Free From the Fire II by Kent David Kelly Page B

mockery of its frailty. She was hollowed, defiled. Shamed.
    So ashamed, she thought. So unworthy. I lived, and all the others? All the good people, all the deserving ones, Tom and Jake and all the rest, they all died. In flame, in horror. Souls for the White Fire, ashes for the Archangel.
    She moved her head back under the water, ran her fingers through her hair. And what, she wondered, was she truly guilty of for being there? Survival? Life itself? She did not know. She knew only that she should feel more, that the numbness spreading through her mind was threatening to destroy her.
    Another minute below the water, another. Time was nothing there and neither day nor night could reign where only the false lights glowed against the shelves and concrete slabs, where the dust powdered down and the servo-motors whirred.
    So many. Ashes, all.
    A strange sound crept out from behind her, where her back had shifted and smeared the waters upon the wall. She slipped and the pain went straight up into her shoulder.
    Get up, hon. Now. I’m counting to ten. Don’t make me shut off that water.
    A wild thought flicked into her mind, that if she failed to rise again this time, her father would be standing there with the belt. From death, from the finality of the real. He would rise and she would see that clenched and solid hand against the glass, the hand that —
    No.
    She had the strength, then. She had to. The pain no longer mattered. It was simply something that was a part of her now, something to be sacred and ignored, like her beating heart, like seeing, like breathing. She rose, teeth clenched, refusing to cry out again. The falling waters clicked off as she pressed the aluminum plate beneath the spigot. The glass door tilted open, seemingly of its own accord.
    There’s someone out there.
    “Don’t be a fool,” she whispered. She had not yet decided if talking to herself was the key to her salvation, or merely another path toward her annihilation.
    There’s no one. No one.
    She left the shower, walked around the hanging light and its strobe of lazy shadows still twirling back and forth. Slowly. And what did ‘slowly’ mean? What could be the nature, then, of unrelenting time in a world of one?
     
    * * * * *
     
    In the great room she found a clean blanket beneath the work table. She lifted it, shook it out like a great white flower upon the air, and wrapped it around her shoulders. She stood there oblivious to all but the most primal sensations of her surroundings, shallow breathing, dripping water, sparks dancing somewhere in a blown-out socket. The smell of ozone, the coppery taste of her own blood where she had bitten into her tongue.
    All of this, all of this under my control. What am I supposed to do? How can I do this all alone?
    Perhaps, she thought with a disconcerting idleness, she would press her way through the vinyl seal into the back rooms, devolving, moist and shriveled and disintegrating, pushing through the leaves of plastic and so crawling back into the womb, Failure, you’re nothing if you are alone, nothing, find the gun locker there and select the easiest gun barrel to push into her mouth.
    And why not?
    She would die for Tom, if she could keep herself from thinking long enough to pull the trigger. Yet even as she thought this, a greater clarity washed through her, purifying her grief with the frost of its fading purity and leaving only a solemn resonance in her mind:
    He is dead.
    There is nothing left of me.
    Nothing left of the person
    I was this morning.
    Mother, bride, anthropologist.
    No more.
    Like a spider, I need
    to walk out of my own skin
    and be reborn.
    I need to be skinless,
    fragile,
    to be new again.
    But without Tom, without anyone, what did any of this matter, after all? The entirety of Sophie, the past-self who had been fractured yet threaded together and nearly made whole purely through the joy of Lacie’s love for her —
    (You can’t survive this all alone, you were and now you are