When it ‘went’, it wasn’t really gone. It stayed with her forever and made her thoughts a little bit more black overall. The fear would keep drip-dropping in, shocking every time it appeared, tinting the water darker each time.

Stark fear drip-dropping in at random, until her floating, bobbing balloon mind couldn’t get any darker and was that inky, shroud-wrapped octopus.

What happened then?

The door opening and the blinding light shining in her eyes was a welcome distraction from the old fear and a new blot, blot, blot of fear. Because everything was terrifying when all you had was a string tying you to your body.

The music was louder, pounding. Someone sang along.

Two men, she observed. They were hard to make out because she was looking down on the room from an impossible height, like the room had a ceiling a hundred feet high and her balloon mind had come to rest on it, looking down.

Mope whined.

“Hey Mope,” Cooler said. “Hey, Carrie girl. Eidolon jammies.”

Eidolon jammies? When had she got those? Was she losing her mind?

Was this how the balloon went away? Deflating? The important things leaking out?

Her thoughts knotted and twisted up with the sensations, the smell of Cooler’s incessant cigarette smoking, and of booze, and body odor, and of sex. He sat on the corner of the bed and called Mope up.

“Who’s a good boy?” Cooler asked, words blurring into each other. It wasn’t that her hearing wasn’t sharp. It was that he was drunk. Mope nudged at her body’s butt, whined, and then hopped down from the bed, going downstairs. Without the dog to hold onto, Cooler sat there, swaying visibly even while sitting down. He fiddled with something he had resting on his knee.

“Let’s leave,” came the voice from the door. Cooler ignored the voice.

Bottom Bunk leaned against the doorway, arms folded. He looked so unhappy. The smell of him was worse. He smelled like her mouth tasted when she threw up a bit but the barf never left her mouth. Sour and bitter.

Him smelling like that made her hate him because it was awful, and because every time he got near, she had the exact same struggle to put her finger on what that smell was like. She had the exact same conclusion: barf in the mouth. Then she had the exact same thought after.

What if she threw up in her mouth? Right now? What if thinking that very thought made it happen?

Drops of black ink unfurling into horrifying shapes without meaning. Black ugliness with nowhere to go because it couldn’t travel down that string to her body.