It would be a simple thing to finish what we started – simple, efficient, a line drawn the way lines have always been drawn in rooms like this. My hand remembers the weight and the angle. The drain is ready. But I don’t move.
The hum of the bulb is almost a laugh already and my chest is too tight and too bright, brimming with the knowledge that the game was bigger than the room and I have finally been allowed to see the walls.
Mother. Father. Brother.
Of course. Of course it was them. Who else would have loved me enough to cage me with such care?
The first hit is a voice, amplified, flattening itself against the door and spreading into the corners like paint. “Armed unit! Hands where we can see!”
The second hit is the strike plate failing. The door doesn’t so much fly as fold, a hinge giving up the ghost while wood turns to splinters and the light from the hall pours in boot by boot.
Floods.
Ropes of it.
My eyes don’t need time to adjust; I’ve always been a creature of light and blade.
I turn toward them with my palms empty and lifted exactly as requested, because ceremony matters even now. Because I want them to see the steadiness. Because I want them to see me.
The room explodes into choreography that isn’t mine: three shout, two move, one covers the corner with the crack in the plaster as if the wall might lunge. The beam of a rifle finds my sternum and pins me to the floor without touching me. My boy in the chair finally makes a sound, not a word, just that soft exhale you hear when a nightmare ends before the teeth close.
Then the air changes and I’m pissed that I’ve been denied the chance to witness his final breath.
Mother fuckers.
Mother. Father. Brother. If I weren’t so distracted I probably could have got myself out of this situation. And now it’s too late. All that hard work for nothing.
Frowning, I look at the man nearest me whose mouth has learned to be a line and whose eyes are almost kind and I think how tired he must be, carrying a silence like that home to whoever waits.
Someone announces numbers I don’t recognise, someone else replies with numbers that rhyme. They tell me to kneel; I do. They tell me to put my hands behind my head; I do that too. The metal that kisses my wrists is quick and cold and almost affectionate. A voice calls my name like it belongs to me and I want to answer that it never did.
Behind the mask of all the noise I hear another sound rising, small at first, like a bird far off in the trees.
It takes a heartbeat to know it’s coming from me.
It takes two for the pitch to find itself.
It starts as a hiccup, a bubble in the throat, and then it climbs, bright and wild, too high to be proper laughter and too joyful to be anything else.
Kookaburra. That’s what they called it the first time – the laugh that doesn’t know it’s wrong, the laugh that creates unease. It ricochets off concrete and metal and stern instructions, it threads through the light beams and makes them hum, it sits in the hollow of my chest and vibrates until even the man with the kind eyes looks away.
I can’t stop.
Of course it was them. Of course it’s me. Of course this is how it ends, with the door broken and the names laid out and the song thrown back at me by every hard surface I ever loved.
Hands take my elbows and lift. Boots reverse their pattern. The cart wobbles, the bulb buzzes, the drain catches a last slow thread and swallows.
As they lead me into light, the laugh keeps spilling, bright as cut glass, bright as noon in a room that never had windows, and in the center of it all my mouth shapes a thank you to no one and everyone, because the lesson is finished and the end game is finally clear.
REAL OR MAKE BELIEVE
Control - Halsey
Honey
Warmth is the first lie.
It wraps around me the moment I wake. Blanket-soft, skin-deep, the kind of heat that makes you think of safe rooms and clean beds and hands that don’t hurt. For a second my body believes it, because bodies are stupid like that. They remember comfort and reach for it before the mind has caught up.
