I found myself on my knees. Clutching at the pant-legs of someone—Bell. Begging her. My words tumbled out of my face. They were not my own. There were alien, sickening, transplanted into my brain by the black swelling that suffocated all else.

“Please fix me,” I begged her. Close to sobbing. Or maybe sobbing. I don’t know. I don’t remember.

I don’t want to remember.

“Please,” I choked out. Small voiced. Crumpled on the cold ground. At the mercy of whoever would see me.

Dead to rights. No outs.

I’d always hoped, feebly as it was, that this would turn itself around. That Sophia would figure out what to do to make it better.

But she was afraid of me, like everyone else. I was always a quivering red spot in her mind, a hair-trigger from exploding, a hair-trigger from receding endlessly into myself, never speaking or thinking or wanting again.

There was a part of me for each. A part of me to slaughter. To run amok through the world and destroy everything in my path because I could. A supernova held back by skin. Blow the lid on this whole life-charade I’d fallen into wide-open. And who better to expose the secret life of the unfortunate than me? The most powerful. The most unlucky.

A part of me for void. A hollow shell with no sight and no hearing and no touch. Each and every part of me that made me, removed. Until only the barest minimums were left. Lungs for breathing. A cold steel heart for beating. The braid of fire ‘round my mind long since extinguished. Buried and frozen in an avalanche—everything else lost and covered in the depths of a dark and endless winter.

I pawed at Bell’s legs and begged her: “Please fix me.”

And she looked down at my pitiful self and she said, “I can try.”

0 0 0

I was still on my knees, but Bell crouched down to my level. Even with a lowered stature like that, she still towered over me.

I was completely and totally at her mercy. She could have ordered me to decapitate myself and I would have, gladly.

And even as I knew that was wrong, I couldn’t muster the mental strength to push the dependency out of my mind.

Weak.

Bell spoke. Words from a true goddess. “You know, in my travels, I’ve learned a few things about flesh magic. This might not matter to you, but I’ve got a suspicion it will. Stop me if you don’t care.”

I hung on her every word. I stared at her blankly.

She went on. “The mind is a product of the brain, and the brain is a piece of flesh. But the mind controls the body, doesn’t it? Sure, there are things it doesn’t control, but everything can be overtaken, temporarily, by conscious thought. And it was enough to make me wonder—somewhere in the brain, the mind exists. Somewhere there’s got to be a fold of gray matter that determines what we think. How we feel. What we’re afraid of. And we know some of those places, and some of them we don’t, but…it has to be there, because where else can it be?”

I had nothing to say. I was incapable.

In my ears I heard the music of my heart overlaid with the sound of my empty whooshing mind; the beats came erratic and sudden, a touch too many for instinctive listening, hard and abrasive on the off-times. It brought me no peace. It was impossible to follow.

I stood encircled by it. It whirled around me, unknowable chaos-noise. Structured enough to be music, unstructured enough to be nothing but sounds.

“And everything can be replaced,” Bell said, leaning in a little closer to me. “Everything is temporary to a flesh-key. Everything part is serviceable. Upgradable.”

I opened my mouth. My words were lost to the booming percussion, the crackling snare-hits loud enough to reset trains of thought, the yawning droning screech that swallowed the world.

Bell’s words became quiet. Her eyes filled black.

“I can’t guarantee I can do this for you,” the deity known as Bell said. “I’ve never tried to perform this kind of surgery on a willing participant before. My experience is limited only to experiments on prisoners. But if you are truly desperate—”

In the halls the air was cold and lifeless.

Bell looked away from me. She examined the tips of her fingers, pianist’s hands, and I wondered if she could hear the music I could hear.

I wondered if she was playing it.

“I can see what I can do,” Bell finished.

Again I opened my mouth—and again my words were swept away by the typhoon.

All I could do was bob my head up and down. Like a plastic ornament.

To be taken apart and reformed. Brought low and brought high.

I nodded.

And inside me boomed and rattled the hateful death-song. The invalid-music.

I looked down. I closed my eyes.

I croaked out: “Please.”

Bell shifted. In the darkness I did not know what she did.

I chose to believe she smiled her little quiet smile. And maybe that smile meant joy that I was going to choose life, no matter how tenuous a chance; and maybe that smile meant pity at how low I brought myself; and maybe that smile meant excitement because she would finally get to uncover the world that ticked and twirled under my skull.

The skull of the legendary, the feared, the venerable—Erika Hanover.

But then Bell said, “Alright,” and a pinpoint hole in my heart burned hot.

Bell took me by the arm. I let her do it. I trusted her unequivocally. There was nothing in the world that could make me not trust her. I knew she would never hurt me. I knew she would do everything in her power to save me, because she knew what I was worth when no one else did.

She pulled me to my swaying feet.

“Let’s find somewhere quiet,” she said.

And my steps followed hers down the hall. The feet in two-step lock with hers. The eyes clenched shut. The lungs held stagnant; the hands loose and lifeless; the mouth sealed; the brain in chilled slowness.

She opened a door.

I was inside.

She closed the door.

0 0 0

Hal stood behind my chair at the little wooden circle-on-legs we called a dinner table. That thing was worn and wobbly when we moved in. Chipped and bare and ragged. He always said it was “well loved”, but I couldn’t understand why something so cherished would look so tired.

0 0 0

He came to pick me up from school one day; I was sick with a twenty-four hour flu. I’d known about it that morning—the creeping weight of nausea shifting onto my stomach—but I chose to risk getting through the school day over truancy.

He said to me, in the car: “Sick, huh?”

I nodded. It was all I could do, lest I open my mouth and vomit again.

“When did you feel it coming on?”

I knew the answer, but that wasn’t a yes-or-no—I had to give a word. Maybe a few words.

I couldn’t do it. I shrugged.

“If you knew about it this morning, you should’ve told me,” he said. “I could’ve used a vacation day or something. Now they’ve got nobody to cover for me at the plant—shit’s just stopped.”

His words weren’t directed at me. It wasn’t my fault any more than it always was. It was the wind, the course of a river. It just was.

I kept my mouth shut.

We arrived home, and I left the car and crawled back into bed. I wondered, briefly, why I’d bothered getting out of bed in the first place if I knew that I was just going to end up there at twelve-fifty-five again.

Why I did anything if it would just be undone.

Twenty-minutes later, Hal brought me a bowl of soup.

0 0 0

I came home alone. Ate alone; scavenged through the fridge for something vaguely nutritional. Watched TV alone. Brushed my teeth. Put myself to bed.

It was Wednesday. That was the usual.

But on Thursday, I woke up alone.

I ate breakfast alone.

And when I came home alone again, and waited and waited for him until seven o’clock when finally the front door click-rattle-clunked its way open and revealed to the world that yes, Hal Hanover did still exist, and yes, his daughter was not going to be alone forever, I was struck upside the head with a feeling so large and complex that it overwhelmed me; it swallowed my understanding whole and left me with nothing.

I watched him come in and take off his work boots and I just stood there and cried.

Hal heard me sniffling, looked at me. Confused.

He asked me what was wrong.

I couldn’t tell him. Not because it was forbidden—but because I didn’t know if I was happy or sad to see him again.

0 0 0

Dan, Earl, Davy, Hal, and I at the poker table one Friday night. Blinds at five hundred and a thousand. I hadn’t dealt myself anything worth a damn all night—that was one of the nights were I both played and dealt—and that hadn’t changed yet, so I folded on position. Hal was down to three-thousand, or our equivalent of three dollars. Saw two face cards in his opening two, pushed all. Davy was the chip leader by a rather large margin and called him on principle, since he had something better than off-suit two-seven and in that position, he might as well go for it.

Ten-king of hearts from Hal, five-six of spades from Davy. Hal matched one heart on the flop against Davy’s pair of sixes, catches another heart on the turn, and flipped the ace of hearts on the river.

As he scooped his meager paycheck, Davy leaned back and pulled a terse smile. That was his third blowout at the hands of Hal that night. Said to me, “You know, I swear you do this shit on purpose.”

“Have you seen the horseshit I’ve been playing tonight?” Hal said back, laughing. He took a swig of his sixth beer. “That might’ve been the best hand I’ve seen all night.”

“I only deal it when it counts,” I said.

“And that was one of those times, huh?” Davy replied.

“Every time I let him win a hand, I get another five strands of spaghetti for dinner.”

I didn’t think before I spoke when I dealt card games. It was better that way. I liked not thinking.

What had thinking ever done for me?

“Maybe if I adopt you, you’ll deal me a hand worth a damn,” Davy said back.

We all laughed. Laughing was fun. We laughed all night.

Davy slaughtered Hal with flopped triple-fours in the next hand.

0 0 0

Bell had told me, “There is nothing in the world that can’t be changed. Everything can be fixed. Everything can be replaced.”

Bell had told me, “There is only one way I know of abandoning fear completely.”

Bell had told me: “Let yourself die.”

0 0 0

There was a searing pain across the back of my head. It snapped my world in half, and for a second I was falling in a dark room, sitting perfectly still—going nowhere—careening in freefall toward an endless pit.

The pain snapped through my mind so hard and fast that I couldn’t stop myself from lurching forward and crying out.

Bell grabbed my arms. Held me while I held myself.

And I waited and waited for the pain to stop.

I waited and waited and waited.

Bell whispered to me, “I’ve got you.”

She whispered to me: “It’s going to be okay.”

0 0 0

But despite Bell’s best efforts, Erika Hanover died in her sleep that night. She was fourteen years old.

There was nothing to say or do.

In the morning, I was gone.

That’s all.