Control kept me alive.
Breaking it might keep me human.
I close my eyes and let the tremor continue, a deliberate flaw in their perfect machine, and wait to see how they respond, all the while trying to remember something important…something urgent…and coming up blank.
A CONFESSION BOX WITH A DRAIN
Cinderella’s Dead - Emeline
Kookaburra
The room is the way I like it because it’s the way I was taught: a single bulb that hums like a trapped fly, a wheeled cart with the things that make sense lined up in the order my hands expect, concrete floor washed so many times it smells of old bleach and stubborn copper, a drain that doesn’t quite sit flush so liquid always finds it. I move without thinking, the choreography sunk so deep I could do it blind.
Cotton, water, gauze.
The small, balanced weight in my palm.
The man in the chair breathes in wet, rickety pulls, the kind that shiver through the whole body even when the mouth stays shut. He’s been loud already; the silence now isn’t mercy, it’sthe weary shape of a mind that knows there’s only one way forward.
I take my time because time is the only real lever left. I smooth the fabric at his shoulder, straighten the strap that has worked itself crooked with all his thrashing, re-fold the towel beneath the bend of his elbow.
Ritual makes the world obedient.
Ritual keeps the edges of me from fraying.
Somewhere beyond the walls, a pipe ticks, expanding or cooling, I can’t tell. The air conditioner coughs, briefly thinks better of it, quits. The bulb’s hum threads into the low whir of the portable unit I brought because the sound helps some people talk. People like to fill silence with bargains; they’re quieter with a lullaby.
When he starts shaking his head I’m not sure whether it’s refusal or a tremor, so I pause, let the seconds stretch until the gesture resolves into meaning. A small, exhausted no. I nearly smile; I am always kinder when the fight leaves them on their own. The rag in my hand is still warm from the kettle. I press it to his temple and the skin there blushes under the heat. “Listen,” I say, even though my voice is barely above a breath. “We’re at the part where truth becomes easy.” He closes both eyes like prayer might change the shape of the room.
It doesn’t.
The room is a confession box with a drain.
He tells me things that don’t matter, first. Addresses that never existed, dates that belong to better men, the way fear invents details when the bones of a story are rotten. I nudge, I wait, I change nothing except the tempo of the questions. It’s a dance – I lead, he stumbles, we find the beat together. I touch the side of his throat where the pulse labours and feel my own answer through my fingertips. We are drums in the same band for as long as this lasts.
I don’t have to ask the question I came for. He gives it to me sideways, the way secrets always enter a room, not through the door but through the seams. He tells me who paid for the first intake and who signed the second and who kept the lights on when the money ran dry. He doesn’t say their names; he doesn’t have to. He says, the woman who made the appointment because she couldn’t stand the way you looked at her. He says, the man who never sat on your side of the table. He says, the one who watched and taught and called it love.
Mother.
Father.
Brother.
The words land without sound and still somehow hit loud enough to ring the bulb.
For a moment the whole room tilts. I see the plastic chairs in waiting rooms that swallowed weeks of my life, the ink on every form that bloomed like a bruise where a signature should have been, the careful hands that taught me steadiness and called it kindness.
The floor is where it has always been – I know this – but my feet forget.
The hum of the bulb swells and thins and swells again. I think of the first time I stood under a light like this and wanted to laugh because everything made sense in the bright: how pain turns talk into truth, how the worst things done to you can be made beautiful if you hold still long enough to see the pattern.
He keeps talking because now he can’t stop; the dam is gone and all that’s left is the spill. He tells me about a storage unit key taped under a sink, about files and invoices and the kinds of receipts people don’t believe are real until they are. He tells me dates that do matter and the way winter smells when you wait in a car with the engine off. I’m not writing any of it down. I don’t need to. Memory loves me when it tastes like this.
I should be grateful, and I am, but gratitude tastes like iron.
Mother. Father. Brother. The list completes itself in my head with a clean click, the way a bone slides back into its joint. The last three doors I was meant to open. The last three rooms I was built for. I feel the shape of the future like a hand closing; there is work to do and I am very, very good at work.
The light changes first, not by dimming but by acquiring other lights. A slice of white knives across the crack at the bottom of the door – thin, then wide, then thin again, as if someone is breathing on the other side. The building’s quiet shifts into a quiet I know too well: the held-breath hush of men who think they’re invisible. Weight settles into the air - gun oil ghosts, nylon whispering against nylon, the particular animal patience of boots that won’t be quiet but will be careful. He hears it too; his eyes snap open the way prey hears snow slide off a roof. I step back so he can see me, so his last picture isn’t just a ceiling, and for the first time all night, his expression softens into something I can almost name. Pity, maybe. Or relief that no choice is required of him anymore.
