The Weight of Being Whole, Part I: Ink in Water
Fiction by Sandolore Sykes
The stories in this volume compose FAB = -FBA, SUM FLUX V.2.2. See more stories, and check out the authors featured in this edition here.
Part 1: Ink in Water
I'm a killer too. But she’s the only one who was ever real. When she dies, I’m gone.
Roe settles her notebook on her thigh and writes: It better be fucking worth it. She scans across the auditorium, without looking at the page, and continues: after everything I gave up to be here.
Roe scans the room, packed with somebodies perched on rickety folding chairs, pretending not to notice the forced stillness of their hands. Since their phones had been confiscated at the door, everyone has notebooks and pens. Look how brand new they are. Roe’s notebook is already half full of scribbles, the blue cover creased with seams of white-bend marks. Without looking at the page, she writes: Evelyn Waters will notice me today.
Camilla used to watch Roe writing in her notebook while staring out the window as if it were some kind of magic trick. “How do you keep the lines straight?” she asked.
“We see things out of the corners of our eyes, you know,” Roe had answered.
Roe observes the room in profile. Stained beige peeling paint on the walls and peach-colored linoleum floor, the place reeks of old hot dogs and burnt coffee. She’s hungry—forgot to eat again—the smell turns her stomach. She’s been forgetting to eat ever since Camilla left.
What does she miss more, the smell of empanadas, or Cam’s gingery, lime perfume? Sometimes Roe catches a lingering whiff of lime, all these months later, even though every last trace of Camilla has been removed.
Get her out of your mind, Roe tells herself, today is about Evelyn Waters.
The stage is about as basic as a stage can get. The ratty grey curtains must have seen their fair share of bingo balls and Christmas pageants. Roe wonders if they’d ever hosted a prisoner before. Roe, surveying the crowd, thinks that they were all lucky to have been chosen. Fifty out of three hundred requests—or more? The somebodies look like they know it too, the way they’re sitting there. They’re performative in their specificity like they’re playing themselves on TV. That woman, wrist flexed, gazing at her claw-like, two-toned nails—who even is she? That guy in the three-piece suit, knuckling his jaw, is that a paisley handkerchief in his breast pocket?
Even the prison guards along the wall look like they are extras wearing identical blue buttoned-up costumes, their tasers looking like painted cardboard, their blue costumes an un-even, washed-out blue.
Everybody’s in costume, Roe thinks. But look who’s talking. Who’s the try-hardest of the try-hards? Roe—freshly dyed red hair, that notice-me purple, seal-sheen coat she couldn’t afford. And that necklace—Jesus. The retro mermaid tail pendant, worn like a real fan girl would. Embarrassing. Camilla would’ve talked her out of it. She always knew the difference between enough and too much.
Camilla had been a living, breathing specificity—those black curls against her leather and fake pink furs. Roe had once told her, “You’re lucky you’re so beautiful, because you dress like a four-year-old who got into her starlet mother’s closet.”
Camilla had loved the way Roe described people's “specificity,” their attempts to shout out who they were, trying to drown out any ideas you may come up with yourself.
Camilla had found it thrilling—how Roe watched people, studied them. They’d turn out the lights in their apartment and watch the neighbors across the way as Roe told stories about their lives and cataloged all their habits.
But when Roe’s attention turned to Evelyn Waters, this slow unraveling of a person’s story, stopped being so charming—didn’t it?
“Hybristophiliac”—Camilla must have found that one on Google. But once she latched onto it, the word took hold. As if Roe were one of those women obsessed with Ted Bundy, as if her fascination with Evelyn was some kind of sexual perversity, a sickness. The idea spread like rot, and it slowly ate away at Camilla’s support until she became more and more of a problem.
Roe opens and closes her notebook, a cue to herself to focus. She scans the crowd, a man sitting in the row near her is crossing and recrossing his hairy hands over his slightly wrinkled blue suit pants. He looks like some kind of high-middle management administrator of the detention facility. The man beside him, sitting rod straight with his delicate wire-rimmed glasses and expensive sweater, must be a Times journalist or something.
Because look at them—professionals. Real reporters. And Roe? Just a blogger, not even a famous one. A nobody who somehow got through the door.
She needs a “somebody” question. If Roe asks the right thing, Evelyn will see her, will choose her. Ask her to write the book, the exclusive deep dive. Roe has to know what it felt like, for Evelyn, when she did what she did, what it did for her—in her body.
Roe’d been obsessed—up all night obsessed—trying to answer it herself. Sometimes, a little drunk on that leftover rice liquor Camilla had ordered in cartons from Spain, sprawled across her bed in a sea of papers, flipping through documents in a frenzy, she felt the roles reversing. Like she wasn’t the writer at all, but the one being written. Like Evelyn was writing her.
Roe Loch just somebody else’s draft.
But that was just the Ruavieja talking.
A new guard crosses the room and takes position in front of the stage, scanning the crowd. His uniform is crisp, and immaculate. He has one of those earpieces. He looks more… “expensive.”
Roe wonders—is he Evelyn’s personal guard while the others belong to the detention facility? Of course, Evelyn would have her own guards, but where would the money come from? Benefactors? Fans? Hybristophiliacs?
Roe looks down at her notes, several quotes she’s scribbled down from the handful of interviews Evelyn has allowed.
“They turn blue—I can see right through their skin.”
She said this in every single interview.
That’s what she wants to talk about.
The email asking for access to the conference had been a long shot and yet, there she was. “Re: Going Blue,” had her email crackled with enough raw energy for Evelyn to see into it—straight to the somebody Roe could be?
You are not a nobody, Roe reminds herself—a credo Camilla once made her write down. But Camilla is gone now. Roe stuffed the void with paper—newspaper clippings, and court records. Every fact and footnote about Evelyn Waters is amassed and cataloged. The only thing left of Camilla was the stray black curls, mysteriously resurfacing in drains, coughed up from the swirling dredges.
Whatever substance she’d used, investigators reported that it was, “remarkably easy to clean up.”
***
There is a palpable shift in the room, the lights dim in the auditorium. The guards in blue take their places along the walls and in front of the doors, tilting their heads into shoulder mics…
One spotlight snaps on with a brittle clack, then another—bleaching the stage in harsh light, revealing a single empty chair. The spotlights are shoddy and the light from the more powerful yellow spotlight shudders, the other, weaker, and tinged with red, casting distorted shadows of the chair on the bare stage. The high-end guard’s silhouette shifts back and forth.
Roe flicks to a fresh page, glancing at her burning question—underlined so hard it scars the pages beneath.
And then, there she is. Evelyn herself, her hands are clasped together as she glides across the stage in a purple kimono.
Roe writes:
No orange jumpsuit.
Then:
Bershka dancer floating, slow motion.
She writes:
Blinks of blue eyeshadow. Red lipstick.
Evelyn is even more beautiful in person. She’s taller than Roe expected, and as Evelyn reaches the center stage, unflinching under the lights, Roe realizes—this isn’t just a press conference.
Evelyn lifts her wrists, makes an X with her arms, and looks offstage. A beige uniformed officer instantly appears from the wings. His hair slicked back, his uniform distinctly retro with a high collar and brass buttons. He cuts the red rip tie from Evelyn’s crossed wrist.
Roe writes:
Theatre.
***
Evelyn stands center stage, a frozen smile stretched across her face, holding still for an unnervingly long time. Her chin tilts upward, arms bent at the elbows, splayed open as if declaring, Here I am—drink me in. Her long black hair with striking streaks of silver, catches the flickering lights.
Roe tries to take it all in and her pen flies across the page:
Pure elegance—hands still, no nerves. Teeth—too white. Skin—matte, powdered, no sweat. Poise.
Evelyn remains motionless. Too long now—Roe feels restless. She hears the fidgets of bodies around her in the dark, crossed legs uncrossing.
Roe watches her—and something clicks, startling in its obviousness. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Camilla and Evelyn share a kind of dark, cinematic, old-world beauty. A Monica Bellucci, Sophia Loren sort of beauty.
Evelyn’s voice detonates through the silence, startling the audience.
“Hello and Welcome” her hands spread open as she speaks, “ Thank you for coming out today.”
Roe writes:
Like Miss Fucking America . . .
—then immediately crosses it out.
Keep the sarcasm in check.
Camilla used to say it was just her way of deflecting anxiety.
Evelyn moves at last. A flourish… her kimono billows as she lowers herself onto the chair. One leg crosses the other. The light steadies for a moment and she lets one leg fall out from her robe, flashing a mischievous smile.
“Did you know I was a movie star once?” Evelyn says. Her voice is low, a little gravelly, very sexy and her diction and lilt remind Roe of a flapper, Betty Davis-style vowels, and dull “t’s” but this must be put on because Evelyn is only 57, a very well-preserved 57.
“They had to burn the film reels. Every magnetic strip of tape. It was that dangerous.”
She pauses, flicking her eyebrows, her smile has changed into a knowing smile.
“Crowds of spectators...” she leans in towards the audience, and whispers, “liquified in their seats.”
Roe suppresses a feeling of disappointment with the obvious theatrics, the camp, the seduction. Roe wants raw, wants the real person, but she taps her pen once, turns the page, and tells herself, just write it all down, it’ll mean something later.
Evelyn stands up so suddenly that the guards react, a subtle ripple of movement, hands tightening on weapons, reminding Roe that Evelyn, despite her beauty, is still dangerous. You could almost forget, Roe thinks.
Roe writes: real film? scribbles:
Movie = metaphor? personal mythology?
Roe’s mind flashes to all her research, interviews, photos—she sees herself trying to connect the pieces and reminds herself:
You are not an investigator.
Evelyn straightens, smooths the folds of her kimono as if clearing away the word “liquified.” Her gaze steadies and her posture shifts back into her regal one.
“They had to hush the whole thing up, that’s why you’ve never heard of me.” She laughs, “Well at least I’m not famous for that, am I?” There’s a long beat, like she is waiting for us to laugh, but we don’t.
“We all know what I am famous for, don’t we?”
“The reason I have gathered you all here today is to answer any of your questions and to make an announcement.” She leaves a dramatic pause.
“I am going to be released.”
Roe hesitates, and her pen hovers. Then she transcribes the words.
“Before they unleash their electricity— and light my whole city on white fire—I want my story written.
Roe writes:
Opportunity, electricity, release.
“I was a quiet, dutiful girl once, buried in books where the villains were obvious, and the storylines started at the beginning and flowed neatly to the end—obedient stories.” Her eyebrows are raised dramatically, looking burlesque and startling with deep grotesque shadows. “But I’ve outgrown those kinds of narratives. I prefer ones that start in the middle, which fork and twist with lives of their own.”
Sitting back down, casually crossing her legs, Evelyn’s tone shifts again, now she’s easy and intimate. The shadows have softened, the light more diffused.
“It’s time you knew the real story of Evelyn Rosemary Waters.”
“Let’s start here: they keep me in the bath twelve hours a day now.” She stretches her arms above her head, then her hands go behind her head.
Roe writes out Evelyn’s words, thinking it is harder than usual, despite her fascination, to just listen and not think things, especially with a pen in her hand.
“You’d think they’d be afraid I’d dissolve. Sometimes I’m surprised myself that my ligaments haven’t softened like wet bread, that my skin hasn’t popped open like beer bottle caps, the water fizzing inside me.” Her hands lift, her fingers curling, flicking open, mimicking the quick pop of a breaking seal.
Evelyn laughs then, rich, full. It’s a real laugh, contagious. She leans back in her chair, legs sliding forward. The lights steady and Roe gets a good look at her face. Smooth and unlined.
Roe writes:
Perfect skin, olive, creamy, tan, like she’s just gotten back from the Riviera.
Roe forgets to write and thinks: the color of her eyes is golden, light, like wolf eyes, she thinks, almost yellow. Her eyes curve up at the corners, her cheekbones are bladed by the shadows and her lips, so red and drawn.
Her beauty makes Roe’s chest ache, how often does that happen to you, Roe wonders.
“The water isn’t the problem,” Evelyn continues, sitting forward, letting her shoulders sag and her back curve, “It’s the air. It dries me out, flakes me, presses down on me. The weight of it on my bones—my muscles.”
Roe remembers to write, trying to get it all down. She adds:
Not smiling now.
“At first they dyed my baths red.” She says this lightly, and then almost laughing, “Not the best idea. Can you imagine? If they were trying to keep me from coming apart…” she makes a strangely delicate, stylized gesture gliding the side of her palm, slowly slicing her other wrist, “blood baths were a terrible idea.”
Roe writes:
Dyed waters. Blood bath. Suicide attempts.
“They switched to indigo after that. Deep, black-blue. My color.” She sits back in her chair. “I open my eyes underwater and it's an ocean cast,” her voice is just a murmur now and Roe must strain to hear. “It’s quite beautiful, really, like looking up from the ocean floor.”
Her lashes lower, her head tilting back. The audience is still.
“That’s when I let them slip out.”
In a full voice she adds, “The fins.”
Roe forgets to write. This part, this part always gets her. When Evelyn talks about the fins. It arrests her, she doesn’t know why.
Evelyn continues, “Spectacular. Multicolored. Glinting.”
Roe’s hand moves to her throat without thinking, her pen scratching her chin. Roe is running her fingers along her mermaid tail’s scales pendant. The thought crosses her mind, to try and catch some kind of light in its metal scales, try and send a reflection of light, to get Evelyn to see her.
She imagines it, flashing refracted light onto Evelyn’s face, onto her hands. She imagines Evelyn noticing it with delight, shading her eyes, and finding Roe, the source of this light in the crowd.
Fucking stop that, Roe tells herself, drawing her attention back to her notes, cramming the thought to the back of her mind.
“My tails,” Evelyn draws this out, slowly raising her legs in slow, deliberate motion, the fabric of her kimono shifts to reveal the long lines of her calves. Her hands glide down her body, fingertips skimming the air just above her skin, tracing the invisible outlines of her fins. Her ring fingers and pinkies fold inwards, the other fingers splayed, moving in a slow, rippling arc.
Her feet begin pivoting back and forth before she drops them down hard.
Pretending to answer a question from the audience, Evelyn tilts her ear. “The dye is to hide the fins, yes, but also to hide this.” Her hands skim the curve of her breasts, down to her hips, sliding to rest between her thighs. “They need to hide my body too. Because… they go blue… and then….”
Her hands pop open, palms flat, facing us.
Evelyn takes a breath, and Roe takes it with her. She is about to begin the story, Roe can feel it, but the spell is broken by a man’s clipped professional voice, obnoxiously cutting through. “Where did it begin?”
Roe tried to see through the dark to the asshole who broke the flow of the story with his stupid question. He just wanted to field the first question, wanting to get noticed. Sound familiar, Roe? Put your jealousy away. Will you even get up the nerve to ask your question?
Evelyn laughs, the rich sounds vibrating through the auditorium. “You really want to go there, back to the beginning? Some people,” she says as if confidentially to one side of the room, “need stories to start at the beginning, don’t they? Well, fine then. It started in the womb.” She takes a long beat and continues, “I consumed my twin in the womb.”
Roe has a sudden moment of vertigo, of confusion.
That was her joke.
Or, no—her family’s joke.
No, it had been his joke: her brother Philip’s. He was the only one laughing. At dinner, Phillip whispered in her ear that Roe had eaten her twin. He said it just as Roe was putting her fork to her mouth (especially if it was meat) and it always ruined her appetite.
Truthfully, her mother was obsessed with “VTS” the “Vanishing Twin Syndrome” mentioning it to every doctor who sighed and said, “Yes, Mrs. Loch, we have that in our records.” Her mother always brought it up after one of Roe’s episodes, she must’ve thought it was connected.
Her brother said Roe’s twin was tucked inside her, as he poked his finger into the folds of Roe’s ribs. Whenever she got in trouble, Phillip would say, “It wasn’t you, it was him,” making mocking ghostly sounds.
Evelyn’s eyebrows are flicking upwards, a twitch, a tick, a whisper that she isn’t entirely under control. She closes her eyes and tilts her face in the flickering beam of the spotlights.
Roe shivers, goosebumps rising on her skin, pen frozen in her hand.
Evelyn suddenly looks mournful, and her voice goes low. “Swimming there, with my baby brother, there we were, curled up together. Brushing our equal and opposite thumbs. Prints of each other.”
Roe imagines herself and a ghost-body pressed against her own, seeing the veins, the filtered light.
“I grew stronger,” Evelyn continues, “and his membranes began to dissolve. The glue holding his cells together.”
The flickering light makes Evelyn’s skin look translucent, flickering between the gleam and shadow.
Roe writes: Evelyn’s unstable, shifting shape.
“I imagine it,” Evelyn murmurs, eyes still shut, “like gold dust. Suspended in that red-amber fluid. Catching the light. His cells become fragments. Absorbing into me. I grow stronger. The sponge of my open pores drinking in the pieces of him. Until he becomes transparent. Clear blue.”
Her voice drops lower, small now, singsong, sad.
Roe feels the pulse in her throat.
Then Evelyn’s eyes open and she looks directly at Roe. Or at least, Roe thinks she is.
Evelyn holds the gaze for a moment too long, then tilts her chin, speaking again. “That’s where my powers come from,” she says.
Her voice is serious now. Dark.
“From him.”
Roe's pen passes from one side of the page to the next, but she is no longer transcribing. Her mind is wandering, and she isn’t even aware of what she is writing.
She is remembering—
***
—being alone in her room, dark painted blue walls, Roe hearing her mother on the phone speaking German, hearing her own name between indecipherable words. Roe is looking at the second bed in her room, covered by a quilt— each lozenge, a texture from her grandmother’s past, the original Rosamunde. A cherry patterned tablecloth scrap, tiny violets from an old sheet, the blue terry cloth texture from a childhood bear.
Something horrible about that quilt, that patched together body of history.
***
“It’s not uncommon.” Evelyn’s tone changed Roe notices, snapping back to attention. She is speaking in a clipped, knowing way now, “It’s called Twin Reabsorption. Have you ever heard about Fetus Papyraceus? The dead twin is compressed,” her open flattened palms draw into fists, “and flattened into a parchment state.”
Roe suddenly feels hot. A dizziness comes over her, her ears ring and she wants to think about anything else but this horrible flattened, desiccated sheet of skin that she now imagines herself floating beside.
She can feel it coming. Camilla used to say—there’s always a moment, right before panic, when you can choose.
The auditorium thins, as if turning transparent. Like you could almost see through it.
Roe remembers Cam’s words, pulls herself back. Don’t go down that road.
You can let the feeling take over—or you can decide.
It’s your mind to control.
Roe feels herself standing up before she decides to. Her knees are locked, her breath tight.
Evelyn turns her head, the light washing her out, blurring her edges—except for her face. Her face is sharp as if Roe is seeing her through a telescope. Roe swallows and begins to ask the question—the one she really wants to ask.
But before the words leave her mouth, something cold strikes the top of her head. A shock of freezing water. She flinches, looking up into the blinding white burst of the sprinkler system, the artificial rain crashing down.
Roe shoves her notebook under the skin of her ruined coat, shielding it under her arm. Then she lifts her other hand as a useless shield against the downpour. The auditorium lights blaze on, drenching them in fluorescent glare.
The audience is in chaos—soaked notebooks covering heads, and flattened hair. People rushing in frantic loops, everyone talking at once. The guards block the doors.
Roe wonders:
Is this an escape attempt?
Roe looks to the stage. Evelyn stands there, drenched and serene, arms at her sides, smiling. The robe clings to her skin, turning sheer, molding to the curves of her body. Roe sees the full shape of her breasts, the dark halo of her nipple beneath the fabric.
A sudden, brutal ache tightens in Roe’s chest.
Camilla, running in from the rain—her white button-down translucent blouse, nipples peaked from the cold. The way Roe had peeled the fabric from her skin, slowly, deliberately, unsticking it from her body. The chill of Camilla’s breast beneath her mouth, the shocking contrast of her wet heat under Roe’s hand, beneath her soaked wool skirt.
Roe stands motionless, and Evelyn looks at her. They are the only still figures in a time-lapse of confused bodies.
A guard grips Evelyn’s arm, leading her backstage. Roe watches her go, unmoving, as the audience is herded toward the lobby under the guards’ orders.
Roe stands there, drenched, watching the water pooling at her feet.
This better not fucking be over.
END OF PART I
Continued in Part II—dropping soon on SUM FLUX!
This gets better and better as you go. Well done my friend.
Shark tooth