Echoes
She is full of hollow places. Dripping caves and winding tunnels that open into darkness. Something is waiting for her down the ends of some of those corridors, but she is too afraid to look, afraid of what might be there other than the darkness. Her voice does not echo despite the space about her.
They do not see the holes in her, the vast emptinesses. But they have a way of looking through her nonetheless, talking as if she cannot hear, murmuring hard things in soft voices that reverberate in her head.
Mad.
Whore. Or hor—?
Poor thing.
Poor thing.
Sometimes she wakes in the darkness to the touch of fingers in her hair, and she knows them, is comforted by them, before she screams herself awake, floundering amid grey, wet sheets that rise and fall like swells around her, wide and fathomless, crashing against the hollow places, filling them. Filling them.