A Ghost Limb

The long stretch of manure-soaked highway outside Visalia reminded those who so rarely strayed from their air-conditioned temples about the existence of soil and livestock. My mom referenced the smell more than a couple times as we drove, as if to eradicate the piles of cow dung through ritual chant. Contrary to her perception, the valley of farms, orchards, and tilled plots of land did not conjure a water-color pastoral scene found on a china set, or smell like refrigerated fruit. Instead it was aching backs, dirt-covered knees, zigzags of strawberries, variants of red stretching into the horizon. And most importantly, shit. Tons of shit. People waited in parking lots, hoping for work outside the scattered Home Depots and Lowe’s. I peered out the window, shoving gluts of bread into my mouth as I watched them smoke cigarettes, the sun beating down on the hardened tar. 

“Did you get your pee and timber, woman?” I asked.

“You always give me a hard time,” my mom responded, as if I’d hurt her feelings.

“I’m not giving you a hard time man, it’s just funny how you have to pee every three miles.”

“Wait till you’re my age, then you’ll regret the days you gave your poor mother shit.”

“We’ll see.”

She promised two hours of swift driving, but instead we broke off thirty minutes in, having spotted fresh fruit on the side of the road. The rain had come early: mercy for those breathing the dry dusty August air, but malady to the confused, disfigured fruits. Citrus dropped mutated with tentacles, GMO strawberries bulged before bursting into icky stick, owing to perpetual, endless rainstorms. I looked at them nestled and felt a strange kinship to those things brought into the world too early, malformed, lives shaped by freak sequences of weather, life seemingly unjustified in its malformity, jutting not from intent or purpose but more for the fuck of it. With the strawberries and mangoes on my lap I gave my lame philosophical sermon. My mom’s response was divine interference; tactically, one of the easier responses. Of my whole family she, my mother, was the last lingering Christian, at least truly. I thought something had brought me to where I was, but doubted it was god. I decided it was useless to unearth the deeply planted roots of others when the roots went to the core, one is better off disengaging. I watched the pink of the sunset on my mom’s soft face, eyes delicate enough to still need sunglasses, even as the sun went down. 

“Why did your sister tell me I look ‘exotic?’” I asked, knowing why.

“I don’t know sweetheart did it bother you?”

“No.” 

“Okay then.” 

So I figured I had built myself like a gas station bathroom, at best a dilapidated construction of comfort and familiarity to those I met, conjured by pastels, general cleanliness, stored colloquialisms, and it was enough—at least it usually was. It was always my mom’s sisters who looked at me funny, but she usually hated her sisters anyways. 

 Henry sat waiting under the orange tree in the dark smoking yellows as we pulled up. I exited the vehicle quickly, almost too quickly, slapping the door closed like I’d forgotten the woman inside. She followed me swiftly, feeling the coldness of the speed. 

“You sure you have a ride back?” she said, her voice strained as I had already begun moving a bag into the house. 

“Yeah, Henry will drive me it’s fine.”

“Okay.” She waved to me once more, Henry waved, and then she pulled away.

Henry looked up at me, letting out a puff and pulling the chair out in one swift jolt. We stared down at our calloused feet on the brick, quietly pulling cigarettes. 

“So you’ve decided you’re going?” Henry asked.

“Well I’ve made it this far, she wants to meet me, and I feel I have to go.”

“We’ll be in California again, it’s not like this is the only time.”

“I’m ready, okay. I need to do this, I have to.”

“Whatever you say. What do they think?”

“Oh I didn’t tell her. Or my dad.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be fine, this is your journey.”

“Yeah … ”

I looked off past the oranges and cascading smoke to the strong four or five lingering. It seemed possible in desert skies, held by mysterious beautiful fabric, the plentitudes of stars a symbol of the infinite. But here, with the scant city sky, felt familiar, in all its deep darkness. 

“You sure you don’t want me to come in with you? Or at least drop you off at the house?” he asked me. We hadn’t talked the whole way. 

“No, leave me here, it’s fine.” 

“Call me if you need me.”

“I won’t it’s okay.” 

I sat in the kitchen of the woman who had given birth to me. She was a head and a half shorter, almost amusingly short compared to me, with a thick black bun of hair at the base of her skull. Almost the entire time, her barefoot children clung to her maternal figure with great enthusiasm. They glared up at me with something like a deep gawking curiosity, in a twinkling, harmless way. I couldn’t tell if they knew. On her fridge were little magnets of faeries and trees. I could see her impish children dancing among them. It was the afternoon but she poured me wine. It sat in my hand like a dark red weight. I felt calm, steady and easy, but I thought to myself, steady and easy. It wasn’t entirely real. 

She asked if we could sit outside and we did. It was warm and sunny, plus outside, there's more. More to pick at. To point out in harmless observation. Plants, dry walls, disparate people wandering through weedy backyard. Kindling for a conversation between two strangers, and also not strangers. She told me about when she didn’t leave bed for months, about having me at seventeen. Not going to college until she was twenty-one. To not to waste time on men. But also about her boyfriends, her current boyfriend, his training to become a nurse. About drinking too much. About living with a spirit that seeks destruction. I offered her the soft white stripes on the inside of my arm, as if to say, me too. 

I even got tipsy enough to tell her how I had forgotten I was adopted for years. How, while standing in the shower at seventeen, I felt it, and remembered it, really for the first time realized it. I walked inside and went to the bathroom, the same as her family. Without thinking I rifled through her hair products. In the living room were photos of living blood, dead blood, fumbled origins of recent immigrants, cultish garb and years lived in India. Portraits and all the forgettable easily passed-by trinkets of a home gathered and clumped in lovely dusty corners, candy wrappers and mermaid toys. I knew I was not a part of it. I was dumb lucky, and I knew it, but also truly felt half of me ripped and oozing lost blood. I did not find it in the photos of strangers with hair dark like mine, the other part of me, the ghost limb. I couldn’t trace it. Even as a mutant occurrence, as a fundamental accident, I wanted the woman who complained about the smell of shit, who had driven me, many miles by pink churches peppers and adobe graveyards, she would hear me cry at night, and come to my room. 

 After leaving I sat in a green place. I wished I could burrow deep into the soil, joining the generations in the dirt, how they suffered, I would never know their suffering, even though everything was beautiful and perfect. It was not a guarantee to be alive but a part of me wished to donate it back, to not be a parasite clinging to the lives of others. But the plants sprung neon and crept up the mountains and lay glistening with dew under trees. And even though nature at times seemed a horrible dance, there was palpable joy in the eerie aliveness of plants and grasses so long left without rain. When rain did come to them they were overfed, gluttonous, jolting with invisible electricity conjured in the most desiccant of times. 

The little instances came to me, hearing cracks in the voices of others, the color of air fresheners at gas stations, weddings around large turquoise fountains. The horribly mundane details. Times when it seemed all the living things withered away from the world. Many agreed, without knowing it, as they expeditioned around to see the anomalies of a great rain, golden poppies and decorated fields that the most vibrant and beautiful lands were often the ones left longest deprived. The lands left longest without gully washers and rains, the ones that thought they had seen their own end. I placed my hands on the plants and trees that make their own food and watch the world quietly and thought, the river continues to flow, how can I keep from singing. 

Mommy Issues | December 2019

The Six

In the first installment of “The Six”, a man named Tai finds a young boy, Shin, alone in the forest. As Tai promises to help Shin reconnect with his missing friends, the two encounter a door and enter it, finding themselves in an unfamiliar room.

On its mantle were various knick-knacks. Model airplanes, ships in bottles, ceramic figurines, the most appealing of which was a cat. A comfortable-looking feline sleeping and curled around a white circle marked with needles and numbers.

A clock.

Perhaps an agent—a spy for the grandfather back in the meadow. Perhaps, but not likely. It was broken. Decommissioned. Never again to tick the tock of its kind, it simply displayed the time: 8:37. A reminder of the day it died. Its last words.

Most remarkable about this room, however, wasn’t its contents. Instead, it was the palette of everything in it. The color scheme was … it was …

“A disgusting spectrum of grays. But that’s life, isn’t it? There’s no clear line between black and white. Just gray, gray, gray.”

Suddenly, there was a girl in the room with them. The sassy remark droned out of her mouth in a dull repetition. Arranged into a neat pile and propped up in front of the television was a plethora of pillows. In fact, all around the room there were pillows scattered about in lazy patterns. However, the mound of fluffy squares that gathered in the middle was nothing short of a bouncy throne in a kingdom of clouds. 

That’s where the girl lounged. She laid across them in a long, relaxed stretched-out pose. She wore pajama shorts that barely peeked out from under an oversized cotton shirt that hung on her like a nightgown. All of it was gray like the room. Even the girl herself was trapped in a sepia portrait. Lips, skin, and eyes were all various shades of an artist’s sketchpad. Long hair dropped past her shoulders in unruly charcoal tangles.

She expertly held a gamepad in her hands. A controller. Connected with a wire, it zig-zagged across the carpet in a labyrinth of curls until it plugged into a video game console next to the TV. As she focused on the images appearing on screen, she repositioned a pair of coke-bottle eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose.

“Hey Null, good to see you,” Shin greeted cheerily.

The girl looked to him, but quickly returned her attention to the screen, unwilling to tear her eyes from it for too long. She popped a potato chip into her mouth from an open bag beside her

“How’s it going little man? Come to watch and see how far I get in the game today?” she asked. “I’ll save you the anticipation: it’s the same as it was yesterday.”

Shin moved into the pile of pillows and found himself a spot next to her. He was always a fan of armrests, so he sighed with delight as his elbow sunk into the feathery lump of softness beneath him. The embroidered fluff gave a wheeze of appreciation. Tai picked a seat on the opposite side and found himself hugging a throw pillow in the shape of a fox head. He played with the ears, flopping them back and forth with child-like enamor..

Null swung her head around to look at the unfamiliar intruder. Strange. Unusual. A really stupid smile. Where’d he come from? Before she could confront him, the TV trilled with excitement and recalled her attention to it. Her fingers began mashing buttons purposefully 

“Who’s the square?” Null wondered aloud. “Don’t remember him coming around here before.”

Shin laughed. “Yeah, he kind of just appeared out of nowhere. He’s a friend though. A little funny, definitely weird, but I like him.” 

“Uh-huh,” Null droned. Her interest waned quickly, and soon she completely forgot that the two of them were in the room with her.

“My name is Tai,” the square said. “Nice to meet you.”

The girl shuddered, fully realizing she wasn’t alone. “Uh … Yeah. Sure. Good to meet you too, I guess. People call me Null.” The TV beeped and flickered for a moment. Almost like it was introducing itself into the conversation. “Is there a reason you’re here, Tai?” Null asked.

“Well—” Tai started, but Shin interrupted.

“We’re going to bring everyone together. It’s about time we go home, don’t you think?”

Null scoffed. “Oh, this again, huh? Didn’t I make my stance clear last time? This idea of trying to bring the six of us back home is pointless. We’re all too different from each other. Oil and water. Better off just giving up. This is working out, isn’t it?” She swiped a couple more chips as she spoke and chewed on them absentmindedly.

Shin frowned. “Don’t be like that, Null. You know this isn’t really working. Everyone’s just miserable on their own.”

“Yup, sounds about right.”

“No, sounds about wrong,” Shin countered. “We’re not supposed to be this way. All broken and separated.”

“And why not?”

“That’s just how it is. Don’t you remember? We used to be happy. Strong. A team. When we were together, we could do anything. Experience the world and see wonder around every corner. You remember, don’t you Null? Don’t you?”

“I don’t want to remember!” Null flung the controller from her hands, causing it to ricochet over the mountain of pillows and crash onto the carpet. The outburst was vicious and unexpected. She was breathing erratically. Her fingers trembled.

“I don’t want to remember,” she repeated. “Don’t you get that? It’s all rather pointless. Everything. Talking to the others, trying. Why try? Why try? After all, nothing we do will matter. 300 years from now, everything we do, right now, means absolutely nothing.

“I can’t do it. I can’t keep putting forth all this effort for no reason. It’s taxing. Draining. We argue about the smallest problems as if their answers are the secret to solving world hunger, and what do we get in exchange for these wrinkle lines? Nothing. Repetition. Remission. Regression. I’ve been here before, we all have. This isn’t the first time we’ve separated and it probably won’t be the last time either. We get so pent up with anger and then run off like moody toddlers refusing to talk to each other. It sucks. It really, really sucks. We keep coming back to this and it’s just not worth it to keep trying.

“So yeah, we’re miserable, but at least we’re not failing anymore, right? I’m tired of feeling like a failure. I want to forget how it hurts. That’s not too much to ask for, is it? The world doesn’t matter, the people in it don’t matter. Just let me be numb. I’ll turn off like a TV screen, and be empty, blank. Everyone, stay away from me. Let me exist, but don’t expect anything more from me. Stay away. I’m here. I’m alive, aren’t I? That should be good enough.”

The silence was piercing. It had a weight of finality. Even Null herself stopped moving. She was sitting cross-legged staring at her hands like foreign objects holding an ancient, unknown secret.

Shin didn’t speak. He was afraid this would happen. He could be as cheery as he wanted, but spirit alone wasn’t going to rescue Null from the mist of apathy that imprisoned her. What would he say? He was at a complete loss for words and submitted to the devouring silence. Failure at the start. He knew this could happen, but still he had to try. Someway, he had to know how to stop the suffering.

“Wow. That’s the answer? Turn off like a TV? I never thought of it like that.” The voice came from Tai. Odd. He wasn’t fazed by Null’s monologue. In fact, he almost looked comforted; like he agreed with her profound declaration. “I get like that sometimes myself,” he continued, “but you make it sound easy. There are so many emotions that we all experience. How do you do it? How do you put a wall in front of all these feelings?”

Slowly stirring back to life, Null flexed her fingers and smiled briefly. It was nice to know that someone else felt the same way. Someone was listening. She didn’t want to disappoint them if they wanted to be like her. Maybe a few pointers to guide the apathetically inclined.

Encouraged, she gathered her thoughts and began her lecture. “Sometimes, it’s hard to turn off. The mind isn’t so accommodating.” Interrupting herself, she threw accusing glances at Shin, who gave a sheepish shrug in response. “But there are things you can do that will flip the killswitch. Alcohol, for one. Delicious liquid numbness; that’ll do the trick.”

As Null spoke on the subject of liquor, she took swigs of spirits from imaginary shot glasses. “A couple of drinks to relax, a few more to forget, and then finally another dose to simply fade into nothing. Better to be gone than to feel, right?”

The girl hopped to her feet and danced around with playful vigor. As her two-man audience watched her performance, she leapt from pillow to pillow giggling in a blissful fit. It slowly changed from dancing to drunken stumbles. She hiccupped in mock remembrance and toasted the ceiling before downing another shot of faux liquor. 

“This one’s to you, Suffering,” she celebrated. “May you disappear from my life forever.” A few more chuckles followed her showtime play, but it garnered no applause. Undeterred, she decided to move on.

“And if alcohol doesn’t fit your bill, well, there’s always drugs,” she appealed. Sitting down again, she switched from imaginary drinks to playing with an imaginary lighter. Clicking the flint wheel a couple times, she pretended a soft flame wiggled enticingly in front of her. She brought the lighter to her mouth, igniting what could only be some type of hallucinogenic contained in a glass pipe. Her free hand cupped it, protecting it from the windless wind, and she puffed out streams of indulgent breath.

“One hit to relax, two hits to leave the body, three hits and you’ve reached euphoria.” Null sprawled outwardly collapsing into pillows and exhaling with a sigh of satisfaction. “Wonderful, isn’t it? How wonderful to slip into paradise when living is nothing more than a slow, dull agony.”

Her grin faded. Eyes glazing over, she seemed to almost fall into a trance. Did she actually manage to get high off of some placebo drug? Quite the vivid imagination she had. But before anyone could raise concern, she jolted alive and leaned forward on her knees. “My drug of choice, you ask?”

“Uh, no one asked,” Shin stated.

“Of course you did, my curious little friend.” Null wrapped the boy in her embrace and fussed over his head of hair, making it almost as disheveled as her own. “Since somebody keeps all of the fun stuff away from me ...” Again, her words were pointed at Shin, but she dropped the subject (along with her hold) and scrambled over to the controller that she tossed aside earlier. “I choose Regressi!” She gestured to the footage on screen like a salesman unveiling the latest gadget. 

“What’s Regressi?” Tai questioned with awe.

“A video game, of course. Addictive … It’s all a girl like me needs to bum away the useless hours of the day. Why drown yourself in the stresses of life when you can plunge into the world of Regressi. Demands. Deadlines. Debt. None of that matters here. What matters most is reaching the next level.”

“I see, I see,” Tai lied, nodding his head enthusiastically. Shortly after, he decided to drop the facade. “Actually, I really don’t,” he confessed. “What’s so great about a game? About reaching the next level?”

Null thought about the question. She mulled over the words, trying to decide how to explain video games to someone who has never played before. On the screen, the title “Regressi” flashed across the top of the monitor. Beneath it, the phrase “Start New Game” was highlighted by a pointed cursor. She pressed a button on the controller in her hands and the TV displayed a change of scenery. 

A new game had begun.

“Regressi is a lot like life,” she started. “Think of your favorite memories. Maybe the time you won a prize at a state fair, or your first concert, or maybe even your first kiss in the dark aisles of a movie theater. It’s something you cherish. Something you could never get enough of, no matter how many times you lived through it. That’s what Regressi is. Memories of happier days. You might not be able to go back to them in real life, but in here, those reflections of the past play over and over again. But, of course, there’s always a flaw.” 

Null was passionate as she talked, but her passion seemed to die as she advanced in the game. When she completed the first level, the words “Victory!” danced on screen and a jubilant fanfare congratulated the completion of the stage. Then some new words appeared on display. “Save data?” The question implied a choice, but the only option available was “Yes.” 

“Imagine there’s a problem. This problem,” Null said, “no matter how long you play, you have to stop eventually. You reach your first checkpoint in the game and you save the progress you’ve made so far. Only natural, right?” She tapped the edge of the controller hesitantly, then pressed a button on it. On the TV, the question was replaced by a loading bar. When the bar filled to 100%, a checkmark appeared, accompanied by the phrase “Progress saved!” It lingered for a moment, and then the whole screen fizzled out to darkness.

“You might want to turn off the game. Take a break for a while, you know? Get a good night’s sleep or something like that. And when you wake up, ready to play some more, all you see is this.”

The box illuminated again with its cheerful fonts and noises. Trills of music invited a player to join it in its call for adventures.

The title screen reappeared. “Regressi.” And just beneath that, the familiar cursor pointed at “Start New Game.”

“There’s nothing there. No saved data. No progress. Everything you accomplished the day before? Gone. Empty, like a bag of potato chips.” Null took this as a cue to grab the nearby plastic bag and condense it into a small crinkly ball. She tossed it into a wastebasket in the corner of the room, and produced a new container from seemingly nowhere.

“You’re back to square one,” she said, “so what do you do? There’s no one else to get mad at, after all, you were the only one here. You could be sad, but really there’s no use crying over spilled milk. You could even try to give up on the game all together. But you know you can’t because, remember, these are your favorite memories in the entire world. You can’t leave them behind even if you wanted to.”

“No, there’s only one thing that you could possibly do: let out a big sigh and hit the button that says ‘Start New Game,’” Null said as she did just that. Resigned to her fate, she started a fresh round of Regressi, knowing full well what was to become of her game when the first save point appeared. The eternal cycle. Progress, regress. Progress, regress. A testament to the name of the game. Null didn’t seem to mind, though. It looked like she almost relished in the mindless repetition.

She began talking once more, but now she seemed even more distant. It was as if she was finally able to explain her dilemma. The futility of her efforts bore down on her shoulders with an icy presence. “So that’s my vice,” she said, “my poison. It may not be as strong as drugs or alcohol, but, you know, it works the same.

“You wake up, play Regressi, and just power down. There are no arguments you have to win, no thoughts racing through your mind. You become an empty TV monitor and leave the shackles of life behind you.” The game’s reflection danced on the lenses of her glasses in pixelated kaleidoscopes. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe the TV mirrored the frenzied thoughts skittering across her mind. This girl and her television were one. A single entity isolated from anything beyond the boundaries of those four walls.

Who talked now? Was it her? Was it really her? Was it Regressi? “Play the game,” they said. “You are the main character here. And you’re happy. You have a purpose. Get to the castle, save the girl. Be the underdog, win the championship. Defeat the villain, become the hero you were always meant to be. That’s a good life, right? That’s something worth living for. Not this endless loop of ‘Try again?’ and ‘GAME OVER’. We’re trapped in a thousand player battle royale where none of us truly matter.”

Null stopped. She clutched the controller in her hands, but her fingers were frozen in place. Her bottom lip quivered in defiance. Something was wrong. She could sense it. She felt like a puppet at the mercy of its master. Wires dangled down to her joints, commanding her to say and do things she didn’t want to.

It’s a lie, she told herself. You’re lying to me. I know you are. Who was she talking to? Not to Shin, not to Tai. But still she was certain someone was lying to her. Her eyes glared at the screen with hatred and disgust, yet it told her to smile. It commanded her.

It was the TV! That’s who she spoke to—she talked to Regressi. It was nothing more than an old tube television working long past the days of its retirement, but somehow it made Null loathe its presence with vivid contempt.

This entire time, as she spoke with Shin and Tai, she never really cared about what they were saying. They were never her target audience. She was her own audience and the words coming out of her mouth weren’t hers, they were Regressi’s. The TV was wriggling its way into her mind, clamping down on her conscience like a brain-grinding parasite.

She tried to peel the words off her tongue as if they were an unripe strawberry when suddenly, it happened. The TV moved. It was only a little shuffle at first, the corner of the television shifted over the thing carpet beneath it. But then it moved again, a more impressive jump this time. The cords and wires plugged into its rear components held taut, containing the rogue appliance. 

Null was fear-stricken. Not a single syllable uttered out of her mouth. Seeking confirmation, she turned to Shin and Tai, giving them a look that said, Are you seeing what I’m seeing? To her dismay, they were frozen solid. Like two mannequins, they stared at her as if time ceased to exist and she was stuck in a realm just outside the edges of reality. She was alone. 

Another jump. Null turned back to the screen, her eyes as wide as her glasses. She released the controller from her hands and proceeded to scurry backwards, trying to escape the approaching threat. A low hum began resonating from the television. It started off quiet and then rose in volume like a lightbulb being overloaded with high voltage.

Bump, shimmy, BANG!

Null cried out in terror as the TV ripped the cords from the wall with a massive pop. The room was plunged into darkness. There was silence.

For a moment, Null kept completely still. The only movement was the heaving of her chest as she tried to contain her heart from leaking out of its ribcage. 

Before her mind had the chance to start cranking again and could tell her what to do next, a booming laugh bounced off the walls of the tiny room. It was a guttural rumble, vibrating the world with a pounding bass. It looked at Null’s skin, causing her arm hairs to curl out in a wave of panic.

A lie? A lie?! I’m lying to you, am I?!  The TV flickered to life. A cacophony of fuzzy static scattered across its face. It was a few feet from where Null huddled on the floor and somehow became larger—intimidatingly large. The metal box now towered overhead, stretching from one corner of the room to the other.

As its next words came out, the TV screen split in a jagged zig-zag, revealing an army of serrated glass teeth. Behind these layers of angry chompers dangled a sharp tongue that dripped strands of putrid saliva. Oh Null, you silly, STUPID girl, how could I even lie to you? No, you asked me to do this. You practically begged me for it.”

Null was a deer in headlights. She stared at the huge tongue as it wiped a glossy coat of spit off of its lower row of teeth. Was this really happening? The game was actually talking?

Save me, Regressi, save me, mocked the television. Take me away from this place, take me away from my sadness, ha! That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? You wanted me to lie to you because if I did, then you would be numb. You could ignore everything in the world, and you like that, don’t you?

No reply. Null was shell-shocked. She wanted to talk. She wanted to defend herself from the monstrous demon slandering her words, but she couldn’t. She was in a state of complete paralysis. Wet pearls beaded behind the cover of coke bottle glasses. She bit her lip in frustration. A line of blood slivered down the crease of broken skin.

DON’T YOU? Regressi bellowed. Null flinched. Scared, fearful, she nodded her head submissively. Good, see? Ignore your suffering, girl. I didn’t lie to you. I’m merely giving you what you wanted: freedom. Freedom from depression, freedom from oppression. What’s the answer to it all? Slip into regression!

Again, the TV laughed. It convulsed in jester spasms, inhaling great swarms of air in between fits. Being the only source of light, its static screen cast shadowy illusions over the once familiar den. Those might have been pillows on the floor, but it was too dark to be sure. Instead, they resembled minions. Evil subjects hopping to their master’s laughter with delight. Snakes, rats, nightcrawlers, mobs of moths, lidless eyeballs, wicked china dolls, animated cadavers, grisly skeletons, snickering imps. The floor was a devil’s audience, an imagination’s playground. The walls slithered with oozing shades of nightmare planes and angles, and finally, when Regressi chose to stop, its predator teeth spread wide with a macabre smile.

Yes, yes, that’s the ticket, Regressi sighed in a sickening euphoria. Ignore your suffering, girl. Bury your woes in the tomb of Regressi. That’s about all you’re good for. You’re too weak to do anything else. You’re too weak to face the life that belongs to you. Pathetic. Weak, weak, weak!

Stop! Please stop, a small voice cried deep within the recesses of Null’s mind. It sounded like a girl, a young child in distress. Null’s eyes shifted frantically over the shadowy landscape trying to locate the source of pleas for mercy that appeared from nowhere, but she found nothing. Was that her? Was that her own voice against the harsh roars of Regressi? She couldn’t be sure; Regressi was too strong. The desperate cries were drowned in a flurry of flashing lights.

Weak, weak, weak ... the TV echoed. An eerie fog of madness spewed from its gaping mouth. It was a misty apathy. The rolling cloud of chaos swirled out in smoky tendrils clinging to its surroundings like a soaked, somber blanket. 

It stalked over to the cowering Null, grasped her shaking limbs, and pulled. Come, Null, come, Regressi demanded. Come, embrace the joy of my world. Sit, play, smile. The last word drew out with a raspy hiss. Give your life to the next level. Minutes, hours, days. I want it. I want all of it. You are mine, your life belongs to me. 

The spiderweb of darkness squeezed Null’s pale legs and yanked her to the television. Dragging her body in ruthless hunger, it posed her in a trance-like display. Crossed legs, spine hunched forward, eyes peeled open. The demon tentacles thrust the controller she had dropped earlier back into her hands and wrapped her fingers around it tighter than a hostage bound with tape. Then, finally, the evil wires crawled up her neck like a bouquet of veins and clutched her jaw. It sunk into the corners of her mouth as if they were a thousand fish hooks parting her lips in a bloody death smile—the same smile that Regressi had so viciously laughed with before.

Now talk, little puppet, talk. Tell them the truth, Tell them what your life truly means.

Null was hollow.

Broken.

Empty.

She found her voice, but it wasn’t hers, the words didn’t belong to her. Regressi was an expert ventriloquist, throwing its false promises from her throat. 

“In video games,” she recited, “we are the most important people in the world. We’re the main focus. We’re number one. But in reality ...  in reality, we’re nobody. Billions and billions of nobodies. We try our best to put a foot in the door of history, to leave our mark. To feel like we have a purpose among the ocean of people just ...  like ...  us. But we can’t. We’re too ...  weak.” Weak!  “You and me? We’re just sand in a bottomless hourglass sinking to our deaths like everyone that came before us.” A pause, a silence, a moment of resistance. But it failed. It always failed. She could never defeat the mesmerizing control of Regressi. “So leave me alone,” she spoke. “Let me be sand and fall down. That’s my job, isn’t it? My one true purpose: to be sand.”

And then she was. She was falling. Null’s body was still in the room, but her mind had dropped in a vast black tunnel. She was falling down, down, down the ravines of her fears, and she wasn’t alone either. Around her were other people. Individuals that all succumbed to the same thing as her: a life that scared them into apathy. As they descended, they moaned and cried in fright. It was the torment of a thousand souls suffering from an empty existence. They roiled and splashed like human water filtering into drain pipes.

Null was there with them. A girl sapped of color; gray in her heart’s void. She writhed in anguish over the bodies of others and clawed longingly for an escape. Did it slow her descent? Did it speed it up? In truth, she didn’t care. As long as it took her away from there, it didn’t matter.

Because she saw the end.

Down there, way at the bottom, she saw it. The same thing that picked at her soul every second of the day. Glass teeth. Huge, colossal canines chomping closed and open, closed and open, like a compactor of human beings fed by a chittering assembly line. The beast ate the people as they wailed in ghostly agony.

And it laughed. It laughed at their suffering, because it was a monster. It was Regressi, a massive static-filled television clamping its jaws on the limbs of its victims. It laughed because it knew that she was next. 

You’re next, Null! You’re next, it said. You can try to run, you can try to hide, but it doesn’t matter because I eat all of you eventually. In the end, I eat all of you.

And the descent sped up. Null tried to climb, climb with all of her strength up and away from the white noise mandibles chewing people like popcorn, but it was impossible. Her arms were tired. Her legs were exhausted. She whimpered and cried as the sound of death drew ever closer to her ears.

Don’t give up! I know we can make it. Please don’t quit. She had an ally. Here in this hellish plummet was someone else struggling against the forces of death, maybe even someone willing to help her.

Null couldn’t see anything beyond the rolling waves of bodies, but she was certain she heard the child speak. Eagerly, she reached out to the voice. Who are you? Where are you? I can’t see you right now, say something again. I’ll try to come to you. She waited for a response, but the only replies were those of the future corpses around her. She knew she hadn’t imagined the voice; she was positive. Undeterred, she tried again. Please, I can’t do this alone. We can help each other. I don’t want to die.

Nothing. Only a song of morbid sorrow.

Null started to cry. Her mind kicked into a high gear insanity. Was she going crazy? Was there really a voice, or did she make it up? There was no hope, there was no point to this. That tiny voice had disappeared as quickly as it came, and now Regressi was going to eat her. 

Wiping her nose on her shoulder, Null stumbled along in a wild hysteria and mistakenly toppled over a pile of nearby bodies. She fell beneath the surface of human murk. Trapped.

Fear enveloped her. If the mind, when submerged underwater, switched to a primal clawing mania, then this was a terror beyond that. Null flailed madly, kicking and scratching the people around her in a dash for freedom unlike anything she ever experienced. She shoved and pushed while screaming at the top of her lungs, and only by pure chance, her head resurfaced. She barely managed to pull out of the gray whirlpool and prop herself on her knees. Her breath rattled achingly as she gasped for a renewed supply of air. 

Don’t leave me. Null wished she could hear the voice again. It was a companion in a post apocalyptic world. She tried her best to focus on the girl’s words, hoping to dilute some of her panic with reason. 

The child wanted Null to fight, to push as hard as possible to survive. Do anything and everything to overcome the madness. But how could she not? How could she not surrender to the terrifying end that awaited her? She was paralyzed. Alone. A single person fighting the tide of a tsunami. The more she struggled, the more it swallowed her in its murky depths. No ...  she couldn’t fight it. Not forever. 

The noise grew louder. Metal striking glass. An endless repetition of chaos grinding higher and higher until her ears were ringing from the destruction. It was so consuming that every other sound ceased to exist.

She closed her eyes, waiting to be eaten.

“It’s pointless to try, it’s pointless to try, it’s pointless to try.” Back in reality, Null was a broken record. She repeated the same phrase calmly and robotically while staring at the TV. Over to her side, Tai was saying something. She couldn’t understand any of the words, but his lips were definitely moving. Even while concentrating all she heard was white noise. The gnashing of metal teeth. Finally, after a lull in the madness, something got through.

“—don’t give up—”

It startled Null’s conscience into place. Were those the same words as the voice in her mind? Rapid blinks cleared away the fog of confusion. “What? What did you just say?” she asked.

Tai smiled. “I said, you don’t give up do you? You seem pretty set on this video game.”

Same words, different context. Not really what she was hoping for, but at least it broke the hypnosis. The room had returned with its comfortable gray softness. The pillows underneath her were still fluffy, the carpet was still fuzzy, and Shin and Tai were both still close at her sides. Being in the presence of others was a slight relief. “My will is iron,” she replied, returning to her rigid viewpoint. 

“Yes, I noticed that. It’s pretty amazing, really.”

Amazing? Me? That was odd. A compliment like that was rare to hear, especially if it was directed at her. There was instant mistrust, as if she had to pay in exchange for hearing Tai talk. “I don’t follow. What are you getting at?”

“I’m not getting at anything. I’m just telling you how I feel,” Tai explained. “Personally, I don’t think I could do what you do here. I would have been broken long before now.” Broken? She knew that feeling. There was an interesting factor in his voice, a hidden layer of some sort. What was it?  

Unbeknownst to her, Null had stopped pressing buttons on the controller. Her focus was now entirely on Tai. She listened intently, trying to decipher his words.

“So you play this game, Regressi, you called it? How many times have you played up to this point? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?”

More, Null thought. Much more. The game on screen asked its favorite question, “Save data?”

“Over and over you play through this knowing that the same thing is going to happen, but not once have you stopped, have you?”

I haven’t. Not even once. He’s right. Why is he right?

Shut up, shut up! He’s lying to you! Regressi. It was coming back. Null resisted, doing her best to keep her attention on Tai. 

“Each morning, you wake up, see your saved data is gone, and then you just … try again. That’s willpower, strength. I’m amazed.” 

Weak, weak, weak! Regressi was getting louder. Why was it so hard to listen? Null began shaking her head, attempting to get away from the voice. Her eyes closed in concentration. But before she had a chance to return to one of her internal battles, Tai grabbed hold of her wrists. It was sudden. Jarring. What was he doing? Trying to hold her there in the realm of reality? Her body turned to him. She found herself gazing into his eyes, liquid pools of honey. His palms on her skin were radiating with warmth. Him, focus on him, she told herself.

“You say you’re turning off. That’s enough of the world for one day, right? But you’re not really gone, are you? You’re still here because you have the willpower to push on. If you really gave up, you wouldn’t be alive, would you?” 

You’re next, Null. You’re next. “Hard to call this living,” Null murmured.

“It is, though. You’re living. And maybe today’s not the day that we consider a winner. Maybe not tomorrow either. I don’t think any of us could even reach the end of the game in a single day. It’s too long for that, too difficult. But one day ...  you’ll make progress. And deep down, you know that, don’t you?” Climb! Climb, Null! Don’t give up! “That’s why you keep clinging on. You never give up because you have that hope. The same hope that I have. That tomorrow will bring something new, something different. Advancement, change, relief.

“Progress.”

Ever so gently, Tai was moving his hands. He kept his eyes on Null’s, but his fingers traced down the tendon of her wrists and touched the cool plastic of the controller that she held. She was nervous. No one had taken her controller before. She never let them. But Tai was different. Worry was coated on the features of her face, but Tai simply smiled. It wasn’t a stupid smile anymore. It was compassionate and loving. Null knew she could trust him.

Against the screams of her inner voice, she released the talon-like grip she held on the controller. With his right hand, Tai took the gift gratefully; with his left hand, he laced his fingers in between Null’s.

Warm. So warm, she thought. Is this what normal people do when not playing games? I could get used to this.

Tai, happy to see the anxiety slip from Null’s face, mimicked what he had seen her do earlier. The question “Save data?” was still on screen. The cursor hovered over “Yes.” A simple question. A simple answer. However, he was ready to change the results.

With the press of a button, he summoned the loading bar. Next appeared “Progress saved!” and, finally, the all too familiar darkness as the TV reset.

Null trembled. A layer of cold sweat dampened her palms. Her teeth chattered. Her crossed legs were falling asleep and she refused to adjust for comfort. What’s wrong?  This had happened to her countless times before. She knew what was next, yet her nerves had never been this frantic. She shivered like a leaf in an autumn breeze, restless ripples cascading down the length of her spine. 

The darkness seemed to drag on for minutes, then hours. What time was it? The cat clock on the fireplace mantle still read 8:37. Why was it taking so long? Did it always take this long?

Tai’s hands were steady and his eyes narrowed attentively. Despite the concentration, his facial features were lucid with a commanding bravery, as if nothing was capable of shaking his resolve. Whatever was about to happen would not surprise him. Moments before the game reignited, he gave a slight squeeze of pressure to tell her that it was coming. Together, they watched the TV return to life. 

Mommy Issues | December 2019