And I wait.
USE YOUR WORDS, NOT YOUR KNIVES
Mad - Echos
Kookaburra
The knock on my door isn’t really a knock – not one meant to be heard, anyway. It’s the timid, apologetic tap of someone hoping I won’t answer.
Callaway slips inside before I can tell her not to bother, her bun too tight, her smile tighter, the strained professionalism of a woman who’s been up all night trying to pretend she didn’t see something she definitely did.
“Kayla,” she says quietly, “it’s time.”
I don’t move from my place on the bed, cross-legged, staring at the crack in the ceiling shaped like a man mid-scream.
“For what? Another round of ‘use your words, not your knives’?”
She shakes her head. “Medical check.”
My stomach doesn’t drop; it rearranges itself. A small, subtle shift. Not visible – nothing on me is ever visible unless I want it to be – but something curls and unrolls just beneath my ribs.
“I didn’t agree to medical checks,” I say, almost pleasantly.
“You did,” she insists, already lying.
Two orderlies materialise behind her like cowardly shadows, both broad-shouldered and smelling of nerves. One of them is new. I can smell it on him. They’re not here as escorts – they’re here to make sure I comply.
“Unnecessary,” I tell her, flicking my gaze toward the muscle. “I’m pregnant, not rabid.”Ish.
The silence that follows is thick and clumsy. Good. I slide off the bed and let them flank me, the way you walk a dangerous animal through a zoo that pretends it doesn’t euthanise the ones that don’t perform.
The scan room is colder than the hallway, the kind of cold that feels deliberate, calculated, stitched into the walls. Everything is white or pale blue – the tiles, the gel bottles lined up like obedient little soldiers, the monitor already blinking my name as if it’s been waiting for me.
The sonographer looks up when I enter and goes instantly pale. Young, too young, with soft hands and softer eyes – someone who still thinks the world plays fair if you cry nicely enough.
“Up on the table, please,” she says, trying for steady but landing somewhere between a tremor and a prayer.
“Buy me dinner first,” I mutter, but I climb up anyway, the paper beneath me crackling like dry leaves.
I don’t like how exposed the light makes my skin look. Too washed out. Too human.
“Lift your shirt.”
So I do, slowly, enjoying how her throat bobs when I don’t rush.
The gel hits my skin without warning, cold and slick and intimate in a way that makes my breath catch once –once– and only because it reminds me of restraints and antiseptic and the kind of hands that didn’t shake when they hurt me in the best ways possible.
“Try to relax,” the girl whispers. I laugh, and it ricochets off the tile in a way that makes her flinch, a little trill that sounds too close to the laugh I try not to think about.
“You should print that on a t-shirt,” I tell her. “Kayla Kingfisher: Try to Relax.”
The probe touches me and everything inside me goes taut, an invisible wire pulled so tight it could cut. Outside, I’m still – always still – but in the architecture beneath my bones, a door slams shut.
The machine kicks on with a soft crackle, and a heartbeat thumps through the speakers, too fast, too eager, like something knocking from inside a sealed box. The sonographer’s brow pinches. Callaway sucks in a breath.
“What?” I snap.
“Nothing,” they answer in unison. Wrong answer.
