What Lies Beyond the Veil of My Mind

An uneasiness wormed its way through Millee’s body as her heart pounded against her chest. Anxiety coursed through her veins like a poison, irrigating every cell in her body with a fatal neuro-like toxin. Her eyes grew heavy, an unmistakable desire for sleep, but why? How could she sleep when her thoughts raced like speeding cars through her mind? When poisonous anxiety fueled the adrenaline that sent her heart into a frenzy, and the return of buried feelings plagued her? Her subconscious screamed at her as she reached into the furthest depths of her mind, but that only made things worse.

She rolled over onto her side and emptied the contents of her stomach into the grass only to find herself gasping for air instead. This isn’t how she imagined facing her past, the tumultuous days she’d spent locked away inside her bedroom, unable to come to terms with the one thing that scared her most—she refused to accept it, to accept… What was she running from again? She couldn’t remember anymore…

“Millee, heeeey,” a gentle voice called. “It’s time to change shifts. Are… you okay?”

Confused, Millee slowly lifted her head from the table, a puddle of drool gleaming atop the oak finish. How long had she been asleep, and when did she fall asleep? How much time had passed? The side of her hair was matted against her face, their golden locks just as frazzled as her mind. Sleep dotted the corners of her eyes. She squinted as they attempted to adjust to the bright OLED ceiling lights.

Her stomach growled, begging for food. She felt like she’d just run a marathon: forehead covered in beads of sweat, heartrate still elevated, and strangely out of breath. Not only that, something lingered in the back of her mind, enough to excite the goosebumps that lined her arms. The air conditioning blasted her face, only aggravating the chill that already haunted her aching body, but she couldn’t figure out why she ached.

“Lailah?” She rubbed her eyes. “What are you doing here? What am I doing here? I think I was dreaming…”

Lailah crossed her arms, a sour expression across her face. “Yes, you were. You kept saying something about not leaving. That you were sorry you couldn’t save them?” She shook her head. “Look, you know you can talk to me if something’s going on, ok? Outer space is a pretty scary place…”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll be ok,” she said. “Um, more importantly—” A wave of nausea rolled over her, forcing her to sortie with a nearby trash bin. “What the hell?” she muttered.

“This isn’t normal for you, Millee,” Lailah said, rubbing her back. “You remembered something, didn’t you? Why don’t you go lie down in your room and get some rest? I’ll cover your shift today. You look like hell, girl.”

“I feel like hell, too…”

                                                                           ***

Lailah walked Millee back to her room, promising to come by later to check up on her. The door closed with a soft whoosh as she stumbled over to her bed, draped with a floral pink comforter and fluffy bed pillows. She kicked off her shoes and pulled an oversized T-shirt on over her head, preparing to sleep off whatever was bothering her. Dimming the lights, she turned to crawl under the covers but stopped halfway through pulling the silken fabric back; the midnight-blue sheets stared back at her like a ghost, their dark hues embellishing the dream from earlier—bits and pieces coming into focus.

It wasn’t Lailah she had been dreaming about—it was herself, but she dreamed she was Lailah, in her body, living her life. Right? Fragmented memories threatened to carve her mind into unrecognizable patterns. She wasn’t sure what was happening—why her dreams were mysteriously colliding with Lailah’s, but they were oil and water. Did that mean they weren’t mixing, spilling together? These weren’t her dreams, her memories—right? The room spun as she relived the dream in vivid detail:

She was twenty-one again, boarding the shuttle from Earth to LLS1—Low-Level Ship 1. It had been five years since the incident, five years of repeatedly burying the antagonizing memories that she just couldn’t shake, yet they felt strangely… foreign. The dusty air dehydrated her skin and cracked her lips; she was there, in Site 96, standing at the precipice of her new life: the doors of the Selection Committee.

Discordant voices rang through her ears, calling her name. She spun around only to find herself alone, still standing on the dust-lined concrete steps, overshadowed by the dark, wooden doors of the Committee. Her wrist brushed her thigh causing her to jump, afraid she’d touched a snakeskin that had blown in on the wind before she realized it was just the polyester fabric of her leggings. She placed a hand on her chest, taking a deep breath, as she tucked her hair behind her ear. Did she always use to do that? And did she always wear ankle boots? She pushed the questions from her mind for the moment.

She’d been selected as a priority candidate to leave the dying Earth, now relegated to a brown ball amidst a cosmic black background, and begin a new life on a low-orbit spaceship—on the day of her birthday, no less. She shoved the doors open as they groaned with a loud, obnoxious creak, expecting to see the linoleum floors and desert-plant lined hallways; instead, she was met with a vaguely familiar scene, though she couldn’t place why it was familiar: a small bed was nestled in the corner of a white-walled room, neatly made with a pastel-pink comforter dotted with cherry blossom petals; red, silken sheets had been pulled back, ready to welcome their next occupant. Aside from the bed, a small mirror had been stuck to the far wall—the room was barren, otherwise.

The obtrusive rattle of an air conditioning unit startled her; it had been so quiet, she could hear the blood rushing through her ears. She walked around, examining the room, looking for a door. Panic set in, the kind of panic she hated—panic that wrapped its cold, dead hands around her neck, forcing her to choke on the little air she was allowed. Something nudged at the back of her mind, an unsettling fear that rode in on the panic—a trojan horse. She didn’t want to think about it, but how could she not? She felt trapped inside the cramped room, the bed taunting her with its blood-red sheets and triggering petals.

“Huh? Why,” she sniffled, “am I crying? When did this happen?” Reluctantly, she approached the bed. “Why are you here? What are you trying to tell me?”

The voices came again, louder this time. They pierced her ears like knives as blood dripped from somewhere farther in, dripping into a small puddle on the floor. At first, they seemed to be gibberish, void of any meaning and just haunting, fever-like thoughts, but as they grew louder, they grew more coherent.

“Why did you do it, Millee?”

“I thought we were family.”

“Use the knife on the bed. You’ll join us if you love—”

“STOP IT!” she screamed. “Get out of my head! I didn’t have a choice! They were going to string you up and slaughter you like pigs!” She fell to her knees, covering her now blood-soaked ears with her hands as she squeezed her eyes shut. “It— It wasn’t my fault… They forced me to…”

When she opened her eyes again, she found herself surrounded by a mound of corpses, some still moving, the fleeting essence of life escaping into the oxygen-less air. Oxygen-less air… She realized she couldn’t breathe; she was suffocating amidst the rotting stench of flesh and bodily secretions.

“Why, Millee? Why won’t you join us?”

Bony fingers locked themselves around her legs as her own flesh began to rot away. She tore her leg away only to lose her balance as more undead hands clawed at her ankles, dissolving the leather of her boots, steadily eating away at her porcelain skin. White to purple to black. Rotted. Useless. Forgotten. She careened into a second mound of corpses, their cries discordant melodies and haunting reminders of the lives they used to relish. It was her fault—everything was her fault: their deaths, the falling cherry blossom petals that fluttered across her cheek—even the sickened Earth. She was to blame. It was her fault. This was her fate, destined to join the legion that lurked in the shadows of her mind.

”No,” she thought. “This isn’t how I died. But… When did I die? Did I die? What, exactly, was my fault?” The sound of rushing water and subsequent cold shock reminded her of the lazy, hazy summer days she loved as a little girl, splashing around in the nearby creek outside her home. “I can’t die here. My river hasn’t run dry yet. I— I have to fix this.”

The cherry blossom petals brandished the air, filling her vision with incessant flurries of pink and white. Their sweet-scent lingered in her nostrils, their soft, elegant petals and loving aroma enveloping the seeds of loneliness that rooted themselves in her mind, unwilling to relinquish their hold. For a brief moment, she thought she felt something grab her right arm, trying to pull her out of the rotten hell that had attempted to swallow her whole.

“Go back…”

A cacophony of dry coughs filled her ears. Obnoxious. Who had the audacity to cough so loud when other people were trying to sleep? Her throat felt dry, though, like she’d swallowed a gallon of sand. She waited for the coughing to stop, but it only grew louder, a subsequent ache in her chest following in immediate pursuit. And now someone was shaking her! But that couldn’t be right. She was supposed to be alone. Dead. Gone. Forgotten.

“Dammit, Millee,” a familiar voice sobbed. “Wake up already!”

Something dripped onto her face. Cold. Icy. Lifeless. Was someone crying over her? How could she hear if she was dead? The word echoed through her mind, obsessing over the final two letters: a d.

“Like a TV ad.” She let her mind wander. “What’s being advertised, I wonder? Or maybe it should be ad with an extra d. Add, like numbers. Like an addition of something. Additional people. People, friends, family— Strangers, community, relationships—”

She shot up like a mattress spring, ramming her forehead against Lailah’s elbow. The OLED ceiling lights danced in her eyes, eager to play with the scattered shadows like a child’s toy. Her lungs were on fire—the coughing had come from her, but why? She rubbed her forehead, waiting for her eyes to focus, for the world to stop spinning.

“What the hell, Millee?!” Lailah shouted. “I’ve been trying to wake you up for the last hour! I could hear you coughing from outside your door, and when I walked in, your skin was whiter than the clouds on Earth!”

She groaned. “Sorry, Lail—”

“No. You have no right to apologize.” Fresh tears streaked her cheeks. “You scared me, ok? I thought you were… I thought you’d gotten sick and died, and I panicked, and I was so afraid you were going to leave me alone and that we’d never get to take trips back to Earth to—”

“Lailah,” Millee coaxed, still rubbing her forehead, “please. Stop. I was just… having a really bad dream is all…” How could she explain what she’d just experienced? The voices, the unconscious desire to take her life—the way she was ready to accept death as recompense for the betrayal towards her family? Was it her family? “I think… I have a problem. No one else knows…”

“Of course you have a problem, child.”

“Huh?”

“The knife is right there, Millee. Just do it already. Become a forgotten nothingness like how you discarded our bodies.”

“Lailah, what the hell are you talking… about?” The face of her mother flickered onto Lailah’s face, twisted in an asymmetric smile. Blood trickled from a wound in her gut. “No! This can’t be real! I was just— Lailah—!”

“Lailah is gone. Her conscious has been locked away permanently, somewhere deep, deep down. I can still hear her cries from that little cage I threw her in.”

“Who— What are you?” Millee demanded. “What do you want? Why are you doing this? Why won’t you just leave me alone?”

“What? You don’t recognize me? I’m your mother, of course. Don’t you see my face in the reflection of the knife in your hand?”

Lailah’s head had the face of her mother, but the same body as her best friend. She couldn’t understand what was happening, and when did the knife end up in her hand? Was it supposed to be so… large? A lump formed in her throat. How would she know what was reality and was unreality anymore? She had a sinking feeling there was more to her past than she knew—something so repressed, so refused to her conscious, that it had to stay locked away in the back of her mind.

“Don’t you remember?” The face changed again, this time to her father’s. “This is the same knife you used to slit my throat as I drowned in my own blood. Why do you refuse to accept the sins you’ve committed?”

Accept. Refuse. Sins. Three words. That’s all it took. She rushed out of the door, subconsciously knowing it would be there this time, but she was also back in her room, that place of comfort and familiarity. But what was it now? A portal to hell? A manifestation of her deepest, darkest, and most-feared memories? Moreover, where was she running to? She was trapped on the ship, forced to loop the same route over and over again until she grew tired enough—tired enough so her demons could swoop in and lock her away in the same mental cage they did Lailah.

“What choice did I have?” She could feel her lungs screaming for air, her side in stitches, as she flew through the hallway—as fast as her legs would carry her. Tears stung her eyes, sharp like the melancholic knives in her heart. “This isn’t real! None of this is real! At some point, I’ll just wake up and—”

She barreled face-first into a wall, stumbling back as she fell onto her tailbone. Blood seeped from her nose, through the hands she was using to try and stem the flow— She looked up from her position on the carpeted floor, a human-head-sized dent in the wood. A ceramic vase fell into her lap from a shelf above her—it must have fallen when she hit the wall. Its smooth, grey shell mirrored her reflection back at her. Wiping her nose with the back of her hand, and pinching it with the other, she gave the mysterious object a light shake.

“It sounds like… there’s something sifting around inside.”

She popped the lid off and peered inside. At first, it looked like a bunch of white sand, masked grey by the shadow of her figure, but as she leaned in, she wished she’d left the lid on: a sickly-sweet scent rose from the inside, a mixture of light floral undertones combined with something… rotted. The floral scent reminded her of cherry blossoms and warm, rainy afternoons—halcyon days of a lost Earth, days spent strolling through the local park, days with… with… With who?

The initial puff of air from the vase dissipated, leaving her with a growing ache, both in her heart and her mind. Was she lonely? Missing someone? Something tugged at the back of her mind, like there was something she needed to do but couldn't remember what. And why was she pinching her nose? She turned the vase around in her hands again, lid still off, as she examined her reflection: ocean-blue eyes, blonde hair, ivory skin, and red stains streaked across her face. She jumped, spilling its contents across the floor, now permanently entrenched in the threads of the carpet she had been sitting on.

Shaggy carpet, wooden walls—she looked up—fireplace mantle, dusty portraits… A strange feeling of guilt washed over her as she replaced the vase, but she couldn't figure out why. She wandered around the strange room, searching for a broom or some sort of dustpan to clean up the mess—an apparently more difficult task than she remembered. There it was again, the inklings of a memory she wasn’t sure was hers, or that she even recalled having.

She gave a defeated sigh. “Where the hell am I, and how do I get back…?”

Four walls. One window. No doors. How is it she continued to find herself in all of these enclosed spaces with no doors? She mused the idea of exiting through the window, but it had been nailed shut. Should she try shimmying up the fireplace? She shook her head. Too cramped.

Without warning, a faint, piano-like melody began to play, creeping through the walls and into her ears; it was… sad, remorseful—like the music she’d play after a breakup? No, that wasn’t it. It was more solemn, mourning. Was it a funeral of some kind? A wake? If so, for whom? Shadows flittered past the window as they danced along the walls, their humanoid shapes hunched over, dragging their feet all the while.

Reluctantly, she pushed the tattered curtains aside, their sheer composition unable to tamper her curiosity. She watched as a line of people, faces covered, sulked by; they were dressed in all black, an amalgamation of negativity and porosity as their emotions poured from them like a flood: regret, remorse, repentance.

They were like ants, just milling about—no sense of coherent thought or desire for anything other than the task at hand. Within minutes, they’d erected a small stage as one of the faceless figures took to the associated pedestal and microphone. She blinked, but in the moment her eyes were closed, a coffin had been placed at the foot of the stand: midnight-blue dappled with pink and white cherry blossoms. A lump formed in her throat; the walls of the room she was trapped in were the exact same midnight tint, and the curtains she’d pushed to the side were the same shade of pink and white as the petals on the coffin lid.

Her life literally flashed before her eyes: the Friday night dates and horrible boyfriends when she was a teenager, the evening strolls through the neighborhood with the family dog in the summer—even the early days she’d spent sobbing into Lailah’s uniform back on Low-Level-Ship 1, filled with anger, guilt, and regret for the death of her life.

That was it—her answer. She finally understood what she was feeling, what her mind had repressed for years, trying to shield her from the ghost of the past: she wanted to feel loved by someone, but she’d repeatedly forced the idea from her mind despite the lingering sentiments of sadness; she was lonely, wanted someone to tell her that she did what she thought was best, and that she had a strong sense of morality. Morality—a word that had lost its meaning.

She stumbled away from the window, tripping on an upturned corner of carpet. She lost her balance, ramming her shoulder into the wall to break her fall. That night, after her meeting with the Selection Committee, she’d gone home, anxiety wrapped around her like a wet blanket. She’d been selected to leave the dying Earth for LLS1, but not because she was a genius architect or had offered an effective solution to a growing problem; she’d been selected after a randomized drawing of Site 96’s residents.

As per the rules, if she accepted, she would have to cut emotional ties with anyone and anything left on Earth, a process done to ensure the mental stability of space colonies. Early colonizers had suffered horrendous nightmares of plagues, nuclear warfare—some even grew schizophrenic, claiming they’d seen evidence of extraterrestrial life. The site’s governing bodies blamed space radiation, a lousy excuse she’d never bought, and that the interaction between subatomic cosmic particles and chemicals in the brain were the only thing to blame.

The memories, thoughts, and emotions she’d grown to repress slammed into her. “They told me I had a choice… That they’d give me a day to make up my mind.” Her legs shook with a concoction of fear, anxiety, and trauma. “The gap in my memory— After they were already dead…”

She thrust a pair of fingers down her throat, emptying her stomach onto the floor but, this time, something else came up: a small, metallic microchip—the same chip they implanted in residents who accepted their selection to LLS1. For years, she thought nothing of it, chalking the hallucinogenic symptoms and nightmares of the those aboard the ship up to biological changes. Now, she understood what was really going on.

“These chips,” she groaned, wiping her mouth, “emit a small neurotoxin that travels through the bloodstream and into the brain.” A purple streak on the back of the chip affirmed her theory, puncturing it with her nail. “But if mine was never activated, what does that mean? What exactly happened that night, after I left the Committee?” Slumped against the wall, she scoured the furthest reaches of her mind, looking for one final answer to a lingering question. “Did I… kill Mom and Dad? Does that make me responsible for the entrapment of Lailah’s consciousness too, then…? Her… death?”

The blood drained from her face as the same sickly-sweet aroma from before wafted back into her nostrils: the floral scent was the same perfume she used every day, a small bottle with a powerful effect. The rotted stench, however, wasn’t from something rotted: it was the smell of burning flesh—her flesh.

As a child, she loved poking burnt-down fire pits and campfires. One morning, after a campfire the evening prior, she’d snuck out of the RV, creeping across the gravel lot toward the smoldering pit. After tossing a handful of dead leaves onto a pair of still-hot coals, she managed to reignite the fire, albeit the flame was small. Excitedly, she continued to feed the fire, growing larger and larger until, eventually, she couldn’t control its size any longer. Tongues of orange flame leapt at her flesh, igniting the sleeve of her jacket as the fire grew out of control. The stench of burning flesh filled her senses as angry flames wrapped around her arm. She was fortunate, though. Had her parents not been woken up by her screams, subsequently dousing both their daughter and the fire with water, the damage would have been much worse.

“Still, though,” she said, staring at the spiraling burn scars across her arm. “Why did that memory resurface?” The realization hit her like a brick in the face. “No… I wouldn’t have… That memory— That memory isn’t mine—! Right…?” She scrambled for the vase again, the only reflective item left in the room—the mirror had disappeared when the music started. “Am I really me? Can I remember what my own face looks like?” She paused, vase in her hands. “What makes me who I am? Do I want someone to love me, or do I just want someone to hide behind, to shield me from the blame?”

Holding the vase up, she peered into its porcelain, mirror-like surface. At first, she thought she recognized herself, if only for a fleeting moment, but as she stared back at her reflection, she grew less and less certain it was hers. The caked blood across her face, the perceived innocence of the whites of her eyes, the curvature of her jawline like that of a butcher’s knife—the makings of a monster.

The sound of a hammer and nails pulled her from her reflective daze, realizing the sound was coming from the window—her only way out of the nightmarish hell she’d found herself trapped in. Wooden planks refused the luminescence of the sunlight as the room grew darker with each new addition. She dropped the vase as it shattered into tiny pieces; she wouldn’t need a reflection if she was trapped within an oversized coffin, void of any and all light. Her fists pounded the glass, screaming for whoever was boarding her in to stop.

To her surprise, the same dark figures from the funeral—or whatever, she supposed—acknowledged her. They looked at each other, then back at her; one scribbled something down on a piece of torn fabric, plastering it against the window:

“This is where you will remain, perpetually consumed by the darkness in your heart. God has cast His judgement upon you, and this will be the punishment you face for your sins.”

Somehow, she knew the fabric belonged to her mother, a patch she’d used to cover a tear in her favorite pair of pants; it was even made from the same material. Still, what did it mean by “punishment” and “sins”? Words began to form on the tip of her tongue, lips parting like the Red Sea, prepared to embellish whatever she had to say, but she hesitated.

A sharp, stabbing pain erupted from her lower abdomen. She dropped to her knees, bent over in torment. Breathless. Useless. Heartless. Every breath was like inhaling fire, oxygen adding fuel to an inferno she couldn’t extinguish; it was useless, anyways. She wasn’t just heartless, as she came to understand at that moment, she was without a heart to begin with. Another stabbing pain bubbled up from beneath her ribs followed by a third and final excruciating blow in her neck.

Three knives: one that stole her parents’ time, another that captured their breath, and a final knife that stole their right to life. One by one, she pulled the knives from her flesh, the same curved blades she’d used to carve the existence from their souls. She’d always joked about their work offices being the equivalent of soulless coffins and how she’d hate to end up in a windowless space, hidden from the daylight, buried under tons of steel and concrete. Now, those same offices truly were the coffins where they were laid… and where she would lay with them.

“The mind,” she choked, “is an unforgiving hell. I kept telling myself, all of these years, that I never had a choice, but I didn’t know what that choice was.” Blood pooled onto the floor, painting the grey concrete red. “I guess, I couldn’t know their pain, or understand mine, until I actually felt it. This room… is the office where I took their lives that night, just a mindless puppet of the Committee…”

The pounding on the window resumed, sunlight unable to reach the solemn walls of the office-turned-coffin. Hot tears caressed her cheeks, leaping from the edge of her chin into the crimson pools below. She sobbed into the darkness, victim to nothing other than her own foolish trust she’d placed in those who were supposed to protect her—victim to a corrupt, power-hungry system. Her breaths grew ragged as her mind screamed at her, telling her she was a monster and that she deserved to die—that she really was just a puppet on a string meant to submit to the overpowering will of bureaucracy.

She closed her eyes, like it would do much good, and allowed her muscles to relax, telling them that it was ok to let go. She’d accepted her fate: eternity within a repetitive void where she’d relive the most harrowing, most traumatic, days of her life like a song on replay. It was fine; this was the life her mind had unconsciously repressed years ago, something she didn’t even know existed anymore. Every new trigger—the flowery comforter, bedsheets soaked in the colors of midnight, the fabric patch—unraveled a piece of the past her mind had so masterfully crafted into the demons that now plagued her.

Red eyes pierced the darkness, but she’d never see them. The knife in her lower abdomen had stolen her time; the knife below her ribcage had stolen her breath; and the knife in her back had stolen the world she’d thought she trusted, only to be betrayed as she lay motionless in white. Her life had been stolen, colors stripped from her past, present, and future—a shell as grey as the porcelain vase now in pieces, the one she was meant to return to.