WnW 12.a – Amygdala

10 minutes

“What’s wrong?”

“He isn’t crying. Babies are supposed to cry.”

“Let me see.”

“J- just don’t do anything.”

“Like what?”

“…”

“His motor functions are fine. He’s reacting to light and sound.”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“Oh? And why is that qualification important? If I were to cure your headache, would that make me a doctor? Or maybe if I were to score well on certain tests would that make me one?”

“I just-”

“If I were to cut you open and remove your gallbladder, would that make me a doctor? I could do it. I know where they keep the anesthetics. I know who to talk to. I know how I could make them give me 30 minutes in that room alone with you.”

“You’re right. He’s fine, I’m just tired.”

“Understandably so, you’ve created a life. I can hear the cells sing within the body. They vibrate.”

“He’s looking at you like he understands.”

The first memory I have is two piercing eyes filling my entire sight.

“No. He doesn’t. But he wants to.”

3 months

Two voices, one high, one low.

And the high voice was pitching higher as they cried out, “Stop that!”

“I’m teaching him not to be afraid of pain. Look at my face, Chase.”

The eyes loomed again very close. Ravenous.

“See my smile? This is nothing to be afraid of. Doesn’t it feel interesting? It’s strong, yes, but you can handle it. See?”

I started to cry.

“Fucking stop!” There was a loud crash of something breaking.

“You’re drunk,” the lower voice remarked.

“Making up for lost time. How about you feel a little pain for once?”

I looked at each of them. Trying to understand.

“Please. You’re so scared of life. Trying to dull it away with drink. We only live once. We shouldn’t waste a single drop of its essence.”

Movement caught my eye. Another person, much smaller than the other two, walked into the room.

“April, come with Mommy. Let’s go for a walk.”

“Bottle stays here.”

The door was slammed angrily, making my fists clench.

“My my. How startling.”

6 years

I ran after April, her long hair trailing behind her like a fleeing jellyfish. I could hear her hitched breaths and her feet padding on the grass and I felt like a predator chasing its prey. Each of us expending a little life in exchange for a chance at more.

We ran through the trees and out into our backyard where Dad was sitting on the steps, painting a chair.

“Daaaaaaaad!” April cried out, tears running down her face.

Dad put the paint brush down and stood as April ran into his arms.

“What has you so distressed?” Dad murmured, still looking at the chair.

“We were in the woods and Chase he-” she paused and sobbed for a moment, “he was cutting up a squirrel! With a knife!”

I held out the knife to show Dad. I’d gotten it from the kitchen by standing on a stool. I’d wedged a cushion underneath so the slightly uneven legs wouldn’t make a sound on the creaky floorboards.

Dad’s eyes finally left his project. Intention in every movement, he crouched and held April’s face still so he could stare into her eyes. “That’s awful! Life is precious. We shouldn’t waste it.

April stiffened and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to stifle her sobs.

“April.” Dad tapped her eyelids and she opened them reluctantly.

“Do you love Chase?”

April glanced at me and Dad forced her to look back at him. She nodded.

Dad let her go and took her by the hand. He finally looked at me and held out his hand.

“Come on, Chase. It’s time for a lesson. I think you are ready. I hope so,” he said that last part almost absently to himself.

I took his hand in mine, still sticky with blood.

He led us into the house and down the hallway, to the stairs that led to the basement. Dad went down here sometimes and told us not to follow him. I’d been curious for a long time what he was doing down there, but he kept the door locked.

My heart beat with excitement as we descended down the stairs. The walls were simple concrete and I tapped my knife along it as we went down. The basement itself was unfinished. Exposed pipes ran along the ceiling and the concrete floor was cool on my bare feet. The light from a single fluorescent bulb blanched the room with pale light. Most of the walls down here were unpainted plaster, but one of the walls had been painted a pure blank white. 

Dad bent down and took the knife from my hand. I stared into his eyes, seeing up close how the different strands in his iris were subtly different shades.

“Chase, you don’t seem to understand how valuable all life is. Every atom moves in a cosmic dance and once in a while, something becomes conscious so that the universe can watch itself unfold. We need to stretch every second of this experience to its maximum. To learn every truth about ourselves. That squirrel was part of the dance as well.”

“I just wanted to see how the muscles worked,” I said.

“An excellent curiosity. I understand that desire. But our destructive nature should be restrained. There are far more interesting crevices of reality to explore. And once you have a taste, you will see how the muscles move beneath the skin. You will be able to flay meaning from form without ending a life. So let me teach you.”

The knife tip pressed against April’s neck. Her eyes went wide and she froze. It was as if she had turned into one of her dolls.

“Do you love April?”

I nodded.

“Then turn around and face the wall.”

I did so.

“Step closer.”

I did so.

“Closer.”

My nose came inches away from touching the wall. All I could smell was dust and white nothing filled my entire vision.

“There is a thought experiment called Shrödinger’s Cat. We put a cat in a box with something that can kill it. But we can’t know for sure if it’s dead or alive until we open the box.”

April’s feet rasped against the floor and I heard her whimper for a second before silence. Then I could hear nothing but my own breathing.

“If you turn around, Chase, I’m going to kill April.”

I believed him. When my father said he would do something, it happened.

“Don’t open the box. And don’t close your eyes. I need you to see reality for what it is.”

I started to pant, staring rigidly at the wall, seeing nothing but imagining everything.

My senses felt like they were on fire. Every muscle in my neck was tense, ready to turn while simultaneously stopping itself from moving. I imagined every tiny noise, the rustle of clothing, the rumble of something outside, was the trigger for my sister’s death.

Eventually, the buzzing in my own head drowned out everything else. The wall became all-encompassing. It wrapped around me. Filled every part of my body. I could feel time passing like a gentle breeze caressing my mind.

10 years

“You’re such a freak!” the child teased. “Every day all you do is watch the ants. I bet you want to be an ant!”

His voice was mere sensation. I didn’t really mind. It was easy to ignore what he meant with his words and simply enjoy the buzzing.

I watched a procession of ants follow each other. They moved with such purpose, each little leg pumping with fluid, driving them towards that all important goal. Yet somehow, they hadn’t realized that the ant in the front of the line was following the one at the back. An endless loop. It was incredible to watch. All that effort, did it achieve anything? Would they continue like this for eternity? Or at least until they no longer had the strength in their tiny bodies to take even a single step more?

A shoe set itself down on the ants, wiping them out.

I leapt to my feet, seizing the child’s shirt and dragging him closer. The eyes were the easiest target. I could stick my fingers in them, make him squeal.

Hands wrapped around my chest and dragged me off of the child who was laughing like he didn’t know how close he had been to losing one of his five senses.

“Easy, Chase,” April spoke, hugging me close.

“I’m… so mad,” my teeth were clenched so hard that it was difficult to speak. “I want to make him stop laughing.”

“Control it. It isn’t safe here,” April said soothingly.

When I stopped resisting, she pulled me away from the child, to a secluded part of the playground. Then she let me go and I turned to her with wet eyes. 

“Please let me hurt him.”

April was a few years older than me, so she bent down to look me in the eyes. One was a bright blue and the other a dense hazel, like a whorl in a tree.

“No,” she said firmly. “Cause it you do, they’ll take you away from me. You have to push down the feelings. You can do it. You’re special like that. Most people can’t control themselves like we do.”

I thought of the ants who had never gotten to see what was at the end. “It’s hard.”

“I know. And later, when Dad is asleep, I’ll let you cry and scream and hit me until you’re satisfied. But right now, you have to chain it up. I’m your leash.”

I nodded and April patted me on the head. Once she walked away to talk to her friends, I went back to where the ants had died. Delicately, I placed each one of them into my palm. There were a few who were still wriggling, desperate to finish what they had started. I let them fall onto my tongue and savored the tangy flavour.

15 years

I crept into April’s room. She was sitting up in her bed, waiting for me and she patted the spot next to her. I sat down and closed my eyes. In the past, I’d been concerned about the limit to my restraint. How many ugly feelings could I stuff down the well before it was full? What if the next drop was too much and it would be the trigger of an eruption of blood and bile and curses? I knew now that this was an illusion. I could fill the well as much as I wanted, and it could always wait to be emptied until now.

“You were in the basement for a while,” April whispered softly.

“I think I finally get it,” I said.

“Yeah?”

My fingers wrapped into each other. I stared at the dark, seeing the eyes of my father in the corner of the room.

“He doesn’t love us. He’s too broken for that.”

April was silent for a moment. “Yeah.”

I looked at her. “But you never told me that.”

“I needed you to see for yourself.”

Looking down, a single tear dripped down my nose and plopped onto my thumb.

“That’s all?” April asked.

I searched the depths of the well, wondering if there should be more.

April showed me the scar on her hand, a perfect semi-circle around the base of her thumb. “I thought you might give me a matching one on the other hand.”

I had bitten down to avoid screaming. Even when I tasted her blood I hadn’t stopped and she hadn’t asked me to.

I realized I was shaking. A deep vibration at my core. There was something else in the well. Something I could produce at any time. I didn’t know where it came from. But I was glad for it. It was a relief.

April hugged me. “It’s okay. Let it all out. Here, where it’s safe.”

I put my face onto her shoulder and laughed quietly into the fabric of her shirt.

18 years

The wood handles of the wheelbarrow felt good against my palms. A roughness that could scrape my hands raw by the time I was done. I looked forward to it, something to help the time pass a little slower.

I came to the small clearing in the woods that we had chosen.

Dad was there. He watched me as April stood behind him with a loaded crossbow pointed at his back.

I plopped the wheelbarrow down. “Get in.”

He was quiet as he stared into my eyes. “I can see through you, Chase. You can’t hide anything from me.”

I spread my arms. “No hiding. If you run, you have a good chance of getting away. April isn’t that good of a shot.”

His expression didn’t change. “That seems like a good option then. I don’t want to die.”

“If you run, I’ll kill someone else.”

Dad frowned. “After everything I taught you, you’re going to take lives? You profane our existence. Life is-”

“You know, I appreciate your theory. It’s truly compelling and thought-provoking, but it has a flaw.”

“And that is?”

I looked at April.

She gave me a small smile and nodded. “It’s fine. It’s safe to do so.”

My smile spread from ear to ear. “The problem with your approach to life is that it has no drama. The stakes are so bleached it’s sickening. I don’t care that you’re fucked up in the head. I don’t care that you used every person in your life for your own satisfaction. What I have a problem with is that you don’t love the struggle. You don’t love stories. The universe loves them, that I’m sure of.”

Dad’s eyes went wide as he listened to me. After I finished, he beckoned me closer.

I came close enough that our noses were touching. His eyes became my whole world. 

“You’re enjoying this?” he asked, terror in his voice. It made his eyes shake.

“Absolutely.”

“I’m assuming you have a plan for the body?”

“Your body, Dad. Pay attention. We’ll wheel you out into the wilderness. Cut you up and feed you to the coyotes. Clean the bones and then April has a friend in the crematorium business. We’ll mix you in with the ashes of a few people.”

“Good. Leave no trace. You have my blessing for this grand experiment.”

He paused. “Will I suffer?”

I pulled out my knife. “Yes. Be sure to experience it fully.”

20 years

I was on a different planet. The paint on the wall was nuanced. It had valleys and mountains like frozen waves, like a great ocean under a dead sun. It was as vast as space and many things lived there. They moved without moving, dancing just past the concepts of physical reality. Living paint. Electricity that could sing. The folds I peered past were the folds of my own mind and everywhere I looked, there were only deeper depths.

I was lost but I wanted to be. This was home. A place where time felt eternal and yet there was nothing to do.

I could spend hours here and I often did. Without a single input from the outer world. I could ignore all of it. But today, a voice pierced through my reverie. It was one that was familiar, it tugged nostalgically on my memories. The voice of my mother. Faint, muffled, speaking outside of the house.

“This is it.”

A stranger responded, “Just the two of them?”

“Yes. Ever since their father went missing. He was mentally ill. The bastard passed it on to them.”

“We don’t get a lot of targets as golden as these two. Most people, even the loneliest have a connection or two that would wonder about them if they disappeared. Here’s the pay.”

April wrapped her arms around my shoulders, bringing me back into the room. “How are you doing?”

“Someone is here for us,” I said.

She froze. “Who? Did the police find out?”

“No. They were speaking to Mom.”

“She’s here?!”

Seconds later the front door banged open. I moved April behind me and faced the stairs. I didn’t think about the well inside me much these days. But at the thought of someone taking April, I felt something slither past in that dark hole.

Three men walked down the basement stairs, holding guns with laser sights that centered in on me when they saw me. After a momentary silent staredown, one of the men reached into a pocket and pulled out zip-ties and black sacks.

“Put these on.”

“Here to take us to a chop shop?” I asked, a smile creeping onto my face as I tried to think of a way to fight back. “I guess Mom is finally desperate enough for money that she’d sell us for our organs?”

To my surprise, the men chuckled.

Then one of them spoke, “Don’t look so excited. Whatever your expectations are, I can promise you you’re wrong.”

20 years

When the sacks were finally removed from our heads, zip-ties were cut, and the door was slammed and deadbolt was slid into place, we were in a cell with padded walls. There was a mounted camera in the corner of the room.

April rubbed her wrists, looking around.

Then a voice emanated from a hidden speaker. “You’re probably the most stoic captives we’ve seen.”

I chuckled. “This is a pretty fun setup. I’ve never been to an old asylum before.”

The voice didn’t respond. I grinned, enjoying their confusion at how I knew where we were. I did my best work devoid of sensation. The smallest shifts in the vehicle, the specific potholes that were driven over, they were all pieces I used to construct a mental map.

April poked me and when I looked, she pointed at the metal case that sat on the bed.

I went over and opened it. Two vials sat nestled inside a foam insert. The vials were each already fitted with an injector apparatus. The intent was clear.

The voice spoke, “I offer an easy choice. Sit and starve, or inject yourself and I will open the door. You will have your chance at freedom.”

I picked up a vial and held it up to the light. The liquid inside was as clear as water. “Not to look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said. “But why let us roam free? I’m very intrigued by this. Would it not be better to observe the effects of a drug in an isolated space?”

The response came quicker than I expected. “Stress is important to the test. We want emotions running as high as possible. Hope is a necessary factor.”

I grinned wider and held the vial up to my neck and pressed the plunger.

“That’s all I needed to hear.”

20 years

The pulse in the scientist’s neck trembled along my knife, vibrating all the way up the handle and into my hand.

The asylum was ablaze. Something massive had burst through the roof of one of the buildings and was keeping the attention of Organ’s soldiers.

An impossible level of tissue growth while retaining function. More indications of something potentially beyond the constraints of physics taking place.

I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts that plagued me. The thoughts were getting louder and more incessant ever since I took the vial.

The connection is obvious. The vial changes everyone in different ways. April, and my own body, and that thing are all affected.

The scientist had said something quietly and the thoughts had made me miss it.

I dug the point of the knife deeper, feeling the pulse quicken like the heart was excited to meet the knife. “Repeat that. I didn’t hear you.”

“Th- the Shaping, it was unstable. Most of the time in the results, we see two kinds of failure states. One is the warping of the mind past human limits, creating a monster we call Aberrant. The other…”

The scientist hesitated and I sighed.

“Honestly, I don’t know how I can threaten you further. I should get better at this.” I watched in awe as the massive biological thing roared and completely tore through the side of the building. It was heading towards us. Perhaps it was the sheer bulk of its movements, but it gave the feeling of a bear, lumbering and utterly powerful.

The scientist started to babble in fear, “The other result is that the Shaping takes too much energy out of its host. The Shape doesn’t complete before the body’s reserves are spent. We don’t know enough about the source of Shaping to know why this happens, sometimes people feel fine afterwards, it-”

I felt numb. The voice in my head was desperately trying to tell me something, but I ignored it and shoved it down the well.

I cut the scientist off, “You’re rambling. Spell it out.”

He winced and closed his eyes. “She’s dead.”

I gazed at April, encased in what looked like pink quartz, with veins of marble white running through it. Minuscule little pieces lifted off of her shoulders and head like dandruff falling gently into the sky. Storm clouds rumbled overhead, as if greeting my sister.

Her expression was so serene.

Dead?

I felt like I should have a response to that.

The leash had gone limp. The safe space was gone. If I didn’t do something, all that poison that I had stuffed down the well, it would come spilling out. This was bad. This was very bad. I need to. I needed to…

What?

There was nothing there. I peered down into the well and it was empty. I felt myself descend into it, realizing that it was much larger than anything in the real world. It was the wall. It was my father’s eyes.

I slit the scientist’s throat without really thinking about it, but he didn’t look concerned. A visage of apathy, like he knew what I saw.

I stumbled past my sister, knocking into her. Larger fragments broke free, looking like tiny icicles. The bear was getting closer.

People were screaming. Organ staff and captives alike were running around, trying to find a way out. The doors had been remotely locked. Whoever was at the top was willing to sacrifice their own staff in order to see this play out, contained within the walls of the abandoned asylum.

I sat down on the steps of another ward, watching the last of April crumble and disappear.

I smiled. There was nothing left to hold me down.

A rain of pink slivers of crystal fell, slicing through anything and anyone left in the field between the wards. Blood sprayed as people were cut into ribbons by the lethal rain. I laughed over the screams of pain and terror.

Sis gets it.

April wanted the chaos, just like me. The drama of the universe eating itself.