Letting a group out. A woman in a suit and black wool coat, a bunch of capes, and their prisoner.

“Her in particular,” Withdrawal finished.

That bad feeling had just gotten a whole lot worse.

Interlude 17.y (Sundown)

Caryatid, Then

Mope licked at her face, tongue stroking her eyes, licking the eyeball directly, dragging her eyelid closed so it would slowly open again. Mostly the eyes, she supposed, because she was crying. He searched the inside of her mouth, collecting her drool for himself, before wagging his tail for a moment, then whining.

I can’t play with you, Mope, Carrie thought to herself. Not today. My mind is a balloon attached to my body with a long, long string.

She looked down at the room like she imagined God looked down on people, but she could only really see what her eyes saw, one open and the other partially closed. Smell, though, she could smell the smoke and people and the more smoke and the booze, as if she was sampling the entire room. Or just what reached her nose, half stopped-up with snot. It made more sense for her current balloon-brain self to be bobbing around, tasting it and smelling it all over the place.

Mope nudged her body with a cold, wet nose.

She could hear too. Voices. Talking, conversation overlapping. Most of them were distant, because only her mom and stepdad came up to the second floor. Sometimes Cooler and Bottom Bunk did too, they were the guys that came over every weekend and some days after school. They were ‘family’ enough that they could go upstairs. When they came over, she stayed in her bedroom and maybe they would peek in on her and say hi.

She wondered, if God could see and hear and look down on everything like this, could she do that too? She floated like a balloon and the string felt shorter than it had a moment ago. Could her hearing sharpen until she could hear every word? Or would she remain a balloon with a funny string, until one day she popped or the string came undone and she never floated back down?

The mortal, existential fear that seized her had a grip on her brain while leaving her body taking its slow, shallow breaths.

This kind of fear came and went, like black food coloring or ink dropped into water, it made scary shapes at first, dark and unfurling like a black octopus wrapped in a cloak, then expanded out, reaching for every part of her brain. Unlike the ink, it was a threat, and she could imagine it was cold, cold enough to shut down her mind or make parts of it shiver like her body shivered uncontrollably sometimes.