Fragmented

My face wets and I am sure the ceiling must be weeping with rain water. It was raining outside wasn't it? My hand reaches tremulously up aided by my arm imbued with all the strength of a deceased eel. I feel a tightening in my chest as something wrenches wild and free, threatening to devour me whole.

The room is swimming or maybe I am. It must be the room holding all this excess water and not my flesh filling up like a child's summer toy. I mentally plod towards the words swirling about me in tandem with the blinking of red and blue piercing through the glass of the windows and painting the walls in warning. I feel flushed, not in my skin but of the world. My being has been tossed into a swirling of toilet water. I am wasted.

"I'm so so sorry." The skin around the older set of eyes pinches with the grief of the theft of a lover promised through sickness and health.

The flesh of my body folds in on itself like the material of a sweat drenched piece of origami. I am undone. Whomever I am in this moment is unravelling, but someone fiercer weaves themself within the strands of me.

"Flora."

I'm called by a name not my own. I can't wear the name. It's a hand-me-down suit that doesn't fit me, but I have to wear it or they will see the nakedness of me. The length and breadth of the sleeves tear to accommodate the fullness of my being. The letters of the name tear with the papery translucence of the stretching it requires to allow me out.. or in. I'm not sure which.

All feeling has become mist. It kisses the earthen blades that protect the tenderness of soil beneath. Red hot blame shoots like lasers at her from my eyes, in spite of the chiefest of it reflecting back onto myself. He had asked me where I was going. I was so angry at him for giving up and lying down as if to die. He died.

How could he die without me here? He asked me if I was going to leave him there to deal with the landlord on his own. All those childhood dances and skate parties were wasted while I stayed home to watch him. A childhood of care scrambled like so much egg yolk before my eyes. I am anger and bitterness incarnate. I am the sharpest blades of grass fending off the mist of emotion swirling about as if it were my father's murderers. Many years later, I would come to understand they, in fact, were.

The paramedics are sitting on his stool. Don’t they have any idea what this is doing to me? I need something to comfort me. I need something of his to tether me to the cracking and crumbling earth beneath my feet. I walk through the doorway leading to his deathbed looking for his jacket only to find his corpse lying there as if waiting to mock my efforts. He’s gray now and in soiled boxers. This is how I am doomed to remember him.

I am falling through the darkness of the evening sky. When my body hits the floor, my eyes close with the impact. With a groan from the pit of my stomach, I peek my bleary eyes open. Shock racks my emotionally mangled frame, as I find I am no longer in my home but somewhere entirely foreign to me. Just as my father instructed me for years, I take stock of my surroundings. Where the hell am I? Did the shock kill me? The padding of small feet has me looking behind me.

"Heya pal! Nice to see ya, pal!"

"Pal? Who are you, kid? Where is this place? Are we dead?"

"Dead?" The matted blonde curls bounce about her freckled face as she walks on her tiptoes closer to where I am sitting on dusty wooden flooring. "What's dead, pal?"