I would like to request your finest post-Blackwood angst, madam
“So you don’t remember...anything?” they asked her, and not for the first time, their faces warped and somehow too harsh, hidden behind blinking red recording lights and the scorching white lamp meant to illuminate each and every scrape and bruise so they could catalogue them for later.
Time had passed in the sticky-syrup way of dozing off during class - moving sometimes too quickly for her to keep up with, and then other times so slowly that she felt the minute might never end - but the table in front of her was too high and the plastic chair under her was too solid and while there was a clock ticking away somewhere beyond the dizzying paparazzi flash of camera lights, this wasn’t study hall. They’d asked her questions she had no answers to, questions about...about fire, and the lodge, and serial killers, and gas leaks, things that she couldn’t have answered even if her head hadn’t been pounding like a drum.
“Um...” Jess said, and to her it felt very much like the ninetieth (or maybe even nine hundredth) time she’d said it as she sat there, clutching the scratchy fabric of the old jacket she’d found in the mine closer to herself, her nose too plugged or too broken to smell the reek of it, but her fingers avoiding the patches that had gone stiff with blood, “Um...um...um...I...” She swallowed hard and her throat felt like it was full of glass dust, but she focused as hard as she could, squeezing her eyes shut tight to help bring the memory forward as she slowly (very slowly) managed to pull something out of the noise in her head: “I remember...Mike...he...he came for me...I remember...that.”
And she couldn’t tell what their faces did when she said that, or even if they did anything, the lights in front of her blinding her, skewering her eyeballs until she felt like her head might split in two...she couldn’t tell what their faces did, but she didn’t need to, because when she asked “Is he...okay?” their combined silence was all the answer she needed.
