"FEED" last day

Harley stopped painting her nails.

Not because she didn’t care, she still wore the white hoodie that swallowed her whole like a straightjacket made of cotton. But the tiny rituals, the gloss, the eyeliner wings, the chewing gum she swore kept her sane all stopped one by one, like lights going out in the distance. She was conserving energy, maybe. Or time. She watched her own reflection that day, lingered longer than she used to, as though waiting for it to move on its own. In the bathroom mirror. In shop windows. In Dylan’s eyes.

There was a shift. Not loud. Not sharp. Just enough.

It started when she found the dead cat outside the building early in the morning, stiff in the snow with its stomach split open, pink spilling like melted bubblegum. She stared at it for fifteen minutes. When Dylan found her, she didn’t say anything. Just asked if he had a lighter. She didn’t smoke.

“I think I’m going to die here,” she told Vanessa over FaceTime a few hours later. Not dramatic. Not even sad. Just factual, like a calendar event. Vanessa laughed, called her morbid. Harley smiled, too, but she could feel it.

She didn’t journal, not in the traditional sense. She doodled and sometimes copied down pieces of conversations from memory, even ones she hadn’t been part of. She opened her journal that afternoon.

March 7, 2023   12pm

“My bones are cold. Something’s coming. I opened my eyes and knew it was today.” 

Harley stood in the middle of the basement, just stood there, staring at the fish tank. She watched as the fish fought for the flakes she sprinkled inside. 

“You know, they float when they die” she murmured to Dylan, who sat on the stairs, legs slack.

“What?”

“The fish. They float. Upside down. Like surrendering.”

He laughed, unsure.

Harley touched the glass.

"You think they could eat me whole?"

“Jesus” Dylan muttered, half-smiling. “That’s disgusting.”

She smiled too, that crooked smile that never quite fit her face.

March 7, 2023  2:08pm

Wiped the sink twice. Took out the trash. Sorted my laundry into piles. Something about leaving a clean corpse. Not mine, necessarily. Just… absence. I wanted my absence to be neat. I made coffee. The mug had a chip on the rim, shaped like a crescent moon. I liked that. I ran my thumb over it like a charm.

March 7, 2023    2:45pm 

I sat on the kitchen floor for a while. Just sat. The tiles were cold. It felt good. Grounding. Like maybe the earth still wanted me a little. I didn't do anything for a change. 

March 7, 2023  4:12pm

By 2pm, I’d already decided not to go to sleep. Sleep felt like surrender. I wanted to be awake when it happened. Whatever it was. I went to the corner shop to grab chocolate milk. Walked without my headphones. Felt nothing.

March 7, 2023   6:34pm

I took one last photo on my phone. A close-up of my eye. Just one. The one that never stopped twitching. I deleted it a second later.I  brushed my teeth. Braided my hair. Put on the fancy button-down. I wondered if ghosts got cold. I wondered if I’d get to be one. I didn’t pray. I didn’t cry. I'm just going to lay on the couch and wait. Not for death, exactly. But for the moment I’d stop trying not to die and when Dylan walks into the room, shadows stitched to his feet, I won't flinch.

All I do is think. I wake up and the first thing I do is think. Not of breakfast, or the weather, or that recurring dream about the hallway with no doors. No, I think about thinking. That’s the curse. Or the power. Depending on the hour. No doors and it goes for miles. 

The truth is, I don’t remember the last time I did something without dissecting it first. I resent spontaneity. It’s not real. Impulses are just decisions we make without having the courage to admit we made them. I don’t write to share stories. I write because silence is heavier than ink, and I’m too weak to carry it. My head is a swamp, not my thoughts. My brain. It's rotting.

Harley is watching me. Harley never blinks. I don't remember her being not restless, ever. The girl can barely sit for two minutes. Haven't done so since she was 13. I'd know, I was there. 

"Waste the good stuff on your shitty pasta, why don't you."

His eyes snapped up from the pan to meet the blue and eerie orbs. He bit the inside of his cheek, feeling caught off guard. He grinned, grinding black pepper into the pan.

"Shitty? Wow."

Harley rolled her eyes, maybe good naturedly or maybe in annoyance, he couldn't tell. He never could tell. She leaned over he kitchen island, pursing her lips.

"You put salmon in that?"

He shook his head, looking at her over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow as he plated the food.

"No?"

She recoiled slightly as she tilted her head. Her hair was dyed a light brunette, but he remembered the silky blonde under it.

"Huh. It smells like fish"

He shrugged, putting two plates on the island. She'd been acting a little off lately, but he knew better than to ask.

Vanessa is moving to the East Coast for Stanford, Jake found an internship program for himself in Egypt. Harley got into Cornell Biological Engineering as a legacy kid. I'm staying in Boston. MIT is two miles away from here. 

Harley looks sick. She doesn't blink. I can't ask her. If I ask then she'll ask back. she'll tilt her head and say, "You look like a kicked puppy, Dylan." Then she'll make a tasteless joke about throwing herself in the Charles River, or kill herself in a Dunkin Donuts to get a reaction. She's weird. She irks me. In a nice way that's just enough to make you want to look away when she stares at you. If I wasn't myself, I'd think she's crazy. But I know crazy. I'm crazy. I'm crazy without reason.

I wasn't raped, I wasn't orphaned, I don't have a crack whore for a mother or a deadbeat  for a father. I never "went" crazy, I always had a crowd up in my brain. Crowd of things. Observers, judges, an audience. They ate away at my brain from the start. Now I believe it's round and smooth. I wish to take a look inside. Maybe there's nothing left. 

                                                                  ***

His mouth twisted in boredom as he headed to his car around the corner, keys spinning in his fingers. The sun pressed down like guilt, hot and omnipresent. He squinted, but didn’t look away. The silence outside was too still. The wind didn't move, not really. The world held its breath when he walked. Like he deserved.

He got in and drove without a direction, or maybe the direction had been planted hours ago and he was just obeying. It was hard to tell, sometimes. The lines between intention and compulsion were more blurred than his rearview mirror, which reflected nothing. Not even his own face.

The air conditioning blew stale nicotine and something else. A smell. Metallic. Faint. Like pennies left in a cup of water. He turned the dial off. Silence again.

Sometimes, I feel like an object. Inanimate and possibly rotting, much like a wooden chair. The other times are all spent with Harley. She's a real girl with real emotions and nice teeth. She has a cool military dog tag collection. She's a good pitcher. Last week she painted her nails white and red before the Red Sox game. She has pretty tears.

He licked his lips and tilted his head back in exhaustion, melting into the couch. When he opened his eyes, the ones that haunted him stared back. He didn't move. He grinned and spoke lazily.

"Calm down, Har. It's just one time."

She bit the inside of her cheek.

"Don't kill my fish, Dylan. I'm serious. There's no one else to feed them. You know I'm afraid of the basement"

She frowned petulantly and he raised his hands defensively in return, smiling softly.

"Relax. I'm going now, Happy?"

She swallowed thickly, her face tight.

                                                           *** 

Real things had shadows and made footsteps when they walked, they were warm. Harley always had cold hands and feet though, since forever. Harley made the faintest sounds when she walked, she was feather light. She was so tiny she didn't have a shadow. I wanted her teeth and her bones and I wanted to bathe in her blood. I wanted to make her skin crawl in disgust. Without reason, of course. Just because.

He stood slowly, feet finding the ground like he didn’t trust it was there. Each step toward the stairs felt like climbing, not descending. The banister felt foreign under his fingers. At the bottom of the stairs, the hallway stretched. No doors. Just like the dream. Miles long, impossible. He counted the steps. Thirty-two across the living room. Eighteen to the bathroom. Eleven into the hallway. 7 steps down the stairs, to the basement.

Walking towards the aquarium, he picked up a journal from his workbench. The one Harley gave him on his birthday, a week ago, covered in stickers and doodles and jokes he never quite understood. He hadn’t opened it since.

He smirked down at it.

Inside, the first page read in her handwriting:

"You're not alone, but that doesn’t mean anyone else is here."

He flipped to the second page.

It wasn’t her handwriting anymore. It was his.

"Harley says I should write it down when I feel slippery."

He flipped again. Pages and pages. Entire conversations. Arguments. Jokes. Her jokes.

"Harley doesn’t blink."

"Harley’s hair is brown now. Looks like a witch."

There was a photo taped to the inside cover. A group picture. Him, Vanessa, Jake and Harley. 

Harley stood by the stairs, lips curled in a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Blood gushing out from every orifice. He felt a blinding headache, a churning in his stomach. She tilted her head, approaching a makeshift altar of her.

“You still pray for me?”

Blood began to run down the sides of her face, slow as honey.

He swallowed the lump in his throat, the taste of iron climbing into the back of his mouth. His voice cracked on the first try.

“I don’t pray.”

Harley smiled, slow and crooked. “Liar. You beg.”

He looked down at the journal in his hands, the ink smudged where fingers had pressed too hard. His fingerprints were all over the pages, some warped from dried tears—or maybe something else. The photo was peeling at the corner, like it was trying to escape.

"You left me" he said.

"No," she said, her head still tilted, blood now threading down her chin. “I'm still here.”

She walked closer, bare feet silent on the cold basement floor.

He looked up at her, chest tightening. 

“You were fine.”

“I was dying.”

She sat on the floor in front of him, folding her knees like she always had, hands in her lap, though one ended in a stump, bloody, broken bone sticking out. 

“You didn’t mean to. I know that.”

 “You’re not her.”

“You’re right” she said, still smiling. “I’m the version you could live with. You can still bury her, though. Maybe you'd stop talking to her rotting body then”

A silence bloomed between them. A quiet too wide to cross.

“Do you remember where you put me?” she asked after a moment.

“No.”

“That’s okay,” she said, tilting her head the other way now, so the blood trickled down her collarbone. “They’ll find me eventually.”

Her skin was mottled with rot, right eye socket hollow, her arm a torn memory of flesh and bone. Her white button-down was soaked through, the blood creeping up the fabric as though it were alive.

And yet, she still smiled like she used to—soft and exasperated. Like he was a mess she’d grown fond of.

         ***

The Boston Globe

Metro Section – Monday, March 18, 2023

M.I.T. Student Found Dead in South End Home

Police Treating Case as Homicide; Roommate Taken Into Custody

By Julia Bennington, Staff Reporter

Boston, MA — Authorities have launched a homicide investigation following the discovery of an 18-year-old woman’s body in a South End basement apartment late Sunday evening.

The victim, identified as Harley Eden Caldwell, a first-year student at Cornell University visiting Boston during spring break, was found deceased in the home she once shared with longtime friend and M.I.T. student, Dylan C. Weaver, 19.

Sources close to the investigation report the body was discovered after neighbors complained of a persistent odor. Responding officers found Caldwell in what police describe as a "compromised and altered state," prompting immediate involvement of homicide and forensic units.

Weaver was taken into custody at the scene without resistance. According to law enforcement, he appeared "confused and emotionally detached," and has since been placed under psychiatric evaluation at McLean Hospital. No formal charges have been filed as of Monday morning.

"It's a tragedy," said Miranda Santos, a neighbor who has lived in the building for six years. "We all knew Harley. Bright girl. Always smiling. Something felt off lately, though. He \[Weaver] looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks."

Caldwell’s family released a brief statement requesting privacy and expressing their devastation.

Excerpt – Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office

Autopsy Summary (Case #24-1173)

Name of Decedent: Caldwell, Harley Eden

Date of Death: Estimated March 6–8, 2023

Age: 18

Sex: Female

External Findings:

 Significant cranial trauma consistent with blunt force impact

 Partial amputation of right forearm, clean severance below elbow

 Orbital trauma to right eye; ocular structure displaced

No evidence of sexual trauma or defensive wounds

Toxicology: Negative for alcohol, narcotics, or sedatives

Cause of Death: Blunt force trauma to skull

Manner of Death: Homicide