The Written Woman

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I walked slow. My feet were heavy. The leaden fear had sunk down into them. I stared down at them, dragging across the green velvet floor. At least, it looked like green velvet in the dirty yellow lights, carelessly mounted on the wall to my left. I continued to shuffle down the musty hallway toward the blackness. The lights leading to my door hadn’t been cleaned in god knows how long; the neglect stuck to the glass in thick, permanent dust panes.

 

I kept shuffling.

 

I grabbed the gaudy wooden bannister to my right. I felt the smooth curves stacked on top of one another, a true work of art. The woodworker must have tried to offset the darkness with beauty.

 

It only added to the empty feeling.

 

No one joined me in the hallway. I guess none of them avoided the darkness of sleep. The vulnerability.

 

I stopped in front of my door—214. We were all numbers.

 

I turned the dirty handle and pushed against the heavy door. Sometimes I wish it pushed back so I didn’t have to go inside. More and more every day.

 

As I creeped into bed, I pulled the covers up to my chin, clinching my eyes tight.

 

But I heard it.

 

I always heard it.

 

The faint sound of bones rattling against the walls.

 

She’s always there, huddled in the corner. Bony shoulders poking out, arms crossed where I couldn’t see them, bare legs clanking together. Her stringy hair twitched from side to side.

 

I never saw her face.

 

And the writing. It had already started.

 

The text on her back had started writing itself.

 

I knew it by heart by now. My mom had taught me by the time I was five.

 

I lunged out of my bed and grabbed my notebook from the table at the end of my bed and started writing, faster than her writing scrawled across her back.

 

If I didn’t finish the text in my notebook by the time hers did on her back…