Lotus

I could hear them fighting down below. The force of the blows on the walls traveled through the house. The house never talked, because the only time it opened its mouth was to scream. Its eyes never left you, even after you were gone. The five little birds that had come before me had disappeared years ago, and they left a deafening silence meant to be filled by happiness. Yoselin was first to go. She couldn’t stand the feelings she’d been drowning in as the hands of the house wrapped around her neck.
I lay alongside the wall, my back on the floor. I could feel the hands brush along my body, fingering the paint flaking off my skin and clothes. I brushed them off, ignoring their protests. I didn’t care about them any more. They’d lost their hold on me over the years I’d been with you. Now, I was waiting, although I wasn’t sure what for. I think I was waiting for you, but I was scared that you wouldn’t come.
Maybe that’s why I’d taken my fury and directed it against the room. I beat the walls and pounded the door, leaving marks and stains from my hands when they began to openly bleed.

The bed was next. I hunted through the dresser drawers until I found the knife. The blade was perfect, pretty and personal, deadly in the arch from the handle to the point and the weight it carried in my palms. I gripped the handle and let it sink into the mattress. I hacked away, the stuffing spilling over onto the floor, as if by massacring my bed, I could cut away the ugly parts within me.
The balance in my mind tipped, and I fell off the scales. When I awoke, it was dark. That was the end of day one. The rest of the week was a blur. Food arrived at the door twice a day, and through the open space, I could see Nicole’s face twisted with some strange emotion. The door remained locked except for those brief intervals of time. The food I was given remained untouched. I just sat against the wall, day in and day out like a broken doll, unable to move.
On day three, a set of oil paints with brushes arrived instead of dinner. On day four, I picked them up. I suppose that was when I achieved a type of mental clarity. From then on, I gave up sleep. My room became a hell-like jungle with flowers blooming on the walls. I painted the lotus again and again, its sizes varying from small to large. I guess I was trying to find a non-painful way to bind myself to you. The knife lay forgotten on the corpse of the mattress.
I painted words across the floor, the walls and ceiling. Paint crinkled and cracked as I moved my arms after it had dried onto my skin. I want to die, I want to die, I want to die. I repeated those words over and over, like a spell.
I waited for the reaper to take me as a kind of punishment for everything I’d done. I gave up hope of being rescued by you. In my mind, it was a realistic fantasy.

On the seventh night, I ran out of paints and gave up my soul to the devil. I always thought that you were an angel, so in my delirious stupor, it was no surprise that you appeared in my room through the balcony doors. Maybe it didn’t seem quite real, because the moment you saw me, you began cursing. That’s something angels don’t usually do.
You picked me up and swung me down onto the ruined bed despite my protests. Maybe I fell asleep after that, or I fell unconscious from hunger and lack of water. I heard a car door slam, although I didn’t see anything. You were talking with a woman, your voices low enough for me to catch only random words. Suicide, food, school, tickets, money, address. All words leading to an escape.
The woman said thank you as I felt the car begin to move, and I thought I saw Nicole watching us as you drove away from the house. You told me to sleep, and I did.
That moment went on forever as the car slowly headed off to its destination. I felt safe with you, despite the fact that I didn’t know where we were going.

People say that heaven is full of flowers. I think that’s wrong. For hell is a garden, and its flowers bloom madly during the night. In the center, on a hill, sits a house. When you walk down the halls, you can hear ghosts whispering about the devil that haunts the building. The devil locked me in that room to pay for the sins I’ve committed. One can never fully escape from hell, though, and I’ll always pay for what I’ve done. I ripped the lotus from the walls and spread the petals across my face, crushing them into me.