eden

Sascha looks down at her knees, both which are cut and dripping. The left knee seems to be leaking more than the right. She reaches down and lifts her knee, meeting halfway up her body the hem of her sock. Hitches the sock up over the skin-tear. Sascha feels the blood patch into the bamboo-weave material but it doesn't show because her socks are black. That'll stop the bleeding, she thinks.

When Sascha gets home she takes off her sneakers and goes into her bathroom. The washing machine is against one wall. Sascha takes off her black socks and puts them into the wash. Not alone -- with some other semi-dirty clothes.

Sascha leaves the washing machine by itself and goes on her computer. The computer is in her room at the other end of the house. The washing machine rumbles away by itself, full of wash. Goes through eight separate cycles. Sloshes the socks around with the other semi-dirty clothes.

A few cycles later, the machine beeps at Sascha. Sascha leaves her computer chair, leaves her browser open, traipses into the laundry and opens the machine lid. She looks inside at her clothes. Clothes that are hers.

There is a lot of water that hasn't drained. Maybe the drain is blocked again.. 

Sascha sees a scraggy old white/grey t-shirt she got from a fundraiser four years ago. She sticks her hand down the machine barrel and pulls the t-shirt out. It's tangled around the other wash. Not all of the wash. Some of the wash. The old t-shirt is smodged in soft-edged orange-brown patches. Sascha's black socks are still black.

Sascha holds the t-shirt semi-flat and stares at it briefly before scrunching it up with both hands. She paces out of the laundry and bins the t-shirt without stopping as she passes the kitchen on her way to the computer.

When Sascha sits at her desk for the second time, she lifts her left knee up to cross over her right. Her kneecap cracks against the underneath of the desk top and the cut on her left knee bleeds a bit. Again. She keeps her browser page open. As Sascha shifts the mouse across her screen, a tiny bit of blood shifts off her right knee onto the left thigh tucked underneath.

Sascha clicks the left mouse button.

The blood is very, very, very red. It carves a stain down her inner shin bone, hovering linearly above the skin illustrating where Sascha's tibia lies underneath. Sascha doesn't feel the delicate dribble of her insides out until it intersects her ankle bone.

Sascha plucks a tissue from the cube box on her desk (having transferred her eyeline back to the open browser); lifts her ankle to meet halfway up her thigh which is crossed over like an 'x', hip rotated completely open and obtuse. Doing, not looking, she smears the blood flat across her skin and drags the tissue back up her leg -- horizontal; anti-gravity -- haphazardly cleaning some of the red, missing other parts of it. The manky tissue arrives at the base of her patella and is flipped immediately into the bin on her left. Whilst opening a new window. On her computer. With her right hand. Sascha can't feel the persistent hack beginning to leak again. It is very subtle.

The flow is steadier this time. Less determined. Defending, rather than advancing. But equally as red. Sascha's legs still in 'x' shape, the blood wraps around her knee cap and folds underneath her lateral collateral ligament. Hides in the crease behind her knee cap. It doesn't want to be discovered, for fear that discovered droplets end up in the bin.

Sascha notices -- feels, doesn't see -- the damp behind her knee. She plucks another tissue and jams it into her knee-fold; tosses it in the bin. It lands on the other tissue. They sit obediently next to each other like small children with folded arms. The bin is not lined with a plastic bag.

Sascha hitches her left foot further up her right thigh with her right hand.

Sascha clicks open, reads and answers an email. Dear --, Yadayadayadayadayada. Sincerely, ... . 

Sascha shuts her laptop and unhooks her left leg to place the foot flat on the floor, pushes her chair back from her fixed feet and leaves the room. Her steady toe-heel leads her into the bathroom. Sascha pulls open the shower door -- pliingggg -- and grabs her razor. She pinches the plastic hooks above the blade-head to release the rusty blade, flips it into the bin (lined) next to the toilet, and replaces the head. It has clean, blue stripes above and below the blades.

Sascha sits the razor back on its shower-shelf and plunggs the door back shut. She holds onto the door handle for a moment, looking into the shower from behind the glass.

Still hand to handle, still standing, looking. Sascha turns her head over her right shoulder. There is a patch of water growing underneath the washing machine. Sascha stays exactly where she is and watches the patch creep towards her.

Sascha's head inclines slowly with the movement of the patch. It bumps gently against the edge of her right foot like a cat saying hello. Sascha lifts her foot slightly and the patch continues growing around her left foot. Replaces her right. Sascha is standing in a tiny lake. In her bathroom.

Sascha lets go of the shower handle and just stands.

The vinyl floor begins to rot at fast-forward speed. The water chews away at the synthetic layer and turns it into a slimy precipitate. Sascha's arms are by her sides, wrists turned into her body. She sinks a millimetre.

The slimy vinyl squidges around Sascha's toes and slides underneath her toenails. It turns her nails fungal yellow. They shift into a crusty, brittle texture and some of them disintegrate completely. The toenail dusts dissolves into the vinyl-slime. Sascha sinks another two centimetres.

The slime looks like the alien green mucus you get when you have a bad sinus infection. Hyper-natural. It climbs up Sascha's legs and crawls through the pores of her skin. Finds its way through the maze of her muscle tissues. Into her bones. Digests the marrow and replaces the marrow with itself. Here is home, thinks the mucus. I don't have to wash any clothes here. I am safe. 

The wash-floor mucus-slime settles in to sleep in Sascha's bones. Sascha is still standing evenly across both semi-digested feet, arms by her sides. Her head is still inclined right and she recalls her computer. I closed it, but didn't shut it down, she thinks. The parasitic sludge swirls inside her skeleton like a dog circling itself to sleep.

And then it smells something. A whiff of something delicious has caught the slime's attention.

Sascha sinks further into the floor, so that the base of her knee caps are sitting above the would-be vinyl. The clotted cuts on her knee skin ooze open again and this time there are no socks to cover it up with. The blood wriggles out like a thin, pathetic flatworm and tries to make an escape across the sickening, liquid-infested surface. But the new-marrow squirms through her bones up towards Sascha's patella, drills out the same holes the blood leaked from and leaps out onto the sludgy floor after the blood-worms --

Still, Sascha is sinking through the floor.

Sascha watches (her eyes leg-height above floor level) the chase between her body parts happening just outside of her. The green mucus-marrow engulfs the sad red blood lines, incrementally chewing over them like carnivorous sleeping bags slipping over bodies.

When Sascha has sunk far enough through the floor that her hands touch the slime, she keeps her wrists by her sides. She doesn't lift them out of the way, or above the sludge-surface. Her head is centred now, though nodding down straight to her would-be feet. A small gap of air circulates between Sascha's chin and her chest.

This is not such a bad way to die, Sascha considers. This is relatively peaceful. I have not had anyone yell at me. It has been fairly quiet. 

Sascha imagines the many other ways death might stumble upon her as she sinks down deeper. Fire. Home invasion turned homicide. Electrical appliances in the dish water. The mucus burps up its blood-fluids in the corner and settles back to sleep. What a glutton, thinks Sascha. Her eyes are ruler-height above the floor.

In Sascha's room, the battery in the shut-but-not-shut-down computer slowly wanes. The sludge reaches Sascha's neck level. She wonders where her flatmates are but doesn't really care.

She slips into her vertical grave and feels the oozing sludgy crap flood through her hair. It surges up over her crown and Sascha's scalp relinquishes its crusty skin into the slime pool. Goodbye, Sascha thinks to herself. I really should have gotten that drain fixed.