The Chasm
Content Warning: this is a psychological horror short story, dealing with themes of sexual assault, emotional abuse and mental health issues. Honestly, if psychological horror does not clue you into reading at your own discretion, I don’t know what will.
There is a chasm in my living room. On sleepless nights, when boredom gets the best of me and I get up from my fitful bed to grab a book, I carefully step over. Each of these times, I am reminded that I might just trip and fall – an endless fall, down the abyss. Yet I cross. Day after day. From the bed to the bookshelf and the desk, back to the kitchen.
* * *
There is a pit in my living room. I sometimes trace its history.
When I was maybe six, in the house my parents had just bought, away from everything I knew, I first saw the crack. A fine line, on the corner of my room. It might have been one of my hairs. Except, when I reached my fingers to remove it, the truth of the crack chilled me to the bone – or so I like to think, though it might have taken me a few more years to know it for what it was. However, I knew, then and there, that it was dangerous, and scary, and should not be on my wall.
I went to my mother, of course. I hadn’t learned not to bother her yet. At the table, she was preparing some greens for dinner. It bothers me that I can’t remember which ones.
– There’s a crack on my wall.
Her hands kept busy. She did not raise her head. Spinach, maybe? She liked to remove the stems. Or green peas, that she bought still in their shell.
– Don’t be silly, dear. The house is brand new, and we just painted your room.
Discomfited, I went back to my room. Sure enough, the crack welcomed me. Had it moved, or opened an imperceptible bit? There was no way to know. I bit my lip in thought before running to the miscellanea drawer. Broken pencils, pens that had long stopped working, empty lighters… And there it was. Tape, and a plastic ruler. Back in my room, I carefully measured the crack. Seven millimeters in length, less than one in width, it defaced my wall roughly at eye level. I taped it shut.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. First of many. I kept imagining the crack suddenly opening into a giant maw of darkness and swallowing me whole. When the first rays of daylight finally shone, I jumped off the bed to grab the ruler, and check on it.
The tape was still there. So was the crack beneath. It didn’t look longer, and didn’t seem to have moved. I felt my muscles unknot from relief. Maybe it was just the paint cracking. I still put the tape back on.
And then? Then I went to school, a new one. I felt utterly alien. My strange accent, and how quick I was reading, did not help me make friends. I certainly was not about to mention a strange crack in my bedroom walls. It helped that my mother, obsessive over any of my mess, never remarked upon it. When I couldn’t sleep, or when fear overwhelmed me to tears, she called me sensitive or difficult. But she never believed there was a crack, or anything strange, really. Just a vague something her child was lacking.
So I tried to forget. When the crack grew larger than a hair, I pretended it didn’t happen. When the crack spanned the height of the wall, I ignored it. When it was large enough that I could stick my hand in it, if I dared, I took deep breaths, and reminded myself that I would move out after high-school, leave the crack behind me.
* * *
I moved out at seventeen. Apartment paid for by my parents – we can talk about privilege another time – under the guise of a demanding degree. The studio itself was lovely, with its wooden beams and decoration picked by my mother; there was little of me in it, and thus I felt entirely comfortable there. Almost giddy, even. My own place, in the big city. You know how it is. Seventeen, first time away from home, brand new schoolbooks and not knowing which kind of adult I wanted to be. It was a day for celebration; I brewed some tea in the cast-iron pot I had just gotten – one of the rare things that felt mine in the red kitchen.
After some happy contemplation, I set to unpack my books on the shelves. And I saw it – with a sense of dread, but also inevitability. Of course the crack was there. Of course it had moved with me.
I don’t know how long I spent observing it, on that first night. Wondering what it meant, how it had followed me there. Why I couldn’t leave it behind, like my hometown. I know that the sun had long set when I got up, poured another cup of now cold tea, and finished unpacking. Even the books were not hiding it. It expanded all the way to the floor, and encroached on the fake grey wood. I had to admit it, then. It was growing.
The next few years are a blur; I excelled academically, and at little else. I was cold, lonely. The crack grew to a chasm, which could have swallowed me whole. Every morning, as I stretched my legs over it, I thought of how it would feel to trip and fall, endlessly, into it. Still, I was able to clear it in one long step, and throughout the day, drowning in pieces of knowledge, somewhat forget about it. To one or another acquaintance, I might mention it. And they would talk about the forever flickering lights in their own room, or the shower water which ran dark as rust, but never showed on clothes. I felt something like connection, almost.
After harrowing practice and memorization, I got in the graduate programme I had been aiming for, which is something, I guess. By then, I wasn’t even sure I wanted it anymore, having settled on an obscure research topic to pursue somewhere else – anywhere else. But when I heard the news, I felt bound to celebrate, and called one of my few friends. Unfortunately, his application had been rejected, and the drinks soured into an impromptu commiseration.
I truly liked Paul; he often had an ear to lend, and a kind smile. A few beers, a walk holding warm hands under the soft streetlights, made me want to kiss him, invite him home. His lips were soft, his arms inviting. Call it a fleeting fancy, if you will.
Past my door, his hands grew eager, then brutal. A milky veil settled over his eyes. I asked him to stop. Instead, he threw me to the floor, at the edge of the chasm. My head slid back into the void. His eyes did not meet mine. They reflected a strange grey wood floor I didn’t know: whole, absent the chasm. When the will to fight left me, I stared down the abyss. There was nothing to see.
And my face right at its edge; I couldn’t look anywhere else.
* * *
Shortly after, the scream started. It lives in my stomach, and my lungs, and my arteries – these fleshy parts that kept working long after I wished them to stop. A silent scream; it crawled in my lungs, cut my viscera, rang my ears, split my brain in two. I held my head as tight as I could, to drown its noise. Make it stop.
The scream wanted out. It whispered words of love and hatred. I tasted blood in my mouth. It urged me to keep a distance, and to get closer, and destroy. I started counting words. Ever so careful. Sometimes, when I opened my mouth, the scream blocked my airways, and I couldn’t make a sound. Its venom swole up my tongue, and cracked my lips.
* * *
I tried talking about the pit. A well-meaning psychiatric nurse welcomed me in his office, and let me pour my middle-class, pretty, white despair upon him, while outside his colleagues restrained a seizing patient. I felt ridiculous.
– So there is this pit, right. It goes all the way down, nothing inside. And when I look at it, I’m terrified that I will jump into it someday, just to see what it’s like.
– Do you want to jump?
– Of course not! (What kind of question is this?) That’s why I’m here. I’m scared that I will want to jump someday.
– But you don’t want to jump, right?
– No.
– That’s good.
– …
– It sounds to me like it might help if you didn’t think about this so much. Like, stop staring, go out, make some friends, and you’ll notice it feels less lonely.
– …
– Ok, so, tonight. Do you feel that you need medication to take the edge off?
– Not really, I guess.
– I can get you a referral to someone to talk to about the pit. It might help. What do you think?
– Yeah, sure. Thanks a lot.
He was doing his best, of course. Sound advice and everything. Slightly callous, maybe, but he had more pressing cases to deal with. He shooed me out the door, and I walked home in the sunlit streets. I took a detour through the park, and another through the library, postponing the time to go home – to the pit.
I did need to think less about it.
* * *
I moved again, and again. The pit followed. I experimented with accepting it: bridging structures over, which would collapse after a few days, screaming in with no echo, disappearing objects into its depth. I experimented with forgetting it: hobbies, distractions, lovers and friends. Late at night, however, its darkness always gaped.
No visitor ever seemed to mind the gap in my floors. They stepped over, unaware, from one side of the room to the other. I envied their ease; who would I be, if I never had to stare at the abyss?
Daniele was one such. He trusted he was right, about anything. Endearing, in an arrogant sort of way, in how he talked about love, and ideals, and his hatred of knives.
He spoke, once, of the monster he felt crawling under his skin, digging for a way out. I replied, softly, that he wasn’t alone. That there was a pit in my room, and a scream in my guts.
– You sure love talking about yourself.
Afterwards, he said that he lashed out; that he found it difficult not to hurt and push away the ones he loved. I said I forgave him. I don’t think I ever did.
We fought a lot; unending, venomous fights that end up being about feelings, and who you are as a person, and how to listen, and anything but the dishes. If I raised my voice, the thing under his skin crawled all the way to his face, and spoke. I did not care for him, I did not love him as he was.
Of course I did.
I learned to hold the scream in. To stare into the pit as he enumerated my wrongs, and everything I lacked as a person. To soothe him with the right words until the monster receded, and he apologized.
And then, once.
– This is not working. I want to break up.
The monster under his skin growled. He grabbed my wrist.
– This isn’t working because you can’t love anyone but yourself.
I pushed back, as hard as I could. I did not want to hurt him. At least, I don’t think I did. But, for the first time, his feet caught onto the edge of the pit. His face went white as he stumbled back in the void, and fell back on the other side of the chasm.
– You’re fucking crazy. You act like there is this darkness in you and you’re scared, but the truth is that you’re a spoiled kid with no idea what life is, and you’ll never amount to anything.
I didn’t scream.
– Get out of my life, I said.
– No, come on. We can talk about this. You know how I get. We can –
– Get. Out.
He stared at me, and at the chasm. He opened his mouth, to argue further; I stared him down, as I did the abyss so many times. I thought of the things he said, and the deep, vulnerable corners of his soul, and the monster under his skin. I thought of how good it would feel to give back some of the hurt, let the scream out in his face, all of the rants I had heard and explained away and accepted when he said sorry.
– Get out. Do not come back here. Do not call me. Do not write me letters. We’re broken up. It’s over. Get out, and stay gone.
A while after he left, it clicked. I could have let the scream out. I could have shoved him in the abyss. I didn’t. I pushed back, and he fell to the other side. The pit did not claim him, or me. The scream coiled, warm, in my gut.
* * *
Something changed, slowly. I can’t point to a specific day. But one hot summer, I stopped shivering when I saw the chasm. And another, or maybe the same, the scream purred when someone held me.
Gingerly, I evoked the chasm and the scream. I heard back stories of those who let fungus grow over their skin, forgot their name, and became moss. Of those who had knives for teeth, and kept them sharp, but never again tasted flesh. Of those who fixed the rainfall in their roof, and others’, and didn’t feel quite so cold anymore. Some had despair, some had hope, some had a lot of practice in standing up and letting storms pass. More than anything, we had stories.
Nowadays, I think of them, when I cross the chasm in my room to pick out a book. This is not an ending: I might still trip and fall – I might open my mouth, and let out the blood-curdling scream from the depths of my guts. But instead. I sit on the edge of the pit, and dangle my legs, when I talk, listen, write or read. Sometimes, I scream down the abyss, so I don’t lose my voice.
There is a chasm in my living room. There is a scream in my guts. There is a light in my eyes.