Tell Me I'm Worthless(48)

Alice passed from consciousness, and when she came back to the world, the torch had been removed from her insides, and Ila was holding the scalpel. Alice didn’t recognise it. Hannah did. Hannah knew the scalpel well, from her other eye. Ila brushed the hair from Alice’s face and there, in the dead centre of her blemishless forehead, she carved the smooth diamond of a cunt.

“You will always know,” she said, “what you aren’t.” And she left, without the scalpel or the torch. It took a long while for Alice to pull herself up, and when she did she was barely able to walk. Her insides felt like they’d been pulped.

The House let her leave the room. It threw her out onto the street, and the cold air stung the cunt on her head. Somebody across the road was walking their dog, and they called an ambulance, and she asked them to take her home.

ALICE





In one eye, Hannah saw this: Ila lay in the puddle of her own sick, heaving great sobs deep through her body. She had no way of comprehending what had happened to her friend, and had shut down in response, let herself go prone and helpless. Which made it easier, really. Alice was still standing at the door, looking from Ila to Hannah and back again. Her stare had grown strangely blank, like she had left this place and fallen to somewhere else. Then she walked, like a dreamer, across the room. Hannah watched with one eye, while the other was elsewhere. It was not a clean split. Both visions bled into the other. The border that lay between realities was a jagged wound.

Alice walked across the room, like a dreamer. She walked with purpose to the desk pushed against the wall. Her hands opened it and felt around for something inside which she knew would be there. A scalpel. Small and bright. It had been in the room for as long as the room existed, yet it was as sharp as if it had been made only yesterday. Ila didn’t notice any of these. She just lay there. Sobbing in her own vomit. Alice returned, moving carefully to her friend. She bent over Ila and brushed the hair from her face.

“Come on,” she whispered, care in her words. “Let’s get you up.”

Ila let herself be pulled up by Alice, her face dripping wet. She put her arms around Alice’s shoulders and sobbed into her chest. Alice placed one hand on the top of her head and, out of nowhere, slammed Ila back down onto the floor, face first into the sick again. Ila screamed, starting to struggle, but Alice had her completely: she lifted her up again, now with no tenderness at all, and smashed her face into the floorboard a second time. When Ila rolled over to look up at her, there was blood pouring from her nose and mouth.

“What are you doing?” she spluttered.

“Taking care of you,” said Alice, wiping blood and snot away from her cheek. “Stay still now, okay?”

Ila didn’t want to stay still. But Alice held that scalpel up in front of her face and nodded. See. This is why you have to do what I tell you. This is why you have to let me do it. Alice cut down the length of Ila’s clothes, exposing her stomach and then her crotch, too. She hooked the scalpel gently inside Ila’s underwear and tore them off her body. Her hand, with the blade in it, hovered over Ila’s stomach.

The cuts weren’t deep. But they were deep enough. Blood seeped down in thin lines, dripping, bright with the freshness of the cuts. The words weren’t deep, but they were deep enough to scar, and in a year’s time Ila will still have them on her, still feel horror and shame whenever she sees them. In one year, in three years. Forever.

Alice pulled apart Ila’s legs, the scalpel still glimmering in one hand. Hannah, floating helplessly, wanted to scream out, to try and stop what was happening. She could see the room settling within Alice, as she could see it settling within Ila, too, from her other eye. But it had her, and that was it. She could only hang there like a desiccated Christ on a desiccated cross and watch as Alice pushed her dick up inside of Ila, and by this point Ila couldn’t say anything at all. Alice didn’t cum. She only managed a few thrusts inside before she started to go soft. She was on antidepressants and hormones that made orgasm practically impossible anyway.

When she went soft, she pulled out and stood up. Her skirt fell back into place. She stepped away from Ila, who was sprawled and utterly motionless. She stepped away towards the door. It opened. Outside was the world, as it had always been. As she left the room, Alice dropped the scalpel under her feet. When she had gone, Ila pulled herself up, wincing with the pain of movement. She grabbed hold of the scalpel and brought it back to her. Her thigh was exposed, and, without even looking, she cut a word that girls at school used to call her into her leg, a word which looked sometimes like panic but was not.

She waited to die beneath Hannah’s gaze, but she didn’t. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to, she pulled herself up and stumbled from the room. Behind her, the door slammed shut, and Hannah was alone.

ILA





Hannah saw them leave. The two split instances melded together once they were gone. She hung there for quite some time, not alive, not dead. Her body began to rot. The flesh fell away, exposing the bones beneath. The longer she stayed a swastika, it seemed that she had always, deep down, been a swastika. This was just her true self. It had finally been achieved, expressed in euphoric ecstasy, glimmering with fresh dew. She hung there. At first a girl, then a symbol, then a stain on the wall. The House swallowed her, and inside it she found that she wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of girls buried within. Girls without eyes, girls without heads, girls without wombs. Giant holes cut into their bodies to pull things out, unravelled and pleading for help that would never come. Martyred girls, mutilated girls, girls that Hannah thought, in her darkest moments, deserved what they had gotten. They all huddled close to one another for warmth.