Inhale, Exhale

Keep a rhythm; in, out, in.

Will you help me with my hair?

It’s a simple request- (and the only spark of life she’s shown in days, though her fingers hang and stutter mechanically as she garbles pseudo-speech)- and not one he’s like to deny.

He seats her on an old, weathered stool whose rearmost leg wobbles precariously as she shifts her weight (“Your mother used to stand on this to reach the pantry,” he could say, but the silence lays thick around them) before a mirror fogged and chipped with age, the glass warped around the edges. Of course, that is where her eyes are drawn: to the fringes where her countenance grows contorted and bestial. It’s easier to hate that way.

His hands are unnervingly deft for their size (and his fingers remember the intricacies of Chase’s braids, even as the imprint of her sounds and scent and smile fades from his mind) as he weaves strands of dark, satiny hair together. It’s grown in healthy, a little past her shoulders, thick and soft and flowing through his fingers like liquid night.

He considers her face in the mirror, eyes roving along the sunken valleys of her cheeks, the flat, wary set of her jaw, the thin, scabbed lips (and the hint of a smile that touches them is too bittersweet to be savored) while his fingers cross and weave and knot. She jolts once, when the side of his palm brushes her shoulder, the accidental intimacy seeming to sear her flesh through the thin fabric of her shirt.

He tries not to look at the places where the slats of her ribs still show through fabric pressed tight over the subtle curve of her chest, directs his eyes away from the hollow places starvation has bored into a once-strong body.

(He still notices where skin tents across stilts of bone, making up her matchstick limbs; she’s been eating, he thinks fiercely, as much as to convince himself as praise her, she’s going to be fine, but it all echoes hollowly inside his pulse).

Her head tilts slightly; he adjusts his hands, peering over the crown of her head to where she’s directing an intent stare into the eyes of her reflection, peering at the glass as if trying to glean some stark, ugly truth from the slackness of her mouth and the starkness of hollow, ruddy eyes.

Her fingers twitch, raise. I hate you, she signs, digits moving slow and unwieldy-

(the nonchalance of her words cuts deeper than he cares to admit, carving flesh away from the bone shielding his still-tender heart).

His fingers hang, burdened with questions and shock, his eyes searching hers in the rippled glass.

Hate me?

Hate myself.

The satisfaction in the crimp of her fingers only cuts deeper.

Author's Note

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