A highly specialized blastocyst has embedded itself in the lining of my uterus. Its’ cells have begun to rapidly differentiate.

“Analee?”

A question.

I move through the door of one waiting room, directed to sit down in another. This one is less crowded—just me, a television on low, and another patient, who talks endlessly at the tv in a deep, southern drawl. I name her Loud Mouth. She will not shut up.

Fear squeezes me into a sieve of silence. My ears defy the tv’s sounds and the Loud Mouth’s babble. The fluorescent lights are too bright. I can see every dirty scuff mark on the yellowing tile. How long do we sit here? My eyes have been on the floor but I glance up to see Loud Mouth’s face tilted in my direction, her tongue and lips flapping. She is talking to me. She is asking a question. Her words stretch like tendrils of flame across the room. They lick my ears, jolting my cochlea into submission.

“This is your first time isn’t it?”

I have kept my hands clawed and bleeding to an edge of hope, vise-gripped and hanging onto the edge of innocence. But her question comes down like a hammer on my fingers and I let go. Time slips, slows. Down, down beneath the fluorescent lights I fall.

Darkness encamps around me.

I slide my eyes away from her slack jaw hanging open in the brightness of this stupid room and feign complete deafness. In my peripheral vision, Loud Mouth clamps her mouth closed and stares at me. Can she see the petals of my heart wilting? When I look back directly at her she drops her head and stares at her shoes. She does not speak another word. She does not dare another question. The tv mumbles low. The clock on the wall beats a steady tick-tick-tick. We wait. Minutes crawl. This day spans a thousand years.

“Analee.”

Not a question. Fear is now a knife poking my spine. It forces me out of the chair to follow another nurse to another room.

I am left waiting, again. But I am not alone.

A tattered, disparate collection of large recliners line the small room where I stand. It smells like rubbing alcohol, plastic, and dust. Women sit in the dingy chairs, their arms crossed over empty laps, wrists upturned. Some have their heads cast downward, some upward. Every one of them has their eyes shut. They look like abandoned dolls, marionettes that have lost their strings, dumped in this room—some dusty, forgotten alcove behind a stage.

I count seven chairs. Seven devoid figures. Me, the eighth, standing in a tomb of sleeping women. My nerves begin to calm in the quiet stillness. There is no ticking clock. The walls are bare. We wait.

A sudden sharp inhale slices the air. Terror zips along my spine. One of the dolls shifts in the chair while her eyes remain closed, brows creasing together in a scowl. I hold my breath. Her mouth yawns open, emitting a long, deep moan—a single note rising in the room. It hangs there poised, a conductor’s baton siphoning akin sounds from within the hollows of the other dolls. Guttural sighs and groaning fill the room. Each figure begins to animate, adjusting their limbs, transformed in orchestration. They are sheep bleating, cattle lowing, newborn pups with lids still shut. All protesting out a deafening warning—run, run, run!

But, I don’t.

I just stand there like a dog at heel on the piss-yellow tile.

The nurse returns with her pills. A thousand years are swallowed by a single day. The things I knew in part, now I know fully. I am the entirety of an abyss enclosed in one tiny room.

Loud Mouth will always be at the surface when I tilt my face up in memory, laying over the edge of the cliff, peering down at me from above. She will go on speaking through the years, haunting my nights with her babbling and pointed question. I will, one day, cast her question outside of my memory—all rights reverted back to the speaker.

One day, some day. But not yet, not yet.

Today, the marionette sirens lash me down in the darkness with their song.

It goes on and on and on.

-Analee Kluge

Analee Kirby Kluge lives and writes near the beach in Florida with her husband and three children. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in publications from Allegory Ridge, Haunted Waters Press, Barren Magazine, Raven Review, and in Kairos Literary Magazine.