Quoted By:
>Sanest woman you know
You spend an uncomfortable amount of time staring blankly at the back wall before you jolt and blink. Shit! Were you <span class="mu-i">considering</span> it? Were you actually considering— no! No, you're not fucking feeding the— the— you are not risking your fucking neck to— it's not like you <span class="mu-i">care</span> about Pat, but you care about not being shot on sight, and— you don't even know what the fuck it'd be good for, it could be good for <span class="mu-i">nothing,</span> it could get <span class="mu-i">you</span> eaten by a fucking flesh abomination, there is <span class="mu-i">zero</span> reason to— to— to—!
Fucking <span class="mu-i">breathe!</span> What is wrong with you! Breathe. Calm <span class="mu-i">down.</span> You are a grown-ass woman fully capable of weighing your courses of action. You're not drunk. You're not incandescently pissed. You're a little sleepy, maybe, but there is a <span class="mu-i">wide</span> fucking gulf between sleepy and mentally fucking defective. You've never been mentally defective in your dreams before, right? (Probably?) So breathe. There was never any chance of you doing something so ludicrously pointless and reckless and stupid. Never. Your common sense is intact.
(You want to believe this very badly. That there was never any chance. That you were never even considering it: when you were staring at the wall you were staring at the wall, not some some sickening maddening void. That there is something fundamentally <span class="mu-i">different</span> between you and the kind of person who'd force-feed a flesh thing on impulse. You're trying not to name names. You're failing. Alright: that there's something fundamentally different between you and the <span class="mu-i">Ellerys</span> of the world. And the Charlottes, when you think about it.)
It's <span class="mu-i">intact.</span> It's intact. Which is why, sensibly speaking, you'd wet a <span class="mu-i">little</span> bit of Lester Food and try that out. See if it even does anything. And you could go from there. You're not doing that, though: you're running your hand along J for Jewelry and I for IDs all the way until— shit. There's no B for Bucket. You search around in Clothing instead until you locate a wide rubbery raincoat, then sling that over your shoulder.
You're going to do a sack. One sack. It is not, necessarily speaking, sensible. But deep down you feel like you have to make a compromise— have to stave off the whatever-it-is that wants to see the world burn. That's what grown-ass adults do, make compromises. And it's not like anybody's watching to judge.
So you painstakingly scrape the tendrils off the doorframe (they plop to the ground unharmed, their underbellies veiny and blueish) and rattle the handle and retreat to I for IDs and jigger the lock until it clicks for you. And you slink out with the raincoat. You walk softly barefoot to the lobby and the water tank and scale the stepstool and inflate the raincoat with water, then tie it into a bundle. You slink back, your payload sloshing. You try not to think about <span class="mu-i">you</span> sloshing earlier.
(1/3)
