The Lady Lays | Petrichorgazette

The Lady Lays,

A brown-haired woman comes before me,

Bathed in darkness.

Sits herself down on my bed, squishing my mattress with her weight,

She lays herself onto the backs of her arms, resting, balancing herself on her elbows —deflating my pillows in the process.

Her ethereal face captures me whole.

I don't know how she even got into my room,

Maybe I tracked her in on the bottom of my shoes.

But as we sit here together, I study her silently, and I witness that,

All light refuses to cross her borders,

As if it knows something is so truly wrong with her,

That the elements of her being would stop them dead in the air if they even so much as dared.

She reaches out a hand,

Saying to me,

“Touch me, even though they won’t,”

And I do.

With fingers intertwined and hands so soft, I can't imagine they've ever held anything.

I bask in this warmth of nothing, just this simple holding,

Just this very human touch…

—But then suddenly, oh so very suddenly,

My hand fizzes and pops like a shaken-up soda,

Bubbling like a burning wound,

But it doesn’t hurt.

In some ways, I beg it to hurt,

To scar me unrecognizable with lashes and deep wounds

That would make even the most professional of plastic surgeons get down on their knees and cry—

But it doesn’t.

I shake it lightly, like how I tried to get that small bug off my sweater last Spring,

But it just grows and grows with this unexplainable ecstasy,

And I fear that if I stop moving it, the feeling will go away,

So I shake faster, madly now,

Like a dog trying fruitlessly to expel all water from its body.

With this movement, a fuzziness grows, radiating up my arm from my hand, a long, tight rubber band growing,

And with every moment, a deep, mellowed twang that creates a hollow, steady beat

Which I become completely enamored with.

As I glance up, the woman has vanished,

And all that’s left of her,

Any trace that she once sat here, on my bed,

Is the burning bubble of pleasure that stirs within me,

Daring to be popped.

I am so afraid to let go of this feeling, to give it up to space and time,

So I find myself running around my room,

And scratching at my skin,

Trying to get every part, every inch of me moving, so this feeling doesn’t decay.

And yet, it does so slowly.

I will it, like I did before, to hurt.

But now, instead, I will it to stay forever,

But it goes just the same, no matter how much scraping and sobbing I do—

I still fall backward onto my bed,

And the last remnant of touch the brown-haired woman gave,

Drifts me off to sleep.

I don’t dream—

Awaking in my dark room, covered from top to toe in a sweat,

I reach over my head to pull the cool metal cord on my lamp.

When I do, light illuminates my room,

And I find, to my horror, that it is not sweat that my bedsheets and I are drenched with,

but blood.

I get up, stumbling, trying to rush to the mirror.

Flinging the thick, red substance onto my white walls on the way.

I try to keep myself from falling to the floor by grasping onto everything in my path.

Upon making it to the bathroom, still hunched over,

I tilt my head upwards, expecting to see my ravaged face, ever so cold and tired,

But instead, I catch a familiar set of eyes—

The dark-haired woman staring back at me,

Her feet planted in the exact same position I should be.

I pick at the scabs on my face, peeling them, trying in vain to get off this horrible mask,

To wake up, but I can't.

Her silk-smooth arms reach out to me through the glass—

Longing to soothe me, and I smile ever so softly, terrified that—

I didn't even have to ask.