PreventSuicide-Etc

Grey shadows loom in rows around my door a cluster of bruises, waiting for the moon to rise her slipknot circle into the rafters of the sky. They move in time, loose and heavy as a noose of hands around my throat. My breathing closes swallow, swallow hard shallow gasps as smudges tread their march spreading black into my room. I watch with nightjar eyes and hear with ghost-bat ears for footfall and door creak. Hallways baited with breath loaded as a gun and screams I cannot speak. Horror is cut into the bone skeleton of this home. In the dark my ears grow ears of their own. My antelope heart turns and runs. Daylight bleeds its fingerprints over the wall embers of relief ignite burning heartbeats and breaths through my chest with their slow growth and gentle crawl. The knifeblade under my pillow loses its weight as my hand falls. The spell breaks, and I lay my head down, down, in drowning sleep. A moment of death before voices waking with the day disturb and raise me from

My breath catches in my chest and flickers out. I howl down the corridors fluttering like the flame of a sputtering candle in the darkness. Howling smoke wreath, I reach for the crack of the windowsill. My voice aches and screams to lift the pane a perfect prism of glass separates me from home. Outside, streetlights wink so many stars and I dream of freedom. He lifts my feet onto the metal pedals it bites into the soft underside of my flesh. I steal footsteps. Cold floor, machine whirrs lyric alarm to my racing heart. Sleepy nurses snap to attention in the night, they shine their tiny laser spotlights into my eyes “Why are you awake? Get back into bed! You’re sick!” Check the tubes and IVs for tampering, crisp nods. Their pens bobbing up and down in small salutes.

My lips crack and bleed, the skin of deserts. They restrict my water and dispense ice chips measured a millimetre at a time. Heart monitor beeps with every motion butterfly effects, slow echoes pulses and waves of pain, pain, shame hollow caverns missing from their charts. They don’t see my face, they see a collection. Insect bodies stabbed through with delicate pins perfectly preserved, labelled, prized, cotton-wool stacked and exo-skeletoned. He presses the soft underside of my mandible and leaves me to my pain for days exclaiming that he’s never seen nor heard of a specimen like me. He relishes the study. The tube pulls deep into my stomach like the rope of a well or a divining wand for water. I imagine dropping stones and making wishes to fill my belly or create a sinkhole big enough to swallow me into oblivion. I wish for rain that never comes and realise they never hear my words or ask the right questions. I touch the salt of my cochineal lips ground ruby red and taste