaming atop it. When she turned around and saw me, she stopped singing, and smiled.

“Hi!” She called softly. Her bright blue eyes dappled with light like the forest floor. Honey blonde hair fell like ocean waves across her oversized red cotton shirt. Freckles dotted the bridge of her nose and her cherry blossom cheeks. 

“Hi.” I said awkwardly, suddenly aware of how soaked with sweat and dirt I must be this far into the hike.

“Would you like some tea? Something to eat?” I couldn’t place her accent; it was rural, almost sounded foreign, but her voice was gentle and clear.

“If you don’t mind.” I told her. In truth, it was far too hot for tea, and I wasn’t hungry, but in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to stay here, with her. She smiled again, a wide, beaming smile, and poured the kettle into two wooden mugs. I sat down on a log as she handed me a warm cup of dark, red liquid.

“Lingonberry.” She told me, sitting down beside me, “I foraged them myself.”

“Are you sure they’re lingonberries? I don’t want to be poisoned.”

She laughed raucously at my weak joke, bumping her shoulder into mine. She took a sip of her own tea as if to assure me it wasn’t deadly. I took a sip of my own, and near scalded my tongue. I didn’t let it show in front of her.

“I’m Astrid, by the way.” She told me.

“I’m Jens. Are you hiking the King’s Road too?”

“Oh no, I just camp out here sometimes. What’s the King’s Road?”

I was surprised she hadn’t heard of the King’s Road, given how outdoorsy she seemed and how close she was camped to it.

“It’s this hiking trail that goes across the country. It’s about 100 kilometres long.”

“Wow…” she said, putting a hand on my arm, “You must be like a serious hiker then.”

“Not really, I mean, I…” I suddenly became self conscious of the lingering scars near the crook of my elbow. I prayed she wouldn’t notice.

“Let me get you some cake,” Astrid said, “it’s just in my pack.”

She got up and crawled inside her tent. I awkwardly averted my gaze from her, and looked towards the fire. Within the smouldering ashes, I saw something… alien. A warped, partly melted piece of pink plastic. A driver’s license. I plucked it from the coals. It was warm to the touch.

Magnus Olsen. Age 51. The photo depicts a heavy man with a great, wiry beard.

“What’s that?” Astrid asked me. She was holding a tin cylinder in her hands.

“Oh, I found it in the fire…”

“Oh, yeah.” She smiled, “Just some trash I found around the campsite.”

“It was issued recently, why not return it?”

“Who has the time. Here, have some cake.”

I reached into the tin and took out a thick slice of the cake. It was stale, with thick chunks of browned apples inside.

“Excuse me,” I said, before I could take a bite, “I’m just going to use the bathroom.”

“Okay.” Said Astrid, smiling again. “Hurry back.”

I left the clearing and headed into a thick brush of ferns. I looked behind me; there were enough trees between the camp and I so Astrid wouldn’t see me. I headed towards a thick pine, but I tripped on something in within the ferns. I looked down to see a blaze of blue nylon. A rain jacket. I pulled it from the undergrowth. It looked weather-beaten, but fairly new. Something heavy was in the pocket. A folding knife. Alongside it was a sodden piece of crumpled up paper, a parking permit for somewhere further down the trail. The name on it was Magnus Olsen.

I dropped the jacket, but pocketed the knife. I headed back for the camp, but paused when I saw Astrid’s face between the trees. Her smile wasn’t as wide as before.

“I… found something weird.” I told her. “That driver’s license guy’s jacket. I don’t remember seeing about anyone going missing when I l-”

Astrid cupped my head in her hands and pulled me forward, kissing me deeply. She tasted of wild strawberries and the way wildflower meadows smell in the summertime. My body went limp once more.

“I’m so glad you found me…” she whispered. It was almost a cry.

My hands rested on her waist, then wound up into her shirt. I was broken from my stupor when I felt her back.

It was cold. Hard. Rough and peeling, like tree bark. My fingers ran deeper, the small of her back some kind of cavernous hole where a spine should be. I pulled away from her embrace, but Astrid grabbed my throat slammed me hard into the ground. On the ground, winded, she straddled me, held me down by the shoulders. 

“Please, give me a chance.” She croaked, tears in her eyes, “You could love me. I promise. You could love me.”

Behind her, a thin, brush-like tail whipped behind her.

I struggled, kicked, dug my heels into the dirt, but I was pinned to the ground as she planted kisses across my face and neck. Then I remembered, Magnus’ knife. I drew it from my pocket, flipped it open, and drove it into Astrid’s leg. It singed and smoked like it was furnace hot, and Astrid jumped back in a wailing fit. I clambered to my feet and ran for the tree line. I scrambled up the cliff side and clawed my way onto the path.

I looked down. What compelled me to stop and look, I can’t say. Amongst the shadows of the trees, I saw Astrid. Weeping.

I never completed the King’s Road. I ran to the nearest town and got the bus home, not sleeping until I had a locked door behind me. It’s winter now. Sometimes, in the long dark, I’ll sit and trace my scars. I’ll think about Astrid sometimes. If she’s out there, in the cold. I think about the last thing she said. If out of all the lies she told, that could have been true. I don’t know why.

It’s quiet here now, in the cold, and the dark. But if I stand still, if I ignore the sound of my own beating heart… I swear I hear singing.

(Part 3 of the North Sea Trilogy)

Solitude can be cleansing. That’s what Lena said when I told her about my trip. She told me about Christmases back in Poland, when her father would catch a carp to eat on Christmas Eve. It would hover solemnly for days in the sterile, alien world of a tin bathtub. Fasting, like a monk, the clean water would run through it, flushing out all the filth and bitterness. It would die alone, far from home, but pure.

I had been clean for a year at that point. Whatever poison once ran through my veins had long since left my body. My trip would not be cleansing so much as reaffirming, remembering who I was before the heroin. I was an outdoorsman, a hiker, like my father raised me to be. I climbed mountains, trekked across fjords, challenged myself. This was my natural habitat, and for too long I had been trapped in dirty apartments, on bare mattresses, numb to the world with a needle in my arm. The King’s Road would be the path home.

Two days in, and the pain was a sharp mix of familiar and foreign. I knew the ache in my shoulders, the blisters on my toes. They were almost nostalgic, an old friend welcoming me back. But my boots rubbed against new scars. I, despite all my recovery, was not nearly as strong as I once was, and drastically out of practice. My confidence about doing this hike was chiefly fuelled by some poetic fervour. My own personal pilgrimage, walking myself back to purity. A saner man would start off smaller, work his way up to a week-long hike. I was never that man.

I was in a valley when I heard it. Steep, jagged walls of grey rock and stubborn ferns to my left, a dense forest of native spruce plummeting down to my right. Above me, a hateful sun, below me, the road. The sound hit me like a cool breeze, rang through my whole body. Clear like the tone of struck crystal. Singing. 

It was coming from the woods. The summer heat bore down on me, and the shade below the spruce trees appeared like cool water on my burning skin. I had been stacking good miles, I could afford a break. I stepped from the path and scrambled down the mountainside, into the valley. I followed the singing into the trees. I didn’t recognise the song, some ancient mountain lullaby. The shade was blissful, and after days of hard footpaths, the soft spruce needles felt like walking on clouds. I lulled forward, my body suddenly tired and limp. I had only been on the trail a few hours at that point.

I came across her in a clearing. She squatted by an old canvas teepee over a gentle fire with a copper kettle steaming atop it. When she turned around and saw me, she stopped singing, and smiled.

“Hi!” She called softly. Her bright blue eyes dappled with light like the forest floor. Honey blonde hair fell like ocean waves across her oversized red cotton shirt. Freckles dotted the bridge of her nose and her cherry blossom cheeks. 

“Hi.” I said awkwardly, suddenly aware of how soaked with sweat and dirt I must be this far into the hike.

“Would you like some tea? Something to eat?” I couldn’t place her accent; it was rural, almost sounded foreign, but her voice was gentle and clear.

“If you don’t mind.” I told her. In truth, it was far too hot for tea, and I wasn’t hungry, but in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to stay here, with her. She smiled again, a wide, beaming smile, and poured the kettle into two wooden mugs. I sat down on a log as she handed me a warm cup of dark, red liquid.

“Lingonberry.” She told me, sitting down beside me, “I foraged them myself.”

“Are you sure they’re lingonberries? I don’t want to be poisoned.”

She laughed raucously at my weak joke, bumping her shoulder into mine. She took a sip of her own tea as if to assure me it wasn’t deadly. I took a sip of my own, and near scalded my tongue. I didn’t let it show in front of her.

“I’m Astrid, by the way.” She told me.

“I’m Jens. Are you hiking the King’s Road too?”

“Oh no, I just camp out here sometimes. What’s the King’s Road?”

I was surprised she hadn’t heard of the King’s Road, given how outdoorsy she seemed and how close she was camped to it.

“It’s this hiking trail that goes across the country. It’s about 100 kilometres long.”

“Wow…” she said, putting a hand on my arm, “You must be like a serious hiker then.”

“Not really, I mean, I…” I suddenly became self conscious of the lingering scars near the crook of my elbow. I prayed she wouldn’t notice.

“Let me get you some cake,” Astrid said, “it’s just in my pack.”

She got up and crawled inside her tent. I awkwardly averted my gaze from her, and looked towards the fire. Within the smouldering ashes, I saw something… alien. A warped, partly melted piece of pink plastic. A driver’s license. I plucked it from the coals. It was warm to the touch.

Magnus Olsen. Age 51. The photo depicts a heavy man with a great, wiry beard.

“What’s that?” Astrid asked me. She was holding a tin cylinder in her hands.

“Oh, I found it in the fire…”

“Oh, yeah.” She smiled, “Just some trash I found around the campsite.”

“It was issued recently, why not return it?”

“Who has the time. Here, have some cake.”

I reached into the tin and took out a thick slice of the cake. It was stale, with thick chunks of browned apples inside.

“Excuse me,” I said, before I could take a bite, “I’m just going to use the bathroom.”

“Okay.” Said Astrid, smiling again. “Hurry back.”

I left the clearing and headed into a thick brush of ferns. I looked behind me; there were enough trees between the camp and I so Astrid wouldn’t see me. I headed towards a thick pine, but I tripped on something in within the ferns. I looked down to see a blaze of blue nylon. A rain jacket. I pulled it from the undergrowth. It looked weather-beaten, but fairly new. Something heavy was in the pocket. A folding knife. Alongside it was a sodden piece of crumpled up paper, a parking permit for somewhere further down the trail. The name on it was Magnus Olsen.

I dropped the jacket, but pocketed the knife. I headed back for the camp, but paused when I saw Astrid’s face between the trees. Her smile wasn’t as wide as before.

“I… found something weird.” I told her. “That driver’s license guy’s jacket. I don’t remember seeing about anyone going missing when I l-”

Astrid cupped my head in her hands and pulled me forward, kissing me deeply. She tasted of wild strawberries and the way wildflower meadows smell in the summertime. My body went limp once more.

“I’m so glad you found me…” she whispered. It was almost a cry.

My hands rested on her waist, then wound up into her shirt. I was broken from my stupor when I felt her back.

It was cold. Hard. Rough and peeling, like tree bark. My fingers ran deeper, the small of her back some kind of cavernous hole where a spine should be. I pulled away from her embrace, but Astrid grabbed my throat slammed me hard into the ground. On the ground, winded, she straddled me, held me down by the shoulders. 

“Please, give me a chance.” She croaked, tears in her eyes, “You could love me. I promise. You could love me.”

Behind her, a thin, brush-like tail whipped behind her.

I struggled, kicked, dug my heels into the dirt, but I was pinned to the ground as she planted kisses across my face and neck. Then I remembered, Magnus’ knife. I drew it from my pocket, flipped it open, and drove it into Astrid’s leg. It singed and smoked like it was furnace hot, and Astrid jumped back in a wailing fit. I clambered to my feet and ran for the tree line. I scrambled up the cliff side and clawed my way onto the path.

I looked down. What compelled me to stop and look, I can’t say. Amongst the shadows of the trees, I saw Astrid. Weeping.

I never completed the King’s Road. I ran to the nearest town and got the bus home, not sleeping until I had a locked door behind me. It’s winter now. Sometimes, in the long dark, I’ll sit and trace my scars. I’ll think about Astrid sometimes. If she’s out there, in the cold. I think about the last thing she said. If out of all the lies she told, that could have been true. I don’t know why.

It’s quiet here now, in the cold, and the dark. But if I stand still, if I ignore the sound of my own beating heart… I swear I hear singing.

(Part 3 of the North Sea Trilogy)

Been texting this guy. Today he hit me with the “trans girls are the best girls!” Line. I asked why, and he says “Other girls can be quite annoying in hindsight, trans girls seem very chill in my experience, maybe not internally maybe they're a mess but still“.

Told him I couldn’t relate. Told him I love other girls, that they’re my sisters, and I’ll be DAMNED if this pervert chaser piece of shit is gonna get into my pants with his not like other girls bullshit.

Been texting this guy. Today he hit me with the “trans girls are the best girls!” Line. I asked why, and he says “Other girls can be quite annoying in hindsight, trans girls seem very chill in my experience, maybe not internally maybe they're a mess but still“.

Told him I couldn’t relate. Told him I love other girls, that they’re my sisters, and I’ll be DAMNED if this pervert chaser piece of shit is gonna get into my pants with his not like other girls bullshit.

Ave Maria, grátia plena, dominus tecum.

A strange habit, I know, to pray while throwing up. An heirloom from catholic school, when the nuns would find me in the morning, after a night spent with a boy from town and his stolen bottle of peach schnapps. Messy, sickly, late to prayers. 

Benedicta tu in muliéribus, et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.

“You are imbued with sin.” Sister Catharina would tell me, my knees cold on the bathroom tiles, my head haloed by porcelain. “Your body will cast it out.”

Sancta María, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus…

Swaying gently, half in a dream. My throat full of glass, my head  full of asbestos. Ephesians 5:18 one hundred times over on the chalkboard.

Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

I walked out of the stall, half numb to the world. A line had formed, but there was no bitterness here. We had all knelt at this alter, we all understood. I was a visage in the speckled mirror. I appeared vague. Mascara and eyeshadow stains below my eyes. Scarlet cracks in the corners. Lips pale, the merlot gloss smeared across my left cheek. Dab it with a wet towel, reapply, no one will know.

“Does anyone have a hairbrush?” I asked the room. From behind me, a hand, slender and pale, passing me a little wooden brush. Only here are prayers answered. The temple of the women’s bathroom, the only true convent.

I pulled out the knots, the tangles. Sweat matted the edges. The  summer’s been a killer. I put the brush down by the sink, ran my hands up my scalp, inspected my features an inch from the mirror. When I looked down, the brush is gone. I returned to my friends at our table outside. Two drinks awaited me. They’re two for one tonight.

I woke up late the next morning. The bedsheets that were serving as a blanket clung to my damp skin. I skipped breakfast, showered for thirty minutes, and got ready for my shift. The café wasn’t too busy that day. Everyone ordered iced drinks, and I took pleasure in the cold mist of the ice drawer on my neck. Some of the tourists try to order in my mother’s tongue. They laugh when I respond in English. They buy postcards of the canals, the cathedral. They tell me I’m lucky to live here.

When I close up, I don’t go home. I go to the bar. I know the hangover won’t go away, and the humidity made me crave tall glasses of cold soda and vodka, feeling the bubbles sparkle on my upper lip. The bartender, a skinny blonde with faint stubble, tries to make conversation but I’m just not there. I smile and nod politely until he gives up on me.

The sun is setting when I feel it. Like someone gripping me by the spinal column. My muscles tense, my ribs feel cold, my lungs empty and I can’t fill them. My nails dig into the bar. It’s the last thing I remember before waking up next to a corpse the next morning.

I don’t recognise him. He’s naked, folded up on the floor, a caved-in hole in his skull. The eye beneath it has popped out of its orbital. I’m naked too, laid out flat on my front. The ends of my hair are stained from the blood pool. I don’t scream. I can’t scream. My throat twists up and refuses to open. I lie still like a scared animal. My body feels far, far away, but I’m anchored by something. A weight in my right hand. I drag it up to my face; I’m holding a heavy, earthenware plant pot, half full of black soil. The same dirt speckles my hand. A plant lies uprooted by the dead man’s knees. A darkness stains the base of the pot.

I scrub myself in the dead man’s shower until I bleed. I haven’t been this raw since birth. I paint the world in bleach water. I take the bus home, drifting from reality. I feel cold despite the heat. I hide in my flat and wait for the police to knock. I sleep deeper than I have in weeks.  

No knock came. I woke up after the sun sank down. I sit on the edge of my bed in silence for what may have been seconds, may have been hours. I got up. I got dressed. I went to the bar.

There are messages on my phone. Lotte asking where I was, pissed off she had to cover my shift on her day off. My friends asking me where I am, how I am, if I wanna meet up later. I apologise to Lotte, tell her I was ill. I tell my friends something similar.

I look up at the bartender. It’s the same one from last night. His name-tag says Willem.

“Another?” He asks, nodding at my empty glass.

“Yes. Do you remember me from last night?”

“Yeah.” He tells me. He’s smiling.

“Was I… was I acting strange? Talking to anyone?”

“Hmm, no, I wouldn’t say so.” He says, frowning. “Why?”

“I… I blacked out, is all.”

“I didn’t notice anything. You only had a couple drinks here.”

“Do you know what time I left?”

“Maybe halfway through my shift, so eight o’clock maybe?”

Eight o’clock. Barely even evening.

“You didn’t seem drunk when you left.” Willem tells me.

A buzz on my phone. My friends on the group chat. They’re worried about me, bless them. I tell them I’m fine, just not felt well today. We arrange to meet up later.

We meet at the other bar. The last time I was here was when I gagging into the toilet bowl, praying to Mary. I tell them I think I was spiked. They all gasp, recoil. Annika holds my hands tenderly.

“Oh, sweetheart…” she says, “Are you okay? Were you…” she asks, afraid to say the word.

“No.” I tell them, sounding more sure than I possibly could be. There was no hurt, no sting, no evidence.

“What happened? Do you remember?”

“No, I blacked out. One minute, I was having drinks after work, the next, I was waking up at home.” I lied. How could I tell them the truth? 

“How many drinks did you have?” Mila asked.

“Two or three maybe?”

“Are you sure? Maybe you weren’t spiked, maybe you just drank too much.”

“I know how many I had, Mila, Christ.”

“Do you remember talking to anyone?” Annika asked.

“No, I was alone.”

“That’s not safe, Femke.” Mila told me, a reminiscent judgment in her eyes.

“I know, I just… I don’t know. I’m fine. Honestly.”

They looked at me with the sympathy of unbelievers. I escaped to the bathroom. Locking the stall, I sat down with my head in my hands and wept. I was in a nightmare. An unjointed nightmare I couldn’t will myself to wake up from.

A girl in the next stall asked if I was okay.

I didn’t answer.

I felt the grip on my spine again.

I woke up on a sofa, in an office. The walls are lined with mahogany shelves framing psychotherapy textbooks. A painting of the sea above me, a sailboat breaking through the waves. A man is in the chair opposite me. His pants are around his ankles. A fountain pen hangs limply from his bloody, ravaged neck. This time I do scream. No one hears me.

I scrub my bloody hands with the hand sanitiser on the table, but I don’t bother cleaning up the scene. I don’t care if I get caught now. I’m scared. I’m tired. I do what I always do when I’m scared and tired.

In the park, I sip from a water bottle full of vodka. Raspberry flavour, because it was cheaper. It’s maybe ten or eleven in the morning. I can’t find my phone to be sure. I watch the kids play on the swings, watch the young couples run together down the path. There are flecks of dry blood on my top.

“I’m sorry about all this.” A voice says behind me. A young woman sits down beside me on the bench. “Honestly, I am.”

I don’t recognise her. She’s skinny, pale under the pillowy white sky. Her dark hair tumbles down in thick locks, her eyes hidden by huge square sunglasses. She looks well put together, precise and dedicated, like a scalpel.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

She rests her Prada bag on her knee and digs through it. She hands me something from it. A small, wooden hairbrush.

“Oh.” I say, not sure how to feel. “You lent me this at the bar.”

“I did.”

“… Thanks?”

“Don’t thank me.”

I stared down at the brush. I saw strands of my own blonde hair still in it. 

“The men you’ve been killing… they deserved it. I promise.”

The blood ran from my face. My grip on the brush loosened.

“How did you know…” I began. I was beginning to feel faint.

“You’ve been doing a great service to your community, Femke. Those men have hurt women before. They would have hurt more if it weren’t for you. You’re a hero, Femke.”

She gripped my hand, stroked the back of it with her acrylic stamped thumb.

“Why am I doing this…? Why me?”

“Why not you? I understand it must have been scary. Maybe it was cruel to force you into this role without your knowledge. But I was with you the whole time, I promise.”

She took the brush back and dropped it in her bag.

“That stuff is killing you, by the way.” She said, gesturing to my bottle, “You deserve better.”

She kissed me on the cheek and left me on the park bench.

That was four months ago. No police ever came to ask me questions. Not yet. I don’t know what to say to them if they ever do. I’m 115 days sober. It took a while to get used to drinking Diet Coke when my friends were on cocktails. My friends in the program were worried about me still hanging out at bars, but I’m doing okay. I was in the bathroom one night when I heard it.

“Does anyone have a hairbrush?”

My eyes shot up and I saw her. She was looking at me, her pale hand holding out a little wooden hairbrush to a girl by the mirror.

I said nothing.

(Part 2 of the North Sea trilogy)

Once upon a time, I was in love. This, however, is not a love story. This is a confession.

All my life, I have felt alone. I wasn’t alone though, I was never alone. I had family, friends, countless people who loved me dearly. But there was always that gap. That empty space. There was me, and there was everyone else, and there was nothing in between. Until Alice.

We met in the spring of our second year of university, and soon found ourselves indivisible from one another. To say we were in love would not be a just description. Got to a place where two rivers flow into one and try to pluck out one’s water from the other; you will have an easier time of that than finding where I ended and Alice began. We were indelibly stained with one another, and had become the same hue.

I first noticed the shift two years in, on a trip we took to the city one weekend in December. It didn’t start there, of course. How could it? The tide rises for hours before you notice the cold lapping at your feet. The space between us in the hotel bed was chasmic. I endured long, silent bus rides with her body rigid against mine. Weak smiles where once was laughter.

We suffered through the winter. I felt the gap forming, the glass wall through which light was muted and sound was like a voice underwater. I knew it well, but never with Alice. Some primitive part of me thought the spring would save us, that our love would bloom once more like snowdrops poking through the frost. But March came and we only suffered under warmer skies. Alice began to lose weight. Her hair became straight and straw-like. Her once full, pink cheeks became shallow and grey like bruised fruit. Her eyes had changed, I noticed. No longer did she look at the world with a sparkling softness. Now her eyes pierced, burned through, scanning the room unblinking until they watered.

One night, I think April, we were on opposite sides of the kitchen. I called to her.

“Alice?”

No response. I turned around. She was leaning on the sink, gripping the ceramic.

“Alice…” I called again, softer. She was staring at the space between atoms. Suddenly, Alice unfazed, a foul crunching noise rippled through the kitchen. A bead of cherry red ran from the corner of her lips.

A shattered tooth, the doctor told us. By the time she had the shards removed and her raw gum sewn shut, the sun was rising on a new day.

On the ride home, she stared out through the passenger window, bathed in the gold of the dawn.

“We should open up the relationship.” She told me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I knew what it meant. The thought made me sick, like the inertia of a falling elevator.

“I think it would be good for us,” she continued, “We haven’t had sex in months.”

“You never want to. Is it me? It’s just me you don’t want to sleep with?”

“No!” She cried, “I just…” her eyes went wide, her lips sucked in in frustration. Whatever this was clearly seemed reasonable and obvious to her, and I was the problem for not understanding it.

“I love you.” She continued. It sounded wooden, hollow. An ersatz love, a consolation. “I just understand you have needs and-”

“I don’t need to fuck anyone else. I’m happy just being with you.”

“No, you…” she began, stifled by her own visible anger, “You’re not listening.”

“It sounds like you want to fuck anyone but me. If you want to end this, say it, just have some fucking balls and make a decision.” My knuckles were alabaster white, close to snapping the steering wheel.

“No” she wailed. Her face burned a fluorescent pink, hot tears streaking across her cheeks. “I love you. I love you I love you I love you. I just… I just need… I don’t know…”

I pulled over. The road had become vague through my welling tears. We were a couple streets from her apartment.

“Why don’t you go home, figure out what you want, and we can discuss this later?”

She got out the car, sullen, wounded.

“I’ll call you.” She told me.

It had been almost a week when she did. She told me, through tears, that she had been to a nearby city and fucked an art student there. She wasn’t crying because of that, but because he never called her back. She called me multiple times a day that week, but it would be minutes if not seconds before the screaming or crying became too much for me and would finally block her. Just like that, it was over. The rivers had separated. We had become ghosts in each other’s stories.

Alice. Alice Alice Alice. For the longest time, she was everything to me, so when she left, I wasn’t left with much. Those first few months, I can only describe it as a phantom pain. Some integral part of had turned septic, and had to be hacked off. I felt hollowed out, reaching instinctively to something that simply wasn’t there anymore.

My friends were worried, of course. They knew I was hurting, and did what they could to ease that pain. They crucified Alice with insults, taking every opportunity to tell a joke to try and muster a smile out of me. They did everything in their power to fill the pit forming inside me, the aching one between my lungs. In truth, even then, I felt no hate towards Alice, nor did I forgive her or romanticise her memory. Now, only the pit was real. The nothing.

They decided to take me out. I had no choice in the matter. They were going to get me drunk, high and maybe even laid. It would be like the good old days, they insisted. I didn’t feel like going. It wasn’t the break up that held me back though; I had developed some… sickness. A dull ache, a migraine, a chill down my spine that never seemed to go away. I assumed it was a mild cold at first, maybe a lack of nutrition or something psychosomatic. My friends made it clear though that no excuse would get me out of this.

I stared at myself in the mirror, fixated. I wore all black. Was I in mourning? Not for Alice, but for the person I was with her. In the mirror was a man I only half recognised, like an old friend after years apart. I had become thinner, paler. The contours of my flesh seemed shadowed, more defined. I continued staring into the mirror, into my eyes. They watered from staying open.

We went to a club, Foundry. The only decent place in the city, we had found. A broiling hot closed down mill, a sea of smoke, flesh and strobe lights. The music was loud, ceaseless, a physical force to wade through like water. We cut through the dancing crowd like a knife through buckskin. My friend handed me a shot of something that smelled like acetone and cheap candy. I knocked it back, then a few more, sank them like they were keeping my blood pumping.

Behind me, a girl. Her mascara clumped thick over bloodshot eyes. Streaks of blue in her blonde hair. Flakes of dry skin on the ridge of her jaw. I felt something new then. Not attraction, not lust, but something else. It wasn’t in my heart or my pants, it was like dull nails in the back of neck, cold wind on my canine teeth. Could feel the heat from the valley of her back.

She took me home, fell laughing onto her couch. My hands prised her thighs open like halves of a nectarine. I don’t remember her name. She tasted of sweat and chemical vanilla perfume.

I thought of Alice. Not that she was her, that I was with her. I was just thinking of her, as though in this act I was… proving something. Something I can’t quite describe. I felt nothing. No pleasure. No disgust. All I felt was the pit. That void of inescapable black. For the first time in months, it had ceased its howling.

I peered up over the crests of her body and saw it. In dark of the corner of the ceiling. It was a spider. My mind insisted upon it. Only it wasn’t a spider. It was me. It was me and it was the spider and I was the spider and the spider was me. A creature, a man, velvet black amongst the darkness, its crooked limbs scrambling across the wall, across the ceiling. The white of its wide eyes, the edges of its fangs, glittering in the darkness. I was looking at it. I was it. I was looking at me.

The next morning, I felt incredible. The persistent sickness had drifted away completely. I felt clear as virgin glass, soft as butter. Not even a hangover vexed me. Alice’s ghost no longer clung on my shoulders. This feeling lasted maybe two weeks. It did not fade all at once, but divided itself into fractions of fractions of fractions. A cruel and swift half life. The pit devoured it, sprawled through me like an oil spill, like a cancer.

It became too much one night. Foundry wasn’t open that night, but I texted my friends asking if they wanted to go out to the bars with me. They all declined, for various reasons. I was furious. I felt as though a  burning ember was being bellowed in my chest. The grip of my hand almost cracked the phone screen. I paced my apartment, eyes wide, dry, sharp. I ran my tongue over my teeth. They seemed to crackle with electricity.

I went to bars alone. I talked to some girls, but it didn’t go anywhere. My teeth felt like they were ringing like a bell, my hand trembled without the weight of a drink in my hand. I felt the pit yawn. I felt the spider on my neck.

A man was glancing at me from across the bar. Salt and pepper hair, beard, tan. Somebody’s father. Here all alone dabbing his lips with whiskey. He was handsome, objectively. I had never considered being with another man before, especially not one twice my age. The shadows from the pit creeped up my spine.

In the bathroom stall, his stubble scratched my neck. His name was Mike. I saw a picture of a woman and a teenage girl smiling together in his wallet when he paid for my drink. His hands were huge, in my hair, under my ribs. He tasted like whiskey, obviously. Smelt like mid price cologne and car seat leather. Past his ear, his tongue in my mouth and his fingers on my zipper, I saw the spider, crawling over the stall divider. Through its eyes, I saw myself. I was beautiful.

Months went by. The time between encounters dwindled each time. The pit spread further, infecting every vein, every bone, every scrap of flesh and sinew in my body. I would awake every night, in stranger’s bed, wide eyed, grinding teeth, drenched in cold sweat. The spider would always be there. In the dark. In the corner. Tearing at the walls. The flesh of those I slept with tasted like ash now, felt cold to the touch. Only the arteries felt warm.

Alice still lived at the same apartment. Still kept her spare key in the same place.

In the night, she jolted awake. The streetlights cast a pale glow into her bedroom. She stared into the corner, into the shadows. Into me.

“Luke?” She whispered. I said nothing. “Luke, is that you?”

Her crucifix rested between her breasts. This is my body that is given to you. This is my blood.

“You’ve got it too… haven’t you?” She choked out in the dark. I walked towards her. The sprawling limbs of the spider unfolded above her. I sat beside her on the bed. This bed was once my home.

“I missed you.” I told her. Was I lying?

“There’s a cure… you can get better.”

I kissed her on the cheek. Familiar peach fuzz.

“You can get better, Luke. I got better.”

I kissed her on the mouth. I was expecting cherry, like the old days. There was nothing. She kissed me back. Stiffly, almost necrotic. My lips on her neck. Her hand on my thigh.

“I missed you too.” She whispered in my ear.

Her neck gave way like chicken flesh. Her nails pierced the flesh of my leg. My fingers gripped her hair tight. Blood poured down my throat, down my chin. It matted our clothes, stained her bedsheets.

I drank. I drank until I was sick then drank some more.

The spider held me up like a marionette as I kneeled on the sodden carpet.

I love you. I love you I love you I love you.

The pit howled.

It will never be filled.