Chapter 16 Below
Below
The toilet lies on its side. So do I, my temple to the cold concrete as I work the bolt slowly. Each rotation makes my fingers hurt horribly, but I can’t get a grip with anything but my bare hands. The threads have stripped my skin raw.
The bolt wobbles now. At last it rotates freely and comes loose in my hand. I don’t have the energy to cry out in triumph. I only fold my hand around it, trying to measure the length by touch alone. If it’s only a couple inches, I’ll have done all of this for nothing.
But, no—-it stretches the span of my hand. Five inches long, I’m guessing. Will it be enough? Two of them, straining in opposite directions—-maybe. The chain isn’t so thick. I think I can bend it.
I still need to unscrew the other one, but I’m exhausted. There’s no time down here, only the internal rhythm of my body, and it’s begging for sleep. My stomach cramps with hunger. A dull, pulsing headache has lodged behind me eye.
There isn’t time.
I thought they might be gone for good, my gossamer girls, but here they are. They surround me. Their feet are bare and blistered. I can feel the sores on my own feet—-too long in the cold and the damp. Too long pacing a rough floor in the same endless circuit.
The bones of their ankles gleam through their skin.
I reach out and close my hand around the nearest of them.
The skin is cool and moist. The girl bends down, peering at me.
Her eyes are a cluster of moth wings, twitching.
Her gums are black. I imagine maggots in her chest, and there they bloom, tumbling from between shadow--slashed ribs.
She isn’t the one who’s spoken to me before, but that doesn’t matter.
I know now why they all look alike. Why they all look familiar.
I’ve created them all, and they all have my face.
Keep going, the rotting girl says.
I pull myself across the floor to the remaining bolt. I have trouble getting any kind of grip. I didn’t think I would get this weak, this quickly.
The screw turns. A fraction and a fraction and a fraction more. It all adds up. Every small thing piles up.
You think you have it bad, says one of the girls—-the girl’s voice, my father’s words.
He loved to make my suffering small by standing it up next to his.
Like I should be grateful for the things he could have done to me and didn’t.
Well, let him see me now. My lips peel back from my teeth, a skeletal smile.
Let him tell me now that nothing I’ve suffered has been so bad. That I’m being dramatic.
See? See? I want to say.
The bolt gives way, turning easily. Excitement leaps in me, slick as a fish, and then excitement turns to horror as it flicks into my palm.
Not the whole bolt. An inch, maybe. The end of it jagged and dusty with what I know by touch must be rust. It’s snapped off at the ground, the rest of it impossible to retrieve. Useless. It’s useless.
My breath comes too fast, and then not at all, stuck in my throat.
The gossamer girls ring me, crouched down.
They bend their heads together over the unseen remnant of the bolt in my palm.
My light--starved eyes conjure the image of it, burnished orange at the end.
The girls keen. They grab at their arms, at their hands.
But then the one with moths in her eyes speaks:
One will have to be enough.
I will find a way. I have to. And I will return to the light and speak my name again.