PART I - THE UNTRUTHS

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12 P.M.

I wake up to stars, but there is no sky. Only pulsating pain between my eyes and chartreuse yellow ceilings. Bile mixed with a little sun, bleeding into my eyes.

I am unpeeled. Bare as the day I was born. Fruit with no skin, glistening wet, slippery on the tongue, browning at spots I’ve been held too hard. Vinyl floors are biting into my skin. And I realise, I am horizontally sprawled, a lopsided boy on fire, or at least in feeling. Fiery pain licks a ring around my head. I am cracked open, discarded shells spilling whites and yellows, crimsons drying brown at the edges.

Where am I? What have they done to me?

I try to pull myself up, against gravity, the anchor sitting on my lungs. My fingers grip the floors, but to no avail, the floors are liquid beneath the tips of my finger, they slip and every muscle of my body screeches in pain. When I hold them up against the yellow ceilings, they are wet in dark red. It trickles, like bloody tears down my swollen face, pennies in my mouth. I’m in a sea of my own blood.

So I drift in the still waters, plucked chicken on the butcher’s block. Paralysed, but my mind, it leafs again and again through my shuttering thoughts. In pins on a singularity, wisps and trickles of filtered memories—my mother’s face in vignette. Her fragility across the kitchen table in the bales of morning glow slipping through the blinds. Her loneliness in the empty alcoves of the night. Her depravity as she pummels a crystal ashtray into my head.

It’s so cold. My toes must be black. So cold I can see the ghost of my breath snake and twist in the air. It’s so cold I force myself to turn on my side, swimming in red, curl like a child in the womb against the amniotic blue. And in the cold and the wet, I let the festering angry teeth of betrayal eat me whole.