by: Alijah Mallula

Everyone lies to themselves. They aren’t conscious lies. It’s as if our brains try to protect ourselves from information that we need. Those thoughts manifest into the things we see in passing. A reflection that shouldn’t be there. A voice echoing our name in an empty hallway. Our true, hurting selves that don’t get the chance to heal because our brains think it’s safer if we didn’t know the damage that something- or someone did to us, planting seeds of doubt where there should be clarity. Our consciousness only roots so deep- too shallow to understand where the issue stems from, only deep enough to allow irises of false contentment to bloom, their petals dripping with tearful lies.

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These flowers thrive in the chaos that our brains don’t allow us to witness.

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I was on the subway to Jamaica Station in to Manhattan, on a blurry Saturday morning, the cab virtually empty, save for huddle of elderly people and bright, young parents. Strollers being held in place by the toes of parents’ muddy tennis shoes, while their children leave streaks of dirt along the fogged-up windows as they draw jagged smiley faces in the canvas their breaths create.

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An elderly woman stares at me, her wrinkled, blue eyes sparking with something I can’t quite place. A chunky, handmade shawl struggles to cling onto her gaunt shoulders, the stitches getting caught in her shoulder blades. Her walker groans in front of her as she leans on it, her chunky, generic, tennis shoes squelching, while she dabs tears from the corners of her eyes with a lint-filled Kleenex. Her attention never leaving mine.

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The old woman opens her mouth to say something when the lights flicker and everyone near me in the cab disappears. Soleless Chuck Taylors and rain-streaked, Velcro tennis shoes lie waiting in the place where their owners had sat. Their bodies gone. No stainless-steel walkers, no jogger pant legs swishing in the mud or cardigans catching on loose screws in the seats. The smiles in the windows now crying all by their lonesome. Gone is their laughter and babies’ babbles. Their reflections though still stare, their pupils wide at the void in front of them. The backs of their hair matted against the windows. The old woman’s eyes are still trained on me as I peer in the window next to me, her hand reaching so close to my face I can feel her yellowed fingernails against my cheek.

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The subway train screams in horror, rattling faster and faster on its enclosed track, unable to separate itself from the tension between its walls. My pocket crinkles as I look both ways, the lights in either of the cars beside me flicker on an off, a shadow stalking behind the bodiless passengers in every single one of the windows’ reflections. I sink deeper in my seat unable to escape the fear freezing every muscle in my body, my mind searing with something that I should remember- but I can’t, my lungs lead weights in my chest. I track my eyes across the windows, the figure taking form as it gets bigger and bigger, closer and closer. I squeeze my eyes shut as it drags its hand across the window sill and places a dark palm on the pane.

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I claw my eyes, forcing them to close, my fingernails splitting the sensitive skin around my eyebrows, the raised scars around them twinge in pain as I split open old wounds. I force the shadow to vacate my mind, but all I see is its gnarled nails behind my eyelids, jagged and tangible. The creature strikes the windows, the glass reverberating under the force of the shadow’s intensity. The thrumming against the window echoes long after the shadow ceases its pounding, dragging it’s clawed fingers down the window pane, though no scores remain.

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The glass bends- but doesn’t break- as the figure reaches through the glass keeping it at bay and into my chest, squeezing my lungs like my last breath will give it life. The vibrating windows drone out the squeals of the train tracks in droves as my vision shifts; dark and blurring the edges of reality- paralyzed- caught by the pulsing and pulling through my mind, draining every thought and feeling through the floor of the laminate subway tiles. The plastic seat sinks to the floor, its legs grip my ankles, and snake around my calves. Stinging tears stream over my cheeks and pool in the hanging leather handles that circle around my ears, beads of sweat fall into my eyes, obstructing my vision of the figure stealing my breaths, that bulb of doubt germinating into panic.

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Iris roots burrow into my eyelids, creeping in the vessels of my eyes, and into my mind. The nagging roots wrap around my consciousness parting the bedrock of the barrier between conscious and subconscious, planting that festering bulb of malice deep within my hippocampus, forcing my memories to bare themselves to the shadow’s view.

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Flashes of memories, memories my brain forgot, are forced up through the roots from the base of my mind.

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Times with my parents, times with partners, times by myself I don’t remember, not all of them negative- though all of them tainted with worry, dipped in sorrow, slashed with pain- all of them connected though I can’t remember why. They’ve manifested into reflections that bend my thoughts to their will.

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Faded words hang backwards in the window’s reflection, jagged and smeared against the figure’s frame, disappearing where it looms; their meaning lost in its darkness. Leading to a meadow of black irises looming over shadowed hills behind the figure standing in the window- a barrier between me and what lies beyond in my deepest consciousness.

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A woman’s rasping laughter paralyzes the roots instantly as a bright memory sinks through meadow’s sky. The elderly woman’s wrinkled face creases deeper with each gasp for air as joy flashes across my mind forcing the shadow and its roots to tremble. Her eyes, bright with life, burn the shadow until her smile grimaces her eyes growing tired as a hollow cough rattles her thin frame. She takes my cheek in a shaking hand, and whispers something unintelligible into my ear. I turn my full attention to her, not understanding what she said… and she’s gone, the light fading from her eyes, as she sinks deep and heavy into her lacey pillowcase. The words she left with me lost with the soul that uttered them.

The memory curdles with sorrow, causing it to fold in on itself until nothing is left but a speck of pollen that disappears into the soil- gone, swallowed by the depth of the sadness in that memory, sprouting a bloom of grief amidst the meadow of harrowing gloom.

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Shocked, it rescinds its claws from my chest, the roots carving lesions on my eyelids as they coil back to where they came from. As the figure releases its grasp on my lungs, the subway chair bends back into place, lifting my limp and bruised ankles to where they sat originally. The leather handle gently releases my eyes, wiping the tears away as it pulls away, and I drag my gaze to the figure in front of me.

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I meet eyes as dark as my own, their honey hue dulled by life and the fluorescent lights above, sorrow and grief creasing time into her cheekbones. A grim smile lilts her wrinkled lips, as she waves at me, her arthritic fingers adorned with silver rings gleam against the glass reflection. With well-manicured fingernails, she gestures towards the soleless shoes and then points to my own. She then reaches her hand to her heart, I follow suit, feeling a strong, perpetual heartbeat beating beneath my chest.

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I never leave her gaze as she lifts her poignant nose in inhalation and releases a sigh. I finally take in a deep, grounding breath and close my eyes. As I open them again, the woman is gone, my own frowning grimace stares back at me. All at once the laugher returns, the subway laughs with them, no longer screeching in horror. The shoes have souls in them once again, squeaking as the subway slows to a stop.

 

I turn my gaze to my own, braided shoelaces as the elderly women across from me chirps, Your grandmother loved those shoes, the laces were her favorite part, that’s why she got them for you. I don’t exactly recall who my grandmother is or who this woman is as grief threatens to take hold of me again. I’m Gerdes, I was a close friend of your grandmother’s. She holds her delicate hand out for me to shake it. I don’t. I’m visiting with her today, I respond and hold out a crinkled sheet of paper I pulled from my pocket, the old woman’s eyes tinge with the same grief growing in my chest. It’s the first thing on my list, I point, Iris’s Garden.