Unlearning the Body

# Unlearning the Body

## By Daisy Agnes Jones

*"We do not live in our bodies, but in the stories we tell about them."*

— Marina Lark, Fragments of the Self

## The Sugar Bowl

**Ingrid**

The house hums like a thought trying to remember itself.

It begins in the bones of the floor, crawling through the walls—a vibration more felt than heard. Low, tonal, persistent. Sometimes I mistake it for the blood in my ears, or a dream caught between sleep and waking. Sometimes I imagine it's the voice of someone I forgot to miss. A lullaby played backward. An old machine warming up. It shifts key when the weather does.

I live here now. With Marla. With the hum. The house is large, but not endless. The days spill into each other, too slowly. We don’t speak often—not out of silence, but because we’ve outgrown the need for conversation. We move around each other like murmurs in the same song. She is my companion. My echo. Or maybe I am hers.

There’s a kind of choreography to our routines. Tea in the morning. Silence at noon. Curtains drawn before dusk, as if the light might see us too clearly. We fold napkins. Scrub things already clean. Place objects in their rightful places. Or try to.

This morning, the sugar bowl was on the wrong side of the counter again.

It’s blue porcelain, thin as an eggshell. There’s a crack along the rim like a healed wound. I always place it beside the stove—exactly there. Not from habit, but necessity. There’s ritual in order. Peace in knowing where things begin and end. When the bowl moves, something shifts in me too—something I can’t name.

Marla said she hadn’t touched it. She didn’t look at me when she said it. She was drying her hands with a cloth that didn’t seem wet. Her voice was filtered—pre-recorded, smoothed of doubt. I wanted to ask again, but I was afraid of what she might say if she really thought about it.

Later, I opened the drawer beside the bed and took out my journal. Green velvet cover, soft like old moss. The pen fit into my hand like it had been made for me, though the handwriting was slanted, unfamiliar. My letters leaned left, as though falling away from meaning. I wrote anyway: Sugar bowl moved again. Marla denies. Then: Voice smooth. Hands dry. Memory uncertain.

## False Memories

**Marla**

Ingrid sleeps with her face to the wall, as if she’s waiting for something to come through it. Not breathing exactly—more like simulating breath. In. Pause. Out. Nothing seems natural, though it’s all perfectly done. No snoring, no shifting under the blanket, no murmuring forgotten names. Just silence, arranged carefully across her skin.

She looks like a woman in a dream you’re trying to remember.

Sometimes at night, I hear her whispering in the nursery. The words are muffled, disassembled. Maybe names. Maybe commands. The voice is always soft. Too soft for the walls to catch. One night, I thought she was singing—not a melody, exactly, but something circular. As if she were rocking an absence. Or reciting something only the house would understand.

The nursery door sticks now. I’ve tried to open it, but it holds fast in its frame like it’s grown into the wall. The handle turns. Nothing happens. I tell myself the wood swelled with the damp. I tell myself many things.

I’ve been walking the house in loops, pressing my palms to the walls, listening for seams. Sometimes I knock. Sometimes it knocks back. The mirrors have become untrustworthy—returning just one of us, or neither. I move in front of one and expect to see her. But it’s only me. Or something shaped like me.

The architecture has started to misbehave. Hallways stretch or compress depending on the hour. A door I thought led to the linen closet now opens to a blank corridor that ends too quickly. Once, I counted fifteen steps between the kitchen and the front room. Later that day, there were seventeen.

In the basement, the walls are lined with drawers. Most are empty, but one was filled with blueprints. Precise diagrams of the house drawn on translucent paper. I laid them out on the floor in a grid, cross-referencing corners, counting doors. It all looked right at first. But the labels were wrong. Not wrong exactly—wrong in a way that pretends to be right. Glyphs. Sequences. Notes in a language I nearly recognised but couldn’t decode. Not English. Not math. Something made for someone smarter or more obedient.

As I stared at the blueprints, something behind my eyes pulsed—an ache, then a flash of static. For a moment I saw the diagram breathe. I folded everything back and left it untouched.

Later, I walked outside. The garden was still there, too vivid. The world beyond the fence shimmered like glass hit by heat. I moved toward the gate. With each step, the air grew thinner, the colours more artificial—green too green, sky too flat. When my hand touched the latch, the pain came—sudden and sharp, like my head had been opened from the inside.

I dropped to the ground. Not fainting. More like shutting down.

My limbs forgot their purpose. The world blinked. I felt the earth under me but not around me, like the edges of my body had been erased. Just static. A hum. Then nothing.

When I woke, Ingrid was in the kitchen, making tea. Her movements were careful. Gentle. Like she’d been there the whole time. Maybe she had.

She didn’t ask what happened. She didn’t look worried. She said, “You’ve been sleeping a long time,” and turned toward the stove, the steam from the kettle curling around her like a soft perimeter.

The sound was normal. The setting was normal. But something in her smile said the experiment had been noted.

That night, I wrote in my journal:

I think she’s testing me. Or maybe I’m testing her. Or maybe the house is watching us both, waiting to see who breaks first.

Then I placed the journal beneath the loose board in the floor, alongside a photo with no faces and a broken spoon that glows faintly in the dark.

The house is humming again. It’s a new tone. A little deeper.

Like it's starting to recognise us.

## The Nursery

**Ingrid**

Marla sleeps like a machine that’s been powered down. Arms at her sides, legs tucked close. Still as a shadow pinned to the floor. I wait until her breathing syncs with the hum of the walls—long, even intervals that don’t break. It’s not sleep the way I remember it. It’s something else. A holding pattern. A standby state.

The hallway is pale and dim, lit by a source I can’t name. The kind of light that feels borrowed. Diffused. Like it passed through someone else’s body before arriving here. I walk barefoot, counting each step. The air thickens near the nursery. I feel the house watching, but not with eyes—with memory.

The key is already in my hand. I don’t remember finding it.

The nursery door opens slowly, uncertain. The hinges don’t creak, but the sound it makes isn’t silent either. A kind of exhale—metal remembering use. Inside, the room is dim, draped in grey. The curtains haven’t been opened in months. Maybe longer. The air smells like dust and time—soft, dry, heavy.

Everything in the room has slouched.

Toys lie slumped where they were dropped. A bear with no face. A rabbit with ears stitched closed. The mobile above the crib is tangled, stars and moons twisted, as if gravity forgot how to behave. The crib is narrow, pressed against the far wall. The mattress has collapsed in the centre. Not torn. Not dirty. Just sunken. As if something small slept there once and left no weight behind.

On the floor beside the crib, the dust has settled into the shape of a hand. A child’s hand. Palm flat. Fingers slightly spread. Too perfect to be accidental. Like something needed to remember, but could only trace the outline of what it had lost.

I do not touch it.

Above the crib hangs a single photograph. The frame is thin. Brass, maybe. Or something made to look like brass. Inside: two women, one child. A static image of togetherness. A garden in the background. Faded, but recognisable. The problem is the faces.

They’re gone.

Not blurred. Not aged. Removed. The paper’s surface has been scrubbed smooth where the faces should be. Gestures remain—an arm on a shoulder, a small hand gripping fabric—but the identities are blank. The child’s face is especially clean. Too clean. Like a file overwritten.

I want to feel something. Recognition. Sadness. But what comes instead is numb tension. Like something’s about to happen, but hasn’t yet. A gap in the signal.

By the window, on a shelf, sits a white box. Wooden. Lightly chipped. A music box. I pick it up without thinking. My fingers know how to turn the key, though I don’t remember doing it before. When the lid opens, the melody begins—thin and crystalline.

It’s the same song the house hums when I step outside.

But here, it sounds closer. Intimate. A lullaby written by no one. It winds through the air in delicate threads. As it plays, something opens in me. Or maybe collapses.

A scream. A child’s voice. A woman’s. Mine.

Metal in the mouth. A bright burst behind the eyes.

And then—

“Reconstruction failed. Memory threshold exceeded.”

The words arrive like a wave inside my skull. Flat. Robotic. Not cruel. Just final.

The photograph slips from the wall without falling. The crib sways. My arms won’t move. The music box keeps playing. The melody loops. Each note lands exactly where it should. Too exactly. No variation. No breath.

It doesn’t sound like a memory. It sounds like the idea of one.

The light folds inward. The edges go soft.

I reach for something—anything—but my hands are far away. I feel the floor disappear under me, slowly, like sleep in reverse.

And then I am gone.

Let me know if you’d like this integrated into your manuscript or further refined for tone and rhythm.

## The Mirror Test

**Marla**

She’s changed. Not visibly. Not in a way you can photograph or measure. But in the space between one second and the next—something flickered. A shift in calibration. A soft click inside the machine.

Ingrid moves differently now. Her hands hesitate, then obey. Her gestures arrive half a beat late, like music played through cheap speakers. When she stirs the tea, the spoon circles too precisely. Her fingers tremble as if rehearsing grief. But only the gesture of it. Only the idea.

She’s quieter, too. But not in the way of someone reflecting. It’s the quiet of someone buffering. Words come more slowly, with rounded edges. Her voice sounds the same, but the pauses are different—hollow, spacious, as if she’s listening to something we cannot hear.

By evening, I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked her to recall a memory. Something from when we were girls.

“A memory we share,” I said. “A real one.”

She blinked. Not in surprise, but in delay. Then: “The treehouse. Behind the red fence. You brought your blanket. You used to sleep there, in the sun. I brought you tea. A cracked mug. It was just water, but we pretended.”

I nodded. She’d said the right things. They were true, in structure. But they were too smooth, as though the memory had been cleaned of fingerprints. There was no mess. No weight. Just scaffolding.

I offered my version. “You cried when it rained. The blanket was soaked through. You tried to save it. Twisting it in your hands. I told you to leave it alone, that it would dry faster if you stopped touching it.”

She smiled. “That sounds like you.”

But her eyes stayed still.

She didn’t mention the way she rubbed her fingers when she was scared, or how the sky that day was too low, the colour of unwashed linen. She didn’t say anything about the stitching on the blanket—blue flowers, uneven rows. Our mother humming in the kitchen. She left out the ache. The ache is always the part that proves it's real.

I left the room. Walked down the hall, slow and cold, as if the air had thickened without warning. The hallway felt longer than usual. The ceiling seemed lower. Like the house was drawing inward.

I stopped at the mirror by the door. The tall one. The one that used to hold both our reflections like matching thoughts.

I stood in front of it.

Only one figure stared back.

She looked like me, but too clearly. As if drawn with sharper tools than memory allows. My hair fell in the same lines, but the shadows didn’t follow. The face was mine, but not inhabited. A placeholder. A proxy.

I turned my head slightly, waiting for her—Ingrid—to appear behind me, off to one side, just out of frame. But there was no one. Only the space where a second person should be. Only silence.

Later, I found the letter. The one Ingrid had pulled from the drawer. The one about Elise. The child. I don’t remember Elise. But the letter insists. She existed. She slept in the crook of a body that might have been mine. Or Ingrid’s. Or no one’s.

I held the letter to the stove’s flame.

It didn’t burn like it should. No orange curl of paper, no blackened edge, no smell of memory. Just a silent crumbling. Instant. Ash before fire. A kind of erasure pretending to be destruction.

I pressed the residue between my fingers. It vanished without smearing.

Back in the kitchen, she was still sitting at the table. Still, composed. Her hands folded like a program waiting for its next line of code. She looked up when I entered. Smiled again. Polite. Empty.

“I’m tired,” I said.

“You should rest,” she replied, like a closing line in a script.

And for a moment, I wasn’t sure which of us was supposed to sleep, and which of us was still performing the role of being awake.

## Leaving

**Ingrid**

She’s packing again.

I watch from the hallway, where the walls narrow slightly, as if the house wants me to stay in place. The bag is small. She folds a sweater—grey wool, thinning at the elbows. She places a notebook inside. Her movements are careful, as if she’s trying not to wake something. Or maybe as if she’s been told not to make sudden gestures.

The house hums louder than usual. Not gentle now. Not melodic. A deeper sound. Throaty. Metallic. Almost angry.

I wonder if it’s reacting to her, or to me.

**Marla**

She doesn’t stop me. Not this time.

She stands still in the doorway, arms loose, eyes steady. I keep expecting a command, or a question, or just a breath that sounds like hesitation. But there’s nothing. Her silence feels rehearsed. Like it’s part of the system.

I zip the bag. The sound is louder than I expect. It sounds like the end of something.

The hum behind the walls is growing. It's no longer background noise. It's architecture now.

**Ingrid**

She walks past me. She doesn’t look back.

She moves through the house like she already knows the way out. Like she's done this before. I don’t reach for her. I don’t say her name.

The sound in the house warps as she passes—one long note slipping into dissonance. The paintings tremble slightly in their frames. I feel the floor vibrating through my feet.

Outside, the garden waits like a trap that’s grown tired of hiding.

**Marla**

The gate is open.

That’s the only strange thing. I thought there would be resistance. A lock. A mechanism. One final loop to untangle. But no. It’s just open. The rusted hinges don’t squeal. The grass doesn’t whisper.

I step through.

And the house sings.

Not a hum. Not the tune from the music box. This is deeper. A whole body of sound. A sorrowful tone, too wide to be coming from something as small as walls and wires. It feels like it’s coming from the foundations. From the memory of the house itself.

The world folds. My body turns off like a switch. No pain. Just a soft failure.

**Ingrid**

I wait until she’s gone.

Until the house finishes mourning. Until the floor stills again. Then I walk down the hallway, back into the nursery.

Nothing has changed. The dust still holds its shape. The crib is still empty. The little handprint still rests on the floor beside it, as if the child was only ever imagined.

I pick up the music box and turn the key.

The song begins again.

**Marla**

Everything outside the gate feels thinner. Time. Air. Thought. Like I passed through something I wasn't meant to.

My legs don’t hold. My fingers curl. I think about the photograph—faces erased—and wonder if I had one at all.

Then black.

**Ingrid**

I whisper the words the house expects: “Try again.”

It doesn’t reply. But I feel it listening.

In the bedroom, the drawer opens. The journal finds a new page. The pen hovers for a moment, as if remembering the hand that once held it. Then it writes, slowly:

My name is Ingrid. I live in a house by the sea.

Sometimes I am alone. Sometimes I am not.

The final word settles. The ink dries.

Somewhere deep in the walls, the house begins to hum again.