Discarded Souls

Down here, the floor smells like yesterday’s washing and just a hint of mould below the window. Down here, I can scream into the carpet and nobody will notice. Newly reborn, I am a babe of dust, leftover crumbs and the corners where no-one will find me.

Weeks have passed since I hugged the walls with their tack-stained white: weeks since I peeled at the edges and my paper-thin weight dragged me from my pedestal. Shed, I was, like the leaves of last summer, cast at the base of the bed and left to crease and wither and gather the filth the cleaners missed.
It’s cold down here, cold but not lonely, for I am hung with the husks of other discarded souls and I bear their weight little easier than my own. They are shaped as I am: fragile, hard angles, the faintest suggestion of a curl around the knees. They all have their own faces, different to mine, multiplied entities, and their diversity is beauty itself. I would talk to them if I could, reach out past the barrier of skin that both connects and divides us. They are lying on my back and yet I cannot say a word to them. I can only scream into the carpet.
A soft arthritic wave is beginning to take my fingers. No matter how hard I try I cannot straighten them out. The quiet hum of the ceiling fan ruffles my sides, lifting me some before resting me back to the crimping fuzz over the floor. A little to my left, a stray morsel has caught in the spider-web frizz of the carpet. The breath of the fan beats it from side to side but it cannot shake loose. I wonder at its permanence.
Will I too lie here ‘til not even the air can touch me?
With a rip the last of us falls. It floats to my back in wide vulture spirals, sings its way down to be comfortably numb with the rest of us. One corner over another. I can’t see its face or its faces but I know it’s there, its corner over mine. I wish I could speak to it. I wish I could be more than just a silent screaming head face-down on the floor.  
Points of cold still cling to my back. Four at each corner and one hastily tacked between my shoulder blades, icy and stiff by the nape of my neck. They are the nails that held me to the wall: the blue spots of my crucifixion. Time has leached their stickiness. Now they just sit as misshapen blobs on my skin, reminding me how I fell.
It’s dark where I lie. It’s been so long since I saw my colours as they are. I can remember little. They are ragged at the edges and tracking, bleeding across 2D contours, coarse as old gum bark in the winter. Mine is a palette of blacks and blues and washed-out white. I fear that I will never see the sun again.
Does that mean I belong down here?
Tiny ocean ripples are forming in the small of my back where the water soaked in. Droplets from the washing, from rain, from sliding condensation… it could be any, or all three at once. But they have misshapen me, and even I cannot pretend to know my ugly, screaming face. I begin to fear that the sun will find me once more.
As it starts to seep its way across the carpet towards me, the room drenched in the shadow of light, I feel soft fingers prying at my sides, lifting me skywards, heavenwards. The glow of the sun drapes across my sagging form. A face stares into my own, frowning, disapproving, perhaps wondering what has happened to me. And how I wish I knew. I’m sure I wasn’t always this way, once upon a time when the folds didn’t exist and there was no crook to my spine. But maybe my face was always melting.
The disapproving eyes look me over, lingering on the wrinkles and the bends and the clumps of dust that cling to my corners. I remember the way those eyes used to look at me, and the times those fingers pinned me back against the wall when I’d fallen. I wait for them to lift me again and fix me to my rightful place. A thing of the dark no more. The fingers let go.
As the sunlight slides from my face and my body crumples atop the stack of rotting skeletons, it’s not the wall in my mind, but the corpses below. I am a speck of dirt in their nothingness and I will never see the sun again.

Down here, the floor smells like yesterday’s washing and just a hint of mould below the window. Down here, I can scream into the carpet and nobody will notice.
Newly reborn, I am a babe of dust, leftover crumbs and the corners where no-one will find me.