27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
29. Chapter 29
30. Chapter 30
31. Chapter 31
32. Chapter 32
33. Chapter 33
34. Chapter 34
35. Chapter 35
About Cat Wynn
Also by Cat Wynn
Chapter 1
Iwake with a gasp, hand to neck, back to headboard, body bent to the darkness.
I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.
Except I can. I’m breathing right now. Oxygen pushes through me like a bike pump, labored and hard.
It’s happening again. The suffocating. The drowning in my sleep.
Use your grounding techniques.
That’s what my therapist would say. Well, before I fired her. Before I realized stepping out of my apartment was a nearly impossible task. She would say, “You won’t suffocate in your sleep, Jules. Your body breathes for you. Trust your body.”
“But what if it doesn’t? And what if I don’t?” I’d reply.
Bodies died all the time, morphed and changed and surprised their dwellers. There was nothing inherently trustworthy about them.
Grounding techniques. Focus!
Right. I turn my gaze to the sparkling rectangular glass across from my bed. My aquarium. An anchor of space and time in my bedroom. But there aren’t any aquatic creatures inside. I could never be trusted to keep something alive. Not even myself.
Bubbles flitter from the pump at the corner. My heart rate slows while I watch the fleeting spherical dance. The aeration of oxygen throughout the water mimics the aeration of oxygen throughout my blood.
My breath settles.
My stare glazes over.
Exhale.
Sometimes, I wonder what it’d be like to be in that aquarium. I wonder what it’d be like to look through the glass from the other side.
I wonder who I’d see.
Chills run up my spine, and I shake them off, blindly grasping for my phone buried in the sheets next to me, its screen a comforting luminous glow.
Four thirty-five in the fucking morning.
Too early to rise; too late to go back to sleep.
I roll out of bed, naked save for the cotton granny panties, and sweep up last night’s robe from the floor, shoving my arms through the green floral sleeves. My friend, Kate, gifted me this robe last year for Christmas, its slinky silk sticking like seaweed around my limbs. I tighten the sash in preparation. An inside girl’s armor.
After I’ve scuttled to the kitchen and collected an enormous bowl of Froot Loops—“You shouldn’t eat that junk.” My mother’s voice swims into my head. “Models don’t eat sugar.”—I wander back to my bedroom, plop down at my desk across the wall from my bed, and shove sweet, wet spoonfuls in my mouth.
I squint with a frown as the light blares from my computer screen.
I’m a copywriter, so I don’t have to commute to an office. I don’t have to mingle with coworkers. I couldn’t even pick my boss out of a lineup if you put a gun to my head.
If it weren’t for my friend, Kate, no one would even know I was alive. Like, what if I really did stop breathing one day? If my lungs just quit their job? No one would know I was here, shriveled up on the floor, like a dried-out sardine.
With that thought, my fingers type in the search browser. A familiar website, but it’s not work. It’s more of an interest. A hobby.
The Freemont Aquariumaniacs Forum
I visit this forum every once in a while. At least, it used to be every once in a while. Now, it’s more like every single day or whenever the idea strikes me that I should put a fish in my tank. Or maybe a snail. A crab.
The people are nice, the community active.
