Her head detaches from her body.
It leaves her torso, drops her limbs, breaks her neck, and climbs desperately out of the nightmare her mind has stumbled into.
Reality is a static bag suffocating her senses her skin is sliding off her bones like slabs of lunch meat in a way that can only be unreal.
And yet.
Her mind is reaching, stretching, searching - begging, she's begging now - leaving any sense of self to find the key that lets her blink and reattach herself to the real.
And yet. And. Yet. And yet and yet.
It doesn't come. She can't find it. She can't think.
Her arms are elbow deep and full of metal gears that whirl and work without consent to keep her busy below the contents of her kitchen sink. Hollow metal tubes crack with a resounding sound against her knuckle as she brushes past them.
Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth.
Her mother's calling. A voice is knocking. Reality is here.
Four doors and an oven down a stranger shivers by the wall. Twenty floor boards down and to her left a stranger's brain slivers from his head. She knows because she counted.
(She knows because she saw - the dark thick puddle seeping along the cracks of panelled wood that held the sprawled body in the traced shaped of a crucifixion)
She knows she needs rubber yellow gloves hanging by the silver plumbing. She knows her mother's hissing commands and embroidered towels along the polished unmarked floors.
She knows she can't find a right so she's biting her cheek to forget the wrong.
Time is of the essence. Thankfully it's gone.
And so's her skin. Her skeleton crawls and clamps until there's two things - limp and yellow - dangling from her digits. The farthest from her head still floating through the rafters and the numbest of her body, the bones of her feet squeal in plastic heels until she's floating forward.
A tub of bleach has found its way onto her too.
She shuffles five strides and then she's on her knees.
Betty. Betty. Betty.
Scrub. Scrub. S. c. r. u. b.
Her skin is back. She's wearing it as gloves. The towels touch her through the yellow rubber hands. The sopping red inside them must be soaking beneath her pores.
Scrub. Elizabeth. S. c. r. u. b.
She's scrubbing, she's scrubbing. Round and round her wrist rotates, pulling the screaming machine in her shoulder taut. She cleans a spot but it's not gone, she sees it still. Scrub, it's gone. Blink, it's back.
The eyes are closed, the head is open, but she knows. She knows, he knows. He sees her.
More bleach. More bleach.
Scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub, sqweeeeenchhh.
She rings herself out of whatever's hindering the work inside. Another towel slaps to the floor and starts the cycle once more. Her mother works with her mouth closed but closed-lipped mutters are slipping through.
Nothing slips from Betty's lips. Air can't find its way.
Scrub, Betty. Scrub. Betty. Betty. Betty.
"Betty—"
Nothing's wrong.
A rigid pole keeps her back straight. Her mother holds the strings that keep her limbs clenched and crossed at her chest until her father leaves. Because he's wrong, nothing's wrong. She watches from above as her headless body dances to her mother's lines. She watches from above as her father's feet retreat and slink across the threshold. Nothing's here, nothing's there. She watches as the door shuts the shadows back into the house. She blinks and still sees a puddle shimmering twenty floorboards to her right. Nothing's wrong.
At worse there's just a noose waiting around her neck for her head to finally fall.
Betty Betty Betty Betty Betty Betty Betty Betty
"Betts—"
She's wrong.
The car bumps and jolts their bodies - three, she knows, three, are jostled, one lies limp when every turn is done - trees twist and twirl- shadows in between, headlights from afar, eyes in every corner she can't see - whispers of the night are young. Pounding, begging, insistent noises that mute her mother and let her body talk without a head.
They take her hands, peel open her fingers, and lay them on the steering wheel. They tell her not to stop the car.
She turns. A bolt loosens in her chest and wobbles. She hopes a ravine is waiting to the side.
Betty.
Gravel under wheels and gravel under feet.
She watches from the car as her figure takes a human form and drops it.
Betty.
The body in her hands, a steering wheel along her fingers, a doorknob in her fist.
Home. It calls her down to her decrepit form.
Elizabeth.
There's pieces of him left.
So they scrub them out.
She leaves her head.
S. c. r. u. b.
Pieces on the door.
Pieces on the table.
Pieces on an apple and another, and another, and another.
B. e. t. t. y.
The towels tossed, her hands now empty, she sees her palms for the first time.
She feels it.
Pieces on her. He's on her.
E. l. i. z. a. b. e. t. h.
The water's scalding, the knob turned to punish. Her limbs scratch and tear. Soiled skin is pulled, layer by layer away. She feels the pieces of him growing under her nails. Pieces in her nails. Pieces in her pores. Pieces in her cuts. Pieces of the night play before her eyes.
Pieces of him in her head.
Her arms pitch up and scramble for her head.
They reach and reach and reach, her eyes blow big and wait for claws to drag her down to the reckoning beneath-
But through the steaming fire they cannot reach.
They flap down like broken wings and dangle at her sides.
A pause.
The press of fingers along her thigh.
A fragment of something quakes feeling to her lower body. A fragment of something makes her head spin.
Her wrist cranks up and along to cup herself below.
A wisp of someone's touch is a wisp of memory inside her.
A piece of someone...
"Betty, god-"
She breathes.
"Please-"
Betty breathes.
And-
Phantom hands clench her throat. Grab her by her veins and drag her down to choke under the pouring water. She sputters as they rip along the seams of skin until every ghostly memory of a fingerprint is gone.
She's left dripping water in the fog with less of herself than she ever had.
And when the world spins under wet hair and perfect pinks dulled in clouded moonlight she steps drags this body until she falls in a broken heap.
She's scrubbed away every bit of Betty Cooper left.
And when numbed and stilled with sleep she stops watching and drifts down the pillow of the bed.
Her head attaches to a stranger's body.
Author Notes:
Fanfiction really fought me with the formatting of this story. I always cross post on my Ao3 account (also under createandconstruct) so if anyone's interested there's a better formatting for this fic there.
But either way I'd love to hear thoughts about this little piece! Feel free to leave a review, I always appreciate it!)