10 comments

Fiction

CW: suicidal thoughts



My mother dropped a thermometer once when I was little. I leaned over the mosaic of broken glass and mercury beads, and a hypnotised hand extended to pick up one of the perfect balls. The sight ripped a screech out of my mother, so shrill it sounded prehistoric, making the hand retreat immediately. She took me in her relieved arms. ‘You’re like a magpie, aren’t you? Can’t say no to shiny things.’

It’s twenty-five degrees outside. I know because I’m looking at a thermometer similar to the one she broke that time, hanging outside my living room window. It could be one way, to drink the shimmering liquid. I wonder what the aftermath would look like. Would my eyes bulge out, would my tongue swell like a prickly, angry blowfish? Or would it all happen inside, the shield of the skin faithfully guarding the bleeding organs until the very end?

I was still sat in her lap when mother told me razors were made of mercury as well, except crystallised. So I shouldn’t ever touch those, either. Same went for knives and mirrors. The last one must have been to repel me from leaving finger marks on her pristine surfaces. She killed a lot of birds with one stone that day, and her inhuman shriek echoed in my head for weeks.

This place is full of razors, knives, and mirrors. It’s twenty-five degrees outside. A gentle evening to go into, and then, a good night. Fingertips are tickling, ready to steer the machine to the scrapyard, but the engine fights back, too flooded to start up. ‘Come on,’ I mutter, trying to stand up, and the phone screen lights up. My mother’s calling. The same hand that once almost dived into mercury shoots to pick it up.

‘Yeah?’ I ask.

‘Darling, I have a question,’ she says without a hello, as quick as the silver she’d warned me against so brutally. ‘I can’t remember what you put in that cleaning liquid you make yourself.’

‘White vinegar and baking soda. Just a sprinkle,’ I reply. I can feel a tug where all my ribs meet, and the mind idly pictures her face, a little wrinkled now. Her neck is sagging, and her hair gets thinner every year. ‘Mum, I can’t talk now. I have to go.’

It’s Friday evening, so she won’t question. ‘Come again?’ she asks simply.

The message is rewound and played again out of my mouth. ‘I need to go now,’ I say. The voice box, like an old radio, doesn’t properly catch any stations anymore, and the sounds that break through are always lined with white noise. But it won’t matter tonight.

‘Yes, yes,’ she replies. ‘Have fun, sweetheart. Such a lovely night.’

She clicks off. The phone is just an intricate piece of plastic again.

After the incident with the thermometer, I asked her whether forks and spoons were made of the same lethal substance. ‘No, of course not,’ she laughed, but she couldn’t deny the impeccable logic. I ate carefully all the same, sticking out my tongue and sliding food inside, quickly withdrawing the cutlery. She laughed at my expense and ruffled my hair.

The mind’s distracted, remembering some of its childhood favourites. Beans on toast, a little disgusting, nothing special, but she heated them to a perfect temperature. Or chicken roast sandwich smeared with gravy, sloppy, a little disgusting, but she cut the bread into perfect triangles. I’m finally standing, so the trick must have worked.

I have pills, I realise. I don’t need silver instruments coaxing the crimson out of me. The narrow hall, the bathroom, lights on. All parts of a ritual so routine it is never remembered. The medicine cabinet. I have momentum, kinetic energy built up from walking. The lips move and I listen. ‘You have reached your final destination.’ That’s funny, I think, well done, you strange creature hidden inside of me, shielded by skin. We’re at the scrapyard now.

A hand lies flat against the cabinet door, trembling a little too much, and eyes travel to shoot it a disapproving look. There’s a ring on the index finger with a single onyx. A graduation present from my father. ‘Remember how you used to be scared of anything metallic?’ he asked after I’d opened it. ‘Kids are so odd sometimes.’ He didn’t know about all of my mother’s curious parenting tricks.

I can’t do it with the ring on. It’s twenty-five degrees outside. My knuckles feel swollen as the hand with the permanent death wish forces the ring off. It jumps off my finger and falls into the bathtub with a drawn-out rattle before settling down. A mean little viper eating its tail, coiled up in a perfect circle, with a single, blind eye.

I lean over it. Come again? It stays silent.

The finger is pasty under where the ring has sat for years. How many years? Another distraction technique while hands go back to the cabinet, filling up with plastic bottles and small boxes. Seven years, no, eight now. Dad bought a suit especially for the occasion. I’m holding enough pills to kill off a small stable. The hall again, only a few steps, light suddenly flooding the room. This is what photographers call the golden hour, but mine isn’t that, it’s still silver.

I sit down at the table and stare into the sun. It sets right before me, I never knew how smoothly it glides down the sky, like a drop of olive oil down the bottle. Who stops to look at the sunset? A silly question to outsmart the mind while the hands pop open plastic bottles and shake strips of tablets out of boxes. Maybe farmers after long days. Old people on their porches with iced teas in their arthritic hands. My parents will look the same one day.

The buzzer goes off. I could ignore it, but it’s too late, the mind is jerked out of the fog, dragging the body towards the sound. The innocent hand picks up the receiver. ‘Hello?’

‘I’ve got a package for your neighbour,’ a familiar voice. Pat the Postman. I can’t remember his name anymore, exchanged awkwardly once, but I know how many sisters he’s got, how his red vest is made of the least breathable material out there, how the smell of curry makes him gag and the hall here always smells of it. A collection of negatives, meaningless snippets from his life he offers whenever I have time to listen.

‘A little late for packages, no?’ My tongue moves back and forth like a tuning knob, trying to find a clear frequency. ‘For a Friday night.’

He sighs and the crackle makes me grimace. ‘I’m just about to knock off. Do you want to get a beer?’

‘Are you hitting on me through the intercom…’

‘Yes.’

‘…again?’

A faint rustle of the red armour betrays him. He’s shrugging. ‘I guess so.’

‘Fine.’

‘Come again?’

Now the other hand’s heard the exchange, it reaches for the button. I hear the buzz of the mechanism releasing the front door. Legs, those legs I dislike, shorter and more stubby than I ever wanted them. Neck, never quite as firm as I wished for. These are the parts of me which look forward to him most, stepping out of the door and extending to see. He climbs the steps slowly, as if it’s all a cruel joke, stopping at the last step. His forehead glistens.

‘Can we go now?’ I ask him.

‘I’ve still got some letters to drop off,’ he replies, waving a bunch of envelopes held together by an elastic band.

‘I don’t mind. I could do with a walk.’

He shrugs and his head tilts, but a smile creeps in, so cautious it’s painful to look at. ‘Can you give me one minute? I’ll see you outside.’ Does it matter which one of us just said that?

Hall again, light on, the sterile bathroom. I grab the ring out of the bathtub, and it doesn’t bite when I slide it back on. Bag, phone, pullover just in case. Nights are moody in the city.

He’s waiting outside. He wasn’t prepared for this, so he hides behind the rhythmic noises his enormous cart makes as he pushes it along the pavement. I walk next to him. He’s embarrassed. He’s always embarrassed near me, of being the errand man, nothing more than a red-vested delivery driver, except without the van. ‘Heart not a servant,’ my mother always says. So I don’t care, and neither does he, or at least not enough.

The first stars are cold drops of mercury spilled across the darkening layer of blue, and I could still reach out and grab one, once and for all. But his free hand searches blindly until it finds mine. It’s twenty-five degrees out here. In the rickety half-silence, his slightly sweaty fingers alternate with mine and resuscitate so gently it takes a while to notice: the stars twinkle like gold, not silver.

April 13, 2021 11:39

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10 comments

K. Antonio
13:41 Apr 14, 2021

This story was eerie, the language, the memories all gave it this vibe. I kept thinking about how the story felt like it was tempting the narrator, you know like when we have those strange curiosities or death-ridden thoughts that spur out of the blue and we let them linger in our headspace for too long. That's what it felt like to me. It was so intriguing, the way even the narrator had this out of body experience, where it seemed like she was observing herself through a lens. Really interesting story and crazy take on the prompt (she sayi...

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Nina Chyll
13:54 Apr 14, 2021

You pretty much summed up my agenda and I'm really happy it resonated. Thanks a lot for giving it a read. Also glad the prompt doesn't seem obscured!

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H L McQuaid
08:52 Apr 14, 2021

The writing is beautiful, and you create an interesting distant narration (like someone still in the body, but looking at it like an objective observer). One thing about character development, was that I didn't get a sense of her motivations--why she wanted to kill herself and why a walk with the postman would be enough to deter her. In the big scheme of things, maybe that doesn't matter, as it's an interesting moment in a life. A few small things. You could remove the 'out' after coaxing here: "I don’t need silver instruments coaxing ou...

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Nina Chyll
10:16 Apr 14, 2021

Thanks for the comment. The decision to leave out potential motivations was a conscious one. I wanted to zoom in on those few minutes the story spans, so it reads like everything else has fallen away from the protagonist and those thoughts and actions are the only meaningful things left. I realise it may do nothing or little for lots of people, but because the story's quite personal, it was an emotional decision to do so. Mind, I'm not saying it was good. About the exchange: "Does it matter which one of us says it?" is meant to refer to th...

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H L McQuaid
12:19 Apr 14, 2021

Fair enough, we all write and share stories for different reasons. And not everything we share needs to conform to the ideal short story structure (most of mine don't, ha!). Glad some of my comments were useful. :)

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Graham Kinross
12:04 Dec 25, 2023

I get the sense that her accepting his advance was a ‘why the hell not, I’m going to kill myself anyway,’ impulse and that if things go well he might never know. The damage her mother has done to her clearly can’t be underestimated, especially giving her phobias of so many silvery objects. The casual cruelty of that just for convenience suggests the mother had her own issues and also that the father wasn’t paying enough attention at all. There’s no certainty either that she’s given up on the idea of ending it at the end. I don’t know how I f...

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20:47 Apr 21, 2021

Wow! The repeated imagery of Mercury was very effective and the way you blend the past with the present was seamless. I also loved that last line. Beautiful. :)

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Nina Chyll
21:02 Apr 21, 2021

Thanks a lot for the kind comment!

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Thom With An H
22:09 Apr 15, 2021

I got lost in this story. It felt chillingly real. It felt like a secret glimpse into the mind of someone who feels at the end. I could see it all. The descriptions were flawless and uncluttered. It surprised me how it ended, in a good way. You have a remarkable talent. Now I beg for your attention. I wrote a story this week called “Tomorrow is Yesterday.” If you don’t mind can you give it a read and let me know what you think?

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Nina Chyll
16:42 Apr 19, 2021

Thanks a bunch for stopping by and the very kind compliments!

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