Anxiety Felt Like a Barbed Wire Noose by Ivy McMullin (13, Florida)

[Content warning: violence and body horror]

Rhynn gasped for breath, the water cupped in her hands above the bathroom sink drowning her. Trembling hands pushed the water to her face, attempting to put out the fire behind her eyes. God, she couldn’t breathe. Could not think. Could not make it stop. Her frail, shaking hands smeared the water across her sharp cheekbones, up toward the freckled bridge of her nose, and painted war marks on the plane of her forehead. It felt like blood. Quaking hands scrubbed harshly at the delicate skin of her face. Another gasp crested the threshold of her lips like a rope slipping from desperate hands and leaving burns in its wake. Her next swallow was of fire. 

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Opening her eyes, Rhynn finally allowed her gaze to fall upon the rusted mirror, meeting the eyes of a twin with whom she would switch places without a second thought if given the chance. Her acid-filled wasteland of a mind toppled listlessly into those dilated, black, bottomless depths labeled eyes. Gasps evened out, the lack of unforeseen views blocked by the black pooling mask resting before her sightless eyes. A sudden vice clasped the airway from her face’s silently gaping cavity to the embers that were left of her lungs. Nostrils flared widely, drawing oxygen through the presently numb shredded ribbons of her throat. Air. She needed air. 

A barbed wire then encircled her moon-pale neck, tightening with each drawn breath. She tried to slow her frantic gasps but the wire had already circled the burnt-out husk her chest had become. Rhynn’s hands shot violently to the intangible noose at her throat, and the sharpened wires probed then pierced the delicate column of her neck. Wide bloodshot eyes stared from the mirror at her semi-nude, heavily shaking body. A future corpse stared back. Ribs bulged through thin, waxy skin above the enclave of her lower torso. The bones of her arms shoved the magma-filled veins to burn through the papery epidermis like molten hills and volcanic mountains. She was going to die, but she wasn’t sure if the alternative was any better. Hair that usually flamed exotically was dampened and now seemed the shade of water-diluted blood. This… anxious feeling choked her like the noose she imagined encircled her throat, but wouldn’t let her die. It forced her to bear the pain of its barbs without the consolation that the pain would soon end. Her gruesome wounds sealed and healed before they had the chance to become lethal. 

Fingers, the condition of which Rhynn cared for no longer, finally dug deep enough into her throat that they were able to tear away the prison barrier noose. Allowing the breath to enter the channel running through her throat, she finally shrugged out of it. It dropped smoothly to the floor like a doffed shawl, which Rhynn acknowledged with a sick irony. Stopping just as sudden as it began. Then it vanished, dissipating to smoke. Her eyes floating above the endless depths of their sockets crawled from the almost spotless tile floor to the cursed mirror. A shallow but crimson painted gash, the shape of fingernails lined up as if a wave in an uncontrollable storm, decorated her already ghastly neck. But no evidence of the wire’s tortures remained. 

A horrid, throaty laugh burst from her lips, another small spray of blood covering the corner mirror. Hands she nearly didn’t recognize as her own clamped down over her maw. 

Rhynn’s lips spilled forth a series of hysterical giggles. A lone tear left the corner of her eye and trickled down her face, and with it, her jaw snapped open, and silent heaving laughs made her body seem to convulse. She finally stumbled to her bed, tears still raining gracelessly down her face. Kneeling atop it before falling inelegantly to the mattress, Rhynn’s jaw finally shut. Slowly, as if a creaking door hinge serving its purpose for the last time. Sobs racked the fragile frame of the woman curled into a fetal position on the small bed. Her shuddering frame seemed inclined to break with each trembling gasp, though no intelligible words left her mouth. Tears carved depthless rivers into her face and formed shallow pools in the indentations of her collarbone, the starkly visible pipes straining against paper skin. 

Her delirious eyes fluttered shut and she slept.