10.2

 

She shivered, goosebumps riding up her legs and torso like ants racing for a dwindling source of sugar. There was no ambient heating in the flat, and without any way of contributing to the gas bills she dared not put the gas fire on just for herself. She grabbed a towel from the bathroom and, in a moment of selfishness, clicked on the immersion heater so there would be hot water for a bath soon. She pressed the towel to her hair, her arms, her legs, while dancing on the cold bathroom tiles. The cotton felt rough against her skin, grounding her. She fended away a wase of homesickness. Her mother’s house was always warm, and her towels were soft as a new plushie thanks to her near-constant use of a tumble drier and under-floor heating. She wrapped it around herself and returned to her bedroom, where there was at least threadbare carpet over the old wooden floors.

The few clothes hung neatly from hangers, the familiar shapes and colours offering a small comfort. She chose her oversized jumper and a pair of worn leggings—clothes that asked nothing of her – and stripped off her damp bra and knickers. The fresh clothes were cold against her skin as she pulled them on, but the pair of clean cocks brought some warmth seeping slowly back into her limbs.

But the warmth didn’t reach her chest.

She ducked under the curtain separating her sleeping area from the rest of the room and sat on the edge of the bed, the towel wrapped around her head like she’d stepped out of a shampoo advertisement aimed at the poor people in shabby tenements who dreamed of the lives they’d lead as a lotter winner on sun-warmed tropical beaches. She stared at the wall opposite. This part of the room was dim, closed off from the big windows and lit only by the small lamp on her bedside table. Shadows pooled in the corners. Specks of mould on the wallpaper formed the pareidolia of faces and figures. Surrounding her was the sound of the rain tapping insistently against the window; the steady, patient rhythm of a thousand souls seeking succour.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

The paintings rose immediately behind her eyelids—sharper now, as though the darkness gave them permission to grow. The colours pulsed. The shapes shifted. The face in the third canvas seemed to turn toward her, its features dissolving and reforming in slow, deliberate motion. She could see the images writhe under her scrutiny, fluid under the mutable passage of time. Bones became covered in sinew, sinew with muscle, muscle with flesh, flesh with skin, with hair, with mucus, with bacteria, and the bacteria dissolved the flesh, bloating it from beneath as pockets burst like mud pools at the base of a volcano. Bloated flesh shrivelled and stretched tight over muscle, which sagged and faded, exposing the bones beneath like a magician pulling out a dead crow when his audience was expecting a live bunny.

Roisin lay back, the images shifting and entwining around her, the oils they were painted with slipping and mixing with her sweat, her saliva, her snot; coiling over her limbs like a knot of eels feasting on a submerged horse. The canvas beneath the figures sloughed away; a barely-noticed shedding of an unwanted external layer as the limbs encased her, drew her into the corruption and warmth of their embrace. Her heart pulsed with the rhythm of decay, pushing her blood through arteries, veins, fingertips, curling back and crashing in a tide of heat that spread throughout her body, pulsing like a migraine though her head and back down into her bones; into the very core of her being, where the spires of calcium lined the waves of emotion like nets in a school of flashing piranha.

Roisin opened her eyes with a series of sharp, inward breaths and wave upon wave wracked her body, her fingers a blur of motion under the tight stretch of her leggings as her pelvic muscles contracted and tightened until they were a violin sting being wound beyond its natural range, singing higher and higher like a wave constrained against a harbour wall, the pressure behind it growing and growing until it was forced upward and over the breakwater, flooding the houses beyond and washing them away, leave the whole body of land exhausted and gasping.

And then the final, long breath out as the wave was spent and the calm of the lagoon returned as she lay there, smiling as broadly as the skull inside her allowed.