Without a Sound

“You need clothes,” Mikey stated.

Blushing, I looked down at myself. The huge leather jacket was big enough to cover me up, but it was uncomfortable and looked very awkward. I looked back up at Mikey and nodded.

Mikey was chewing his lip. Thinking out loud, he said, “Well, I can’t really take you out to buy some. First of all, you look like death itself.”

I tilted my head to the side questioningly.

“You’re skinnier than it would be possible to live if you were human, and you’re as pale as snow. Not to mention that you’re not strong enough to do much yet. Anyway, you can’t be around people until you can control your thirst,” he explained.

I gravely examined my skeletal hands and all the places I had bitten him. He was right.

Mikey rubbed his temples, thinking hard. Then he frowned. When his frown changed to a grimace, he mumbled to himself, “Yeah, that’s the right thing to do.” Louder, he told me, “I guess I have some clothes for you to last you until I can go out and buy you something your size.”

He laughed, saying, “Although I doubt they’ll have a quadruple zero. I’ll just have to get you the smallest size I can.”

I smiled.

“I’ll be right back,” he told me. After pulling himself up off the floor effortlessly, he went out the door. I couldn’t see him after that, but I could feel where his blood was going. I cringed, realizing there was just a tiny amount of blood near his unbeating heart.

He entered his room, and then he stood still for at least five minutes. I wondered what he was doing. At last he stirred and moved around the room like he was collecting things.

When he came back, his eyes were strangely glassy and looked very vacant. He set black sweat pants and a pink sweatshirt on the floor next to me without meeting my eyes. It struck me as odd that they were woman’s clothing.

“There you go,” he muttered almost inaudibly. I brushed his hand as a thank you.

“Do you think you can stand?” he asked me. “If you can, maybe you can take a shower before you put on h– put on the clothes.”

Was he stuttering? Before I had time to actually ponder this, he lifted me effortlessly off the floor and gingerly set me on me feet. He was still supporting most of my weight. He snatched the clothes off the floor and handed them to me.

“Are you alright?” he asked, slowly releasing me except for the supportive arm around my waist.

I nodded.

“Can I let go?”

Once again, I nodded. And just like that, I was standing. It felt very strange, but I grinned.

Mikey smiled back at me, saying, “There you go! Come on. I’ll show you where the bathroom is.”

I took my first awkward step forward. When I wobbled, Mikey grabbed my arm to steady me. We made our way to the hallway slowly, but he was patient with me.

He led me to the door directly across from the little girl’s bedroom door. It was the first door on the left in the hallway. Opening it, he turned on the light. It was bright, but I knew I couldn’t take a shower in the dark, so I’d just have to deal with it.

“I’ll wait right out here,” he assured me when I walked into the bathroom and he shut the door behind me.

Looking around, I saw that the bathroom pretty much matched the room I had just been in. I thought the pink tiles on the floor were almost too shiny. The walls and counter were also pink. Ballerinas were embroidered on the light purple towels, and the shower curtain matched them.

This was so strange. Obviously all this stuff didn’t belong to Mikey, but it was in his house. Why was it here?

Once again, I got distracted from that train of thought. I saw something in the mirror. It took me a few seconds to acknowledge that it was actually me. I looked away, not wanting to see how ugly I was.

Instead, I tried to figure out how to work the shower. After I finally figured out how to turn it on, I stripped off the leather jacket, turned around, and forced myself to look in the mirror.

Seeing myself like that made me whimper. I used to be beautiful. I didn’t know exactly when, but sometime before I was locked up I had been beautiful. I just knew it. My once glossy blonde hair looked horrible. It was caked in dust and spider webs.

It was so long it passed my waist, but it had a surprisingly small amount of knots. I guess it made sense that it hadn’t knotted in the years I was lying motionless on the slab of stone. The only knots it collected had developed since Mikey found me.

The state of my hair didn’t bug me as much as how dull my eyes looked. My hair would look better after I washed it a couple hundred times. Well, maybe my grey eyes would look better after they saw light for a while.

The worst part was that I honestly looked how Mikey had described me: like death itself. If it wasn’t for the paper-thin skin stretched over my boned and holding them together, I would’ve been a skeleton. My cheek bones, eye sockets, and jaw protruded from my face.

My ribs jutted out of me too. Okay, so beneath them I had organs in me, so it wasn’t just my spine connecting me to my legs, but still. I couldn’t see one strand of muscle. I wondered how I was even standing up.

I watched in dismay as tears collected in my eyes. One fell, rolling down my cheek, dropping off my chin, and shattering on the cold tile floor. I had never really been a vain person, but this was just too much. I didn’t even look human.

I turned away from my reflection and got into the shower. Although it was not nearly as pretty, the warm shower felt even better than the rain. After using the soap I found on a little shelf in the shower, I discovered what if felt like to be clean. It was wonderful.

It took a lot of shampoo to wash all of my hair and a very long time to rinse it all out. When I finally did, I turned off the water and wrung out my hair. I dried myself off with a towel, pulled on the sweats that Mikey had given me, (which were a whole mystery in themselves), and walked unsteadily out of the bathroom door.