The static is spreading now, across my neck, down my shoulder, like spilled salt. It’s a new thing, this salt, a flaking, peeling sort of dry. The doctor called it dermatitis. A word to cage the feeling, to make it sound small, tameable. Dermatitis. Pfft. It’s not dermatitis. Dermatitis doesn’t remember what happened last Tuesday, what happened a year ago, what happened in the dark. The itch does. The itch has a memory.
Can you see it? The whisper isn’t mine. It comes from the wall, from the cracks in the ceiling. My own voice is a stranger’s. I hear the sound of the chair scraping against the floorboards as I stand, but I didn’t mean to stand. My hand is reaching for my shoulder, for the flaking skin, and the salt crackles under my fingernails. I scratch, and scratch, and the skin turns pink, then red, then a darker shade. It’s not relief. It’s an offering. A tiny, bloody offering to the thing that lives beneath my skin.
I look at the window. The glass is opaque with a milky frost, the world outside a smear of gray. I remember the last time I opened it. It was a mistake. The cold air rushed in, and with it came the smell of damp earth, of things buried too close to the surface. I smelled myself in it, the rot that was coming. I had to shut it, to keep the ghosts in, to keep the rest of the world out.
My reflection is a stranger in the dark window glass. The eyes are too wide, the face too gaunt. There’s a smudge on my neck, a dark spot where the salt is turning to rust. A stain that won’t wash off. I remember her, the little girl with the bruise on her neck, the one who lived in this house before. Did she feel the itch, too? Was she driven by the whisper, by the knowledge of what was buried just beyond the garden?
The itch is a language. It speaks in patterns, in rhythms of pain. Scratch, scratch, scratch. It is a song that ends with a tearing sound, with a final, desperate gasp. The doctor gave me creams. The pharmacist gave me ointments. But they don’t know the song, the melody that rises from the floorboards and settles in my skin.
The itch wants out. The thought isn’t mine. It’s too clean, too sharp. My thoughts are foggy, a jumble of half-memories and phantom pains. But this one is a chisel. The itch wants to be born. It’s not a bug, it’s a seed. A dark seed of what I did and what I didn’t do. A seed that grows under my skin, spreading its roots, cracking the bones.
My hand is a blur of motion, scratching the patch of rusted skin, pulling, clawing, trying to get to the root of it. The whisper is a chorus now, a chant of a thousand voices. Let it out. Let us out. Let us out. My nails are scraping bone, and I can hear the hollow sound, the final echo of my own name, a name I no longer recognize. The itch is gone. It was never an itch. It was a key. And I have unlocked the door.
