it's disintegrating {m c b & lightwoods}

Soft mattress grabbed at her hands, pulling pastel sheets taunt. Next, the feathered quilt was picked up the ground and shaken out. A smile tickled her face as the waves of blanket swept through the lime-painted room, watching it roll and convulse in such a violent yet gentle manner. She felt in control here, shaking the dust out of something so much bigger than her. It was something she knew she could do properly- unlike being a child, a task everyone seemed to expect her to know how to do. To her, making a bed was easy- being a kid was not.

---

“Now, darling, you mustn’t bend your wrist like that. It’s more of a flick, see?”

Her mother’s voice was warm, like a hot drink on a day that really isn’t that cold. She demonstrated her perfect folding technique on the linen, and then unfolded it again. Enveloping Nora’s infantile, chubby fingers in her own perfectly slender ones, she showed the method again, this time letting her daughter’s hands do the work. It was during one of her rare relapses, handfuls of days in which Nora was strong enough to stand on her wobbly feet, reveal see-through, needle-marked skin from behind it’s harem of a sick bed. These days were filled with lessons, things that proper young ladies, even sick ones, needed to know. Cutlery-usage, dusting, dancing- her personal favourite- and this, bed-making, all jumbled their peculiarities in her head, until she had to first position from the outside in, corner to corner, with her little finger pointing out.

---

It was funny to think that this was someone else’s room, that it held someone else’s memories. Perhaps it was the reason that, on hot days, it got so stuffy in here- the thick nostalgia was an insulator, too thick to let out the heat. Once, Riley Lightwood- the boy who she had told everything and nothing too- had been a child in this room, doing boy things. What even are boy things? Besides the fat-lady guitars gathering dust on the wall, he had left no clues, and Nora certainly had no experience of her own. Before she moved here, the only males she had ever been physically close too were her doctors, and she reasoned that they didn’t count.

She’d had her own memory-room once. Not one like this, a blank slate, green walls meaning nothing. Once, chipless plaster had meant something, a stain on the carpet from a nosebleed, a speck of lipstick next to the doorframe, and a big old cupboard where once, she had hid for hours.

---

“Oh, thank God you’re safe!”

Hefty bossom was shoved in her face, suffocating her with a soft smell of baby powder, cherry blossom, disinfectant and mother.

“Now, just these pills, and you can go to sleep.”

She couldn’t do it. It was the reason she had hid in the first place- the beetle-pills that skittered down her throat and made her feel even more sick. They never seemed to make her better, only hold off her sickness a tiny bit- and sometimes, she wasn’t even sure if they did that. So, her six-year-old mind reasoned that if her mother couldn’t find her, if she hid well enough, surely she and her stupid medicines would be forgotten about. Curled in moth-eaten jackets and old shoes, the cedar walls had guarded her, protected her, given her tiny thunderstorms in her toes, and eventually put her to sleep.

When she was dragged out, however, she had not been forgotten. Her mother’s tearful face greeted her, and she did not even get a scolding- that was something that was very rare in her household. Her very first doddery steps of guilt pounded in her stomach, and she felt ever so mean for making her mother sad.

“Sorry, mummy.”