Hi all.
I'm taking a break from writing for a few months. I've got some chaos in my life right now and need to recenter.
Thank you for your support.
*This chapter contains discussions of anxiety and disordered eating.
His eyes were something terrible. With a color that seemed more appropriate on a feral cat than a man, haunted by the hollowness of despair and ringed with the crystalline brittleness of an ancient rancor, they seemed the product of an eon of bitter experience. She couldn't get them out of her mind. Each day, she would anxiously wait for him to reappear—in that way that was beyond nature—but he never did. Two weeks went by like this. She would wait, he would not show, and she would fall asleep on her half-deflated air mattress with his eyes crowding her mind and infiltrating her dreams.
What was worse? The promise that he would show or the anticipation of it? Christine was never very good with the unknown. She always struggled with 'what-ifs' and 'might-bes'. Her ruminating thoughts ran on a dizzying, serpentine track in her mind. The anti-anxiety medication never truly helped, only decelerating the racing but never fully rid her of the repetition. She had tried three different medications, until, fully exhausted from the yo-yo journey of adjusting to one after the other, she gave up and settled on one, lying to her doctor. Oh, yes, she fibbed, I feel a big improvement.
It had been years now. Years on a medication that did not work, yet she took religiously every morning with the stale hope that it would suddenly gain potency.
She had asked him—no demanded—that he visit her father. Why had she done that? What if he was evil? What if he was the Devil himself, but he held the power to ensure her father could never die? Why had she not asked that of him instead?
She knew the answer to that last; she feared what such a bargain may cost her—may cost her father. One cautionary tales her father always enjoyed regaling on stormy, winter nights was the story about the Monkey's Paw. The image of the body of a recently dead and mangled loved one, reanimated and mindless, knocking upon their door had kept her from sleeping a night or two.
A wish could ruin you if you did not think it out clearly.
Was the promise of hope a careless wish? It seemed more innocuous than any unnatural alterations to his body.
She couldn't stop thinking about his eyes. What would cause any being to have eyes so saturated in sorrow? If he was the Devil, she supposed he would have much to be sad for.
That morning, Raoul had picked her up and taken her to the little diner they had visited dozens of times before. They sat in their usual booth; one Raoul requested every time after Christine had commented that she enjoyed the randomness of the framed portrait of Yul Brynner hanging on the wall above it. There was something charming about the peeling of the red vinyl upholstered booths, with holes in the seat's foam padding unprofessionally repaired with a piece or two of silver duct tape. The large ceramic coffee mugs, heavy and well-used, were never empty.
It felt like their place. A neutral zone where she could imagine there was not an enormous, invisible divide between them. They were both ordinary together. She was not a like a fractured stained-glass mirror, but healthy and whole and he was not leagues above her, but common and obtainable.
It was never quite so easy to pretend, though.
They had visited the diner, for the very first time, the week Raoul had returned home after four years away at a university on the other side of the country. He had kept in frequent contact with her during his time at school, mailing her letters and the occasional little care package with trinkets and little items from the town of his ivy league school. Each letter she received and sent felt like a tenuous tether from her heart to his. He had continued to write, and she him, with steady frequency, even while she endured the crushing heartbreak that came with the news of his relationship with 'the ballerina'—a woman he had met while in school and had been involved with until a few months before his homecoming.
Those years she had been quite obsessed with the beautiful woman hanging off Raoul's arm. She sat up at night scouring the dancer's social media accounts, looking at photo after photo, full of smiles and joy and Raoul. The woman was successful, cultured, and trendy. Christine would fantasize all the ways she could be like her only to come out of her daydreams with the leaden disappointment of reality.
She cried so many times but could never bring herself to feel bitter feelings towards the woman. Instead, she found relief in her secret vice—it had been a means of distraction since she was in seventh grade. She had battled it for years, knowing from media sources that what she did was unhealthy, but leaned into its comforting embrace again and again. It had been the worse it had ever been during Raoul's time away at college. Her body rapidly shrank, and her clothing loosened, but she refused to look in the mirror. She didn't want to see the evidence of her successful self-destruction but felt a sickening joy each time she ran her fingertips across her ribs like playing an organic xylophone.
Her father noticed. He placed plates of food before her and beseeched her to eat like she was three years old all over again.
'Please, Christine, just two more bites…' It was the pained helplessness she heard in her father's voice that cracked through her stubborn shell of misery, the tone of fear from man who had raised her single-handedly and had suddenly found himself treading in the terrifying depths of unknown territory.
She sought help from the cheapest mental health clinic in the city. They put her on medication for anxiety and depression and put her in group therapy that was hit or miss. Oftentimes, she was just sent home with a handful of papers and meditation exercises to do—some as silly as imagining herself as a stable mountain overseeing a valley. There were eating disorder groups she joined as well. Sometimes the other members of the group would share stories that only further triggered her problem.
She tried meetings for other addictions—drugs, alcohol, sex—which somehow helped a little. It allowed her to sit quietly without sharing and listen to the woes of others.
Grocery shopping was fraught with frustration and discomfort. Her father would give her a list to stick to and she would throw every item in the cart without truly looking at it. At home, she used a Sharpie to scribble out the calorie information of every product she bought to avoid temptation. The outside support she received was cheap, but her father was her steady sentinel, always mindful at suppertime, always watching and imploring. He was her rock.
She put on weight again, one slow pound at a time, but she struggled with every morsel of food that touched her lips and the invisible odometer that spun caloric numbers in her head. The obsession for control was always just there on the periphery of her mind. Relapses came sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks but never long enough to consume her as fully as those three painful years.
That first day at the diner, she had been in the throes of a month-long relapse. She ordered the smallest meal she could while silently counting—five calories in the coffee, thirty more with the creamer, thirty-five more once the mug had been refilled. Raoul had asked her if she did not enjoy her eggs, for she had pushed them around her plate to give the illusion of eating. It was easy to feign that she wasn't hungry that first time.
'My eyes are just bigger than my stomach this morning, I guess,' she blushed, managing to choke down three more bites before ultimately pushing the heavy ceramic plate away. She placed her finger in a tiny pile of spilled salt on the table that had been missed when the waitress had wiped it down from the previous guests. She felt small in that moment, like those insignificant grains of salt, here before the presence of someone who was so perfect—educated, socially adept, cultured by the experiences of his life.
'You've always eaten like a bird,' he agreed, a quirk to his lips, his eyes, warm and kind. He was beyond handsome, his features aged a few years since his time away at school, his jaw somehow sharper and more defined. There was a tiny cut on his chin where he had nicked it shaving that he kept absentmindedly touching throughout breakfast. She found it endearing and it broke her heart some more. 'Are you feeling under the weather? You look a little pale.'
That morning was long ago though and years in the past and the complete breakdown she had gone through after he had dropped her off home and given her a hug-the aching desire to be more while knowing it couldn't be—it had altered her. She disappeared in her room for an entire day and shed her silent river of tears into the cheap fabric of her bed's duvet cover until she had nothing more to give, until crying started to hurt and she felt empty and numb—until she walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and removed the ice cream her father kept for his little late-night indulgences. She stood in the kitchen and ate the entire quart without blinking an eye, despite her dairy intolerance. Then she got sick…and as she gripped the rim of that toilet seat, she resolved to let the fantasy of Raoul go.
Christine closed her eyes to clear the memory away from clouding the present. How deep the pain of that day must still be to somehow hijack this moment of sitting before this strange creature. It stared at her with those eyes that seemed to understand the agony she was feeling that very moment. She could almost imagine that he was reading her very mind just now.
Finding him in the waiting room, talking to an empty chair—no not talking, conversating—as if the chair was speaking right back.
"I once died," he quietly explained, but the words came from his mouth with a soft tone of disbelief. "I have died," he clarified. His uncomfortably slender hands clasped together in a pious fashion, like spiders coming together in a fatal embrace. "I was returned with a task to perform." And then he chuckled bitterly, "I'm a shepherd in a way."
He grew quiet and the sounds of people milling through halls in the distance and the squeaking of shoes on hospital linoleum kept them company for a spell.
"A shepherd," she managed to reply, her eyes drifted to the chair by a table featuring an open tabloid magazine. "And the chair is…"
"Oh," he remarked, gruffly. "The chair is just a chair. Iris has removed her obnoxious presence from the room."
She looked back at the vacant chair. Nothing he had said made sense.
"Is Iris….a ghost?" she asked.
He looked away and let out a huff.
"She's a reaper," he said.
"I don't understand," she felt the blood in her body start racing, and she started to feel a bit lightheaded.
"She helps souls across to…", and at this he snapped his hand in the air with a sharply dismissive gesture, "wherever it is that souls go. I could not begin to tell you where."
"What are you?"
"I am one as well," he shrugged his sharp shoulders. "Of a different sort—the rest of the world has the great misfortune of seeing me, unlike Iris who has the bliss of hiding."
Images crashed into her mind. A skeleton in a large black cloak riding a raging mare while fiercely gripping a scythe. A dark image of pestilence and death. He was telling her he was this thing. Her breathing shallowed and quickened and she felt a great spinning in her head as she grappled with this news, just as fantastical as all that she had seen since he first appeared in her tiny world.
His hand reached out and was placed gently on her arm. There was something there, faintly felt under her skin, a tingling—like an odd sort of recognition. The anxiety was taking over now, like a crocodile in a death roll, it had taken her thoughts and spun them out of her control.
"I've distressed you," he frowned. "I'm not here to harm you or your father." Then he looked up and sighed. "Help her," he said to the air, in a gentle plea.
She looked over her shoulder in the direction of his words. There was no one there, but she didn't seem to care because the warmest feeling of calm and acceptance covered her like the wooly blanket her father would use tuck her in at night as a child.
"What is happening…" she murmured to herself with a contented sigh. The cozy glow in her thrummed with a life of its own.
"Abby," he replied cryptically. "She has returned."
"Abby…" she murmured.
"She has completed her task here and will be departing shortly," he replied. "That is not the pressing matter at hand, however. Your father wishes to see me, Christine. He knows that something is amiss, but I am uncertain what to tell him. I am afraid our little ruse is at an end."
"Can you save him? Can you ensure he won't die?" she asked, unafraid of the question because she felt to heavenly.
"I have told you, I cannot," he sadly replied.
"Is he dying?" she asked, her throat constricting and her anguish battling the wooly blanket. "Is that really why you are here? Are you here for my father and playing a cruel game with me?"
He deflated in his chair.
"I wish for your companionship," he grumbled, "As I have already explained."
"Why me?" she asked.
His eyes pierced her.
"Because I think, perhaps, you could understand me, just as I understand you."
"You don't know me," she argued.
"I know you love the smell of gasoline because it reminds you of road trips with your father. I know on said road trips that you have a guilty pleasure for gas station hot chocolate. You like to add coffee creamer to it. One of each flavor they carry." He smirked to himself. "You don't enjoy how it tastes, but you've been doing it so long that you can't seem to stop," He sighed. "Well this was before your struggles…"
"How do you know that about me," she asked, in amazement, embarrassment and surprise.
"It's my curse to know these things, Christine. But it doesn't feel like one, in your case. I am honored to carry these images…I have quite a number of them."
She tried to picture her entire life at once but could only think of a few key embarrassing moments. Did he know about those as well?
He glanced up at the wall and she swiveled her eyes to follow.
"It is time to see your father," he announced as he stood. He was almost preternaturally tall. "Please. Let us find a way to ease your father's mind together."
He moved towards the hallway with smooth strides, and she didn't take the time to think it through. She followed. Down they went towards the hall of the ward her father was kept.
The feeling of warmth evaporated.
She didn't seem to care.
For the first time in her life, she actually felt a bit special.
And the feeling was terrifying.