*It has come to my attention that Child’s Play is a really unoriginal title. Does someone want to help me by listing some other ones? Ones that fit my story, obviously.*
For language and reference to fetuses
I dedicate this section to Andrea, who is my Cecilia.
Mimi lay on the wooden floor, curled up like a frozen fetus; disgusting and half-formed. She gazed absentmindedly at the creaking clouds outside of her window; they looked so fake, like a set painted for a play. She could swear they were made of wood. The room was so hot. She felt the heat swarm around her; press against her eyelids. She could practically see the room softening, changing shape. The clouds seemed to groan under the weight of the atmosphere.
She felt the heat slither around her ankles and up each tender vertebra until it was writhing against the back of her head, tightening around her neck like a noose. The clouds outside waved gaily as the swung closer, still groaning; now in the ecstasy of anticipation.
The walls were melting before her eyes.
And the heat—
She clamped her eyes shut but nothing would help, nothing would alleviate the heat. The walls were moving closer; they were sliding, now dripping towards her. The heat was clamping against her chest; squeezing against her ribcage. She couldn’t hear her pulse over the sound of the walls oozing. The smell of melted paint and hot plaster was unbearable. The clouds outside her window were snapping, popping, breaking; splitting into a thousand splintered thoughts; falling like February rain. She was shivering, wheezing, waiting for the walls and the sky to collapse and crush her--- and the noise; it was ringing now, so loudly it jarred her brain against the sides of her skull. Again, and again, it was getting louder and more violent. Ringing like… a telephone?
Mimi picked up the receiver; it was on the desk above her. “Fuck you.” Her voice was hoarse and her hand was sliding across the plastic handle of the phone; every pore in her body was secreting sweat.
“Mimi? What kind of hello is that?! I carved some time out of my ridiculously busy life to check up on you, and that's how you thank me? Bihaj. How was your day, are you making any progress? Are the therapists nice? And where were you? I called about twenty times.” Cecilia’s chirpy voice helped fizzle the hallucination. Mimi stood up, slowly, no longer hot but shaking and woozy.
“Right here. Under the phone. I couldn’t hear it over the walls melting and the sky falling.” Mimi looked around the room once again. Not such a bad suite, after all. Especially when it had four sturdy, solid walls and a window depicting handful of light weight clouds frolicking across an airy blue sky.
“Calm down, Mimi. You always get overexcited.” Cecilia had an edge to her voice that sounded tired, impatient. Like the parent who doesn’t want to hear about the monster in their child’s closet; the parent who can’t understand that even if the monster isn’t there, the fear is so real that their children lie in bed every night, ravaged by terror and praying for the footsteps of dawn.
“Thank you, Cecilia. I think that’s the most provocative, insightful thing anyone’s said to me today. Over-excitement? Is that what it was, Cecilia? Is that what happened when I—” Mimi’s voice had steadily gotten louder until it cracked and she broke off, fuming.
Cecilia heaved a dramatic sigh.
Milanka could picture Cecilia standing in front of her body-length mirror; rolling her eyes at her tanned, toned reflection and sneering at Mimi’s anger. “Mimi, puh-lease. I am not trying to dissect you. I just wanted to know if you were alright.”
“Honestly? Truthfully? I like it here. I didn’t think I would find people that were just as messed up as I am; then I met Lilith the cutter and… Priyesh Jahimm. Try to guess what Priyesh is.”
Mimi waited and wondered idly if Cecilia was messaging her boyfriend; if she was sexting while talking to Mimi about her problems. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Shit, Mimi, I don’t want to think about—”
“Then hang up and find a new best friend, Cecilia. Or else take a guess.” Mimi inspected her room while she waited for an answer.
The floor had long since lost its varnish. It was a raw oak now, the kind of wood that splinters and nips into your flesh, with all sorts of obscenities carved into it.
David won’t be able to suck pussy at the end the rope I hung him with. Fuck Herbert Hoover with a lamppost. I want to plunge a screwdriver into my chest. Hell is where the heart is.
Mimi nodded sympathetically at the miseries and triumphs impressed into the pliable oak like the hieroglyphics of a long-lost civilization; once powerful and feared, now completely irrelivant. She shivered and swung her eyes to another spot on the floor.
There was a sickly pink stain near the painted-shut window, probably from nail lacquer, and a more prominent, darker stain near the bathroom door; most definitely from Lilith. There was an offensive odor about the place: that of irrelevant ecstasy, of dreadful elation, of blood and laughter and insanity. It seemed to be spewing from the walls, an aspirin-white that was anything but sterile. The atmosphere was a fusion between an opium den and a dentist’s office.
Mimi felt the sound of Cecilia’s voice before she heard it; pulsating through the phone, strumming into her ear, the trembling rhythm of anxiety.
“I give up. Tell me Mimi.” Cecilia’s voice was nervous, strained.
“No. But I’ll give you a hint. He has expensive dental implants. And one side of his neck is red and swollen.”
“Oh god, that’s awful… just tell me so we can end this conversation.” Cecilia sounded very, very sorry that she had bothered to call.
“Why? You don’t want to know. You can’t stand to hear about the people I have to live with every day.” There was silence on the other end.
Mimi loathed Cecilia, at that exact moment, more than she hated Chuck and the parents that sent her to Jeremiad’s School For Distinguished Students and the society she rebelled against and the boy she had throttled in the dead of night.
“He’s an addict. A heroine addict who has shot up in so many of his veins that most of them collapsed; and the ones that still function don’t give him enough rush. He’s got a swollen neck, Cecilia, because he takes a syringe full of heroine and injects it into his jugular.” Mimi was choking,gagging on the words and the thoughts she had tried to suppress for too long. They filled up her mouth like black bile and spewed into the telephone.
“And you know what the best part of this fuckfest is, Cecilia? I wish I was him. I wish my problem was something stupid and simple like addiction; or mundane as dragging a knife across my flesh. Because this… this sickness that I have? It’s never going to get better. Did you hear me, Cecilia? I’m confined to this place for life. And then some.”
Mimi heard a small pause and then a click; felt her heartbeat accelerate as she listened to the bleating dial tone.
“Shit no, Cecilia. Come back. I’m sorry Cecilia, come back so I can tell you whatever you want to hear; only don’t leave me, not now, not alone in this place. I’m getting better… Jesus, I’m practically ready to come home. A few weeks at most. I hate it here; the kids are freaks and I know I don’t belong I’m not hopeless like they are. With some therapy I could be out of here in less that a month. I’m going to recover. Cecilia? Please… Cecilia. CECILIA!”
She frantically redialed and held her breath as she listened to the phone ring. And ring. And ring.
“Cecilia here! I’m away right now but if you leave a message I’ll be sure to call you back.”
Mimi ripped the phone out of the wall and hurled it across the room. It didn’t smash, as she would have hoped, but landed upside-down and lay there like a turtle on its back: a little dented and out of order but not in the least disgraced.
Mimi was not an attractive crier. She had a red, splotchy, greasy face and a tendency to gurgle and hiccup. Her mouth would hang open slightly; forming words that never materialized. Smashing her head between her knees and pulling at her face with fat, pink fingers; she burbled out some incomprehensible curses between moans of despair. Her sobs were punctuated by the sound of slurping; sucking the snot back into her nose.
The truly sad part wasn’t that Mimi had lost her best friend. Milanka was crying because she now understood.
She never really had one.
