The room is filling with hands, she thought. There are slots in the walls and in the floor and in the ceiling and the men are poking their hands into the room.
She felt something small and cold press down on her chest.
“Don,” she said. “Is that you? Who’s there?”
Above the hissing, she heard a new sound, a faltering melody, half hummed, half whispered. It was a horrible, haunting little song. She held her breath, listening, but the song didn’t have any words. She felt something cold press into her ear. She concentrated on the paper sliding beneath her, the incessant soft abrasions and electric tingles along her scalp.
“I wish I could levitate,” she said. “Even if it were only with magnets and not truly magical. Would you rather fly or be invisible? Would you rather die, live forever, or never have been born? Or something else? Evaporate? You’d disappear slowly with a sure return?”
She felt a tiny sharp blow on her knee.
She felt a tiny sharp blow on her elbow.
There’s a rate at which I’m vanishing, she thought. I don’t think I’m someone who goes in an instant.
“I’m not getting up,” she said. “Not for awhile.”
The song was already fading. Something prodded her leg, very lightly, her abdomen, her neck, or it might have been an itch produced by her own skin, traveling across her body’s surfaces. Below the surfaces, there were deeper layers to which the itch could not penetrate. The surface sensation traveled, dissipated.
There’s a rate, she thought. But it’s not the kind of thing you can calculate.
How relieved people would be. If only she could tell them.
She felt the paper moving beneath her, and she lay very still on top of it, not saying anything, not moving at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Ruocco is the author of Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2, 2012), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press, 2011), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), and The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, and winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, she co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal, with Brian Conn.