Dirty feet padded softly across the bedroom floor. The sick light coming in through the window gave the nightmare bedroom a dressed look - or maybe the way a nightmare would look if the lights were turned suddenly on, with eyes open. Amy quietly made her way through the bedroom with purpose, certainly without a destination in sight. Amy's eyes were closed, and where the stitches had pulled, making the crude workmanship even cruder, the blood had dried. All of it, the scrapes and pieces of broken porcelain and glass she picked up when they didn't just slide through and let her pass, even where the truly stubborn pieces grabbed on and dug deeper into her foot with every step, none of these things caused a drop of blood. The broken scabs didn't glisten with the wet look of repair work in progress.
Harmon missed out, he really did. Amy was active while he slept, while the ugly clouds slinked into the sky. Just a little rest, that's all, just a little rest for Amy. But Amy wasn't Amy anymore. Amy was the name given what was now nothing but a mannequin. A shell, a body without a mind - there were things going on in there, no doubt, but they weren't Amy - rose from the bed as Harmon slept. The jerky movements of the new Amy bumped and crashed into what there was left to crash into. She made her way to the master bathroom, booting up perhaps, she spent a few minutes banging the forehead of her ruined face into the tile below the shower head. The puppeteer had gotten better by the time she got out of the shower stall and walked on legs that appeared severely asleep. There, she grabbed a brush after much fumbling around blindly. Her fingers gripped the handle of the brush until they popped and the skin around the bigger knuckles ripped open. The brush came down on the counter suddenly and Amy's teeth came together with her lips peeled back in a skull like grin. Pieces of tooth pinged off the mirror.
Now, she strode by Harmon with ease - maybe she didn't want to wake him - and without pause at the hurts the body sustained. Just past where Harmon's feet stuck out from between the end of the bed and dresser she stopped. Pivoting on her right heel - twisting those stubborn hitch hikers even deeper - Amy reached out to the small TV on the dresser. She, or whatever controlled the things going on behind those stitches, found the power button with no fumbling. Amy was working better and better.
The same thing couldn't be said for the TV she left on as she went out the front door Harmon never got around to closing and went on her way into the pine grove ("Money in the bank son, money in the bank"). The news was on. The news was always on now. Every channel was cashing in on the bizarre spectacle of the ever increasing crime rates. Things were going pretty bad out there, not here in Collin's County - "Even more reason not to drink," Abe Kastel would say over coffee after a meeting. But the news caster spoke to deaf ears in this bedroom, Amy was gone and Harmon slept the sleep of the dead. She yammered on anyway, even though the little TV on the end of the dresser only allowed her to report as if she were speaking on a cell phone with bad service.
"This is June Amarta with... World leaders convened today with the U.N.... President Ger... an unknown number, somewhere in the hundred-thousand range... U.S. troops to... If the required number of volunteers isn't reached... talk of a draft... Expected to start deployments in the next few months...
And onto other news, in China..."
And on and on she went. June would be relieved by the next reporter in line and so on. But Harmon slept, rebooting perhaps.
Abe closed his phone and sighed after he read the text from his friend and pupil of sorts in the art of sober living. He sighed and leaned his head back and adjusted himself in the uncomfortable doctors office waiting room chair. Most things weren't okay, he hoped Harmon and Amy were. He hoped his Ruthie was okay, too.
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