All We Know of Heaven

[ 003 ] hell or high water

NOW

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LEGACY CITY

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THERE'S A HEART-LURCHING MOMENT when the world goes like a rug pulled out from beneath Sloane abruptly and without ceremony.

Reality urgently jerks her back into the present. Eyes snapping wide open, panic flashes through Sloane like a flood, soaking her bones before she feels her bike whip out from under her, and it all happens in slow motion. A vicious curse tears from her snarling mouth like she took a chunk out of the air between her teeth when her front wheel clips on something and her bike snaps forward with enough torque to throw her like a bucking horse. One moment she's soaring down the hill on both wheels, and the next, she's launched from the seat of her bike and into the air like an acrobat. For an endless minute, she's suspended in midair, fear icing her veins, bracing, bracing, bracing—

Pain explodes in her shoulder when she hits the ground hard enough to rip the skin off her cheek. White spots flicker in and out of her vision and as she lies on the cold cobbled pavement, feeling slowly seeping back into her body lying sprawled on the ground. Blinking in shock, Sloane sucks in a deep inhale, the frigid air slicing into her lungs, ignoring the agony firing up her expanding ribs as her chest heaves with every shuddering breath. Above, dawn bruises the sky, saffron-robed and gleaming.

Grinding her teeth, Sloane pulls herself upright. One sweep of her surroundings tells that she's only halfway down the hill, and the street lamps glowering an incandescent orange ignite the mist-damp cobblestone in a muddy glow. A stinging pain lances through her knee, and Sloane glimpses the blood oozing through a scrape the size of her fist through the rip in her black jeans. Staring in detached amusement at the blood glistening in the slow light of dawn and trickling over the side of her leg in dark rivulets, Sloane pinches the wound between her thumb and her forefinger and squeezes until shallow waves of pain began rippling up and down her leg.

Sometimes she does that—pick at old scabs, rip them clean off her skin just to see the blood, draw a razor blade over her skin over and over, opening up the fresh cuts that'd closed up just days ago. Maybe she wanted to savour the sting, the warm trickle of blood, the only thing tethering her to reality, because to feel is to be alive, and what else is there besides the granulating guilt but pain? Proof that she bleeds, proof that she is real, when there are days that she feels like a voyeur of her own life, floating inches above her body, watching life pass her by through a smokescreen, constantly screaming that even though her hands were hers, they never did what she wanted them to, but nobody could hear. 

In her blood was the unimaginable aptitude for destruction, but Sloane knew her body healed at the same rate as any normal person in this deadbeat city. Glossing a dirt-speckled, paint-stained finger over the wound, Sloane clamped her teeth down on the inside of her cheek as the pain reverberated down from her knee to her shins.

Hemostasis—the first phase of healing—begins at the onset of injury, and the objective is to stop the bleeding. In this phase, the body activates its emergency repair system, the blood clotting system, and forms a dam to block the drainage. During this process, platelets come into contact with collagen, resulting in activation and aggregation. An enzyme called thrombin is at the center, and it initiates the formation of a fibrin mesh, which strengthens the platelet clumps into a stable clot.

When it clotted, she'd pick at the scab. Like a child's scrawl piece, Sloane's skin screams. Scar tissue stretches over her body, a graveyard of existence, the darkest acts made light. Sometimes she sliced up her own skin in lines and concentric circles, hoping the razor might dig a little too deep, go a little too far, nick an artery and end it there and then in the bathroom, until she was drained of the colour she splashed across walls at midnight, blood smattering the bathroom tiles. When they healed over into pink pillowy tissue, she opened them again. Sometimes she peeled off the scabs that grew, as though by inhibiting the healing process, she was punishing herself. It never felt like punishment, in the moment. Just right. Each time she ripped the dried skin off to let the new blood spring to the surface, a fire tearing up through her knee that wasn't born from anger, Silene would start fussing, nagging at her to let it heal, to take care of her own body by dressing the wound, to let the wound purge itself, so it would stop scarring over.