An overhead shot fading in from black shows a rolling vista of verdant hills covered in evergreen trees. Subtitles in bold white text, their kerning marked by the faintest shadow of an outline, appear on the lower third of your screen, as though they were always meant to be there but arrived almost too late for their cue. They read, "If you have any questions, call or visit us online." There is neither a website nor phone number on the screen. You have many questions. And though compelled to find their answers, you know a dead end when you see one.
Your refrigerator hums, and the coolant in its tubes revs, pumping its machine blood and regulating its insides. You remove a pitcher from its lower chamber and pour your own coolant as though moving through water. Your movements are leaden, joints like boulders. Coolant. Excess has made it into your nose as you prepare your internal void. No matter. Most of it has been properly deposited down the correct tunnel.
The boulders shed a little of their weight. An arm swings and it does not immediately drain you. The recent cut across your ribs is not so forgiving. Your shirt is smudged with blood. You curse softly and apply a hand's worth of pressure. Even slight tasks are often monumental to a recovering body.
A sound across the street drifts past your ears. Today the people in the alleyway are shouting. You hope that their diplomacy will overrule the fact that they, like you, can smell blood. Their eyes are wild, the unrelenting sun bearing down ever warmer and discomforting every moment they exist within its radiation. A thick arm extends from one side, hand grasped around an oblong, spiked fruit, and, with a sound like rusted cutlery and dust, chucks it into the air. Another arm almost lazily snakes its way into position and catches the odd fruit with ease. You wonder what the vision means, and the strange limbs fade into the textures of the walls around them. You need not have worried. When the delivery worker knocks at your door, you know that everything is as it should be.
You have to open the box slowly, laboriously, to keep your wound from reopening any further. You cut the packing tape with your oyster shell knife. You miss your scissors very much. But they weren't welcome here, and when given the choice between a new home, free of charge, and living in a town that allows scissors, you chose the former. Amid a puddle of packing peanuts, which you munch absentmindedly as you unpack, you find another box. It is heavier, a glazed earthenware chest just large enough to span your palm. A single hinge attaches a lid, etched with writing that you are not at liberty to translate, but which you immediately understand. Its significance begins to set in, a tight sensation in your throat, and a muddy speechlessness. You know better than to open this box. It has already taken your voice for the moment. You may regenerate it later. Then again, you may not.
Sliding the curse box into the padded pocket of your cargo trousers, you rise to stand up and move toward your window. Do not forget your key. It can only lock the room from the inside, and you wish to maintain your residence's security. You push the screen out of the window, followed one by one by your heavy limbs. Slowly, now. Easy does it. Your wound protests. A hand and some gentle pressure quiet it. The fire escape stairs take your weight with a groan. They are not immune to the effects of the weather, and neither are you. Your inner garments are soaked by the time you make it to the bus stop.
The wind begins to pick up. The relief of its breeze across your face is nearly overwhelming as your entire form grasps at the chance to cool itself. You breathe, as the whole neighborhood breathes.
You pass through a cloud of shrieking brakes, soft utterances of "excuse me," and "thank you," and "I hope the rest of your day is beautiful," knowing in all likelihood it will not be, but hoping nonetheless. Your face mask sticks to your lips, but only briefly, when you gasp at a sudden and unplanned stop of the metal isopod carrying your physical form across town. A screeching void enters the vehicle, scanning a discounted bus pass and changing form with some minor chromatic aberration so as to fit into two seats. You had expected for it to use at least four, and take a moment to appreciate its consideration.
There is a brief uphill walk from the bus stop to your destination. It does not bother you. Normally, uphill journeys bother you, especially after that experience with a former romantic companion escorting you home at the end of a day together ended with the memory of their tear-stained face being the last image of them you'd ever see. Today is different. The box does not bounce against your leg, regardless of your gait or pace. You can feel it trying to become part of you. You must continue to refuse it.
There is plenty of foliage to cover your desired point of entry to the hospital grounds. You bury the box under a pile of rotting leaves and shed carapaces of local wildlife. It will only take a few hours to decompose, and your mother cannot move that fast. She hasn't been able to move that fast in a long time.
Your eyes are burdened with iron eyelashes, a steel brow. You continue to refuse it. You press your foot onto the pile, and feel the box crack beneath your weight. Something spills out of it, but it does not touch you. It cannot anymore. You continue to refuse it. The something floods into the rotten leaves, fills empty shells and shed skins, fills all the gaps. You are not a gap. You continue to refuse it.
You are home. It is not your apartment. It is not your parents' house. It might be your cousins' house, or your grandparents'. It might be parts of each. The offices where the patriarchs work and are not to be disturbed, while they leave their doors open to disturbance. You look under their mousepads. Sometimes they leave a note, or a coin. You do not read them, and you do not take them. You know better than that. You are home. You are not home. Your chest is tight not from your mother's allergies but from your father's fear. You feel every component of your composite identity screaming to create and to exist and to cry havoc and to survive. You are not what you were. You never could be. Yet still you exist. You are in your apartment. You are home. You are not home. You never can be again. You stare into your radio. You must continue to refuse it. You must and yet it creeps into you again and again. You must continue to refuse it.
You choose to refuse it. You are not home, but you are back in your apartment, its uncomfortable humidity familiar enough to bring your mind and body back together, if only for a moment. You continue to refuse it. The box is gone. The house is gone. It takes some time every time. The box took your words but you took the victory. It hurt, certainly. But you returned to yourself still yourself. The delivery worker will return. It is not their fault. It is not your fault. There is food in your cabinets. You do not recall a grocery run. You put a numbers station broadcast on your inexpensive art tablet. You fall asleep on your couch in honor of yourself.