Unfinished Business

Music bared over the speakers that dawned the corners of the club's walls. Why they were playing this song, she didn't know, but the melody—lyrics and voice—uprooted something she had long since buried.

She had to leave the room. Get away from the noise. But she didn't have time.

Time. It seemed to slow as her thoughts clouded her eyes.

She needed something. Her entire body craved something. But it was something she refused from everyone. Something she refused to allow herself.

But every inch of her skin ached for the comfort she had denied herself for two decades. Hell, even the atoms and the space between them that made up her body craved that bittersweet feeling of another person.

But her mind crumbled in on itself. It collapsed upon the very idea it craved. It tried to bury the thoughts that sprung between the crushing fingers of her desire to repress. It didn't work.

She thought about her worth. About her scarless skin. About her lack of therapy within her teen years. About the pain, her friends would tell her, how their voices broke because they were in real pain.

A pain she would never feel. She will always be worthless. She will never be enough for her weird-ass standards that dictated one could only be a person should they feel the anguish of the highest variety.

She tried to push it down again. Hands of a scraggly outline ripped from the back of her mind. They crawled behind her eyes, gripping the clouds of thoughts that budded from simple song lyrics.

She welcomed their familiar ache. The feeling of closing off and shutting down. She embraced the scratchy texture of "I'm fine" and "Don't worry about me" as they scoured the matter of her mind.

The thoughts fought and screamed with the voices of weeping children, whispered tears, and silent nights. The hands grasped their throats, silencing them down to a hush and whine.

But lyrics seeped into her ears and up to the wrists of repression. The hands writhed and twitched, allowing the whines to travel and grow to screams once again.

She couldn't think. Not of anything other than that which should never be thought. She broke her own rule. The rule she had made on that one lowly night she had cracked.

That one night she had cried into her lover's shoulder. Let the need for affection free from its golden chains, let it consume her entire body—her every atom.

As soon as her lover left the world of consciousness that night, she had vowed a chain be locked around the throat of those words. A vow-a rule-that chained those writhing thoughts and screaming tongues to the abyss near the back of her mind.

A scream ripped through her atoms. She shook and trembled, but others would only see a lonely girl sipping her drink.

The hands were back, but they had missed the throats of those who yelled. They trembled from their wounds as they tried to keep her safe—in their own twisted way.

Keep them out! Shut them up! Kill them. Bury them. The mantra repeated itself over and over until she was gripping her hair in the balls of her fists—onlookers wouldn't see anything novel about the girl in the corner.

Another scream shook her core. It was silenced by two hands grasping its throat and mouth. The ten fingers clenched and dragged. Its whines stopped making their way to her ears, to the spots behind her eyes. But the other remained loose.

Her skin tingled as the stray thought found her eyes and wormed its way wrapped around the two orbs.

It was her atoms that screamed this time. But not for affection or for the sweet kiss of her lover. It called only for sharpness; a piercing, a pressure, or even a hot feeling that would drive itself to her skin.

The hands faltered. If they touched her eyes, the thoughts that dare not be conceived would flood the mind and there would be no chance of success. So they hid. Even she couldn't feel their bitter comfort anymore.

The thought faltered, uncoiled slightly at the feeling of her body losing hope of getting back to the party unscathed.

It bounced, moving from bone to brain matter, to the eye to bone again. But just as it screamed its head off in joy—a worrisome sound that thickened her blood and shivered her atoms—two black and quivering fingers snapped its throat between their forms.

Whimpers of lost puppies and heartbroken children bounded against the cage of her skull, solidifying itself back into the other hand that moved to grab them.

The hands took their time. Slowly dragging their victims from the front of her mind to the deepest depths.

Her brain matter shivered under the twitching forms of repression as they dragged and dragged. It was their idea of a "sweet reward". Their idea of fun times involved extra writhing and twisting guts.

As soon as the hand dissolved into the abyss, keeping the thoughts deep in their grasp, the skin that layered her muscles and the atoms that made them both up silently whined.

The whine faded into the bone of her cage. It kept the sound rooted near her brain so that she would always have a warning of the thoughts that shouldn't be conceived.

The hands and her herself knew she didn't need a reminder but did that stop her obsession to keep her other mental rule in check. Just the mention of that rule sent a quake down her spine; she cut the idea of thinking of it out of her mind.

Her shoulders twitched and relaxed into their sockets. Her spine stretched and her jaw popped. Her fingers twitched, she almost dropped her cup.

She double-checked her mind before she wanted to retreat. Fingers and slithering thoughts tapped at the edge of the abyss; both concepts were fully accounted for. Writhing forms pressed at her brain matter; more of the wretched things were also accounted for. A knock at her skull caused a ring of that whine once again, and the warning was in place.

Everything was there and only one rule was broken tonight.

Her mind snapped back to the loud party; to the red solo cup in her hand; to the song that was barely past 10 seconds into its haunting melody.