echo I see the Thing on my twelfth birthday.
The doctor is still speaking to my mother in a language that isn’t foreign but might as well be, jargon my brain barely even registers fluttering from his lips and dissolving in the open air. I’ve long stopped trying to hear him. All my attention curls out of my mind like a wisp of smoke and flits towards the creature in the corner of the clinic.
It’s—unassuming. In another time, I’d deem it as innocent, with its snow-white skin and fluffy ears, maybe sweet, with a pouted mouth and big brown eyes, or perhaps cute, barely the size of a small kitten with paws to match, pink striping its curly tail. But looking at it now, when I’m sitting in the doctor’s clinic because I’d freaked out and locked myself in my bedroom at my own birthday party before having a meltdown so terrifying it made my mother cry, I can only think of it as unassuming.
Not harmless. I’ve learned that nothing really is.
As I watch, the Thing stretches languidly, then yawns loud enough for me to hear, even from where I’m sitting. For just a second, I catch a glimpse of rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth sitting in its overly large mouth, the barest flash of silver and ivory before they’re gone once more. The Thing smiles at me with tiny, rose-pink lips pouted in a gummy grin. Tilts its head to the side. Regards me casually—as if I’m hardly worth its time, but it can’t take its eyes off me anyway. Despite the people standing in between me and it and the layers of clothes draped over my form, I feel bare. Naked.
The Thing tips its chin at me in greeting. Before my eyes, the fur covering its body ripples. Jet-black now. A little like the hair lining my own scalp.
“Hi,” the Thing says, through a mouth that doesn’t even bother to fall open. “Your hair looks like shit.” It smiles. Teeth sharp sharp sharp before there’s nothing but pink gums once again. “But you already know that, don’t you?”
I’m the only one who can see the Thing.
I find that out the hard way, when I ask my mother if she can see it and she looks at me like I’m crazy. Already thinks I am. But her dark eyes search me, piercing right through to my soul, excavating every inch of insanity she thinks lines my chest. The doctor told her something. She never repeated it to me.
“What does it look like?” she asks.
The Thing in the corner grins. Its fur flashes—black, green, red. Mouth elongating and teeth sharpening to knives. Eyes widening until its lashes flutter against the base of its jaw.
I tell her so.
My mother gives me a sympathetic smile, and for a moment, she looks twenty years older than forty-two. “Aren’t you a bit too old for imaginary friends, darling?” she remarks, and leaves it at that.
I talk about it once more to my best friend, even though he’s been avoiding me since what I’ve taken to calling The Incident in my head—nothing more than an Incident, as if that’s really all it is, as if I dropped a slice of cake on the rug or blew out the candles before the song was over instead of flipping the entire table over and rushing to my room in a flood of tears. My hair had looked fine in the mirror before the party, but the way everyone had stared at me when I’d blown out the candles on my cake had let me know that mirrors tell enough lies for me to not believe them.
He snorts. “What the hell are you talking about, Charlie?” And then he tells me his mother won’t let him talk to me anymore. I’ve known him long enough to know he’s lying.
“He thinks you’re crazy,” the Thing supplies from its corner, staring at me with green marbles for eyes as my (former) best friend stomps away. “They all do. They’re right, you know?” And then, in a whisper so quiet I have to strain to hear it: Even if they say you’re not, they don’t mean it. People don’t mean anything nice they say, do they?
On my thirteenth birthday, no one shows up to my party this time. The Thing moves to my shoulder.
It doesn’t hurt.
Part of me expects it to—the Thing is still the size of a small kitten, but even kittens have weight, and it’s bigger now than when I first saw it in the clinic. But it feels like nothing but heavy air—the tiniest bit of pressure on my shoulders, so light I hardly feel it when I’m moving around, when I forget it’s there. Gravity doesn’t seem to weigh it down the same way it glues my sneakers to the ground or presses my eyes to the floor whenever I trudge through the school corridors. But there’s gravity in its voice every time it presses razor-sharp fangs to my ear and murmurs, “They’re all looking at you, you know that? Who the hell even has this much acne? You didn’t do your hair properly this morning. Hey, did you remember to zip up your bag? You’ve probably already lost something by now. It fell out somewhere along the walk to school. You should go back for it.”
My bag is firmly zipped, jaws locked shut. I go back anyway. Scan the streets for whatever it is I lost—even though some part of me knows I haven’t lost anything at all—until my eyes burn out of their sockets. I’m late for first period. I don’t go.
The Thing gets bigger every year.
The changes are subtle enough that initially, I can dismiss it as part of its ever-shifting form. It is yellow one second, pink the next, small one second, big the next. But eventually, the Thing is no longer a small kitten but a large cat, looks like it too sometimes, maybe a Persian or a Ragdoll. Fur unfurls over my shoulders, curling past my chest and all the way down my torso. Its fluffy tail unhooks my shirt from the waistband of my jeans and retucks it in until it is just right, and even then, it is wrong. It’s hard to be right when the Thing is inherently wrong in itself. Just like me.
We stick together. There is nowhere else for either of us to go.
On my fourteenth birthday, I give the Thing a name.
The Thing smiles. Grins with teeth like razor blades sitting in a rosebud mouth. It digs them into the shoulder it perches on—deep, as if trying to take out a chunk of flesh with it.
It should hurt. It doesn’t. I feel the pain all the same.
Friends are far and few. Loneliness becomes my best one.
That, and the Thing. The Thing, with its shifting, multihued fur and its big eyes and the way it whispers into my ear every time I try to approach anyone else—Why would anyone want to talk to you? You look like…that, and your personality’s pretty shitty too. Look at her, she’s obviously disgusted. Do you hear that laugh? That’s an uncomfortable laugh. You’re grossing her out, you pig. Hey, have you ever considered that the way you walk’s far too heavy?
The whispers become a mantra. The mantra becomes comfort—a familiar sonnet drifting into the right side of my brain whenever I try to pull out a chair, or raise my hand in class, or approach someone I’ve talked to less than five million times. It is comfort, and it is fear, panic wrapping one thorned fist around my heart whenever I allow myself to breathe against the backdrop of the universe and ripping it out. It gouges my eyes from my face with the nightingale cage of my own ribs. I am blind. I cannot see my own faults. The Thing tells each and every one of them to me. Repeats them—again, again, again, until I can memorise each word. Until I can fill in the blanks myself before the Thing does.
That person doesn’t want to even be within a fifty-mile radius of you, because____.
Answer: You’re fat, ugly, dumber than a bag of bricks, and have the personality of dried dish soap.
You shouldn’t try out for that, because____.
Answer: You’re going to fail anyway, so what’s the point in trying?
There’s no one who loves you, because____.
Answer: How could they?
I sit alone. I eat alone. I group with the leftovers for projects and the Thing tells me to memorise their internal groans. I try, I fail, and I never try again. The Thing says: I told you so. The Thing is right. The Thing is something that is inherently wrong, but it always speaks the truth, and I, the blind and deaf and mute plague staining the lives of everyone around me, must listen to it.
My existence is a curse. The Thing makes sure I know that, and soon enough, I do.
Some days, the Thing gets too much to bear.
I cry. I scream. I curse at it. I fling things away the same way I did at my twelfth birthday party, when I saw the Thing in the doctor’s clinic for the first time. I let adrenaline and rage and sorrow pulse through my blood until artwork the Thing has deemed unsatisfactory (all of it, really) lies in shreds on the floor and my school notes are in tatters. I ask, sob, beg: why, why, why?
Through it all, the Thing never answers me. It stays on my shoulder—laughing, laughing, laughing, until my eardrums bleed and my origami heart rips into two.
I turn seventeen. The Thing gets bigger.
There’s a girl—there’s always a girl. A girl with a smile like honey and eyes like the open sky, always neat and poised, and yet so wild and free. Her name is Daphne. Like a dryad of the trees. Pretty and blithe and friendly, oh so friendly, talking to everyone and anyone in her way. Even me. Even me—and the Thing, even though I know she can’t see it. Nobody can.
I think of telling her she’s pretty.
I think of being the one to talk to her first.
I think of asking her to prom.
The Thing tells me, its claws digging into my shoulder: Why the hell would you even try?
I don’t.
On my eighteenth birthday, I stop going out.
The Thing presses down on my shoulder. It still doesn’t hurt, but I can’t breathe. I’m not sure if it’s the Thing anymore or if it’s just me, panic swelling in the space between my ribs, squashing my lungs to the side until they kiss bone. It rips the oxygen right out of my throat. The Thing swallows it down greedily, forked black tongue slithering around molecules of precious air I can barely taste anymore.
The world is scary. It scares me, and my fear delights the Thing. But the times the Thing is happiest are the times I dare to venture out of my home, one foot hardly over the doormat before it’s murmuring in my ear: “You know, everyone’s staring at you. They’re wondering who’s the messed-up kid with the shitty hairstyle and the shitty face and the shitty everything. You’re going to trip over that rock and fall, you know that? You’re going to embarrass yourself if you take even one step outside, and we both know it. Did you know you embarrass yourself just by existing?”
I end up staying inside. I always do.
“Do you have any pets?” the receptionist at the hospital asks me as she checks me in. A new treatment, my mother had said. It’ll be good for you, my father had insisted. But I know better. The Thing does, too. We both know they’ve already given up on me, the way they did from the start.
When was the start? Maybe the day I shut myself in my bedroom and never quite came out again. Maybe the day the Thing appeared. Maybe the day I was born. That, I do not know. I don’t think the Thing knows, either.
I almost say no, the answer everyone expects from me, but almost reflexively, the word “Yeah,” spills out from between my lips instead. Careless, the Thing whispers in my ear, so huge it covers both my shoulders by now, long tail slinking over my neck like a noose around my throat.
“What’s its name?”
She’s friendly, sweet, pretty, wavy chestnut-brown hair pinned up in a neat ponytail and dark eyes that seem to grin wider than her actual smile. A framed picture of a pair of dogs on her desk and another one in her pencil case. I saw it when she took down my details. The Thing did too, fur rippling the colour of coal, eyes wide and wet, wagging tongue completely devoid of the canine innocence radiating from the photos. The Thing is anything but innocent. It means every word it says.
The receptionist reminds me of Daphne. Everyone reminds me of Daphne—the what-ifs and could-have-beens, the maybes and will-nots. I wonder if the end would never have begun if I had managed to talk to her. If I had managed to talk to anyone else. The Thing tells me it wouldn’t have made a difference. I know it is right. It’s just me—me and the Thing, so tangled together I can hardly tell where I begin and it ends, weaving itself into my brain until our chests heave as one.
“Name?”
I almost turn. Almost stare at the Thing looming over my back, tail curling down my spine. It is black, like my hair. It is pale peach, like my skin. It is brown, like my eyes. It is pink, like the brain leaking out from my ears, pooling on the ground in front of us. She cannot see it. I do not tell her I have brought my pet, if the Thing can be called that, with me. A present, perhaps. A gift for my twelfth birthday. Or a curse. Some part of me leans more towards the latter.
“Yeah, its name! I have two dogs. They’re both labradors and I named them Rofie and Rylie!”
“Ah. I guess it would have to have a name.” I chuckle, just a shade too forced. The Thing whispers in my ear—can’t even get this simple thing right, can you, Charlie?
The receptionist smiles at me. I do not smile back. There’s nothing personal about it. The Thing says my smile looks too fake, too plasticky, too much. I haven’t smiled in years.
“Yeah, I named it—”
Look at her, she’s already sick of you, the Thing teases.
“—Anxiety.”
Written by: Amberlyn
Edited by: Ryan
