All I See are Lines

By Richelle Co

A child must have come in the night and took a crayon into my head.

When sunlight breached the heavy curtains, I couldn't move nor could I remember why I wanted to. My head protested with the weight of wax. I looked inside, and there it was: a crayoned pile of lines drawn in a shapeless black tangle.

It took some time, but I felt my way along the edge of the pile, clinging onto a single line to get through a shower.

I looked back to the bed. Someone had also drawn onto my pillow. And what used to be his side of the bed. And the comforter. And the table.

And the walls, and on the couch.

On the stupid stuffed blue koala where he stitched my name with a heart over the "i."

And the dusty empty kennel.

And the lightest touch of any of these lines would strum all of them at once in my head, and it won't be good.

The lines continued on the train to work, rumbling along on the safety poles, waiting for me to touch them, but I didn't. I kept my eyes on my phone, letting a rambling podcast stream into my head in full volume. It tricked the lines in my head into thinking they weren't so tangled. But no music allowed. And definitely nothing with lyrics. Lyrics slide down those lines like raindrops on a thread, dripping into the center of my head. They knot the tangled ball until it pulls. It pulls until I need to curl myself up into a ball, too.

The blank white office walls that I faced for eight hours each day seem to make the tangle buzz with disdainful defiance. People's mouths were moving, but what were they saying? Something about a project. Something about a timeline. Something about numbers. OK, we need to listen to the numbers. Get in your head and focus. We need to know what the numbers are about.

But it’s been ten seconds and they haven’t gotten to the point, and this particular black line reminded me of a bookstore. I followed it, feeling along the crumbled wax, and two young voices among the muted bustle of a bookstore sprung up like sounds from an old record. We wanted to be readers, so he bought me a little cookbook, and I got him a Men's Health.

I jerked, suddenly scalded by liquid wax, and I scrambled away - away from the books and the bookstore. There was a cackle from beyond the black tangle because I deserve this. Eyes peered through the gaps of cracked shiny wax, and all they saw was garbage because I deserve this.

Then I came screeching, scurrying back from the depths of the black tangle, clawing at my chest and scratching my face. I tripped over a knot that smelled like a chubby dog on the last day I held her, and I scampered out to the surface.

The people’s mouths were still moving.

It was still about some numbers.

And I just stared at them.

THE END

Author Bio: Richelle Co works in IT by day and still works in IT by night because of overtime. In between, she likes to write. Other stories by Richie Co are at Literally Stories and Flash Fiction Magazine.