Kitchen Tiles

You were there when the house swallowed you whole, when death came and reaped what life had sowed. It was your blood, splattered on the walls, pooling beneath you on the kitchen tiles, a stretching puddle.

The last thing you saw was an axe. When its blade carved into your skull, you didn’t feel pain, not at first. All you saw in your right eye was red, and all you felt was a reverberation, the force of an earthquake trembling within your skull. You reached up to touch your head in shock of it all and felt something squish against your touch, something wet and pulpy. The blade was a blur as it was brought down again, more centered now, in-between your eyes. It lingered there. You blinked.

Death was not an absolute for you. You thought that it would be life, dying, then death. A peaceful resolution in bed at home, surrounded by love and tranquility. But not for you. It was blurry, it was a burst of blood across your eyes, it was your brains smeared across the floor, it was the sound of you gargling on your own blood while you attempted to push your last death rattles through the thickness of it. It was the heartbeat in your head, the rapid pulses that throbbed in tempo with the blurry halo that circled your vision, larger and larger. Yours was violent, messy.

The thought that carried you over was something pleasant. With your brain the way it was, you couldn’t remember their faces, their voices, their names, the moment. But you remembered it. The warmth, the love, the safety you felt in your chest. Nothing specific, just a concept, a vague imprint of it. Something that just melted out onto the kitchen floor. Flashes that slipped through your fingers before you could completely grasp it, like sand.

You couldn’t recall your name, either. You held an idea that you were something, someone, at least at one point in time. Your identity was hollow; it bled out with your life onto the tiles and left nothing behind the words I or me. No face or name, just a sense that this all meant something once, and that you were.

Distantly, you saw the axe, your blood staining it, the blurred face of your murderer behind it. You tried to move, but your limbs were weighed down by something unseen, something heavy. Like they were made of lead. Somewhere, deep down, you felt yourself scream, but no sound came out.

You knew that if you let that halo around your vision wash over you, you would die. Or, maybe, you were already dead, and that was the finality of it. You weren’t sure anymore. You felt yourself fade in and out, flicker like a candle flame against the wind. You struggled to find something to hold on to, something to tether you and pull you back down. But, there was nothing and no one to save you.

In that moment, you began to dissipate, like wisps of smoke once the flame was extinguished. The dark tide of nothingness swept you under its current, and there you were, floating. The kitchen was gone, the axe was gone, the wound stopped throbbing. You sank beneath the floor and felt your physical body bleed away. You were nothing and you were everything, floating, infinite.

Now, you could scream. You did, and it echoed for light-years. It tore through your chest that now stretched for eons. Your consciousness melted into a puddle of infinity, of cosmos, of universes. And when you screamed they all trembled with it. You were dead. You were dead. This pain was not just your own anymore.

You don’t know how long you had been screaming. Seconds, hours, days– time didn’t exist for you. The void did not reach out to comfort you, offering you nothing but silence.

Then, the kitchen began to ebb and flow back into existence around you. Warped, murky, fleeting moments of staring back up at the ceiling, flashes of faces you didn’t recognize, flashes of cooking and laughing and eating. You tried to grab onto them, these milliseconds of mercy, but you could never quite pull yourself closer, never finding that familiarity.

Finally, you stood back in your kitchen again. You stumbled, the world swirling and tilting around you, your consciousness slipping back into that void. No. No. You pulled yourself forward, determined not to go back, determined to stay right here where you belonged. Where you lived– except, the wallpaper was a different color now, the tiles different. A rug in front of the stove that wasn’t there before. New curtains.

You opened your mouth to call for help, but no sound came out. You were dead. It rang hollow in your mind, but the more you tried to speak, the more that meaning began to sink in like a bullet. You were dead. Still, no sound.

Time flickered, and you were standing over a kitchen table with young faces sitting around it, their hands clasped together and a candle placed in the middle of the table. It was the only thing illuminating the dark kitchen. Your mind barely managed to latch onto the moment, shakily, like a slight breeze may blow you away from it. But you seeped into the present enough that you felt, faintly, the tiles beneath your feet, the solidity of something corporeal.

“Are you with us right now?” one of the young faces said, voice quivering.

With this presence came a thunderclap of pain— the axe that lodged itself in your skull, split it in half, splinters of bone in the mangled flattened meat of your brain. It hit your face like a train, and you screamed. The sound was grounded, almost as centered as those people sitting around the table. The edges of it blurred away, but it was there, it was almost solid, and those teens around the table felt it.

Most of them jumped, some gasped loudly, one of them whimpered. They looked around with wide, panicked eyes, and you began to fade again. You struggled to hold on, no, no, not again, you—

“HELP ME!” You cried, with everything you could muster, all of the energy of the moment that you soaked in. Then, you faded again, like a gust of wind dying down.

Time must have passed, but not for you. With a blink, the darkness of the kitchen turned to gentle sunlight streaming through the windows, a blurry brightness that enveloped you. There was laughing, somewhere, and talking. Kitchen utensils, forks on plates, the smell of food, eggs and sausage.

Another flicker, time wavering and warping around you. Laughter, a young child's, the sound of plastic toys hitting each other just outside of the room, the sun hanging high and centered in the sky as it blared through the windows.

Again, time slipped from you, like water flowing down a stream. The sun had set and the night consumed the windows. A girl, one you recognized from some time ago, talked on the phone at the kitchen table while painting her nails a vivid red--

"Yeah," she said to someone unseen, "they had to completely redo this kitchen 'cause of the murder that happened here. We got it for cheap 'cause no one wanted to buy it."

There was a quick response, and you couldn't quite hear the words, but the girl in the kitchen said back, "Yeah, it's fucked up. We think it's haunted 'cause we heard a scream once."

A stranger sat in your kitchen, painting her nails as she casually spoke of your murder, your life, the ending of your breath. Every moment you had lived for nothing, every thump of your heart leading to the moment you stood in your kitchen, deceased, alone, angry, listening to idle chat about the moment an axe carved out your brain and splattered it on the floor where she sat. This nightmare that stretched on, this nightmare that was yours alone, and she could not comprehend your pain. She barely even knew you were there, but it was your kitchen, this was your home. This meant nothing to her. You meant nothing to her.

Your anger exploded from you like a flash of lightning, like a volcano of misery, and when your despair wracked through your incorporeal body, the light bulb in the kitchen burst, and the girl screamed. She whirred around, and in the dim light flooding in from another room, she saw you. Your eyes locked, and in that moment of mutual recognition, her eyes widened to the size of golf balls, tears welling in her eyes and streaming down her face. The voice from the phone still spoke no recognizable words, but had a tone of urgency, of panic.

After the anger had faded, you reached out, and your mouth formed the words I'm sorry but the sound never reached her, never left your chest.

She yelled something, and her voice became as distant and incoherent as the one on the phone, your energy dissipating as you faded from the kitchen once again. The halo of darkness closed around you, and with a blink, you were gone.

Another blink, and you were there, at the table once again, and the girl sat in front of what you recognized as a toy-- a ouija board. Her hands trembled on the planchette, the house enveloped in darkness, her face barely illuminated by the candle that sat on the table across from her. You don't know how long it had been since you last saw her, though it felt like seconds.

"Is there anyone here?" She asked.

You shifted, and you were suddenly at the opposite end of the table; you didn't have to walk anymore. This was becoming easier to you, if only slightly. It was a nightmare, though it was becoming easier to accept the rules of it.

The thought of being heard and having someone to talk to soothed a deep loneliness that had settled within your core, a screaming pain that ached for someone to see you. Being alone like this for eternity was daunting. It filled you with a sense of dread that almost made you shake like you were alive.

The moment was grounding. There was something about the darkness, the full moonlight in the windows, the way the candle created a soft beacon. You noticed, in that moment, that the girl was wearing a witch hat and a tattered black dress. Memories of candy, of houses lit up on dark chilly nights, dead leaves billowing in the breeze.

It was easier to reach out now. Finally, in response to her question, you reached out, and placed your fingers on the planchette across from the girl's own. She gasped as you began to drag it over to the word yes.

The silence that fell over you two was smothering. You thought, for that moment, of axes, of your brains on the floor, of this vague sense of who you used to be. Your heart cried, and you wondered what it would be like to be alive tonight.

"What's your name?" She asked.