Paper Beings by Siobhan Casey

He sat on the edge of the bed, unmade and quiltless. Knowing his rage would eventually come flying out of him like a skyful of bats, he took the opportunity to try again to make sense of the past forty-eight hours.

She was dead. Not just dead, but gone. She was gone and his sense of the earth may as well have gone to perdition. Raising his head, his eyes fell upon the black wristband on his table. Her wrist – to cover the cuts no-one else knew of. It was a ridiculous piece of fabric humped on the wood, there simply to mock him, not comfort him. She had left it behind the last night that they had been together in this room. It stayed there after she had dressed, after she had put on her coat and kissed him goodbye, before going back to her own apartment. It stayed there as he definitively changed his mind over her, as he visited her to say goodbye again at the café, as she cried, as they fought afterwards. It stayed there for an entire week. He shifted in his position and turned to look at the wall instead.

Their evenings together had been the most incredible nights of his twenty-two hopeless years. Not just that the experience was amazing, but how everything fitted. It wasn’t just the furious metal that they made out to, and it wasn’t how amazing she looked, it was something that he found himself clutching at straws in an attempt to describe. How she looked at him – that was part of it. She looked at him as though she was able to penetrate him with her gaze, and invited him to do the same. Her eyes were beautiful, but such deep sadness lay within them. It had taken him by surprise the first time that he had seen her. And she would hold his head and gently press her forehead against his. She was an avant-garde person.

His boots and dirty clothes lay on the floor, scattered around the bed. His drums sat lonely in the corner. It wasn’t usual for him not to practice at least once, maybe twice, a day. He couldn’t look at them.

He stood up and put his hands on either side of the window-frame. There was a time when they had smoked weed together in here and discussed where they wanted to go as long as it was outside that window. She wanted to travel all around the world the long way and eventually arrive in Berlin on the other side. He argued with her that in order to go to Berlin it would be a lot shorter and wiser to travel in the opposite direction, but she insisted that, apart from breaking the rule, it wouldn’t be worth it getting bored on one short plane flight only to arrive have learned little from the journey. They laughed a long time on that occasion.

He leaned against his hands. She wore purple and black, sometimes red. He’d never thought that he would fall for someone with cropped hair, but that was the way. They both wore a lip-ring. She gave him a new one for his birthday two months ago. He wasn’t wearing it now – just coincidence. She couldn’t hold any more than two beers without swaying. Once she began to vomit in this room and he ran with her to the bathroom to stick her head over the toilet. Then he got sick himself and she held his hair back for him as he puked. Her hands were gentle.

He didn’t understand how she could hurt herself, but he hated her father more than she did. It was blood that helped her to try to forgive him. He never saw her doing it. She told him how she did it, though. Across her left wrist. It grew harder as time went on and as she tried to contain herself. He worsened it.

He pulled open the top drawer of the wardrobe. His lyrics lay piled in a disorganised heap inside. The writer’s block disappeared after he and she were in their first month together. Hundreds of hours of work over two years. It was song lyrics mostly, but a few poems were born after days of gestation, often between seeing her. He showed some of them to her after he let it slip one day. She read them, asked his interpretation, offered hers, gave suggestions, composed pieces of melodies to them, and generally delighted in them. He began to write some for her. He kept a copy of each in order to remember his previous themes and tones and to change accordingly, in order to balance the overall picture. She claimed they made her laugh and remain thoughtful in equal measure. They discussed how poetry and music sounded together, how each had an effect on the other, how they combined in a whole.

Her life ended in her bathroom. She took the smallest kitchen knife to use. On her right wrist – unbalanced. They only found her because she began to smell. The investigators suspected suicide, though it was possible that she could have merely cut an important artery by mistake. It didn’t matter what they suspected, she took her life on the evening he left her.

He looked at the lyrics. What a waste! Suddenly he cracked. The lyrics flew across the room in a sweep on his hand. Filled with everything and without order, he heaved everything off the table. Using his whole upper body strength he overturned the wardrobe, littering his clothes across the floor. He flung the books from the selves by his bed and kicked the drums off their stands, bashing the cymbals off the side of the bed, breaking them. He tore up his roll-ups and knocked over the bin. The posters were torn off the walls and photographs ripped from their places. He punched the mirror, cracking it into a scribbley, malformed star, causing his fist to bleed. He grabbed the sheets of lyrics and began to tear them up, many on top of each other, all at one time. He shoved his window wide open and threw them out. He tore up more and hurled them out after the others. Tears streamed from his eyes and embittered his lips as he continued, page after page.

The vanilla sky loaded with paper birds, flapping in the weightless air and fluttering quietly downwards foot by foot. Song lyrics broken in half, poems abruptly shortened and without comprehensible beginnings or endings, poetry without focus, drifted from the apartment block into the open skies over the city. The paper fall lasted for fifteen minutes; then the sky returned to as it had been before.

* * *

That night he dreamed of a wheat field under a blue sky with strange white aurora-borealis-like streaks flowing through them. He thought he saw her running in slow-motion through the wheat, turning and laughing before fading away into the air. His foot crumpled something thin on the soil. Bending down to pick it up and straightening again, he saw the writing in black ink against the torn page: “Up.”