7:1 – Interlude – Kim
Kim
A carbon nanotube beach-tumbleweed, a kinetic sculpture that never stops shifting and changing its configuration, it is easy to get lost in the chaos of her mind. Keep your feet moving, your arms churning, and always keep a step ahead so the spun-sugar strands the color of a happy childhood don’t catch you. Keep fluid, like a great white shark who knows to stop swimming is death, or between one heartbeat and the next you’ll be flailing against the ethereal strands that wrap you in layer upon layer upon layer of ideas and thoughts and dreams and emotions and tears and screams and ‘this isn’t happening’ and ‘I wonder if there really is something better than this; something I imagine other people’s lives must be’. Your mind wants to convince you the strands, the color of a happy childhood, are spun sugar that will dissolve beneath the liquid spill of tears, releasing you from their sticky, cloying cocoon. But they’re not. They’re fiberglass caught in a whirlpool; each strand a gossamer fine razor leaving microscopic slices as they dance in a whirling, swirling maelstrom around you. Keep fluid, like a great white shark who knows to stop swimming is death.
*
It’s been weeks since Kim did laundry and the pile in the closet has built to a satisfying height. Her nose is always stuffed from allergies so if it smells it has no real impact on her. Plus, it’s always damp in the house so the smell of wet pervades everything, a base note that makes the air a subtle stew of mushroom and mildew. Dresses and jackets hang on the rail over her head, stalactites defining the upper limits of the closet cave, as she burrows deep into the clothes, wriggling and wiggling and squirming her shoulders into the pile, slowly transforming cloth to cradle. Eventually she settles, head pressed into the corner closest to the door and feet propped up on the rear wall with her back settled in the nest of clothes.
It’s a little fortress; a little citadel; a little kingdom of cloth. And she its sole citizen.
Safe in the close confines of walls and clothes and recycled breaths, she blindly reaches for the book she put down earlier. Paper rough beneath her lightly calloused fingertips, she seeks escape, getting lost in other worlds, better worlds, worlds that make sense, where life sticks to a dramatic structure of rising and falling action, where reaction follows action and storms are presaged by a calm where you smell the violence coming ozone sharp in your nostrils instead of having it just break on you without warning from the blue.
The chaos of her mind has no place within imagined worlds where authors control every detail, where each breath of wind that plays over a wrack strewn beach and every thought that plays within a character’s head has a purpose. There is nothing chaotic in stories that an author does not put there whether to drive the plot or force change and submerging herself within those worlds gives Kim respite, quieting the clamor in a way nothing else does.
Settling into the nest of clothes with her eyes half closed she breaths deeply, her ribs expanding as she releases the tension in her frame that is yet another layer of the armor she places between herself and the world, then sinks deeper into the laundry pile. Elbows planted in the give of cloth, she tents the book over her face, tilting it slightly when the spread pages block the overhead light and make it hard to read the words printed on them.
She starts to dive in but then thoughts crowd her mind like a school of fish fleeing a shark; hustle, bustle, whirl, and blend overlapping grains of glass in a kaleidoscope the blurred muddle between one pattern and the next, the colors a swirl of bacteria on the surface of her mind forming twisted fragments of images.
The rhythm of her breathing increases, the air soughing over her parted lips, and her heart lunges against her rib cage.
Screams. Rage. Hands shaking. Head swimming. Memories. Not memories. Memories? Flotsam swirling in a riptide, what drove her to her citadel of cloth surges against the breakwater, a confusion of thoughts assaulting the barrier, and her mind is caught up in the maelstrom. Screaming. A hand across her face. Spittle dotting her skin as the shrieks penetrate the haze she builds like a wall, word by word and breath by breath, between her and… Her. Drowning, Kim gasps, jerks, rears her head up, desperately gasping for a breath of calm.
Her eyes open to the pages held inches from her nose and the words on them overlap, made blurry by the moisture that swims across her vision, an ink blot pulsing in time with the blood coursing behind her eyes as the pressure in her brain expands until the black of the words blends with the black inside her head with its pinpricks of colored lights like fireworks in a summer sky, like the swirling grains of glass in a kaleidoscope. She flails for reason, her thoughts rounding back on themselves, flowing in time with the deep breaths she pulls through her nostrils. In. Out. In. Out. The breath and the thoughts flow until the black recedes and she can see the individual words on the pages held close to her nose.
And everything is calm again. Reasoned. Measured. Black words on a white page. And she can breathe.
There is no warning, no ozone stench of danger, nothing to tell her to tense. Just one moment she’s breathing freely, her armor laid aside, a world that made sense within her grasp. The next the door behind her head is snatched open. Light stabs eyes adjusted to the dimmer light of the closet. Kim slams up the book, a bulwark between herself and the light. Knocking the book aside, a hand snatches at her head, fingers lacing in her hair, and she’s pulled out of the safety of her citadel of cloth and caught by the storm that had no calm before it, no ozone stench of warning.
She should never have stopped swimming.
Enter The Woods 