Layers/ Silver Lining's Safety Net
By Till Kallem (Photo: Kyle Chong)
Whiteness. That was all Levy could see, hear, taste, feel, think. It seeped from the bare walls, swirling in the air like ash from some disaster long passed - one that wind and time never fully erased. He wandered the new but well-worn halls like a ghost, worn wooden floors groaning under his tentative toes as they had under the feet of countless souls before him. He could almost feel the lost memories shift around him; the air thick with stale feeling.
There was noise towards the front entrance, some scuffle with a couch that didn’t want to go through the narrow door but Levy was past all that. He had long ago washed his hands of his parent’s hidden dust. It had started three years ago when he was 9, and a blank thickness had seeped between his parents’ bodies and sat there, rotting in the air. Only he could see it. He used to whimper as he begged to know its name- that cloud of decay - but his parents said he was just stressed beyond his rationality, and a few visits to a stale room with dusty gray couches had quieted their nerves. This only quieted his mouth. His mind still slithered in circles, a rhythmic movement distracting him from his five senses and trapping him in one realm of reality: thought and emotion.
Levy continued his shaky exploration of the house, and yet he did not feel like an explorer anymore. That valiant armor he used to wear - armor against the ripping change of a move - had dissolved under the acid rains of his tears after the first three moves. This was number five in the past year and he had no tears left. Yet the acid remained, and there was a constant burning sensation trapped under his eyelids. His family kept moving because his parents claimed to feel restless. But Levy knew the true cause: that decaying fog. The venomous mist always followed his parents, and in these closed houses it expanded, engulfing them completely while slithering down hallways into new rooms - into Levy’s room. It constantly stretched the walls until no one could walk through them without choking. Yet his parents denied it and they just didn’t move, not past leaving for work and microwaving frozen meals; they grew restless. And yet they still denied.
The burning in his eyes intensified and Levy clenched his fists. For relief he ran one tauntingly down the impeccably white walls - white despite dents here and there: the imperfections one can’t hide and that become more noticeable with every new layer of paint. Some men had recently painted over the grime, the smudged tears, blotted ink, and maybe the blood of the previous owners. And the owners before that and so on, painting over the filthy hurt until the house was merely layers of hidden pain, hatred, and dirt, all separated by lies of synthetic white. Levy recognized himself in this. With each new house a new layer of insulation was added to his mind. So he ran his fist down the wall, pressing slightly harder with each step as he smirked, anger oozing from invisible pores in his skin and seeping into his clothing. He felt damp and it stung everywhere. He glared at the passing wall,
I could expose you for who you really are. I could scrape away all your cracking lies and let the mud bleed out . . .
Levy realized he had been walking the halls for almost half an hour and it was already 9 pm. His father called to him from the empty dining room and when Levy arrived, he found half-heated frozen meals accompanied by an offer to sit on the floor and lean against the wall to eat. So he sat between his parents as the remaining wisps of decay from the previous house swirled before his gaze. He swatted at the air but his hand dissolved through the enemy but with concerned and annoyed stares from his parents he shut his body down and sat. He waited, rotting like the cloud before him. The food was tasteless. He was numb.
Levy didn’t notice his mother’s hand guide him to his new room, a room he had missed on his rounds through the house. In the whiteness, something dark caught his eye by the window: a battered dream catcher hanging on a rusty nail. This device entangled all the nightmares - the painful,and sweat-drenched nights - while comforting dreams flooded through its center. After living within a never-ending painted perfection, Levy was shocked as feeling swept through his previously dead body. He shivered uncontrollably, spasms of frustration, sadness, confusion, regret, and desire cruelly attacking his muscles. Here was the truth left out in the open; Levy could sense the young girl who had lived here before through the nightmares thrashing in the webbing. They hissed of screaming behind closed doors, flickering bulbs smashing, tears pounding like rain, and a man’s voice booming like thunder, all as the girl curled in the corner of this room, moonlight playing with her hair as hope seeped from the dream catcher’s center, filling her eyes in their search for more: promise.
“Oh look, the previous child left you a present!” his mother exclaimed, tiredness permeating her forcibly-excited voice.
Levy nodded and silently slipped into the makeshift bed on the floor. He watched the white melt from the walls as his mother turned off the light. Blackness: the truth came at night. It spat the painful reality into his ears. Levy had learned a way to combat this, and so like always, the whiteness slithered across the floor and climbed under the covers with him, cooing a dulling lullaby as the sleep chemicals paralyzed his body. With the acidic blackness pressing suffocatingly down upon the white shield of numbness, Levy studied the dream catcher as it danced in the moon-lit breeze. He gazed into its tightly-knit center, and soon slipped from his white and black prisons.
