The Wound.

Short Story #9: A Fine and Silent Anger.

Hmm... she thought.

The air was ice. Inside that block of frozen time she sat, cold and placid—silently commendable. A silent war raged within her equilibrium, a phoenix never mended, but rising—always rising, never dropping—with a tedium she mistook for passion. Yet a vague notion persisted: that passion was but the transmutation of another kind. A grandeur, perhaps, more or less than passion itself. But what is a passion clothed in grandeur?

Could it be rage? That feverish sensation roiling inside, consuming her entirely without the veil of passion to counteract it. But no—the passion was instigating the rage. She would ponder the origin of her passion, remembering it as if for the first time, and that remembrance induced a feverish wrath. A reduction of rage, distilled with other elements.

To Silvia, passion was a sick gesture—a means of living in a world from which one must constantly take respite in order to feel at all. Passion was a sin she did not want, akin to living, for she entirely lacked the desire for that, either. It was past the point of a frivolous notion like desire; truth be told, desire was a reduction, a mere derivative of language, and she would not have it. Silvia did not want life. No life at all. It wasn’t a change of scenery that would restore her, nor a change of flesh or circumstance. She wanted nothing—to be the nothing she remembered being, for the first time again, just as the passion would clash and coalesce.

In the suburban lands, she was upraised in a town of “moral” specimens. Weird? she would think, with the unprohibited thought of a child. She knew only as a child knows, thinking with a freedom she never realized would be stripped from her by the unruly systems of magistrates and matrimony—gestures that impeded her ability to savor passion, like one who eats slowly to feel full more rapidly.

Often, Silvia fell into spells of dizziness induced by inertia, examining the remains of the life she did not crave. And to think—the word desire could not equate to the feeling, for it was not even desire she lacked! She did not want life the way a wind may or may not want to blow. The world, perhaps, was what she did not desire? But without the desire, because to desire is to want? No! Whatever lies deeper than desire, possessed of an elemental indifference—that, she could accept. She did not want life because she was born into it haphazardly, by mistake. Her mother reminded her of this, as if for the first time again: she was an accident—and how miraculous that was for the mother!

“I almost aborted you,” her mother stated, with a fragility born of genuine relief. Silvia could always differentiate ingenuity from the pale, pathetic nature of genuine interaction, weighing it on the same scale as the ingenuine matter of all life. “But I didn’t!” her mother would add with haste, as if she had caused offense.

Silvia pondered the outcome of abortion. Nothing would have happened. She would not have been born. But the mystic legends chimed in to justify her existence as a fulfillment—a destiny she was required to carry forth. Thus, she was dragged through the ringer of the nothing of life, a mischievous trick played against her, until she was forced to believe the world was with her. She would never be imprisoned again, they said, if only she would believe—an involuntary act of fulfilling a purpose.

Silvia’s lineage was blackened waters: women’s flesh eaten by worms, men of cowardice using vices to console themselves for the camaraderie of raising amok. She was doomed from the start, had her destiny not held her in place through a belief she held without exertion—the way one believes the world turns for humanity, and not for itself.

She needed to supersede the myths of her lineage to reach the central node. To piece together the disjointed membranes of memory, remembering everything for the first time again—for there was nothing she could not remember without reliving. More and more, she grew angry with life, as if life were a tangible person she could strike.

Silvia was the epitome of everything her mother indifferently loathed. Every accomplishment was followed by a quarrel, a silent felicity, like a plea to return to a form that had never taken shape in her—though perhaps it would in time. Perhaps for her sister, Rosaline, the shape would form accidentally. Rosaline, still a child under their mother’s gaze, felt the threshold of conditional love—that passive reluctance veiled as care.

Rosaline became the depiction of a perfection Silvia never sought. Rosaline would abide by her books and work relentless shifts to save for college years away. “I am the perfect child,” Rosaline would say; Silvia felt no offense, only a mild disgust at the satirical undertones of the statement.

Silvia married a young man of Mexican heritage—a broad in the village whom her mother loathed, casting all hopes instead onto Rosaline to marry into wealth with a Caucasian man. Silvia’s disgust was consistent enough to be an indifference, a rising tedium she noted in the subtle shifts of the ecosystem.

In marriage, Silvia embarked upon an independence she tried to cherish. But with every shared breath, she felt the reduction of the air she was told she could have, left instead with a confined corner. Her husband, Marco, did not pressure her to be a “wife,” yet he claimed she was one, taking no offense at her reluctance to play the role. There were loyalties she followed, finding them less arduous than the lives of the women she saw slinking out into the late hours to be perceived and flattered by the fellows of the town. Had she her way, Silvia would be tucked away in solitude, devoid of the fiendish desire for partnership. Her mother never understood. “Don’t you get lonely?” she would ask. Silvia would try to remember, for the first time again, when she had ever felt lonely.

Silvia was alone. Married, yet inside the confines of the union, she was an almost emancipated woman. Her freedom baffled her. She investigated the frivolities of a “free” life, just as men refer to the imitations of love as “entire.” Everything is imitation, she thought. To act out love is to be an imitator. The Romantics imitated sensuality, rendering only surface pleasures and grandiose crimes in the name of a love that was also a copy. One cannot act out a full love. An entire love is as dull as silence—but Silvia would learn to love it like a child of her own, pitying herself as that same small child.

She perceived the flickering light of existence and once banked on signs from the cosmos—notions she now indifferently recanted. To see a sign is merely to see existence. She remembered, for the first time, reading the symptoms of psychosis as a child, where “seeing signs” was rectified. Everything was just as it was, and it would all simply be. There was no use for tallying.

No use at all. She found herself alone in the night of vertigo, a stretch of pitch-black hours where she felt sudden ruptures—sharp lacerations that did not hurt, for her tolerance was abnormally high. There was no use to living, only an endurance of living that kept her alive, entirely without her control.

She would suddenly tense, her consciousness pouring out messages that she felt compelled to write down. It was as if she were, and then weren’t. One might have been speaking to Silvia and she, in the midst of her own speaking, would stop; it was as if she were listening to every word. Marco commended this. It was as if he said aloud, good girl, yes, allow me to do the talking from now on.

Did she believe in God? She believed there was. She believed her power had beneath it a secret power—lethal, in all its fineness.

Silvia’s rage was lethal; she swore, after one last final night of exposure, to find other ways to tend to her rage, which was inexplicable and bigger than she was. One night, after getting into one of the many debacles with her husband, as they so often did in those first years of getting acquainted, she would come back after storming out angrily, in a fit of rage. She would exercise her right to freedom, which at first felt intoxicating. I can leave, she would say, as she sped down the interstate with tears rushing down her cheeks, the wind roaring in from the velocity. This intoxication, however, was fleeting, and she began to think thoughts which would kill any ounce of convoluted joy. Where to? she thought. It was inevitable that she would have to return and explain herself for her behavior once more. She hoped she could find the right words to justify her wrongs so that she could attempt once again to weather the storm inside of her.

However, this night in particular, the rage possessed her in a manner that frightened her. Still angry, yet fearful, rushing down the interstate back to her husband, she flung the door open. Why didn’t he care? she thought, somehow forgetting that she was the one that fled. Why didn’t he race after me? She continued, knowing full well she possessed a kind of freedom that went without parameters, and he would never know where she was if she didn’t tell him. She was so angry at him, at herself, at the rage that so possessed her on these nights and got her into more trouble than not.

He sat in the kitchen, ignoring her. She sat across from him, staring a hole down his gullet, imagining what she might say next, what she might do. Silvia’s eyes were bloodthirsty, blackened with rage. He continued staring into the void, not giving in this time to her schemes.

“So…?” she said to him, the word reverberating off the walls and enclosing them in a thick, menacing silence. He still refrained from looking at her.

“Is this it…?” he asked, sighing under his breath.

How puny, she thought to herself, it isn’t it until I say it is! She responded, “No, it’s—”

He interrupted, “I have called for a taxi, Silvia. I am leaving you.”

In that moment, her anger dissolved into the weight of those words, and she suddenly grew sad, weakened, sick, panicked—oh, panicked she was!

“But wait!” she hollered out in dismay. He listened, still not looking at her. She could hardly get the words out, and before she could, he was on the telephone with the taxi, and she felt her life slipping from the ground under.

Is this it? The words echoed in her head, ringing round and round incessantly, tormenting her. She needed to be quick, to find the words to salvage this. However, the words slipped her mind; she couldn’t find the ones to wake him up. “I love you,” she said. To which he said nothing. Oh, she thought, oh. So this is it?

But where would she go? Where would she turn? How could she gather the strength to live another day knowing this is how it ended? That they ended… when she remembered his vows to “always love her.” To never leave her no matter how bad it got. Well, now he was leaving, and he no longer felt for her or loved her. No one loved her at that moment. She had become the most unlovable antiquation of existence.

Staring into the void of the moment, she realized the weight of the now. This is it, she no longer questioned herself. Well, if this was it, then indeed it was. She had nothing else to live for if it meant they ended. It was as if he delivered to her the last chance of life and it was stripped away from her. No matter how bad it gets repeated; every I love you he ever uttered repeated; all of the joys of their love made a commission, a triumphant cry of what she was losing before she exposed herself. And the worst of all? What was she to do with herself? She hardly loved herself. That was never a matter of importance to Silvia because loving yourself didn’t secure safety. Safety was in the palms of a man she would try to love, and eventually love so greatly that it would all become too great of a burden for her to hold.

Time was slipping fast, and she was paralyzed with turmoil. If he left, he was never coming back, and if he was never coming back then… She thought back to her life before she ever met him. How she had been convinced she was the fortunate one to leave behind a life of fleeting pursuits, of unrequited love, of certainty… for a life that promised deliverance, that ushered in uncertainty. This moment, however, couldn’t have been more certain to her. He would leave her, and in turn, she would have to leave behind a better life for the one she had just lived. She would have to face the music of her impending fate once more. The orchestra of her fate: violins sweltering, grand jubilance, cymbals crashing at full tedium, a bass so low it vibrates the trachea, the soul of which was born. The accompaniment of death.

The dripline of the present moment remained in the kitchen as she pondered her next plan of escape, since it was too soon to usher in any words. She began to resent his ability to up and leave her so easily. The freedom she once possessed would be stolen from her after she had worked so hard to retrieve it. She couldn’t live another second with this resentment, with herself. So, Silvia did the unthinkable that night. She acted fast, before he could intercede, or before she could intercede herself.

Grabbing a knife, she violently slashed a gash into her wrist. Fast, bloody, lethal, quick! She remembered the way the jagged blades of the knife felt against her flesh, cutting through to the center of her veins. She hardly felt the cut. As panicked as she was, she was astonished at how… easy it was? She fell to the floor, warm blood spewing from her arm to the kitchen tiles.

“Silvia!!” her husband cried out. There she was on the floor, laying in a pool of her own blood. She lay there, as unconscious of herself as she was of him. He cried, cried! “Silvia, oh my Silvia!” It was as if he thought she had died right in front of him.

To some degree, she did die that night, or at least something in her died. She hardly cared if she did or didn’t; all she could do was bury her face into the tiles—which was the closest thing to burying her head in the ground—and smile a smile of relief.

He covered her in bandages, in kisses, putting his lips to her bloody wound to be one with her. She let her eyes peak open to let him know she was alive. “Oh, Silvia! You’re—” He stopped himself. Wait, she’s alive?

Yes, she was still alive. The wound only cuts so deep, she thought. No wound can cut deep enough to die. She was confusing herself, getting lost in hyperfixations about her supposed death, which was now proven a hoax. She wasn’t dead; in fact, she was more alive at this moment than she had ever been.

Needless to say, he didn’t leave her, or threaten to leave her ever again. He said those three words, “I love you,” every day, and she felt most of her rage leave her body that night along with the blood. She remembered the puddle covering the kitchen tiles, soaking her hair, her arms, her breasts. The sanctification of blood, she thought. She hardly knew what she meant. All she knew was that surely she would be saved from her own rage. They would go on to leave behind this night; she would dust every day and mop the tiles with suds to rid them of any speck of dirt. She would be so together that she would, in turn, piece him back together, resulting in a wholeness between them. She would be whole enough for both of them.

She would attempt to write, to work on her novels, only to write for herself. She created a secret world, one she would hole up in when the nights were cold and the wind howled against the pane. Finally, she would say, her eyes glancing at her diary. Taking a moment to stay very still to hear the words that poured in like a relentless current, she would start racing against that current, hoping to be washed ashore, cleansed of herself. If what it took was listening, she would listen with all her might. The words would surface, and she would smile at them with utter delight—not because she came up with them, but because they resembled something she already knew. Her hands would begin to cramp, and the wind would stop. A loud, abrupt ringing in her ear. She would listen to this ringing, curious to see how long it would last, completely unaware that the wind had ceased.

She traced the torn flesh on her arm, a faded scar, once alive; a healed wound, one that never truly leaves, merely remade. Her fingers followed the indentation, the oppressive sensation of the fresh wound, while beneath, blue veins spiraled—a constellation of cross-feed. The interconnections of the micellar atoms of which composed her.

It was then that Silvia stared at the vast nothingness, the mere vicinity of the white-washed walls. Her eyes curdled with hot tears, her face unmoving and emotionless. What had come over her? It was a split moment where happiness turned to anger through the melodic accompaniment of her soul’s rhythm.

She had within her a cult of enraged girls, the annihilated feminine, who waged a war amidst the silence inside of her. A sudden hot flash, a piercing ice-cold chill rushing down the body; it was a split moment of agony, of anger, of rage which she restrained, living only inside her for the instances when nothingness resurrected it.

She thought of the man in the dark, the many men she met only in the dark, all of whom receded into her like a fine storm, unwavering and brutal. There were times she felt her desire being funneled with, while she lay in the dark intruding on a stiff, silent subject staring into the nothingness. Maybe, just maybe, if I close my eyes the nothingness will grant me back to the center of an existence where I can be born again. That was it: the anger of not being born!

She had written herself into a state of paralysis where she could hardly look at eyes without crying, where chills shot down her body in an inexplicable tingle. Her eyes stung so profusely it was hard to keep them open, but she feared closing them. Silvia would explore herself too far; in order to come back up, she would need to console herself in solitude, tracing her fingers over her scars, avoiding her reflection for the rest of the evening.

It was in the midst of Marco’s outpouring of emotions, which was unbearable to her. She could hardly handle herself. He would curl into her arms like a baby, and it was as if she were consoling a small child. Complacently, she would pet the top of his head and say, without moving a single facial muscle, “There, there.”

She resented the ways in which she had once cried in his arms so voluntarily. It seemed whenever Silvia outpoured, she received harsh consequences; she learned to withhold, for it was less painful to keep it all in than to expose herself to herself. She involuntarily became the matriarch of his heart and soul, and this left her hollow.

He looked at her with dreary eyes, saying, “I forgot to dust today.”

She remained complacent, staring into the void of the air. “There, there.”

So much for dusting, she thought. Little did she ever consider doing the same for herself until the light reflected a thick layer of dust eating away at the particles of the wood.

It was a normal day. The normal sounds of the washer spinning a strong current, ticking incessantly against the white walls. The same sounds of the coffee brewing, vibrating the kitchen tiles, the cup sending a vibration through her as if she were drinking the Earth. Swallow me whole, she said while swallowing. The coffee tasted of rotten soil, absolute in its condition. She drank it down as if it were to be drunk entirely before she did anything else. Once the cup was empty, she stared at the bottom of the white porcelain—once full, now empty with the remains of a ring of bubbles and drips clinging to the glass. She licked the glass clean until there was not a single bubble at the bottom, not a single trace of coffee left.

She sat in the dark room where white light leaked in to announce the morning, clicking incessantly on the typewriter. Dust ignited in the light. It bothered her—so much so that she had to interrupt the flow to wipe it away. It was as if a magnifying glass were held to the wood; the whole room became that one illuminated area. She would fetch a cloth and all-purpose cleaner to wipe the surface, but with every stroke, more dust materialized.

And it was not just the dust. She began to spot a layer of crumbs glued to the seat of her husband’s chair; she spotted dryer fuzz clinging to the carpet, strands of ripped towels, patches of hair—filth, filth! She was irate. She scrubbed the counter with an assertive might, imagining the surface was her life and she was wiping the whole thing clean. A clean life, a clean life! she chanted internally.

Silvia grew defeated, tired from the scrubbing. She realized she had spent the afternoon on one spot, which remained unclean, and she had not returned to her writing. The spot appeared clearer only because the sun was setting; the room was drowning in shadow. It was only in the light that she could see the filth.

Dark? It was getting dark. She had not gathered the courage to peer at the clock. She was locked in the moment, kneeling before the table with the damp, almost dry cloth in her hand, her elbow leaning on the ledge. How long? she thought. Tears welled, but she did not move; her face was as solid as a statue while the tears fell. As each drop rolled down her cheeks, it began to dry, leaving invisible streaks on her skin. The surface no longer needed cleaning because the light was gone.

Life went on like this. She began to dread the mornings and their violent cast of light. The night, too, was unbearable; her finest words were produced in the morning, and by nightfall she was empty and no longer alone. She would read her nights into oblivion, but no writing was attempted.

One day, a thought arrived to eradicate her troubles—one she had not asked for. She would tape the windows entirely with fine, thick black tape. This would solve it. She could finally write without the distractions of the sun.

Sitting there in the dark, her heart palpitated. Well, what if the light…?—silence. The silence was always the answer. She felt the answer trickle through her blood, holding her restless heart with its hands, soothing her mind for one fine moment. I will, she vowed, feeling a deep gratitude toward herself.

Not a trace of light reached the room. Her worries flickered like the light of a million tiny fireflies. Split moments of fire. The clicking and clacking echoed down the hallways. Her room was tucked behind a barrier of wall; one had to turn a corner to enter. She always braced herself when turning that corner. No one was there, she was affirmed, but she braced herself regardless.

She typed, the ink bleeding through the paper: I will always be.

This became her mantra in those darkened days, those nights when the wind stopped blowing and she was no longer alone. The walls would creak and groan in the silence. She heard noises impalpable to her, saw her dreams flashing in present-day glimpses. At times, she grew petrified—so much so that she wished she could run to her husband. This she would never do. Her fear was too great to move, and she realized she would eventually have to explain the fear, which was impossible. One explanation would only lead to a series of impulsive confessions she kept tucked deep within. She felt exposed even when she emerged and saw her husband in a quick glimpse. He always smiled. She would turn the corner without looking, pretending she was alone in her own world.

I am alone, she thought. To her, it was a horror she attempted to grapple with. Silvia watched cinema and read books where loneliness was formidably described. She had to identify the word for herself. Lonely… she thought, looking around as if a portrait might fall or the ceiling might begin to buzz. Lonely? She could not define the word because she hardly identified with the examples shown. Or did she? This caused a great confusion, the kind felt when retrieving answers from the deep, imposing well of the self. She would peak her head into the black abyss, hands gripping the stone so as not to lose her balance. She would holler into the well: “Lonely!” The word would ripple in a slow reverberation: lo-oh-ohhh-leeeeeeeeee.

Silvia tried to see how the word applied to her. She rehearsed the lines as if reading from a book not written by her. “I’m so lonely,” she said internally, sitting in the dark. Nothing. The words hardly moved her. It was an unexplainable feat; while she was unaffected, the word still grappled her by the chin and the bosom, assaulting her without consent. It was an invasion, this tentative meaning that seemed to mean something other than itself.

Just like love, she thought. I love you meant, in her terms, I love you because that is what we do. It was a neutral term, like breathing. She could feel the love for those she cared for, but the feeling was separate from the term itself.

As a child, she had memorized scripture at school. She had been paired with Elton—tall, permissible, and nonchalant. They would take turns holding the handwritten cards, filling in forgotten words. “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth…” followed by, “Love, love is not a feeling.”

The day she met her husband, she knew she loved him because it was beyond a feeling. Days into their arrangement, she would repeat I love you as if teaching him vowels, tricking him into a response. He would fight the urge, responding instead, “I feel for you.” Each time he said this, it hurt her more than silence. Her tricks were well-intentioned, but he was immune to her schemes. “Eye-luv-yoo,” she would say slowly.

Until one day, he no longer merely felt for her. “I love you,” he said with tears in his eyes. Silvia, receiving what she had asked for, sobbed as they embraced. That was all she needed, or so she thought. She was charmed by stories where love commenced—tales of a love so real it did not need to be identified. But what did that mean? If it wasn’t identified, how would they know? Despite her repetition, she felt uncomfortable with the phrase. She would grip her palms with her large talons as she practiced the three words.

She reflected on what it meant to love. Love is not a feeling. It was a subconscious knowing, an accident. “Oh, I didn’t mean…” one says when correcting a slip of the tongue.

Optimism felt better. Once she spoke her philosophies aloud—the ones she wrote as a means of sorcery—she wished she hadn’t; they deemed her greater than she desired to be. “I am” translated to her husband as a noble victory, a confession rather than the state of neutrality she intended. Her husband believed in logistics; Silvia was the abstraction. She was the raw edge that gashed the truths he sought.

“There is no meaning,” she would begin in her long protests of reclamation. He would listen with indifference, staring at her like a case study. The gaze was mutual; she would stare at his face to see what he was thinking. She would amp herself up while speaking, only to meet an excruciating comedown when she no longer wished to talk and his presence began to irritate her. He would ask what was wrong; she would dismiss him. Soon, he expected this switch.

The sight of him would first excite her, then immediately become repulsive. She would scrape her fingers up and down her arms to avoid flinching. He hardly noticed her ticks of hysteria because they were like breathing to her. Hysteria, in Silvia’s terms, was sunflowers on a windowsill, a radiant smile, and clean surfaces without a single speck of dust. It was drinking saliva like a glass of water.

She flinched with an unexpectant joy.

Marco sat beside her while she drew out the parallels of missing ships on a docksman. He would fill out crossword puzzles, occasionally interrupting the shared silence for a moment of thought. “Does Heaven have a Hell?” he would ask innocently. Silvia would answer with contempt, her eyes glued to her prospects. “It’s in the perpetual Hell that we create Heaven.”

The evenings would go on like this. Silvia clenched her teeth, grinding them to and fro. She feared emerging from the intense trance in which she was immersed—a sea of words, a sea of sensations. A grand display of order. Doors, always a door in sight. She grew agitated as she sat in the silence with nothing but the fan whirring and her husband’s heavy breathing. There is no such thing as shared silence, she thought, disgruntled.

Her mind would drift from immersion to another kind of trance. She would envision the moment as it was: the two of them sitting together, busying themselves with frivolities. Then, all of a sudden—chaos! A door slams, a car shrieks, chimes clash. It was as if she were experiencing, through these illusions, a physical reality.

She would turn to glance at her husband, only to find him eyeing her with a beguiling smile. He sat there, stoic and smiling like a happy mannequin. She was petrified. Usually, a phenomenon would follow: an item falling, a picture thrashing from the wall, a door slamming shut. It was only after she blinked a certain number of times that she would realize the truth.

Silvia could never catch a break from these extremities. Most nights, she would awake in a state of paralysis with her husband laying beside her. It was as if they were inside the abyss in real time. The warm amber light from the salt lamp only amplified the confined corner where the glow remained. She wanted so badly to scream, to admit her terror, but the terror was the very thing that anchored her paralysis. She never had the courage; she saw it as pointless. No one was going to save her—not her husband, not God. She would have to learn to be in the dark, terrified and without help.

Deep down, Silvia defied the conformalities of a sanctified union. She knew she was a wife, yes, but she despised the label. Moreover, she hated referring to her husband by his title. Inside, a wild magus tore at the seams of her self-induced flesh, ripping bare teeth into the thick wall of her blood. She needed control of this beast; she needed control indefinitely, without resolution.

Silvia shut herself away to test her rights. One week, she said. Nothing but the typewriter, the sterile brews of stale coffee, and dust covering the tables. She waned her impotencies, casting astray the firmament of their loving vows. What were vows other than a script to be followed? The thought of such adherence made her nauseous.

Often, Silvia remained behind the doors of solitude with a quiet rage broiling in her circuit. She never acted upon it—not since their last quarrel. Something that night had changed her. She was different. It was as if the old contaminants of her soul had spilled out with the warm blood on the kitchen tiles. The only parts left in this newly formed identity were a title she passively refuted and the leftover fragments of emotional tremors. She was swollen and bare.

Oftentimes, she could hear her husband outside the door, stirring the kennel and spitting into the sink. She was disgusted; she was beside herself with a dissatisfaction that bore witness to the everyday milieu like a silent jester. Speak! she said to the silence, and the silence replied with nothingness—a thing with a face and two ginormous black eyes.

Where did she go—the old Silvia? The one who cared not if the dust settled, who loved when the hot sun hit the pane, who drank from the fruit of the well? She felt like an imitation of herself, stripped of the elements that made her. She was: woman.

Often her husband would ask, “Are you happy?” and she would reply with an indifferent urgency—just enough to be convincing. “Yes... I am.” He would not notice her flinch or the bated breath that carried a wild, animalistic cry, the kind only hyenas produce.

Writing was Silvia’s oasis. When she wrote, she was at bay. Nothing mattered but the present moment; she was an attentive student of herself. Her process was sacred and felt forbidden because it was so unknown. Pulling words from the void to curate an unknown narrative. Everything, besides the moment and her feeling within it, was unknown. Ardently, she would transcribe the words that came in hot flashes, flooding the gates of her mind. Her mind would drown under the prospect of Divine interception. Write, write, write! It was intoxicating, the closest she ever attained to a Hallelujah. It mattered not what the words meant; she transcribed with the indifference of a student, only to later cipher the material with astonishment.

She wondered: do all writers do this? Did Huckleberry Finn ever make it? Do we, all writers, not actually write? For what she was doing was not writing; it was something else.

Silvia would try to make sense of the words she had transcribed—not written, for they came not from her alone. Yet, these words were hers, from the part of her she rarely visited. They were caricatures of her faint existence, mirroring the trajectory of missing elements. Dust! Like a million orbs of flying dust swept off a surface to float in the ether. The dust would clog her throat; she would suffocate with a bit of derangement. Soon after, the dust would drain back down her throat and into her womb, and she would return.

Silvia, the wife. The sound was repulsive. A wife? It was like pouring alkaline over a dry wound. Nothing. No sting, no burn—just contaminated flesh and another mess to clean. Messes, yes; always some kind of fissure. She kept her sanctuary in pristine condition with elaborate embellishments: doilies, stacks of books, Tiffany fixtures, antique adornments. There was dust, yes, but only a minimal layer she would eventually wipe. Outside her room, the revulsion settled in. Crumbs layered the wooden tables, broken bits of hashish dotted the carpets, revolting sequences of color, chaos, and thick layers of dust ignited by the violent beams of the sun. The sight was revolting.

Often, she closed her eyes to reenvision the disorder with a fresh perspective. It never worked. Solace was found only in the confines of her room, holed up in the narrowing tunnels of introspection—beautiful tunnels one would never desire to leave. She did not mind being confined; what left her with an aching pain in her temples was the disorderly conduct of the world just outside her door.

When her husband set off to work, she would attempt to create order from the chaos. She plucked crumbs from the table liners and the rugs, disposing of them, wiping residue from every surface. The ordeal was dreadful. It was inevitable that as soon as her husband returned from the office, the conditions would revert to disorder.

Silvia began to question, which was never a good thing. As the afternoon blurred into evening, she fell into a withering spell of introspection. She questioned her direction, or the lack thereof. She began to miss running in the rain, feeling the hard drops pierce her flesh like daggers. There was a time when she was free to chase the rain. Now, she was sheltered from every storm, and if she ever thought of running out, she had a husband to stop her.

She began to resent him and the life they had together. Even the thought of him impeded her notions of love. “I am safe in the arms of love,” she would repeat, and while she was sheltered in her quarters, there was a presumptuous quality to the condition. It was a luxurious prison with windows that opened, where she could feel the drops pelting the sill and the faint gusts of wind. It was just enough until she desired more—not just the window, but a passageway into the violence of the rain.

Silvia felt her beauty had been washed away. Her hips were too narrow, her teeth had aged, her hair was unmanageable. She was ripe in age but worn down by a small sum of years. She was resentful, but indifference always followed because she could not afford to react. She had lost the ability. But deep down, there were only tears and a screaming, bloody rage. Anger at her life, and at the life she had once lived.

Glancing down, she looked at the wound—once fresh, now aged with the passing of time, yet never fading; it remained a persistent image of the compulsion that had carved it. It was the wound of her life: like a raw opening drying up, with just enough new skin to shroud the old, sliced-open surface. Though healed, it would never disappear. It served as a mimicry of her current existence, and for all she knew, it would remain so.

She had not the strength to leave, nor could she claim that she even desired to. She did not desire at all. No, all her desires had been depleted by the dry void of life itself—by the world that continued its indifferent orbit around her—and this angered her. With a fine and silent anger, I must add; for she felt the fibers of an anger once acted upon, the very force that had birthed the insatiable sadness that compelled her to take the knife.

The wound would never fade from her flesh—that tattered flesh she loved so, like a gentle and promising sky. A sky full of sun amongst the clouds. But always, deep down, there remained that bloody rage, now tempered and living only as an inversion. A sick and estranged inversion that had become her life.