The Crack

The Crack

At first sight, she thought they were moving. Squirming, to be more precise.

This usually was the time when she’d regret staring at her screen all day, late at night finding everything visually unstable and unsettling. The colored wallpaper with cartoon patterns left by the previous residents, a family with kids, now seemed to wiggle its way into the three-dimensional space, the pink dots and the blue, shedded spots on the skeletons popping out from that surface, nibbling into her bones along with the itchy material of the navy quilt cover, drowning her in this azure paradise of a bleak, empty bedroom.

In the mesmerizingly ascendant mist from the cerulean humidifier her attention was drawn by a strange movement caught by the corner of her eyes—something wormy, quiet yet eerie like this god-forsaken night. Or any of these bloody nights. She slowly turned her head with a sensible disquiet and locked her vision on these centipede-like black, curvy strings hovering above on the pale ceiling. She froze for a second.

After millions of trials as such during each and every one of these bottomless black holes called lonely nighttimes, she indeed had somewhat learned to question her own judgement. She was not crazy, she knew that, but she wouldn’t easily give in to her immediate instinct regarding any thought or perception in these moments like at the very beginning. Without any movement or further imagination, she stared at them, for a few minutes more.

She couldn’t tell. It might just be the foggy spray of that silently working device that made them look like they were shivering, you know, how illusions worked and all. But if it was an actual creeping worm of some sort, which, by the look of that, had companies, they might of course fall and land on her bedsheet. Or she was just going damn insane, whichever explanation there was.

Fuck me, she thought, as she was convinced with time crawling by that whatever were up there were definitely moving around. Please get your shit together and stay up there then, she prayed. She sat up in bed and found her legs’ way out of the quilt, making as little noise as she could manage to do.

With her own motions, she felt that the creatures had been drifting around as well in various maneuvers. She grew inevitably irritated. Now she made her way out of the bed and stood up straight, again, carefully, beneath that particular spot of the ceiling, tilting back her continuously sore neck and trying her best to overlook the fear of having them dropping directly on her face. The crispy temperature in the room of this late winter night didn’t treat her bare torso well, as she tended to prefer sleeping practically naked which gave her the mere comfort like a child craving a womb. Motherfucker, she mouthed.

The sight didn’t change much, no matter how firmly she wanted to tell herself it wasn’t moving at all, that it wasn’t actually, alive, for christ’s sake. In the decreasing patience, she lowered her knees and turned off the small machine. The result was prominent—with the rather fast dispersion of the water molecules which had caused certain mirage, the lines appeared more distinct which even seemed to bring her head to a more lucid state. The action weakened and like peeling off a translucent curtain, she found the sight more tangible and becoming relatively sure that they weren’t what she thought they might be, for what it’s worth. However, they still looked like something protruding from the concrete, some dark elements breaking through the chalky paint and flipping open the skin of this thin protection for the poor roof of this shelter.

Boosting up some remaining courage she had just retrieved, she trekked to open the bedroom door and went to grab over a cheap, plastic chair that she bought for the temporary use. She came back and placed the chair underneath that same spot, then exhaled deeply before climbing onto it. Gradually standing up straight and approaching her face to that spot, she finally took a long moment to recognize that they were, without a doubt, some traces of cracks on the ceiling, with moist stains patched around them which created shadows and made them visibly steric. They came across a bit disturbing, for sure, but in no way threatening whatsoever.

She let out a long breath and felt her entire body limp all of a sudden in mid air. Freezing without a purpose for a few seconds standing on that chair, she looked back up again at those cracks, an odd impulse of wanting to touch them emerged in her mind. It would of course be harmless, she lifted her fingertip. But then she put it down. Somehow, like facing a dirty maggot or a puddle of mud, her gut stopped her from any physical contact with that existence simply lingering above her hair. Even though they were just some innocent cracks.

She stepped down from the chair, put it away and went washing her hands, even though she didn’t actually smudge them in any way. She dried her hands on the towel and crawled back to bed. And before she closed her eyes peacefully, she turned her head up and took a last look at those dark lines.