I hesitate in the lamp bulb this time round the bureau, rather than passing through the blind spot as quickly as possible. I move once the burning gets too bad, but it stretches my mind out wonderfully to imagine that terrifying blank scape sweeping out over the horizon instead of a clear black night. The parakeets chatter for a moment at my eclipse of their lamp, and then forget the incident entirely. Preeetty. Glub ill warrrn. Treeeeee-tree-tree. Down through the circuit, a detour through the clock, and back to my laps through the lamp. Running this circuit generally fries out the day’s gloom pretty well, but even flashing through the bulb can’t seem to knock my sourness today. If I were a human, they would lock me up right now: with my brother trying his best to replace me—and Ellie faded—I am jagged and bitter around every insane edge of my presence. “Bye-bye-byeee,” twittered Mr. Budgerigar-Darling: his stupid birdbrain was on point like a human ballerina, and his performance interrupted my thoughts. The lime green bosom puffs out: “El-lo pretty bird. Byee-bye.” Shut up, will you? I think at the parakeet. For a fractional moment, I huddle myself down inside the dark cavity where the wall wiring meets the lamp’s outlet through a halo of peeling paint. For that slice of time try to tell myself that it wouldn’t be so lonely for long. After all, hardly a month went by without some sentimental person or other who wanted to cling on long enough to watch their loved ones cry and tear their hair around a coffin full of flesh that had gone from them too soon. Perhaps one of them, someday, would be another Ellie. Perhaps if I waited and hoped and tried for long enough, I could almost have the warmth that my parents are giving to Benjamin. “Counttooootinonetootreee. Parakeetwantreat-treat-treeat. All go-ooo-on. Preeeety birrrd”
“I can show you how they work,” I try. “Even Thomas, his brain is less permeable—but we’ll crack it, and he will miss you, and then we will all be together.” “I would rather…fade away,” she says. “It feels like everything is going quiet. There’s a dark wide room, but this one little patch is so clean and quiet…so bright I can’t see…” “But I would miss you,” I say at last. It doesn’t even sound convincing to me. I am no longer waiting for her to recognize me, and say aloud how much she missed me, and how much more she should have missed me. How Benjamin was a terrible idea, but now that she was more like me she realized that I had stayed with them all along and couldn’t be replaced by any blob of flesh that breathes. “Benjamin needs you,” I try, quenching the disgust that builds up through my form at the words. “No one could blame me,” Marceline whispers. She is so faint at the borders that I can’t tell where Shadow ends and the shining floor tile begins. “No one could tell me I should stick like a nightmare in their minds, or watch my other child grow up without being able to hold it. Not when right here is so small…and quiet…” I search my mind for all the sentences, words and nouns that I’d hoarded up to say. Phrases from her dreams that I was waiting to turn against her. Questions about the life that I barely recall, and my death, which I don’t remember. Nothing comes, and she dwindles down and down until there’s barely more than a voice and the outline of wrinkles and bone-thin limbs. “Benjamin—” I try again. “and Thomas—” “Promise me you will take care of Benjamin,” the Shadow says, in the lilting radio tones I know I’ll miss. “Everything…feels so slow, and quiet.”
“She was a hell of a woman,” he says aloud. He turns briefly to face the wall behind the sofa, and then turns back and stares at his hands. “Thomas?” I ask. But he is not looking at me—or at Benjamin, or at the room. “She would have been a hell of a woman,” he says. I leave the room.