“Well, look at you.”
I smell her metallic hair, hear the sarcasm in her voice. Is that what I sound like? Curled up on the couch, I open one eye and find her staring back at me. An entity that is very clear when she is right in front of me, and something I forget entirely when she is gone. That long, brown hair is eternally slicked with blood, some plastered and dried to the sides of her face. She wears a light gray hoodie borrowed from a roommate a long time ago, utterly destroyed and un-returnable.
I put makeup on that morning? Her mascara streaks unevenly. I cried?
Brown eyes stare wildly back at me, darker than I remember, with a sort of terrible light behind them. Glowing embers waiting to be lit up. She grins.
“Big city girl making something of yourself. Moving on? Look at that haircut. It doesn’t sleep well, does it?”
My pixie short hair stands up on the side that is facedown on the pillow. It doesn’t matter, nobody will see it. She keeps talking, and I listen as if it’s a voice in my own head.
“How’s the job?”
“Stop.”
At the sound of her snickering, I close the eye I had opened, hoping this is it for the day.
“NO! YOU LOOK AT ME!”
I bolt upright and pull the blanket around me. A low, uncertain growl sounds from the little white dog next to me, her brown ears perked, not quite sure where one of us ends and the other begins. The girl stops and looks at her.
“What’s her name?”
“Edith.”
Her eyes visibly lighten, holding out a tentative hand. Edith pokes at her fingers with her small black nose, licks them, and lifts her snout to take in the impossible scent of death without decay. “We did always want a dog.”
“We’ve got one,” I smile gently.
“You do. You’ve got one.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Its like…I can sense when you’re struggling, and I just need to see it,” she grins, and my mouth forms a thin line in response.
“Seriously loving that bed head.” She gives me a thumbs up.
I survey the blood stains that grow on the sides of the sweatshirt where her hair rests, fed by a wound on the back of her head.“I hardly think you’re one to comment on appearance.”
She lunges forward, grabbing a tuft of my hair and yanking my head back, her face inches from mine. “Listen to me,” she hisses. “I am a single moment in the time of “you.” I’m not even certain that when the rest of you dies I’ll be able to go too. Imagine being perpetually upside down in that metal coffin that they cut you out of. I am still there. It is still that day. I am the absorption of your overwhelming physical fear that knocked you unconscious, and everything you could not handle. I am the worst thing that ever happened to you, and the reason why the only thing from it you have to carry with you now is the idea that it happened, and not the actual memory.”
Bep! Bep Bep!
Edith commands my release, and my tuft of hair is let go of.
She steps back, eyes flickering, dripping blood onto the wood that will disappear when she does. “Sometimes you just want to see how the other half lives.”
“And words of wisdom? Am I stronger than I know, or something?”
She lifts her eyes to meet mine. “No. I am stronger than you know,” shaking her head, “I don’t know what you are.”
We stare at each other for a moment as she fades into the wall.
I stand, walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower, stepping underneath it to wash away the blood that I can both feel, but know isn’t really there. Edith lays her head down on a pillow, ears perked as she closes her eyes.

Luciana, 29