On Ritual, Rot, & Rescue Pt. 02

A month slides by, slow and invisible, like dust settling on places you don't look. It's February, or near enough that the light has no conviction. I come home when the sky outside is the colour of old water. My scrubs wear the day's story in creases and stains: a patch of dried vomit near the thigh, a rust shadow on the sleeve that might be blood or soup. I don't bother changing until the smell insists.

Above me, Imogen moves--weight redistributed across floorboards, the dull thud of a mat dragged into place. I hear the hum of earbuds sometimes, the breath of muffled rhythm. It comforts me, that presence, not watched but sensed, like a houseplant left in a room that continues to photosynthesise.

Our lives intersect in fragments--a shared banister, the slope of morning on the stair. These handovers, brief and bleary-eyed, are filled with exchanges about bins or broadband, radiators that knock like disapproving relatives. I register the girl's face in flashes: sweat at the temples, a graze on the elbow, mascara smudged just slightly in the corner. Then she is gone again. Most days, we nod. Sometimes, we smile. Always, we continue.

At first, I like the girl's age--twenty--a figure soft and round in my mind, like the word *plenty*. I imagine proximity to it might grant me some small benefit, like heat from another room. But that illusion goes fast. You can't siphon from youth without looking desperate. I've seen myself too many times--in mirrors, in windows, in the unblinking faces of women on the street. It's not that I'm invisible. It's that I am now seen differently: like furniture, or signage, or a nurse you nod to and then forget.

Imogen's presence spreads in evidence. A Sylvia Plath paperback appears on the coffee table, its corners bent into wings. The cover worn, the poet's face half faded by thumb oil. A purple blanket unfurls on the sofa, always left folded but never quite the way I would fold it. Shoes gather by the door in soft, cluttered herds--cheap ballet flats, runners frayed at the heel, black boots with thick laces and a kind of menace. You can tell a lot by a person's shoes. You can tell what they're prepared for.

We begin to speak in notes. Bright yellow squares that multiply across surfaces. *Milk's running low!* stuck to the fridge. *Thanks for fixing the radiator!* on the landing mirror. *Left you some pasta in the fridge x*--the little kiss a mystery. Affection? Habit? Imogen's notes are round, effusive, casual. My replies come in biro and block print. *Window cleaner's coming Monday. Shut windows. Please lock the back door.* The tone not unfriendly, but precise. Trimmed.

I don't mind the quiet between us. Don't even think of it as distance.

***

At two in the afternoon, I jolt awake. The first day of my four off, and my body's still laced to ward-time--a clock that rings behind the eyes. My room is dry and full of that slow afternoon light that tastes like dust. Curtains breathe in and out against the closed window. Downstairs, the house is still.

No footsteps.

No music.

Imogen is out.

The carpet hushes me as I move--not so much walking as arriving. The living room receives me like an emptied theatre, the late sun caught in the lace of the curtain. I don't know why I've come in here. Something like gravity pulls me.

There on the coffee table, the Plath book waits. Black cover, silver font--*Ariel*, the old edition. Its spine broken, like a thing handled too often or with too much need. I pick it up, not to read, but to feel its weight. I flip absently through pages and find them tattooed by Imogen's hand.

In the margins, confessions: *"Is this freedom or just surrender?"* *"The way she turns pain into power..."* *"Am I allowed to feel this angry and alive?"*

The words are more than notes--these are moments caught mid-exhale, a girl's inward howl pinned like a moth. Just ink. But it feels like walking in on someone naked at prayer. I close the book. Don't mark the page.

I move to the kitchen. A trail of dirty mugs marks my path--lipstick shadows, stains like sediment. In the utility room, the air goes cold. Damp walls. The sour tang of wet cloth. Behind the tall plastic soldiers of domestic life--bleach, detergent, floor cleaner that promises *Citrus Breeze*--I find what I came for. Four magazines, spines creased to splitting.

*Mistress. Leather Room. Sapphic Dom.* Pulp wrapped in gloss. Covers slick with suggestion: dark lips, zipped dresses, a hand pulling back hair.

I remember the last time someone found them. An ex-girlfriend--blonde, loud, legs always crossed like she was guarding something--had held one up like a dead thing. *"It's sick,"* she'd said. *"These power games you're into. You're perverse."* Three days later, she'd left. A note in the hallway: *"incompatible desires"*, *"Jekyll and Hyde."*

I go to bed. Shut the curtain, bring the magazines with me. I lie on my side and hike up my nightgown.

Inside the pages: women kneel or tower, mouths open in pleasure or command. But it isn't the images I want. It's the letters. The stories. That old architecture of yearning--some stranger typing out a fantasy where pain is permission and shame is rewired into praise.

I flip to one. A woman in a navy skirt makes another wait outside a supermarket, no underwear, just the promise of later. Another where an executive locks the office door and leads her assistant by the hair. They are always well-spoken, these women. Well-dressed. Cruel with a kind of affection.

I turn the page. Then another.

My mind loops back--July, thick with sun and the sugar-rot of heat. The air had smelled of cut grass and bin bags, that sickly mix of life pared back and things just beginning to spoil. I heard the sound before I saw it: a frantic, papery flutter, like breath snagging in a paper bag.

The bird was small, yellow-chested. A finch, maybe. Its wing bent at an angle that made no sense. It trembled on the concrete, stunned but alive, too young to fly, too scared to flee. A heart beating without purpose.

I'd scooped it up. So light it barely registered in the hollow of my hand. I found a shoebox, an old tea towel, tucked it into shade. I dripped water from my fingertip to its beak. It drank. That desperate little gape.

But I knew. You always know.

The kind thing--*the right thing*--would be swift. Clean.

My hands didn't shake. I reached in. Took it out. One movement. One. But I misjudged. Too much force, too fast. The crack was wrong--wet, thick, messy. A part of it opened that shouldn't. Blood on my fingers. Bright and slick, and something soft and stringy, twitching once before stopping. Its head sagged at the neck, half off.

I dropped it in the bin, quick and sick, and went upstairs.

The smell was still on me--iron and heat, life turned inside out. I didn't wash. I pressed hard. I was already wet.

When I came, it startled me. Not the strength of it, though that was frightening too--white and thick as cream--but the thing that cracked in me, *through* me. And after I cried, but it wasn't from guilt. It was the pressure of something ancient and molten now loose, and finally, finally allowed to spill.

Now, in the thick quiet of this off-duty hour, the magazines fall from my hand.

I give up.

Rise.

Go to the shower.

The water comes slow, then all at once. Steam climbs the tile. I lean my head into it, and let the heat bite my neck.