Tripping Over Silk

Trigger Warning:

Mental health

Physical violence, gore, or abuse

Mental self harm

AFloat, she bobbed about the Waves, curving their crests around darkness from which spewed words of mock. At least that’s how Float felt when those rosy lips of the popular girls jettisoned out their thorns. Float lived most of the day on a little island that others called her mind. She was safe, well, mostly safe there. Not always though. Those words came in from the shores every day, comments from others, from herself, her family. But she’d managed to build things with the words. She had a little sea wall around her island that kept her safe from the rising waters. The only issue was though, no matter how hard she tried she never could seem to wash the words from her splintered planks. Her hair was a muddy red tangle of rust and driftwood, but her eyes shone a bright blue, likely to reflect the waters away from her soul. The sea shimmered, a silk screen, spun by the ceaseless sub spinnerets, each crashhh of the wave emptying her thoughts away. 

Float, despite her name, was terminally afraid of the water. Whenever she looked at the water’s edge all she saw was a distorted version of herself, angles all twisted further than the face she already loathed, and beckoning her into the abyss, popping the balloons in her chest and sending her down below.

And then there was the witch, who wasn’t a Witch…probably. With parents distracted, Float scrambled down the most downtrodden shack she could scout, Alina’s Quill No.6. From outside it looked like it had been made for kids, but looks can be deceiving and she found the entrance sent her down a moist earthy entrance buried underground. Dirt crumbled under her feet and out her hand grasped for a handhold and her hand met with a mouse.

This one seemed dead, cold and hard. She wiped her groggy eyes, as if that would wipe the lost hours of sleep away. She never could sleep. Her brain just never…stopped. She had to exhaust her energy for a wink, and so would end up dreaming away in places like IT Class. This was one of those times.

Float heard the average person consumed 8 spiders a year in her sleep. She was confused why it seemed she had so many if she slept so poorly. She could visualise them, spinning the threads that made up her memories, thoughts and dreams, all in a silk thread tapestry. Except her spiders were drunk. Or just…broken. Maybe she’d bit down on their legs as they went inside her as a baby, and now whenever they walked from thread to thread, they’d trip over themselves, rolling over a dozen different strings, causing a cacophony of humming in her head.

She'd tripped once. Well, more, but she couldn't remember those. She remembered one though. She'd been new to her high school, facing their dark cold pool for the first time, staring into her sullen distorted ugly reflection to ready herself when an unfamiliar familiar seemed to almost form itself outside of the ripples. Her heart jumped, but her body fell, and her little stunted wings did nothing to help her float until she hit the wet mirror. This moment woke her up from sleep once in a while as she tried to fall to sleep. The drop. More like a plop swallowing her hole. As she passed the false floor, she felt cold arms embrace her, millions of individual hairy pin-pricked hands. She thrashed, her body convulsing and when she gasped for air in came waves that flooded her, threatening to sweep out her spiders when the tide reversed. 

That was until she realised the instructor had his arms around her, straightening her, and she realised she was floating. But this was even worse. The silence of the waters was a welcome embrace from the laughter that had been hidden from her. Outside, the most popular girls in school were all there, guffawing with mocking mirth. From that point, the nickname had pretty much stuck. Float. And those girls, she’d returned the jab by calling them The Waves. Well, not really…not outloud. She never understood why her brain was always so busy, but then when someone made fun of an outburst, or mocked her for trying to join a conversation, the spiders all decided to flee into caves, only returning 6 hours later to come up with their venomous retort. She’d once tried one of these out later, but it turns out the Waves lacked her memory of what had transpired, and they’d just laughed as her words stumbled out and into the floor of the circus tent. Her hand had met a hand rail of carved wood, and the smokey tent threatened to stain her nostrils. This dream itself, foggy, all jumbled and out of sync.

There the witch lay, a bag of sagging bones and flesh, all crooked and bent that it was almost like she was training to become a yo-yo. Float thought she should tie herself with a string because otherwise Alina might just fly off into the sky with how her skin folded in on itself like a parachute all tied up.

  Float went to say something but all that came out was a whimper that the witch ignored, those old eyes intently focused on her palm, how had she gotten to her hand already hadn't she just been laid…

  “A girl awash with strings, tripping over between the gaps. Poor child, alone from you, why fall so long, don’t you know, all of you float on silk. You peek and hide behind your eye in those folds of the soul”, the woman croaked out behind a crooked smile “can you see my spiders too”, the witch’s eye somehow now spanning across Float’s horizon, and in terror she tried to spin away, but tripped and fell into her…

…seat. It was maths class at school. Everyone was staring at her and she realised she must have made quite some noise as she woke up.And now they were all staring at her, and she didn’t even know what she’d done. The shame rose up in her, bubbling and boiling, toxic waters threatening to swallow up her island. She was certain where the spiders lived, though she had never gone into the door…not until that night.

It was the only way she could explain why her head was so…her head. She didn’t quite know how to describe it past that. It was always…too much. Her head was so loud, so it must have been the spiders tripping over each other inside her, each wanting their turn to get a say. That’s why she blurted out words without thinking, or made all these strange little connections in her head that no one  else understood, why she forgot so many things (must have been snipped threads), and why she always lost her train of…

The witch who hadn’t been a witch had said something else too. The mind is a powerful thing. In itself an infinite amount of worlds can exist, life can be born, and die, and…" the next warning had been a whisper between gritted teeth and almost stitched lips, “That which you hate refuses to abate, fed by nastiness like bread. A horrid flow, and that which you dread, will split that pretty young head, and flow out like an army, raised from the dead.”

That was silly, Float had thought. Well no, she wished she thought it was silly. But whenever that string in her mind was plucked, she imagined the spiders, taking revenge for the legs she’d bitten short as she dreamt. It’s a shame she wasn’t just normal. Why couldn’t she just be normal.

She really should have listened to the witch who probably wasn’t a witch. For in her mind grew an egg, feeding on her negative thoughts, growing like a tumorous cancer, quivering and shaking with each bit of shame she swallowed. Every curse she self inflicted was sweet nectar, and soon, it was ready to consume its final meal.

It had been another night of salty raindrops and wet flesh pounding into caged feathers, but after the two spinning hands met 3 times while birdsong chirruped from her bright rectangle that her wakeself called twitter, she had eventually drifted away into the misty lagoon of sleep. 

However, like many journeys, the driftwood Floated back to where it came from, and there she was staring at her corpse like visage. Everything looked so strange from this perspective but she could not quite tell why, although somehow she thought she knew. From her mouth flowed a waterfall, almost frozen in time, the strand dripping slowly down ever more perilously threatening to break apart. 

Her skin…she did not like the look of her skin. Each freckle was a dark pool threatening to drown her, and across her forehead and body scattered like seeds were red and glistening volcanos, threatening to burst through a thin veil and scatter its detritus across her living corpse.

She noticed, not quickly, but a dawning realisation that like a train whose tracks have already been set in stone that she was…

    Shudder

She did not want to speak it to give it power, but as her body’s yawning mouth drew ever larger across her horizon, she realised she was falling. But so slowly it felt like it would be eternity before she fell into her own abyss. She felt hairs on her arms but as she looked about on herself she could only see a series of crooked dead rose twigs, their petals all withered away in her desolation. As she went to raise her arms to push away these branches in her way, they moved aside. All of them…all 8 at once she could see in all corners of her vision, though some were simply a deep dark blackness that almost disappeared into the shadows. They were her legs. And as she felt the horror of all those hairs on her arms, she felt…no that wasn’t the right word…echoed the feeling of a million tiny eggs hidden in each pore of her skin, deep beneath the surface, all bursting at once. Her bodies were a mirror, flesh and cuticle, spasming in revulsion at the countless parasites that were now being birthed by her corpse-like, and both forms screamed as one to drive them out, but as she screamed the perilous thread that had slowed her fall snapped from the storm that the wet and windy void had opened, and down she fell into her mouth and she was her mouth and she was her body now.

Her eyes felt stuck yet she like it was daylight she could see what she could never unsee, staring as outside of every pore of her skin. 

But she was not alone…nor had she truly ever been. But tonight, she felt it, no longer in her mind, the spiders rushed out…every orifice now awash with spiders and all she could do was watch, frozen in fear, their webs spun around shackling her down to her plank bed. Her mattress was now a Silk hammock suspending her, arms pulled behind her by marionette strings, every inch of her flesh now a black many legged storm pounding over her, the millions of footsteps like hail biting into her soft mushy flesh threatening to break through the skin and have her life drained…down…down…down…no.

No she wasn’t falling, but her legs were being pulled up, strung up to the ceiling like they’d always meant to be up there if only she had realised legs don’t belong on the ground. And as her face finally broke free of the planks, she realised she was floating again, suspended by silk rather than sea. Instinctively she reached out, gripping the silk that enshrouded her wrists, tightly.

Her eyes tried to close but as she started the spiders rushed towards the lids and pulled them back with thorned hands and strings, forcing her to see as her body was pulled back on itself.

First her heels, the silk had been made into a harp that sliced and sliced away and the music sounded like screams, but her mouth had been covered and she could not scream, yet on the music played regardless. Then pulling her half fallen feet forward alongside her legs she saw them strain, and feel the pain, until the Snap, Crack, Pop of her fleshy matchsticks, blood held by woven bandages but her accusatorial feet step-staired up, asking why she had refused to protect them. Her arms were wrapped around them and soon the silk began to stitch across her eyes. Before the darkness came however, two words had appeared.

You Fell.

In the darkness that followed, those two words repeated anon, and what will, happened to be clutching strings in palms tight. She refused the fall, awaiting a rescueher, and she could…

…that had been days ago, or minutes, or years. Time was funny here. It felt always and never. The only constant was the darkness. Occasionally she would hear little murmurs, as if on the outside of her cocoon an argument lay between two lovers, about whether or not she should be thrown away. She imagined her cocoon was probably quite a nuisance, all that wasted space. And she was broken now. Her legs were a mangled mess, over time the straining off the strings had laid them to her sides, but she could still feel whatever they were now.

Noone would love her like this. Not like they had. Parents have to try to love their kids, Float thought. But it seemed that no one else…

…years elapsed in the dark…her mind strings frayed and swayed, her spine each day more misplaced, legs searing into other flesh, one returning to one. And her mind…her mind was somewhere. Searching, what for she was not sure. She knew she'd find it when she saw it, but the word escaped her. She would always try to catch it, arms flapping out before she remembered they were all that prevented her fall, and her hands would clutch at her strings and it would fly away.

Today though. Today it caught her view on its own. She noticed it, and it didn't fly away. It was so curious, so…beautiful? She had forgotten that word, but it seemed it had not forgotten her. It tiptoed across the nothingness like a ballerina, and thought it seemed so close, she made no attempt to grab it. It had mesmerised her, yet felt so familiar. Eventually it landed between her eyes. The warmth of it flooded her, and she knew what it was.

Colour.

In her joy she went to embrace it, the hug feeling so warm and passionate and missed that it overcame her and tears fell down her face, and when she opened her soggy eyes she found they had pooled into a multicolour paint, with an easel to her side. She began to create. What she did not know but she knew that she had something she wanted to tell, and that all she wished was that someone would see her story and have this joy she now felt. In it were the accusatory eyes of her life, but here they seemed like friends she now wished she had known more. And colour, so much colour. And as she finished her art, she finally realised that she had not been holding the strings, falling yet not falling…she floated. But in her heart, she knew what had limited her before, and that it had just been her belief that she could not. And so, like her heart used to flutter with apprehension, her wings spread out and the cocoon burst forward to say goodbye to its friend for the first and final time. She took off into the sky, and knew she was free.

Impossible. That word gets thrown around a lot. That's impossible, that's unrealistic. Only Impossible Girls can fly. A butterfly once landed by my ear and whispered to me this story, and luckily, no one had told me that's impossible. Now the girl flutters from flower to flower impossibly, and does it excellently too I must say. And occasionally, a little boy or girl, who let their mind wander across the skies catches a glimpse of the Impossible, and eye to eye they meet, a wing to a face, and in each mind wonder and joy. The child imagines what it must be like to be a butterfly, for noone has told them it is impossible to be a butterfly and rightfully so, and in return, wings aflutter so fast it's as if she simply Floats into the sky, the ever wandering child fills with joy that her colours and art inspired a wandering child to wander across the infinities of colour. They say that light eats up seven colours, but when it spits it's rainbows did you ever stop to count all the colours in between. There lies an infinity in the in betweens, and it's there always in your mind, even when all seems hopeless, and the dark threatens to crush you on all sides, remember the impossible girl, and wonder why anyone ever told you your dreams could not be done.