𝔟𝔩𝔢𝔞𝔠𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔟𝔞𝔱𝔥𝔯𝔬𝔬𝔪 (OC short story)

"Your bathroom ... it’s filthy ..."

Said the floating blob. A milky whirlpool of confused and spastic affection. And they engulfed her as they orbited. And the legs she used to see on the blob, the awkward coiffed ponytail, the trying and holding on, the pits beneath no eyes … they all twisted and were slurped once again into the whirlpool at the center of the blob and she heard a toilet flush.

Taste, gurgle gurgle.

Whoosh down a thick gulp and

swallow.

Saliva makes a pond to

wallow

in what was once there …

Soon the blob drifted as if carried by an unsure breeze, down the hallway, not one creek on the floorboards, not without legs and feet. Down the stairs and out of sight. It was not loud, always sighing. Sometimes it morphed to shape a jellyfish, and its sighs thrust it with a pulsating rhythm this way and that about the house. About the rust and wood and porcelain and fire and metal and grunts and fingers and hands wanting and tolerating and thick skin and sunken couch and sunken pits beneath no eyes. 

Long black arm hairs contorted and scratched and fell to the tile floor of her filthy bathroom to join the others. She didn’t notice the squirming and shivering legs until she squatted down and dunked her head low between her knees to meet the mold and stain face-to-face. Resisting to inhale, one bug looks down at the others. One enlarged and blurred. Its center spinning into a vortex and out of reality. Part of her Mother. 

Looking down at pieces of a girl.

Crammed and categorized into what is nauseating. 

Her eyes were bitten in place by eyelashes and their plaque. 

See and don’t recede into a brain maze that is only soft and green and fogging,

as her hairs turns into centipedes that just stare back. 

She rubs her arms uneasy because they knew her just a minute ago. Like eyes that become dry fingertips touching achingly slow across her lands. She shivers under the cold light. But it is bright enough and exposes enough. She is undressed and naked, but she’ll leave the light on. She’ll take her eyes out and place them on her counter, the glass lens facing up. She did not have to acknowledge her old self in her remnants all around. A girl in a grave.

"Your bathroom ... it’s filthy ..."

She heard a toilet flush. She poured in the bleach and she scrubbed. Her face is uncompromising. The flesh around her two eye sockets looks deep inside two raspberries. Just a still, wet portrait. Sweat and layered in dead skin is rotting, but she’s looking forward to washing it off once the bathroom is not filthy. After that, she’ll get everything dirty again, slowly peel herself again. Slowly scrub the waste away again. She does this faster and harder until her hand is sore. Until she can’t pretend she isn’t out of breath, and her mouth cracks open from its tight line, from the hardened clay that is the expression that never changes but is repainted again and again. She gulped breath just enough to hum. Mother sighs, but she also hums about the home. She realizes she’s picked up the habit. The sound of it rolls her eyes off the counter and onto the floor. Something has made Mother upset. Red blots her lip like ink from where her teeth pierce it. 

She pours the bleach onto the floor. 

Her remains die and disintegrate. 

More and more bleach, until she cannot think straight. 

Bleach to loathe

yesteryear and yesterday.

Bleach on her, on her insides, on her mouth, and on her face.

She puts in her eyes and can only stand one sweeping glance at her bathroom that is not filthy, before her discomfort swiftly submerges her again.