Sissy didn't want to move. Pain was making her lazy after torturing her all night. She laid on the couch like an overworked mother of three, staring at the ceiling in an effort to distract herself from the pounding headache she had woken up with. The rim of her eyes were red, so was everything about her : her gaze, her hand’s bandage, her thoughts. She didn't need to pee. She’d eat and it would go nowhere.

That’s something she was obsessing over this morning: this world’s shortcuts.

But more so what it meant about her own existence. Everything here was unbalanced, like a coin with only one side - or no sides at all. Just a smooth piece of metal from her bloodied hand to yours. Even her wound was a joke: just a pink gash from where blood would sometimes spill out. That was the closest thing to a vagina she had on her. The thought was haunting a corner of her mind: she couldn't begin to imagine what her anatomy truly looked like, but it wasn’t human. She wasn’t human. She thought she was, and that's why she felt lonely. But from the very start, she had been an integral part of this world, with or without the worm. She was just a puppet with a name and a sense of self importance. She believed that she would become like Sarah one day once she made memories of her own. That she would learn to know the difference between her feelings and the phantom limbs of the “ones that came before her”. But she wasn’t born from Sarah. She was born from this place, this small world that mimicked life. There it was, the egg.

The womb.

Pain was a theatrical tool but Sissy was missing her audience right now. She had walked for hours yesterday, yet her feet weren’t hurt in the slightest, nor did she feel a change in her stamina. But her hand was different - it only took her father one look at it to realize he had messed up by sending Nate in his stead when the hospital called him yesterday. Now all the neighborhood would talk about was that he didn’t show up for his own daughter. Right now, he was cursing himself upstairs while shaving.

They were going to go get ice cream - just him and her.

Because her feet still didn’t hurt but his ego was bleeding.

And now he was the one dripping. Sweat, tears - blood as he nicked himself and let out an exasperated roar. Sissy heard it from downstairs but said nothing. Now they matched, she thought absent-mindedly. Maybe she would make the joke out loud, later, when they were in public and he had no chance but to laugh. Maybe she would have a reproductive system if her and Nate were Peter’s biological children. But maybe none of it mattered at all and death would come to find her soon.

Birth - Fear - Pain - Death.

It was all coming together so perfectly.

“Come on, get in the car,” said Peter as he came downstairs. “And put on real shoes for once,” he added after a while.

Sissy didn’t react. He glanced at her, puzzled. She smiled and got up.

**

This world had too many ice cream shops but Peter still knew the best of the best. He made small talk with the owner, related the tale of her wounded hand with remorse and obvious worry to the cashier, then they sat down and barely talked. He asked some questions about her school life she didn’t care to answer properly. Once he tried to make physical contact with her by gently putting his hand on her shoulder and she shivered.

Gross things were still gross, even when they were your legal guardian.

Finally she made the joke she had prepared earlier and he smiled. She got upset he didn’t even make the effort to snort, so she turned her attention outside and stopped caring. Outside the sky was blue, the sun was shining. Sissy hadn’t known a single day of rain since the cemetery. She missed it, she was getting tired of this overbearing heat following her everywhere, everything sticking to her skin. She tried to eat her ice cream as cleanly as she could. Peter had started a monologue at one point that she wasn’t listening to. He only interrupted his explanation when a couple recognized him across the shop and came to talk. Sissy was still looking outside.

Puppet, puppet, puppet, puppet, pu-

It was standing out like a sore thumb in a crowd of similar faces.

They almost made eye contact and Sissy thought it was looking at her, but it was really looking everywhere and nowhere at all at the same time. Its face was distorted by an emotion far less polite than the smile puppets usually wore, though the creature did look like them when it stood still. It wouldn’t stand still. First it grabbed a random man by the arm but then it got distracted by another passing by, and grabbed this one; only to realize it only had two arms and let go of both. It started running soon after, only to abruptly stop and go back on its steps. Puppets didn’t know how to avoid it, so it kept grabbing them then dragging them around, never finishing what it intended to do - and Sissy didn’t know what it intended to do.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

She was dying.

But they hadn’t made eye contact and just when she was about to turn her head away ― they did.

“Sissy, are you alright ? Is your hand hurting ?”

Peter and the couple were looking at her with concerned looks on their faces. She stared at Peter blankly.

“I want to go home.”

“Why ? What happened ?”

“Let’s just go home.”

Her voice was but a whisper. That’s because something was sticking to her skin again, and it wasn’t her shirt, sugar or coated blood. It was looking at her - no, staring at her. Its gaze was penetrating her fucking mind. It was different than the devil’s gaze, different than Peter’s scorn. Sissy knew about hunger but she didn’t know about the one that was spilling out of its eyes as it was seizing her up across the window. It felt heavier and wet, like seconds before a rainstorm, when your breath gets caught. It felt like death to her, though she couldn’t justify it. For once, nobody was strangling her.

Peter played along.

“Of course, honey. If you want to.”

But he took his time saying goodbye to his friends, and it was enough time for someone or something to cross the road and stand by the window where she was sitting. It was enough time for her to call Nate underneath the table in a panic. He didn’t answer.

Peter got up, and she stayed sat.

It was right behind the glass, peering at her. She didn’t move.

“Come on, Sissy, you’re the one that wanted to go.”

Peter didn’t seem to find anything strange with the situation, and it made her go mad. None of the puppets appeared worried about the man behind the window. She was alone - alone in front of something she didn’t know the nature of. Not a god, not a devil. Something else.

Something dirtier.

She got up trembling. She thought that maybe if she didn’t interact with it, it would leave her alone.

It launched at her the second she put a foot on the sidewalk.

Plunged its fingers into her mouth and she chocked. Tried to open her jaw by force, and the more space she had to yell, the least she managed to scream. Tears swelled up in her eyes, she managed to push the creature away. It came back like a magnet. It was a frenzy. She couldn’t understand how it only had two hands because each time she would get one off her body, she’d find it elsewhere. Grazing her skin, trying to dig deeper. Sissy had never known such oppression. She was plastered against the wall, it was plastered against her. It had no scent - that’s something she noticed amidst the chaos. It had no scent and it made no sound.

“Sissy, what are you doing ?”

Peter sounded annoyed as he looked back.

“Why are you standing there ?”

His words slowed down her reflexes as she tried to comprehend how Peter couldn’t see the man pining her down when he acknowledged all puppets like living beings. It was enough of an opportunity for the creature to break through her defenses: its hand slipped past her underwear, directly to her crotch. She froze. Then an absurd laugh escaped her lips. It had one hand trying to keep her mouth open, the other down her pants. Sissy felt the emotion burst in her chest and dye the whole of her skin red. Raw, pure despair filled her gaze. She had never felt naked before, not like that.

She hated it.

When she felt the creature’s fingers push deeper between her legs, she nearly lost her mind. But it never found what it was looking for - because it wasn’t there. It took her a couple of seconds to realize that she didn’t have the hole it wanted to bury itself in, and when she did, her mind that was about to collapse stilled in its own destruction. She watched silently as the creature came to realize that she truly was nothing more than a doll, and when it did, it let out a sound for the first time. An exasperated cry so very similar to the one her father had let out earlier.

But blood came later.

As soon as it cried, Peter suddenly grew eyes. The scene finally appeared to him in all of its horror. His body moved first and he yanked the creature off Sissy, before punching it in the face. His expression was a mess of anger, shock, incomprehension - shame. Sissy was still frozen in place as her gaze rested on her father’s face, feeling both foreign to and annoyed by his obvious distress. The creature had fallen to the ground and was crying like a child. That’s when it hit her.

A subtle taste of sulfur.

Down her tongue, past where the creature’s nails had scratched her. She was about to spit it out when something caught her eye in her peripheral vision.

― An eye was floating in the air above them.

It looked like a child’s drawing: an oval for the shape, a circle for the iris, another one for the pupil. As soon as she saw it, her ears started ringing.

“Who is that guy ? Do you know him ? What the hell happened ?”

Before she realized, Peter had grabbed her by the shoulders and started yelling. It took less than a second for all emotions to leave his face - like a switch had been hit. On, off. One second he was losing his mind after finding a man assaulting his only daughter in the middle of the street, the next he was - what was he ?

“Sissy, are you alright ?”

His tone was much more relaxed than before, his hands lighter on her shoulders.

“Why are you just standing here ?”

Sissy’s sweat dripped down her spine.

This was hell.