r (reposeremembers) wrote in repose, @ 2020-04-18 18:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | hannah smith, jamie mayer, ~plot: memories |
[memory]
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing.
Warning, this memory contains: Death.
You've spent so much time in this room that you've begun to pick apart its decor, both figuratively and literally. There is a place on the cupboard, beside the bed, where the corner got chipped. The hard vinyl coating is gone in that one little spot, exposing a cheaply compressed, wooden filling. Late at night, you've begun to scratch at it with your thumbnail, flaking little pieces of chipboard onto your palm. It is just for something to do, something vague to pass the time, something you can obsess over when you can't sleep. You make sure that you destroy the evidence every time. It doesn't taste like anything when you lick the particles off of your hand, but it is a comfort to know that they're safe inside of you where no one will find them.
You can remember swallowing a marble once when you were very young. You still remember what it looked like, even if it was such a long time ago. The marble had been the strangest blue green with a galaxy of molten gold spiraling out from the center. It was the single most beautiful thing you'd ever seen, a cat eyed jewel. You wanted to keep it forever, and so you swallowed it whole. Even though it is impossible, you still like to think about the marble being there sometimes. Something beautiful inside that only you know about.
The room is impersonal and cold, the way that you have decided hospitals always are. It is a room with two beds, two cupboards, and two windows. A nurse comes in occasionally to change the fluids for your IV or give you drugs that make you sleep for a long time. Sometimes you wake up and there is a new person in the bed across from you. Sometimes you wake up and there is nobody in it at all, just clean pressed sheets and sunlight from the window.
You've watched two people die in the other bed. They always go quietly, either in their sleep or with rasping little breaths that roll their eyes slowly up into their heads. You pretend to be asleep when the nurse comes in to disconnect their fluids and their wires. You pretend you're not listening when the nurse orders the bodies taken to the garden, 'with the rest.' At night, you watch out the window while men dig another grave, sometimes dumping three or four bodies in at a time.
You don't want to get caught at the window, so you crawl back into your bed and lie awake all night thinking about that blue marble. You trace the stitches low on your stomach, wondering if it somehow, somehow was still in there after all these years, and if they might have left it behind for you to keep, even when they took everything else.