Shadows in the Corner

I hate paper. I hate books, journals, wallpaper, canvas, cardboard. I hate it all. It's under my nails, and maybe that’s my fault. After all, I am the one who tears it off the walls, and out of binding, and rings, and wood every time that it is presented to me. I can’t help it, so it must not be my fault that it is under my nails. I start out slowly, like peeling off a bandaid; one page, then another, then another, until I am whipped up in a frenzy. Trying, desperately, with everything that is inside of me, to tear it into smaller and smaller pieces. It is under my nails, it is in my teeth, mixed with sweat and saliva in a way that permanently hardens in the more vulnerable parts of my flesh–in my molars, in my nail beds.

“Oh, stop that,” I told myself, looking down at my paper-cut hands, reddened with my own blood. But everything else in the room was very white, so it was such a pretty sight. In one hand, I took my fingers into my mouth, savoring the salt of my life. With the other hand, I spread little streaks of blood around the wall, all the little, crimson smudges weaving together into an image of what I imagined a heart to look like. I had never seen one, after all. Not in images or television. I didn’t even have one of those in the room, and of course, I never read the books I was given. Once, I tried to tear my chest open, just so I could have an image to think of when I painted. I wasn’t served dinner for three days after that particular incident.

A knock came from my door. It was breakfast, or perhaps dinner, I could never tell until I was served. It would either be oatmeal, eggs and soldiers if I had been good, or a chicken breast and broccoli. If it was my birthday, I would get strawberries and cream. My birthday is my favorite day. It had not been my birthday for quite some time, the last taste of red berries only a faint memory, so perhaps it was almost time to be older.

The door creaked open as the pretty hands slip in my food through the gap between the frame and the door. Oatmeal.

“Is it my birthday?” I asked the hands as I took my bowl from them.

“Mmhm!” The hands confirmed with excitement, the voice calling out from the shadows behind my door. I found myself wondering, as I so often did, where shadows came from. There were some in my room, but I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a reason for their appearance. I never saw them come in when the hands opened my door to feed me, and I didn’t have a window to open for them to creep inside.

The soft hands shut my door, a quiet click, and I was back in my own silence.

I ate my breakfast with a plastic fork, then I licked it clean and placed it in my collection. A towering pile of white plastic. Shadows hid behind it, living meekly in the corner. Sometimes I tried to lure them out to talk to me, offering them leftovers of my meals–they must be hungry after all that time hiding, right? But they never came out. Maybe shadows were shy.

Maybe they just didn’t like me.

I ripped up more books when I was given them. I piled up the bare covers into a stool and stood up high to rip the wallpaper off the upper wood of my four walls. I played with my plastic collection. I left oats around the corner for the shadows to come out and play. I scratched patterns into the floor, the corner opposite to the shadows, but my fork broke, and I stopped.

“Why don’t you want to play?” I asked the shadows. “Don’t you get bored in that corner?”

They didn’t respond.

I practiced cartwheels. I made my own dance and showed it to the shadows. I counted the stretched marks on my thighs. I ripped out the hairs on my legs and put them in the corner.

“How many of you are there in that little corner?” I asked the shadows.

They didn’t respond.

I waited for the pretty hands. I layed on my back with my feet on the wall and thunked them to the rhythm that danced in my head. I cried, and then I laughed. I took the empty book shells and leaned them against each other to make a castle of triangles.

“Do you ever get lonely?” I asked the shadows.

They didn’t respond.

The pretty hands opened the door, I watched out for stray shadows as the door creaked open, and they pushed a stack of books to me.

“I won’t read these,” I told the hands. They only hummed in response. I took the stack of books to myself, not bothering with the covers, and ripped up the dust jackets. I took one book, which was a dark purple, and I laid it flat against the hardwood, cover to cover. Slowly I flipped through the pages, landing on one when I felt ants crawling up my skin. I tore the page out. Again, I flipped through the pages, waited for chills, and ripped the paper out. Again, again, again, again. I never bothered with the words. The scarred skin of my pointer finger nicked itself on one page, and I smiled. Over and over again, I ripped out the guts of the book and cut my hands all up. When the cover was empty, I threw it in the corner, knocking it through my tower and collapsing with the others. I did it all over with the next book.

My hands were all blood and scabs and scars and raw. I stuck my pinky finger in my mouth, smiling wide as I bit into the cut and deepened it. In one swift bite, as I chomped down into my own finger, blood began spurting out into my mouth. It fell all over the pretty floor and white walls, and my teeth were painted scarlet. A knock came from the door and time slowed as I drank the blood from my hands, the upper third of my finger left lying on the floor as blood sprayed from my hand. I waited and waited as the pretty, white wood drew open. I crawled silently behind it, leaving my blood to trail in my footsteps. Pretty, sweet crimson against the simple, clean floor. The hands entered the room with a bowl of strawberries and cream.

“Where…” The voice trailed off as it saw the blood. Blood, and blood, and more blood, and no me. The body entered the room, the body I had not seen for so long. Shadows were behind them, but did not follow. Perhaps they were scared.

The body dropped the strawberries and cream from the pretty hands, red against red, seeping into the floorboards. I reached out with one hand, caressing the edge of the door, and I braced myself against the floor with the other. The body reached down to the floor, the hands picked up my chewed off finger.

“Why?” The body asked in a quiet curiosity. “Where?” I slammed the door shut and pushed myself off the ground, lunging at the body and tangling my hands into their hair. Sleek and brown, now mixing with my blood. I slammed the head against the floor, and they did not resist, only laid there as I took out my enchantment on them. The blood from the head leaked out onto the hardwood, mixing with mine. I let out a sigh, a groan, really, of exhaustion as I flopped back. My knees rested against the floor on each side of the torso. I panted, desperately trying to catch my breath, but even the air ran away from me.

“Why don’t the shadows ever come out to play?”

The body crawled out from under me, crawling to hover themselves over me. The blood from the head dripped over my face. The head looked at me, my own eyes reflected back on me. My own eyes, my own lips, my own hair, my own face. My body, my hands, though theirs were prettier. All of me looked at myself. Now we looked more similar, blood staining both our brown locs of hair. The prettier hands of mine caressed my face, smearing the blood into my skin and petting my cheek.

“Because you do this,” Myself answered simply, then they turned around and became a body once more. The hands began to clean my floor.