Bedlam

He lay on the hospital bed — eyes closed, arms at ease. She, who had been pacing around the barebone room for a record-breaking number of hours, had still not figured out why they were here. To her, he seemed perfectly alright. She kept wishing a doctor would barge into the room and reassure her that this was all the result of something ridiculous: a deficiency, an allergy. But more than that, she wished he would wake up and look at her. So many times she gripped his hand, and each time, tears pooled in her eyes when he would not reciprocate.

After what seemed like the millionth squeeze-and-weep, she stood to go to the bathroom. Since finding herself in this situation, she had been incapable of leaving his side. As she peed, her thighs barely touched the edge of the seat.

It couldn't have been longer than a minute that she was in there. The room looked no different. He was still lying there in the exact same position, except for one tiny detail: his eyes were wide open.

She screamed out his name in pure joy. As she took a step closer, her mind realized two things at the same time: that he was staring at the ceiling with a placid look in his eyes that no living being can or should possess, and that he was holding a scalpel instead of her hand. Before she could process the ludicrousness of the scene, an involuntary gasp escaped her lungs.

Somehow, that caught his attention. He turned his head towards her. Glowering straight into her eyes, it seemed as though he was warning her to stay where she was, to resist making the leap she desperately felt compelled to make, and within three seconds, she understood why. He lifted his shirt, placed the instrument squarely at the center of his abdomen, and cut himself open to his chest.

Until this moment, the room's silence had been sending wave after wave of chills down her spine. Bursting at the seams now with rather appropriate sounds of horror and disbelief, the room still remained shockingly devoid of doctors and nurses shouting for crash carts. This had to be a nightmare, and she had to wake up because she hated it. He continued slicing his torso open with a surgeon's precision. That's when she realized it: she was going to have to be the one to sew him back together.

Unable to make him listen, she ran out the door. The sight of their friends waiting outside brought her to tears, and she began to sob uncontrollably.

All their efforts at calming her down proved ineffectual. Try as they might, no one could make sense of her blubbering. Finally, she sat down, took a few deep breaths, and waited before starting all over again. In the middle of stringing together the absurd sequence of events, her voice still panicked and hysterical, she glanced over the shoulder of one of her friends and saw him walking past — in the direction of their room.

But...how? Hadn't she just left him in bed, psychotic and bleeding to death? This time, he wasn't looking at her. In fact, it didn't seem like he was looking at anything.

Her eyes lowered to his stomach, and once again, she gasped. His clothes appeared spotless, cleaner than she had been for a year now. Absolutely no sign of wreckage. Trailing off in the middle of her sentence, she immediately sprang towards the room.

It was empty. No bed, no bathroom — nothing. No sign of him ever being there. It was precisely then that she fell over the edge. There was crying and shrieking, so much of it, as though someone had tried to cut open their own stomach and been electrocuted as a consequence.

It stopped as abruptly as it began. The spine-tingling silence had returned. He was holding her tight, stroking her disheveled hair, promising over and over that he was right here. Right here. Right here!

She opened her eyes and stared, his eyes mirroring her emotions. Several people held her down and attempted to seize the scalpel out of her death grip. She looked around her, and remembering, she finally let it go. The last thing she saw before losing time again was his face, struck down like a tree by lightning.

She was not leaving this bedlam anytime soon, it said.

This story was first published in Sleep Aquarium.

You Are My Christmas

Sprawled across the couch, I watch you saunter across the cheerful mess in our living room, the snowballed fur at the edge of the Christmas hat I forced you to buy wiggling with every unnaturally long stride you take. You look rather endearing tonight, even though your favourite striped-tee-paired-with-boxer-shorts-that-barely-cover-your-pronounced-buttocks attire renders you highly under-dressed for the occasion.

You walk, wearing the Christmas hat, toward the Christmas tree, with your Christmas spirit illuminating the atmosphere more dazzlingly than the Christmas lights, and you twiddle with the Christmas ornaments – the baubles must be aligned and coordinated according to their colors in just the right sequence for it to feel like Christmas, after all, mustn’t they? You asked me if the tree needed any more attention, and I shook my head. How silly you are, I said to you. How silly you are, I thought to myself, to wish you were a tree.

My parents never narrated to me stories about Santa Claus and his elves, and how they took care of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen, before bedtime. They never told me about the significance of mistletoe, of silver stars, of beautifully-wrapped presents festooned with perfectly-shaped bows, or of little flakes of snow gathering on the sill of the window. Candy canes held no festive meaning, other than the fact that being presented with a swirly red-and-white stick in the shape of Grandma’s constant companion as a child because I finished my homework in advance was a reason to celebrate in itself. As I grew up and began to realize the importance of this commemoration, I would silently curse my parents for not having constituted a graphic imagery of this day into the mind of a little girl who wanted to grow up to weave descriptions of important things as graphically as possible.

Tonight, as you find me gazing at you, spread-eagled upon this lumpy couch, and I find you tinkering in the liquor cabinet, seeking an impeccable variety of alcohol that would bring this occasion another step closer to the perfection that you are yearning to accomplish, I send an equally silent word of gratitude upward, to my parents, for not telling me what Christmas has been like for the last hundred years, or what it should be like for the next hundred. For the reason that, if I were to write a book about the day of the birth of Jesus Christ, and if I were to have millions of children all over the world seated in a soundless library, reading the words that I have composed and the sentences that I have strung together, describing an ideal Christmas night, I would play this instance, and the few that are about to follow – which may or may not make an appropriate bedtime story for children – in the eye of my brain over and over and over again, without pausing for breath, until I am convinced that my fingers have done the exquisiteness of these moments complete justice.

You walk back toward the couch with two glasses filled halfway with my beloved white wine clasped in your hands, and you gesticulate for me to scoot over. The glasses pursue their place upon the glass table, and your body pursues its place into my arms. I wish this sofa was less cumbersome, though, for the rest of the night is a prospectively rickety one, and it wouldn’t bode well for either of us to flip-flop onto the floor in the middle of a chapter, or two, that shall render this book unquestionably inappropriate for the children of the world.

As you present me with an especially enticing candy stick, one that no child would want to be given as a reward for the completion of their homework, and the Christmas lights decorating the Christmas tree dance upon your face, and as you run your fingers gently through my fragile spine, I gasp. I gasp because I grasp that I have found my personal description of an idyllic Christmas night. A description replete with mistletoe and silver stars, with candy canes and fairy lights, with cheeks that glow and bodies that flow with a shared warmth; a description that trumps twenty-three preceding Christmas nights’.

And the nights of hundreds of years past.

This story was first published in Thought Catalog.