Grief Week for a Tortured House

The kidnappers came back today. This time they were two black suits with clipboards. Not the torn-up savages of yesterday. But their eyes were the same, calculating slits. They squared up to my skin and examined every inch: new bruises and aged blemishes alike. Tuts and puffs joined scribblings onto their clipboards. In my every cavity they rapped at my chest and pressed their ear against the site to listen for…anything. A groan? A beat? There was no fight in me now.

I had given it all for Maggie.

My only response to their knocking was the echo of my rotting remains. Where my skin frayed, they tore layers away and revealed the scars Maggie had bandaged.

 They tore me away by layers, but they stole Maggie whole.

*          *          *

Their sirens poured in from the street whilst they flashed their blue lights at my eyes that dazzled me, even through my draped vision.

‘Maggie!’ They knew her name.

‘Maggie!’ How did they know her name?

‘Maggie!’ Their voices broke through my barricade, and I willed her to stay hidden. Then came their fists, but I was stronger. When Maggie found me, I was limp and broken but she built me back up. She nurtured me from the inside, and I vowed, always, to protect her with my thick hide.

But she hadn’t moved, hadn’t nurtured me for three days. Every day before, she cleaned my dander, dressed me, and sprayed me with perfumes of lavender and linen. But now she slept, and I didn’t have the strength to keep the strangers out.

Fists were replaced with battering rams and with the first hit a throbbing started in my jaw. Another and they splintered me, cracking my cuticles and by the third, I was a useless gaping hole.

They barged in with big yellow coats still shouting for her, but Maggie lay low, unmoving, and silent in her bed.

I screamed and they faltered. Two dropped everything to cover their ears. The others looked around frantically to find my voice: a shrill oscillation that throbbed in every direction. The tall yellow-coat with broad shoulders that tapered down to disproportionate feet was the one to find the source of my klaxon. 

The yellow-coat stood there, eyebrows scrunched, before grabbling my voice box. It throttled me and my parts began to rattle but I wasn’t silenced. It moved away and I continued to scream. The anger was shaking through my bones for what they had done to us. But yellow-coat stood upright again to regain its grip, only this time with a weapon clutched in the other hand. The weapon was long and flat, cold when it touched my skin. He jammed it into the weak point, the joint, and pierced me. I screamed harder while he ripped the box away from me. I tried to hold on with my vocal cords, but the force of my strength against his caused a sparking sever. Copper innards exposed beneath the red and blue membrane of my veins, left to hang limp while he threw my voice-box to the side. The voice that Maggie had gifted to me. I watched its shell crack on the floor.

They stomped up my wood-stepped spine, moving as one. I groaned and creaked at their heaviness as foot behind followed foot in front.

  When they reached Maggie’s hiding place, they took my silver hand and threw my limb against my body hard, and before I could react, they were at the bed where she lay, tightly crowded over her and stealing away my view.

‘She’s cold.’ One of them said. ‘We’re too late.’ This one had a kinder face, closer to Maggie’s but less decorative. Maggie had engraved lines and texture to her appearance since we had been partners, and sometimes, on sunny days, fashioned coffee-coloured speckles too.

Maggie always celebrated the warmer seasons and fed me with flowers. Not the nasty vines from the garden that whisper and tangle. We both liked the tamer, sophisticated creatures that drank water from tall glasses and fanned with bright colours. She put them in front of my many eyes and I watched them carefully all day, keeping them safe too.

‘She’s probably been gone for a few days now,’ they continued.

‘Let’s get her onto the stretcher’, another said. The two other yellow-coats brought over a canvas table in response and, unified, they pulled her onto it. A white cloth was draped over her. Then, taking a corner each, they lifted her up and carried her out. I wanted to call for her, but I couldn’t. I wondered why she didn’t call for me.

Maybe I was wrong, I thought. Maybe these were friends.

I let them carry her away.

They took Maggie whole, but they’ve taken me piece by piece. Tortured me. For the first two days after Maggie’s kidnapping, I was alone. I stayed awake the entire time. My lights flickered intermittently, but I managed to keep them on. I waited for the siren and lights to come and bring her back. They didn’t. It was in this time that I realised, my first instincts were right.

On the third day they sent my captors. They were the only group to not wear uniforms. Solo agents. They didn’t move together or work together either for the most part. They were erratic and selfish. Taking parts of me and stuffing armfuls into cardboard boxes. Each box had a label in scrawly black ink: ‘tip’, ‘sell’, ‘keep’.

The ‘keep’ box was mostly ignored. Though one returned occasionally to place in some scavenged photos that Maggie hadn’t displayed in a long time. It picked out one of the photos and squinted at the child with bouncy brown curls that looked like a smaller, less embellished version of herself. Then it shook its head, shut the box and sealed it with tape.

They forced my eyes to stay open into the dark night once they’d gutted every ounce of me. On the evening of the fourth day, they took away my eyelids altogether.

Pain was their aim for the fifth day. Heavy boots topped with jeans came in shouting and blaring music from radio’s that threw tantrums of crackles until they were heard. I envied their voices. Uniforms were splattered in the white and grey blood of other victims, like war paint. Once all were inside, they scattered to every corner. And in each corner, they tore at my clothes. In every crevice they chipped at my skin. They scratched at me with squares of sand, and they broke me with hammers: laughing as they watched my parts tumble to the floor.

It was when they aimed for my heart that I felt a new force inside of me. I saw them staring, contemplating whether they could bring themselves to destroy my most beautiful feature. My coal-heart was framed with a marble arch. Maggie would use a feather duster to collect all the fragments that tried to dull its shine and tell me how beautiful it was. When the weather threatened us; whipping cold air, thrashing with pellets of ice, and burying my feet in white cloth that numbed us, she lit my heart. With a match she would strike a flame and throw it in, then watch as it flickered and beat for her.

So, when one took a hammer and raised it over head to aim for my heart, I struck. My glass chandelier winked proud above its head. I seized every ounce of my frame and pulled from the chandelier outwards. I fed my damp tears to it as it began to tear away, the moisture helping to weaken my skin. It shook and chimed, catching the attention of the warrior who looked up at the mighty weapon, taken from my very skin. I wrenched through the pain and my chandelier dropped down, swallowing the warrior who stood beneath. The wound my amputation had caused was still bleeding with timber falling to the ground, and what fell hurt me too. But to see the fresh red of the warriors own blood cover the white blood of my kind was worth everything. His army shouted and cussed at me, but the battle was already won.

During the sixth day my chandelier was removed, and my wound cleaned up. I didn’t notice who or when. I dreamt that it was Maggie.

*                      *                      *

The last kidnappers left about an hour ago. These suits didn’t take anything. They just watched me and nodded at my emptiness. They stabbed a sign in the grass outside – red and ugly. I recognised the colour. The same thing happened to the house across the road not long ago and in the same order too. They are taking us one by one, ripping out our insides until there is nothing left but bare bones that they can shape into something else.

This time I let myself cry. Maggie told me off when I cried. But then she got the bleach and some kitchen towel and wiped away my green and black spotted tears until I was better. She’s not here to help me now and I know that is my fault. I should have trusted my instincts. Instead of her voice, I can hear a whispering outside. The weeds are talking about me. They are creeping up my empty walls.