she screeched and my eyes popped out of their sockets.

A simple way to decay (short fiction)

It took its first breath when I was six. I cannot recall what triggered it. I can only remember a soft scratch behind my chest, something new filling the space between my heart and its bone. Like a cough, but bigger. I held the green crayon in my hand and drew on the wall of our sitting room. It was behind the couch so my father had to crouch down to see it. His eyebrows raised. And then he called my mother. She held me by the shoulders and asked if I had been the one to draw it. I said yes. She hugged me, and I thought a bit of me went back into her that day. The scratch bloomed.

By the time I was twelve, I had gotten used to rounds of applause coming immediately after my name. I painted a version of the Lord that the church now hung by its door. I won a competition, representing the school. I was awarded a laptop that I had no idea what to do with. My father turned it into his ‘shop’ computer. I made a sketch of my mother in charcoal, with her head bigger than her body and her thin lips opened in a yell. She showed it to all the guests who came as they sipped their Fantas and ate their chinchins. The scratch bloomed. And bloomed. And bloomed.

One day, the scratch spoke. I had just spent hours laboring over my first-ever canvas and I had drawn a self-portrait. But her eyes were not mine, not really. There was a depth in them that alarmed me. I was staring at a complete stranger. And then it spoke.

From that point onwards, it told me what to paint. What color to use and how to use it. And when I tried to defy her commands, there was an unsettling push in my mind. A pain I could never put my finger on, but it was all-consuming. Like there was a great fire in a forest, without a source. All you know is you’re blinded by the smoke. The scratch got bolder as the crowds got bigger.

It grew big. And when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any bigger, it grew larger still. So did the crowds and the awards and the chants. I imagined that by the time I was 30, I would have been eaten whole. And nobody would even notice.

I did love to paint. But as a hobby. I loved the calm that washed over me when I was by the easel, with my brain as blank as the canvas I faced. When the art took over, I wanted it to be a little cat that I could name and teach cute tricks. But the thing, whatever it was, wanted us to be a prized lion that everyone went to watch at the zoo.

We had our moments of peace, of quiet. The first few hours into a new piece, when there were no disagreements. Everything going as it should. We co-existed. Until it was time to paint the eyes. I would want it normal, smiling. She would want it slanted, raging. And then it all fell apart again. And when we were done, when we got through the pushing and the pulling, with her winning, I would be prodded and poked as a prodigy. She watched through my eyes, livid, quietly simmering. Her shoulders hunched, her heart thumping.

Why did I get all the glory?

I turned fifteen. And a goat-like stubbornness set into my bones. I began to fight back in my own little ways. I would choose yellow when brown was clearly the better choice. I would turn down commission offers I knew we’d be perfect for. Once, I split water on a drying canvas. She was silent as we watched the oil run. And then she screeched, and my eyes popped out of their sockets. We didn’t agree on much, but we agreed on studying English Language. That was the only course that would give us the freedom to do as we wished. I would read and analyze books for grades, dabble in Theater, and paint the world in my free time. Perfect.

But that also meant spending more time with it, the pollution that was becoming a part of me as much as I was a part of her. Before, it was only confined to whatever portion of my mind controlled my art. But now, it was ever present, as I saw more and more beauty in the world. I would look at a boy smiling at me, and focus on the curve of his jaw, and how I could replicate it in a piece. I would call my mom and hear a voice in the background, we would build a story around it and I would have to get to the canvas as soon as possible, cutting the call without explanation. At the canvas, we would fight. I would want some rest, she would see it as unnecessary. Sometimes, I would force myself to take a break and wake up in silence. Other times, with a splitting headache and a raging spirit in my head. So, when the time came to choose a course to study, I chose chemistry.

As I defied her fierce protests and went on to press the button that would solidify my future as a chemist (I didn’t even really know what they did), I felt a massive push in my head, until something like a drop fell from the corner of my left eye. After I pressed the button, my hand went to my face and came away with red. There was silence then. She knew she had lost the battle. It was now time for the war. And I felt myself ill-prepared for the massacre that was to follow.

But there was no massacre. In the university, my course (which I soon grew to despise) took some much out of me, there was barely anything left for art. Or her. It was then I realized I had the power all along. If I was tired. So was she. So, anytime she began to stir up some trouble, I would tire myself out in the lab, working on some assignment or the other. I still found the time to paint. And anytime I did, it was an opportunity for her to torment me. I painted, but the times grew far and in between as the years rolled by. But every single canvas was blessed with a masterpiece. Although I couldn’t necessarily say that it was by my hand. She had the paintbrush. No more agreement. No more co-existing.

When I graduated, I had the feeling of being completely out of my element. It felt like I had spent five years doing some laborious and pointless chore. I felt so off-balance and without a sense of self, that I threw myself back into my painting. For a year, I did nothing but paint and paint and paint. She was even worse to work with this time than before because I felt like I had wasted time. She had been robbed of hers. And if there was anything she told seriously, it was her time.

As I lost more and more of my art to her, I discovered that my father had submitted one of my pieces for a scholarship. And lo and behold, I got it. I was ecstatic. That was before a sense of foreboding and dread settled on me like the early morning dew. I knew what that meant. Spending years and years with her in control. I was terrified, like I was preparing for some otherworldly monster to come and eat me up. But I filled out the forms anyway. I applied for the visa, and I packed my bags for the Art School in London. Only the day I was meant to travel, I tore up my passport. And then I threw it in the fire for good measure.

The rage was unimaginable. It felt like a pot of fire bubbling in my brain. It wanted me to defer my admission. It wanted me to call the school, and fix this. FIX IT! It screamed once, its voice a booming echo that almost drove me mad. It was horrible. I could barely keep my hands steady enough to sketch, not to talk of paint. I was constantly on edge, ripped apart slowly on the inside. I began to see myself as a volcano. And I would have broken my own hands to stop myself from erupting.

In my town, once you don’t leave a year after college, you’re mostly stuck with no options but to take the first minimum wage job thrown at you. I began to work as a waitress in my mother’s office. It was still alive at this time but starved. It was a terrible thing, waking up and feeling its energy less and less. I got married between the age of 24-28. I’m not really sure of the specifics. Only that it was a marriage of convenience. I had to get out of the house sometime, and that time seemed right.

The marriage was a blur, but thankfully, nothing tangible was created. There were no children, no scars dug into my flesh by matrimony. I tried nursing it back to life. Because now that it was dying, I could feel its body dragging around in my belly, laying on my liver, pressing on my heart. I tried to paint, and it would perk up at that, but not like before. If painting wouldn’t do it, I didn’t know what else would. It was dying, yes. And at first, I was glad, only now, I stopped knowing why I was glad.

The husband would crawl into my bed every night, and the only thing I would feel was the dip of the bed. Somedays, I forgot the steps, the choices I had made that brought me to where I was at present. It was all such a blur. I woke up on Saturday morning, and I knew it had happened. For the first time in years, there was no scratch. It was a Saturday morning, and there was no clawing at the wall of my chest, like a stray dog begging for scraps. For a minute, I couldn’t breathe. And then I could. That day, I didn’t bother to get out of bed, and the heaviness in my tongue, I attributed to the plaque and dirt of an unbrushed mouth.

When I woke up from my slumber, my tongue was glued to the bottom of my jaw. I was horrified. But it wasn’t as if I could do anything about it. It wasn’t as if I could scream. It went on like this, slowly. My left knee became as stiff as steel, so I walked with a limp. My husband went out one day and never came back. My fingertips started to lose their feeling. The skin was being pulled back in layers and layers. I opened my eyes each day expecting to see white, bland bone.

I tried to cry one day, but couldn’t summon the tears. Although the back of my eyes burned and ached, I couldn't summon a single tear. Somedays, I dreamed but I could swear I was awake. Other days, I woke up, but it felt like a dream.

Then the day came. I had dreamed of being shoved into a six feet deep hole, and buried with a thousand screams still in my throat. I tried to stand but fell flat on my face immediately after I did. My legs had glued together. I crawled to the kitchen and took a knife to separate the flesh. It was painless, and the meat parted like the sea to Moses. I crawled to the door and yanked it open. I shouldn’t have done that. A mountain of sand poured into my house, and finally, I was at peace.