I am like water. I reflect things as they truly are.

It’s more a state of being than a mantra—something I picked up while meditating, ever since that day some twenty-odd years ago. I’m supposed to close my eyes and measure my breaths. On the inhale, I become the essence of still water, a flat and glossy pane of glass. A pond in the heart of a lush forest, striking enough to captivate a man until he returns to the soil as a flower. I hold my breath there, freezing the landscape in stillness and solitude. Then, the exhale, revealing the truth behind false colors and illusions.

Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Become the lens through which to see this world.

Opening my eyes strings my gut with unease. Nothing has changed. The room’s darkness is fuzzy, almost tangible, as if I could grab a chunk of it and let it melt in my mouth. I wish it was oblivion or something my eyes couldn’t get used to, because I don’t want to see her.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it goes.

She’s still here, sitting limply in a chair across from me. Eyes without irises or pupils, pallid and dull cavities that leak scarlet teardrops. Her neck snapped and crunched at a horrible angle, a shard of her vertebra piercing skin. The gaping hole in her skull, still fresh and throbbing, exposing the wrinkled texture of her brain. And that smile, wide and unnatural like it was carved into her cheeks with a knife, as if she’s happy about what she’s become.

A grayscale reel of images flashes through my mind. The ocean spray crashing against the cliff face. Two children dancing and playfully jostling each other. Shouts and laughter glowing with youth. Strands of dark hair swaying in the breeze like ribbons of fudge. The ocean spray crashing against the cliff face. A body crashing against the cliff face. Blood staining the ocean spray red as it crashes against the cliff face.

I jerk in my seat, dazed by the matted tufts of brown hair and gore pulsing around the wound in her head. It might as well be corroded with rust, on the verge of crumbling to pieces. I bite my lip to give myself a physical sensation, to ground myself in this room. There’s no telling how far back I can go before I lose myself completely, turning into some broken doll like her.

I wish she’d say something, but I know better. She’s just a distorted reflection.

As I stand up, the whites of her eyes follow me. She always did that, watching my every move. I want to wipe the streaks of blood off her cheeks, but I’m afraid of what might happen if I touch her. She’s fragile, light enough to nearly fall over from a small gust of wind. I know how the slightest push can topple someone over the edge.

She didn’t even scream. It happened too suddenly. One moment her feet were planted, the next she was floating in the sky, and then…

I clench my eyes shut, haunted by a vision of a shadowed specter bashing in a young girl’s head with a salt-covered rock, splattering red like a geyser. I open them, and she’s gone, leaving me alone in this cold, dark room.

The hairs on my arm tingling, I extend my trembling hand and brush the empty space where she was just sitting. Nothing, not even a phantom remnant of her presence. All that remains of her is that ghoulish expression, her smile stretched to her ears but not enough to reach her lifeless eyes. It’s the type of expression found on someone hanging from a rope behind their closed bedroom door, but ghastlier. Her grin makes it seem like she’s still alive, savoring the ecstasy of her pain.

Panting, I realize that I’m drenched. Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I catch the taste of seawater on my parched lips.

My room starts to feel constricting, like it’s sagging under an unseen weight. Soon, the walls will cave in, drawing and spewing my innards like the gravity well of a black hole. The nausea is already tugging at my gut, viscous and frothy. Swallowing a gurgle of rancid bile, I turn around and open my door, hoping to flood my room with space if not light. Instead, I’m slammed by a pitch-black void, numbing my senses like the blast of a freezer.

I search for the door, but I can’t find it. Turning around, I instantly lose my sense of direction, my room having disappeared, swallowed up by this nothingness along with me. It’s more than just darkness. It’s an absence of light, of being, that extends into the depths of eternity.

I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed, but I try to close them anyway. I tell myself to breathe. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Like still water, reflect what truly is.

A chill crawling across my skin reminds me that mirrors don’t work without light.

Echoes hardly louder than a whisper reverberate with an undulating rhythm somewhere in the distance. They draw me closer, my feet taking steps on ground I can’t see or feel, suspended in space. The hazy sounds grow louder until I can make out laughter. It starts off soft and subdued, but with each step I take, the hysteria unravels as the outbursts become charged and forceful, rattling the emptiness around me. My chest aches, my lungs starving for breath as if I’m the one laughing. How can that be? It’s a girl’s voice. It’s her voice.

The laughter intensifies, jerking in pitch and tone. My walk turns into a jog, into a run. It’s battering my eardrums, sending sharp jolts through my skull. Crashing like a thunderstorm, a downpour of maniacal, ceaseless, mucus-laced shrieks losing all sense and form. Senseless emotions pouring out of the deepest recesses of her rotting heart, ripping through her vocal cords, decaying as they travel through the air.

This…this isn’t laughter. She’s crying.

Digging my nails into my ear canals, I increase my pace, tripping over my feet as I struggle to run away from the noise. Tendrils of her racking sobs latch onto me, trying to drag me into the core of the darkness. I hear it now, the anguish in her soul. The sound of her existence shattering as it crashed into those rocks and the sea below.

Suddenly there’s light, and I lunge to the ground, skidding my knees and elbows on gravel and ripping off a piece of my lip with my teeth. I grind to a stop inches away from the edge of the cliff, my torn flesh erupting in pain. My body convulses uncontrollably as I try to turn away, but something is grabbing onto my head and forcing it down, creaking against the muscles in my neck. I don’t have to see it, I don’t want to see it, but that same force peels my eyelids open so that I have no choice but to stare into the murky depths a hundred feet below, even though that same image was carved into the folds of my brain twenty years ago.

This place.

My skull feels like it’s inside a vice clamp, the pressure about to pop my burning eyes out of their sockets. The rolling waves splinter on the cliff face, splayed into so many fragments on the unforgiving crags. I can’t breathe; my lungs are a vacuum. No matter how much my body trembles with the strain of my struggle, I’m unable to look away. The sea is dense, like its clotted with a looming forest of algae. Except that’s just what I want to believe. Even in twilight, I can see that the ocean is blood from a mountain of mutilated corpses.

My ears fill with my booming heartbeat, or maybe it isn’t mine. Thumping, pulsing, louder and louder, jolting my chest, faster and faster and faster until it bursts with a resonating squelch. A wet, sickening sound. I can almost feel the spilled insides drenching my petrified, contorted form. Just like those rocks a hundred feet below me.

A silence follows that not even the waves can break. The pressure on my neck and head vanishes, and I’m able to freely move. Shakily standing, I crane my neck upwards to get as far away from down as I can. The sky is blank save for a silvery disk that fills half of my view, the only source of illumination in this place. It’s soft, mournful, lonely. The moon’s surface ripples like it’s a reflection in a disturbed lake.

“You shouldn’t.”

My gaze follows the timid, hollow voice and freezes on her gaunt figure. She’s spectral, nearly translucent, on the verge of fading into a haze of fog. The color of her eyes has inverted, now entirely black. Soulless. Her face is cracked like porcelain, as if the slightest breath of air will cause her to fall apart. She has no smile. She has no mouth. The only things on her fractured face are those two pits gouged into her eye sockets.

“Why did you bring me here?” I ask.

No response. She’s a statue, staring emptily ahead, penetrating my conscious mind.

“I’m so…sorry.”

I reach my hand out, unsure of my intentions, just wanting to feel her again, even though this thing can’t be her.

“Don’t touch me.”

The voice emanates from somewhere underneath me. It shouldn’t be, but I know it’s hers, because it’s the same voice that haunts my dreams.

My hand stretches farther until it’s an inch away from her face. The noise of a deafening buzzer slices through the air. No. Something cuts off my hand. The spray covers her face. Before I can even cry out in shock, my head splits from a searing pain, and I crumple to my knees.

Somehow, I’m back on my feet. I hastily glance at my arm. My hand’s still there. She’s also in the same position as before, but this time her pale visage is tinted red. It isn’t from the splatter of my blood. Everything’s crimson, like I’m viewing the world through a colored lens.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” Her voice is throttled, like she’s drowning.

“What do you want from me?”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I shouldn’t want?”

“Save me.”

Laughter reaches my ears, prattling, filled with gaiety and joy. The landscape darkens, stained a deeper shade of red like paint seeping into the silk of a torn-up wedding gown. I turn around, but my movements have slowed as if I’m submerged underwater. I see them. Two children, running along the cliff’s edge, shoving and wrestling each other with bright smiles. A boy who has no idea the sorrow he’s about to feel. A girl who’s moments away from never feeling again. The blood moon devouring the night sky.

I try to scream, but my voice is gone. The girl stumbles, but she stops herself just before the precipice, turning around and tackling the boy. I feel her impact, slamming into me with unbelievable force, sending me soaring into the air—until I realize that it isn’t supposed to be like this, that she should be the one falling, that I should be frozen in my spot at the cliff’s edge watching her ragdoll silhouette plummet into the raging depths, helpless.

Instead, I see her. Hand outstretched, still stinging from the impact with the small of my back. Wide, twitching eyes blanched white save for pupils the size of a speck of dust. A bloody smile carved into the flesh of her empty face, remaining in view even as I fall.

I am like water. I reflect things as they truly are.

As my body slams into the churning rocks and waves, I can only imagine the sensation of muscles and tendons tearing from shattered bones. However, when I open my eyes, I’m back in my room. There’s no gaping hole in my skull, no perforated limbs or spewed viscera. In fact, there’s daylight for the first time in so long.

Take a deep breath of fresh air. Hold it in my lungs. Let it out slowly.

Repeat.

“Why do you still cling to me?”

The voice comes from behind me, warm and caressing. I refuse to turn my head, afraid of the dead eyes and broken smile I’d see. It’s a hopeless endeavor, because the memory is muddled with everything else from that day; still, I try to picture her as she once was. I try to remember a time when we were both human.

“Because I failed to grab you back then.”

A sigh. “You’re a fool.”

My eyes water. “Would you be happy if I joined you?”

“No, I’d never want that.”

“Then what do you want?”

“For you to forgive yourself.”

I shake my head. She’ll never be like before. It’ll always be that grotesque distortion, a discarded shell of who she used to be. A nightmare that haunts every thought, every echo of the past. Horrid, bloody, shattered. A reflection of my innermost heart.

Still, I could never forgive myself. If I did, then I would lose her forever.

– Alex Schweich