The Persistence of Memory
an excerpt

“Damn it! Not again!”
Before she started going to therapy, this used to happen all the time. Julia used to black out on an almost daily basis. Anytime someone looked at her the wrong way, anytime a man accidentally bumped into her on the street, hell… anytime the phone rang. It got so bad that Dr. Marin, her therapist, helped her get on disability until she got her life under control. She very well couldn’t zone out at work and expect to keep a job, and driving… forget it. She could end up killing someone… again.
Julia remembered the first time she ‘went away.’ It was immediately following Robbie’s death. She was sitting in the tub in the master bathroom, the cold porcelain soothing to her skin. She was rocking back and forth, hugging her knees to her body, covered in blood and holding a knife. She wasn’t aware of what was happening at the time. First there was only the bright light and she thought she was dying which, funnily enough, didn’t scare her as much as she thought it would. Next came the humming deep in her head, vibrating her fillings. Then she simply slipped into darkness. By the time she came out of it a day later, she was laying in a hospital bed, not knowing how she got there.
She never remembered anything about her blackouts in those early episodes, but now, with the help of Dr. Marin, she made herself remember. It wasn’t hard. After the first few times of remembering, she realized it was always the same. The light, the humming, the darkness… and then she stepped through into a place she could only describe as ‘away.’ She once told Dr. Marin that when she came out she felt kind of like Alice returning from Wonderland. This wasn’t exactly how she felt, but it was as close an analogy she could come up with.
Now, sitting on her faded-blue bathroom floor, Julia knew exactly where she was going. As she sat there, tracing the broken and staggered lines covering her milky skin, her mind flashed to the knife. The light flashed off the blade of the carving knife, she felt herself opening her mouth to scream but the only noise was the humming deep in her head. It vibrated every hair on her head, her fillings felt like they would fall out of her teeth. She closed her eyes and welcomed the dark. When she opened her eyes again she was in her own twisted version of Wonderland, no white rabbit nor any Cheshire cat. This was Julia’s version. Now that she saw it again after so long, she thought it was nothing like Alice’s Wonderland but more like a Monet painting. When she looked out on the horizon everything was beautiful. Yellow and pink pastels blended together to make the most beautiful sunset sinking behind an endless meadow of wildflowers. She could even smell their delicious aroma, a mixture of lavender and buttercups and poppies. It reminded her of Grandma Dot. Her grandmother’s garden was her pride and the envy of everyone on her block. Julia used to spend the summers pulling weeds and pruning rosebushes just to be close to her. She missed Grandma terribly. She never even got to say good-bye. She walked along through the wildflowers, relishing the coolness of the dew on her bare feet. She bent to pick one of the daisies but when she looked down she couldn’t tell one flower from another, they were nothing more than a jumble of multicolored dots. The closer she looked, the more muddled everything became. When she reached out to touch one of the flower-like images, she saw her had had also become a hodgepodge of mottled beiges and creams. Her feel and legs took on the same characteristics, and she saw the dew she so sweetly savored against her feet mere moments ago wasn’t dew at all. Her feet were covered in the colors of the wildflowers and behind her, where she had walked, she had left a path of rough brushstrokes cutting into the serenity of the landscape. It was all too much to handle, Julia’s senses were on overload. She turned to leave but spun around too quickly and fell to her hands and knees. Looking down at her multi-colored hands, strands of her blonde hair swaying in front of her face in strings of yellow dots, she couldn’t tell where she ended and the landscape began. The feeling of coming undone, of losing herself and falling to tiny little pieces caught up with her and she began to cry. When her tears fell to the ground, the dots blurred together. The tears she shed, the hazier her environment became. She was beginning to fear that if she kept on crying like this she’d be lost in this palate of swirling colors forever.
Julia forced herself to her feet. Now, instead of standing in a beautiful field of flowers, she was ankle-deep in a dripping eddy of color. When she looked up at the horizon she was horrified to see everything had changed. There was no beautiful sunset, no sweeping meadow filled with sweet smelling blossoms. She had left the beautiful Monet-world behind and had swum into the disturbing land of a Salvador Dali painting. Julia remembered going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her parents when she was nine. A Dali painting, The Persistence of Memory, completely spellbound her mother; it gave Julia nightmares for a week. Something about the melting clocks and the dead trees disturbed her prepubescent psyche enough to make an encore appearance every time she blacked out. Even the title was appropriate. She was now in her own version of that painting. Instead of a peaceful sunset there was an alarmingly unnatural blue and yellow sky. Instead of the grandmother’s favorite flowers flowing across the countryside there were dead and decaying trees dripping with time lost. And instead of the sweet smell of lavender and buttercups, Julia smelled stagnant water and mold and death. She couldn’t understand how she knew the smell of death was present, she had never even been to a funeral, but she knew this was a death smell, like blood and sweat and fear all mixed together, that sickly sweet scent she has had to her own body on so many occasions. But this was far worse. She turned around anticipating the beauty of Monet behind her, hoping for a way out of this horrible place before the smell made her vomit, but the meadow was gone. In its place stood her husband. His face and hands were covered in blood and one side of his head was dented in. His right arm was hanging limp as if it came out of its socket and his four front teeth were missing, but there was no mistaking that if-you-come-over-here-now-I-might-not-kill-you grin. It was Robbie.
“Y-you can’t be here,” Julia whispered. “I killed you.”
“Well doll-face,” Robbie rasped, “you’re wrong as usual. I’m supposed to be here.”
“I killed you,” she murmured again.
“Yes,” he hissed. “You finally did something right in your miserable little life, didn’t you. Frankly my dear,” Robbie aped in his best Clark Gable cum Jack Nicholson impression, “I never thought you had it in you.”
Julia forgot that little quirk about her husband. His piss-poor imitations of movie quotes that made up roughly one-half of his conversation skills seemed endearing at first, back when he had been attentive and sweet and catered to her every whim. She though his jealousy of other men was a sign of true love. She wondered now how she could have ever fallen for such a man.
“You can’t be here,” she croaked again.
“Damn it Julia!” he yelled. “Clean the wax out of your ears! I told you I’m supposed to be here. You sent me here you bellyaching bitch!”
The sound of his voice rising made Julia cringe in fear. She hadn’t felt that panic in ages. She thought she was going to pass out; she had to steady herself of one of the rotting branches jutting out from a sinister looking tree next to her.
“Where am I?” Julia mumbled to herself.
“Where are you?” Robbie mocked. “Jesus Jules, you’re dumber than I thought. You’re in hell sweet cheeks. My new home… thanks to you. Get ready to join my, won’t you?”
He said this last part too low for Julia to hear clearly. She reacted only then Robbie pulled the carving knife out from behind his back; the same knife she clutched in her bloody hands forever ago as she rocked back and forth in her old claw foot bathtub. He lunged toward her with murder in his eyes. She felt the sting as the knife’s tip pierced the flesh above her right breast. She tried to scream but nothing came out, stumbled backwards and fell square on her ass into the cold, swampy water. The splash and thud when she landed always brought her back to reality. This time was, of course, no different.
Julia opened her eyes to find herself lying on her bathroom floor, blearily staring at a ball of fuzz behind the pedestal sink, thinking she should really clean in here before Robbie got home and found it. When she reached for the little white ball of lint she saw her hand was once whole again, no more mottled dots or blurry colors, just her skin, pink and clean and unharmed. Then she realized Robbie wasn’t coming home to inspect her housework, Robbie was dead. She left the fuzz where it was and moved her hand over to her chest where the knife punctured her skin. There was nothing there. She knew there wouldn’t be a mark, but every time she came out of it she always had to check. This time was no different, no blood, no punctures, nothing but the faded remains of the last present Robbie ever gave her… right before she killed him.
Julia got to her feet, took two more pills with a handful of water and stared at herself in the mirror over the sink. She didn’t think she could ever get used to what she saw when she looked at herself naked. Her right nipple was pinched tight between an S-shaped scar and most of an L. Her left breast was a zigzag of scar tissue and the nipple was all but gone from the huge U scrawled there. Last but not least, on the far left of her chest, a T spanned from the top of her breast down her side, ending just above the bottom of her ribcage. Her beloved husband, the man she had promised to love, honor, and cherish ‘til death do they part, had branded her a slut.
“Thank you Robbie,” Julia said to her reflection. “Rot in hell you son of a bitch.”
She turned off the bathroom light and went back to bed.