The Day I Wore Purple

10.3 Generation 9

hannah made the decision to erase her past. if she couldn't forget, maybe she could dilute the pain by visiting the memories of memories of memories. this was common practice in people with normal brains... though the dilution was usually unintentional.

1999. her mother was in the hospital. hannah watched herself watching the little girl. three hannahs. days later, there were four, but the memory barely distorted. five hannah's, then six, seven, eight; but the memory remained the same.

no matter how many times she visited the hospital, her mother never lived, joseph was never kind about the note, and little bitty hannah never came back after she ran out the door. every time, she missed her own mother's death while hiding in a bed with jon.

the twentieth hannah apologized to her mother for leaving that day, for running and hiding and succumbing to fear, for letting gavin pin her to the grass; that stupid boy thinking they were in love. she was only nine.

with all things right and true and boundless, hannah should have been content. instead, she was uninspired, uncaring, unenthusiastic, un, un, un... on and on until life had become a string of distractions, escaping into the star wars universe, the star trek universe, and middle earth until escape itself had become personified tedium, a clock without numbers that always ticked but never moved forward.

hannah missed movies. she missed their character arcs. she missed the fact that they had endings. she had an arc... but it never ended. and wasn't that just a circle?

the circle began again when worldbuilding—her only remaining passion—fell into obsolescence.

she still had an audience for her work, but it was a tired audience who had seen it all before. their brains are still hungry, she thought, but their souls are stale.

hannah remembered the urn and the crushed daisies. for how many years had she avoided the stairwell in the lefthand door?

with nothing to lose, she dashed with fatalistic joy through her forest, parted the vines, kicked aside the daisies, grabbed hold of the urn with both hands, twisted, and opened the door.

the sickly-clean stench of ammonia rose from the stairwell. the smell drifted through her nose, grabbed her lungs, then yanked until her eyes watered.

somewhere beneath her feet, the distant hssss of expanding smoke grew louder but not closer. it's waiting, she thought, waiting to strike from an open seam...

cautiously, she descended the stairs.

by the fifth step, she could see that the first platform was covered in a different type of metal. by the eighth, she knew they were xacto knives, thousands of them strewn on the ground and jutting in every direction.

deeper hannah.

her toes failed to find a safe patch of ground, and when she stepped on the blades, pain flowed easily from her foot to her knee. she could have disarmed the ache... but she refused.

bloody footprints on the next ten steps; the lacerations in her heels forced her to use the rail for support.

joseph—daddy—stood on the next platform, arms bound in a straight jacket, legs tied with rope, face sealed behind a mask like hannibal lecter. hannah avoided his terrified eyes and pressed her back against the rail. she found the next step and twisted away from the man with the screaming eyes.

the nightmare persisted on the next platform where a ten-year-old gavin scrutinized her approach; the same heavy brow, the same silly bowl cut, the same dinosaur tee. for the first time since entering the rabbit hole, hannah stopped. although her skin was being shucked layer by layer, she studied the boy's slanted brow and sensed his internal struggle, the shedding of childhood naiveté like crinkled snake skin.