The Seams Have Splintered, Too.

Episode 2.

I’d never had much luck making friends of those around me.

Even so, when a familiar face from my routine cycle of coffee shops and fabric stores asked if I’d join her on a Halloween ship tour that evening I immediately agreed. It would be good for me to take a break from my solitude, I decided. Though I’d been frequently meeting with clients and suppliers all month, the largest portion of my work was done in solo. It was an aspect I rather enjoyed about my craft, to be honest, but as I was used to someone coming home to me eventually in my previous situation, the silence had become unexpectedly grating. I didn’t want to grow sick of it so soon, especially when I was doing so well otherwise… The invitation, in that respect, couldn't have come at a more fortuitous time.

I didn’t have anything to wear to the event. Ironically, perhaps, I was too busy constructing costumes for other peoples’ Halloween plans to have anything substantial in my own wardrobe. We weren’t required to dress up, the woman – Anna, her name was – informed me, but since we could, she and her friends had all arranged some sort of matching get-up to arrive in together. In her kindness, she somehow managed to procure another for me in the time between inviting me and picking me up – a whatever’s-in-the-closet spin on a Shakespearean heroine. I was to be Lavinia Andronicus. Not my first choice in “heroine” by far, but a pair of bloodied-up gloves, a flowy, girly dress and some grotesque makeup to announce my poor little missing tongue was all it took to transform me. Anna, or rather, Ophelia, was exuberantly pleased by it anyhow, so much so that she insisted on a photograph of the two of us together – one muted tragedy beside another – before we met up with the remainder of our loveless, wretched crew: a dreamy, pre-smothering Desdemona, and a cheerful post-suicide Juliet. I liked both girls quite well – we had all of us, unsurprisingly, been English majors in college, hence the mutual amusement in our costumes’ theme. As much as I liked them, however, their real names slipped my mind almost immediately, a forgetfulness perhaps aided by the fact that we referred to each other solely as our harrowing alter egos for the remainder of the night.

I am sure I will forever be known as Lavinia to them all.

The tour itself was about what you would expect for a drinks-allowed, haunted excursion on an old RMS ship. Most of it took place on the pier, directly in front of the decked-out vessel – the ship’s naturally looming structure no doubt an intentional backdrop for photo ops, of which, my fellow tragedies took several. We were offered a charming array of overpriced, ghastly-looking cocktails, as well – a villainously lucrative marketing scheme for the event runners, but we all bought into it regardless.

By the time we made it aboard for the tour, our little retinue was more than a fair bit intoxicated, as were most of the guests accompanying us, each one of them stumbling comically after the guide through absurdly narrow hallways, their vampire fangs and cat ears doing very little to make them appear any less of a fool. But we were all fools together, really, hardly taking in the grave or often heroic history our tour guide was so eloquently dictating, only interrupting her occasionally for an ounce of un-needed attention, a cheap hostage audience for the least funny drunken jokes. Poor girl.

There was a lavish dance at the end of the tour that all guests were undeservedly rewarded with. It was located within the ship itself, a grandiose banquet hall likened, I’m sure, to quite purposely mimic that of a Titanic most people would imagine. I can’t say I remember much of the night beyond this. Only more meaningless laughter – in cheek-searing, superficial abundance, always fighting to be livelier than the palpable pulse of music not fit for the venue… There was another round of vibrant drinks on kitschy coasters, more laughter, more music, then spinning… endless spinning, those spinning, spinning thoughts…

And suddenly I was home.

I don’t know how I had gotten there. Who dropped me off… or when… the change between the two environments so simultaneously stark yet muddy that the difference itself nearly made me sick right there. Right where, though? It was then that I noticed where I was. Or rather where I wasn’t. Not in my bedroom, no. And where was Kombucha? There was nobody beside me. For an instant, I feared that I had followed the wrong sort of person home, woken up in the wrong sort of predicament I was far too familiar with… But then I glanced up from my blurry, bare feet – had I been staring at them the entire time? – and I saw her, just before me, frighteningly close, and frighteningly aware…

A woman. Face deeply sick and pale, a horrible stream of a black and viscous something dribbling from her lips straight down her chin. Her hands… why they weren’t there, were they? Oh but they were… and in them: a pair of golden shears.

I gasped. The fabric scissors tumbled to the floor beside me, their clatter dulled by thick wads of velvet shreds. I could have cried in horror. In fact, I think I did. For, around me, in the creeping chill of the attic was a room that had never been. And in front of me… hardly a shadow in the attic’s moonlit dark…

…my very own reflection.