The first I'll share is "Sticky Black." I'm just in love with the way I managed to express all the feelings going on in Alicia's head. Fading in and out of consciousness, the extreme pain and dizzy confusion. It's chaotic to read and that's intentional. I wanted to write it in a way that let people actually feel all the things my leads is feeling and I think I succeeded. The choppy sentences and weird mental imagery add to the sense of everything being scrambled, and to this day, it's still one of my proudest chapters, even though it's also the second one in the book. A have to really thank my developmental editor for the fact that this chapter exists, as I was going to skip over them being in the hospital straight to the lead being discharged but he told me it would ruin the momentum, and I'm very glad I listened to his advice.
It was originally going to be called “Symphony in Red." The winning piece…
-the emergency room is awash with light - bubbling with bodies.
Nothing has ever hurt so bad.
The air is morbid with the scent of blood and the chemicals used for sterilization. Poisonously clean. I almost swoon from dizzy nausea, feeling the light pass away from me in phases.
The shadows settle, swamping mine, like a heavy blanket thrown over my head. I’m abducted and dragged further into the darkness.
As the first rush of the painkillers bleeds through my system I lose touch with my surroundings, almost convinced I’m standing in a vast emptiness, watching the clouds blot out the sun, and submerge me in sticky black. Sweat glitters on every inch of unbroken skin, and pools in places I didn’t know I could sweat, saturating my hair and running down my face, into my eyes.
It’s washed out by a scorching bright- pure white, with spots of noxious neon.
The endless hum of over-bright. LED. electric lights. sings in my ears like a chorus of skittish cicadas, fanning their wings, as if they’re desperate to escape. I can’t blame them. Trembling like a miniature earthquake. My body tries to make sense of this cataclysm that’s left my world seeing stars.
My head spins again, turning bodies topsy turvy. Smearing faces into the paint. Baptized with blood in the white space. I’m not even sure when I woke up or how long I’ve spent lying here, staring at the walls or the ceiling. My senses are all scrambled. Am I facing the left or the right? Am I hearing or feeling the voices crashing around me, a barrage of nervous wrecks? I swim in the excruciating sensation, almost blacking out. I feel as though I'm hanging from the rafters by my hair, and the pressure in my neck only increases with every crash of my heartbeat. My mouth defies me as I try to call for a nurse - my jaw is locked tight as if it’s been screwed shut and it's stubbornly set on staying that way for the moment. The whole thing fills. With bitter bile. I can’t swallow. And I try desperately not to drown before somebody finds me.