Tiles

CW for graphic violence, sexual content, and suicide.

1

 

First, it was the cold tile against her cheek when she woke up. Then, the buzzing of the harsh fluorescent lights above, which somehow made the room quieter than pure silence would. Finally, the smell of scented cleaners over an odor of waste that told the blonde haired girl she was in a bathroom before she even opened her eyes. She was the fourth and last of the girls in that room to wake up, and the first thing she noticed was the tiled floor, a checkerboard pattern stretching out to the sickly off-yellow walls and the green door, and beneath the three doorless toilet stalls and the three sinks across from them, and below the small window near the ceiling.

"Oh hey, she's awake," said a girl sitting on the toilet directly in front of her. She had short, light-brown hair and was wearing a catholic school uniform, blue blazer, black tie, and pleated skirt, with a cross adorning the right breast pocket. Slowly,the blonde realized they were all wearing the same one , though she could not remember attending a school with such a dresscode.

"Oh good. I was kinda worried she was dead." A red-headed girl sat crosslegged below the window. "What's your name?"

"I… I don't remember," said the blonde with mounting unease. "Why can't I remember?"

"Well that makes all of us, then," said a girl with long black hair who leaned against the sinks behind the blonde.

"Why did you think I was dead?" said the blonde to the redhead.

"I dunno. You've been laying there a while, is all."

"We would know if she was dead," said Black. "She would've shit herself and we'd smell it."

"I heard that was a myth actually," said Brown.

"Is it really?" said Red.

"Hold on," said Blonde. "Where are we? How did we get here?"

"Beats us," said Black. "We woke up here just like you."

"And the door's locked," said Brown.

"What?" Blonde got up and tried the door. It was indeed locked. She yanked it harder and harder and found it unyielding. "Oh my god!"

"Yeah, try banging harder," said Black, "that worked for all of us."

Blonde crossed the room to the window, and found she was too short to reach it. She bade Black to step aside and climbed the sink to get to it. Up close, she saw that there was nothing behind the window, only a pitch white light not unlike the fluorescent bulb above. She tried the latch. It didn’t budge. She tried jostling and banging on it.

"That'll do it. Why didn't we think of that?" said Black folding her arms.

"Oh my god," said Blonde, climbing down. "Have we been kidnapped?"

"Probably," said Brown. "But we haven't seen any sign of the kidnapper. We don't know what they want with us."

"How long have you all been here?"

"Hard to say. A few hours maybe."

"We just woke up in this bathroom, wearing these dumb uniforms," said Red. "No memory. No explanation. No way out."

Blonde doubled over herself and began to scream until her throat went hoarse, and the trembling hands at her face went limp.

“Can’t you be quiet?” said Black.

“Give her a break,” said Brown. “We all panicked too.”

“How would you know if I panicked?” said Black, hands indignantly on her hips. “I woke up first.”

~~~

Hours passed, and panic gave way to boredom. Blonde found her own corner to sit and sulk in. The one by the door, hoping that she might attack whoever may come through it and make her escape. Above her the white fluorescent light buzzed incessantly, and exacerbated a growing headache.

Outside the window didn't change. It showed only a blank pitch white. Soon it became clear that it was never going to change at all.

"What do you think is out there?" asked Brown.

"What?" said Black.

"The window. What's out there? Why is it just white?"

"It's just the sun," said Black. "It just looks like that because it's dark in here."

"Why do you think that is?"

"What?"

"Why do things get brighter from the outside when it's dark inside?"

"Because our eyes need to adjust to the difference in light."

"Why?"

"Because otherwise we'd go blind."

"Why?"

"Because our retinas can only process so much light."

"I understand the mechanism. I'm asking why it is the way it is, and not some other way."

"Because that's the way it is, and not any other way."

Brown shifted in her seat on the toilet and slid back into silence. Black crossed her arms and sighed.

"When do you think they'll come for us?" asked Brown.

"Who?"

"Anyone."

"How do you know anyone is coming?"

"I mean, someone has to, right? Someone put us here. They had to have, or else we wouldn't be here."

Blonde brought her legs up and sunk her face into her knees.

~~~

Red said, "I need to pee."

Black said, "so pee. We are in a bathroom after all."

"I don't want you to watch me. These stalls have no doors."

"Fine, then we'll turn around."

"I don't want you to hear me either."

"How are we supposed to not hear you?"

"Hum a song while I go."

Black rolled her eyes and the girls lined up and faced the wall and covered their ears.

"Wait," said Brown. "What song should we sing?"

"It doesn't matter," said Black.

"We should sing the same one so it doesn't sound discordant."

"Red, what song should we sing?" asked Black.

"I don't care!"

"See?"

"I'm gonna hum 'happy birthday'," said Brown.

"Fine by me!" said Red from the stall. “Just hurry up!”

Through the mirror, Blonde could see Red slip off her white panties and sit on the toilet with her skirt up. Their attempt at privacy was pointless. Blonde wondered if she was wearing the same underwear. She shivered at the thought of not knowing. The song did succeed in drowning out the noise, though standing there and humming the birthday while a complete stranger pissed behind them felt much more awkward than it would've to simply deal with the sound, especially as they struggled to stay in sync with each other. Blonde quietly hoped they wouldn't have to do this every time someone had to go.

Red stood up and slipped her underwear back on, then hit the lever to flush her waste. Nothing happened. Slowly, the smell of urine began to fill the room.

~~~

Once more Blonde found her face resting upon that vast lattice of interchanging squares. Each so inordinately small that from any distance it resolved as a chaotic gray static, which elicited in her mind a subtle but persistent agitation, contributing to the singular oppressiveness of her appalling circumstances. Only laying like this, where up close the harmony and order of the pattern was clear, gave any relief to her suffering. The unity of opposing hues brought together by a thin layer of off-beige grout, it was as soothing as the coolness of the ceramic on her skin.

She could in her mind carve out a section of the grid and imagine the games that could take place here, be it chess or checkers or perhaps some new game invented by her. A grid is a nice tool for making sense of chaos and setting down a system of rules atop it to order our thoughts. She did just that, ordering her thoughts into discrete units and arranging them in her mind upon those tiles, separating one into columns upon which she organized her knowledge of each of her fellow prisoners in this fowl smelling dungeon. Brown with her curiosity, Red with her shyness, and Black with her skepticism. On another grid she ordered her catalog of key features of the room. The locked green door, the three toilets inside three stalls, across from three sinks, all for the four of them to share, the window showing nothing but white light, the lights which buzzed incessantly, the vent under the sink, and of course, the tiles on the ground. She hoped that by arranging it all, she could decipher some kind of meaning, but meaning alluded her, and she was left with only a neatly ordered pile of junk info.

Perhaps expanding her knowledge of her roommates would help.

"Is there anything you do remember? Before waking up here?" Blonde asked to no one in particular.

A moment as each of the girls contemplated the question.

"I remember ditching school," said Brown eventually, shifting nervously on her seat on the toilet. "I remember being really upset by the thought of spending another day there, so I went for a nature walk instead."

"You don't like school?" asked Blonde, mentally revising her square under Brown's name that marked her as curious.

"No. I don't. I find it confining. Those white walls and metal lockers. The rows of seats. It all feels so claustrophobic."

"You must be having a pretty bad time in here then."

"Oh yeah."

Black said, "I remember wanting to be something when I grew up. I don't remember what, though."

"Did you study hard in school?" asked Blonde.

"Yeah. I think so."

"If you got out of this bathroom now, what do you think you'd want to be?"

"Maybe a lawyer. Or a nun."

"You're religious?"

"I don't think so. I just like the structure."

"You are wearing a catholic school uniform," said Brown.

"We all are."

"Why is that anyways?" Brown scratched her head. "I'm not catholic, at least I don't think I am."

"I don't remember being catholic," said Blonde.

After a brief awkward pause, Red said, "I think I had a boyfriend."

"Do you remember anything about him?" asked Blonde.

"No. I only talked to him when I was horny. Or depressed."

"Do you miss him?"

"I miss having something to do. I'm so bored. I'm so scared. I just want to get out of here."

The four of them all grumbled in terse agreement.

"Should we try the window again?" asked Brown. "Maybe if we all try at once, It'll give."

Black said, "might as well."

Blonde got on all floors under the window as the three other girls stood on her and jostled the window as hard as they could. The weight was intense, made harder to hold by the violent movement of their actions, but there was nothing else to stand on, and none of them were tall enough to reach the window without help.

Of course, the window didn't budge, and the girls once again assumed their places like actors on a stage.

On the floor, Blonde noticed a white tile with a chip on its edge, disrupting the perfect unity of the design.

 

2

 

A faucet dripped behind Blonde's head as she tried to sleep on the floor. In the terrible stillness of the bathroom, it was an explosive intrusion. She'd had enough trouble sleeping between the incessant buzzing of the fluorescent lights–which of course were as intractably unyielding to her efforts to shut them off as everything else–and the smell of urine in the unflushed toilet. Blonde found that none of the others seemed to be as bothered by the dripping sound as she was, and they were still sleeping as peacefully as they could on the cold ground with only their rolled up blue blazers under their heads as comfort.

Blonde stood up and examined the offending faucet. Neither of the knobs were out of alignment and there was no discernible problem with the pipes. She took off one of her socks and wrapped it around the opening of that faucet and hoped that would at least buy her a few hours of peace.

Beside Blonde, Red stirred, and got to her feet. She walked into the second stall, the one beside the one she had urinated in, and crouched before the bowl. She wretched and vomited into the water, awaking the other girls.

"Are you alright?" Blonde asked.

"I'm just feeling a little sick. I'm sorry for messing up another toilet. We should try to figure out how to flush these."

All examination of the toilets revealed no mechanism by which they could be flushed. The tanks had no lever to lift the stopper, nor indeed did they have any stoppers to begin with. The water simply floated there in the bowl, the pipes unconnected to any plumbing. It's as if they existed purely for decoration's sake.

The sinks at least did work, though the water was acrid and bore an unsettling yellow color that put the girls off of attempting to drink it. Bizarrely, despite being in the room for what must have been hours, none of them felt a particularly strong thirst.

It was as if the room itself resisted any attempt to disrupt its stasis. Blonde shivered at the thought of being trapped inside something with a will of its own. She filed that thought away on a distant black tile under the sink far away from the rest of her mental compartments. 

~~~

So they sat and waited and sat and waited. And nothing came to save them from their waiting. So they waited more. They talked, as much as they could to keep themselves busy, but found that without memories, they had precious little in the way of engaging or novel conversation. Searching their minds for new memories to discuss quickly became a pastime, desperate as they were to relieve the tedium of waiting for some unknown force to rescue them from their grim doldrums.

"Oh, I think I just remembered something," said Black.

"What is it?" asked Blonde.

"Catherine."

"'Catherine?'"

"Yes, Catherine. The name sticks out for some reason. It meant something to me."

"Is it your name?" asked Brown.

"No. I think it was someone I knew. Maybe my mom? There's an air of nurturing authority to it in my mind."

"Could be a professor," said Brown.

"Or a priest," said Blonde.

"Catherine is a woman's name," said Black.

"Some faiths allow women to be priests. Maybe you belonged to one of them."

"Is that something you remembered?"

"It's common knowledge."

"I don't understand how a woman could be a priest," said Red, "if women are supposed to be responsible for original sin."

"Women aren't responsible for all sin," said Black. "Just one specific woman."

"I thought all women bore responsibility and that's why we get periods or something," said Red.

"I think you're confused."

"I don't know enough about religion to argue, but that was my understanding. That's why women couldn't be priests."

"I don't think I know much about religion either."

"I thought you wanted to be a nun?" asked Blonde.

"I said I was considering it. And besides, who says I wanted to be a Christian priest anyways?"

"Are there other priests?" asked Brown. "Aren't they called something else if they're not Christian? Like Rabbis or... whatever Muslims call their priests."

"Muslims don't have priests like Christians do."

And the conversation faded, and they were again left in silence.

~~~

The faucet behind Blonde began to drip again, disturbing her from sleep once more. Examining it, she found that the sock she'd wrapped it in had become saturated, and even started to grow a strange fungus. A fuzz traced along the fabric from the opening of the faucet, streaked in white and black like a zebra's fur. It smelled foul, and Blonde was afraid to touch the sock, let alone remove it. She had never seen anything like it before, as far as she knew.

She braved a finger against the fur-like fungus through the cuff of her sleeve. It was brittle, and crumbled softly under her touch. The ends of the strands fell away in flakes, but the base of the fungus remained clung to the sock. Blonde removed her other sock and used it to plug the drain. She watched the dip-dripping of the water slowly soak the dry sock and stain it yellow and growing.

Black approached her and said, "You haven't told us anything about yourself. I'm very curious."

Blonde kept watching the dampening of the sock. There was something hypnotic in the falling drops. The way they distorted the light as they undulated in the air, bending and refracting the beams from the humming fluorescents and the unknown pitch white of the window-light. The way it fell in rhythmic beats, first pooling through the saturated fabric of her soiled sock above, then falling into the yellowing white sock below and being absorbed by its fibrous threads. Blonde didn't want to talk about herself. Her memories, what few she still had, were hers and only hers. She wanted to hoard them shamelessly, in case she would need them later. In the economy of knowledge, the other girls were fools for sharing their secrets with her, for they added to her cache and would keep her sane, resting untouched on the interchanging tiles beside her bare feet. The water began to soak through the lower sock and pool at the bottom of the sink.

Red awoke from her place on the floor and rushed again into the filthy toilet to gag and retch.

Black said, "what do you remember?"

And Blonde lied, "I remember studying biology. I wanted to be a scientist. I had an interest in molds, spores, and fungi. That's all."

"Do you remember any names?"

"Katherine."

"That's just the one I told you."

"It's a different Katherine. Mine is spelled with a 'K'."

"So was mine."

"Oh. You didn't say that."

"I forgot."

"Then mine is Catherine with a 'C'. She was my biology professor. I studied biology. 'Cathy', we called her."

"You called your biology professor Cathy? Isn't that a little informal."

"She had a casual teaching style."

"An interesting approach to teaching biology, I'd say."

"Did you call your mother 'Katherine'?"

"I don't think so."

"Then why would you remember her as Katherine?"

"It's not unusual to know your mother's name."

"If she *is* your mother."

"If she is my mother, yes."

Red coughed behind them, but spat nothing into the bowl. She emerged from the doorless stall and looked between the two of them. She said, "You two need to shut up now so I can get back to sleep."

Black said, "I think you might be sick."

Red said, "You think?"

~~~

More unaccountable time passed, and there was no method by which they could measure it but by the growing of Red's belly. Brown suspected pregnancy, but surely there was no way that much time was passing. It felt more like days, not months, but every day Red's belly grew and they had no better explanation for how. It could've been months for all they knew, but none of them had gotten their periods since they were put here. Then again, none of them had been hungry or thirsty either, and aside from Red, none of them had needed to use the toilets.

"Did you have sex before we got here?" asked Black.

"Probably," said Red. "I definitely had a boyfriend and we probably had sex a lot."

Blonde didn't like the sudden talk of sex and periods and other bodily processes that Red's condition had brought out, and the situation added fresh urgency to her desire to find a way out of the bathroom. Again she banged on the window showing only a pitch white void outside, this time with her elbow rather than her fist. The glass, if it was glass, did not yield, and she only hurt herself in the process. Still, she kept hammering and hammering. The others perhaps thought that she was desperately seeking help for Red, but in truth, a panic had set in, and Blonde felt deeply that she would suffocate and die if she didn't leave the room immediately.

Finally her legs gave out and she collapsed from the rim of the sink onto the floor, screaming. Tears poured from her face and pooled and flowed into the grout lined gutters between the small tiles. The room seemed to spin in a horrid kaleidoscope of off-yellow, green, and the gray static of the floor tiles. 

Red placed a hand on Blonde's cheek and told her to breathe, and she did. Slowly. In and out. Until at length the panic subsided and she was herself again , and once more the room was static and unyielding and she was bored.

"It was a good effort," said Red, and Blonde laughed weakly and cried into Red's lap.

~~~

Blonde rested her head on Red's stomach, the softness and warmth providing a much welcome change from the cold hard tile. Red had her shirt open and Blonde listened to the pumping of her blood through her skin. Red ran her hand through Blonde's hair, curling thin yellow strands around her finger. They found comfort in the act of touching each other, in feeling the gentle ebbs and flows of each other's flesh. It was a deeper comfort than talking, and they came to enjoy the silence and the stillness of the room.

Black stewed uncomfortably from her spot, sitting crosslegged under the sink and busying herself counting the notches on the pipe rivets of the sinks. Brown curiously poked and prodded the fungus growing on Blonde's socks in the sink. Perhaps they were both trying not to look at Blonde and Red, who hadn't separated once since Blonde's panic attack. They found that they couldn't. They'd come to depend too much on touch, and couldn't stand the cold outside of each other's arms.

When Black and Brown laid down on the floor to sleep, Red and Blonde snuck into the toilet stall and kissed each other's lips. Blonde was home, in the warmth of Red's skin, in the taste of her breath, the moistness of her mouth. Suddenly, the bathroom wasn't such an awful place. They could make it work here. Perhaps they could survive here forever in each other's arms. Even the buzzing overhead seemed to take on a warm, welcoming quality in the euphoria of her embrace.

They were still embracing when the other two girls woke up. Wordlessly they decided to join, sensing that it would alleviate their tedious agony. They swapped warmth and saliva between them freely, eventually stripping their clothes and lying together upon them like a bed as they found pleasure in each other's bodies. These things often happen when fear becomes boredom, and boredom becomes madness.

As always, none of them could tell how long they were in that naked pile, writhing and thrusting. When they were spent they simply lay there and breathed. And when the euphoria wore off and the satisfaction subsided, they slowly got up and dressed in silence, and never again spoke of the incident.

Several more orgies took place before it was all over, but the girls knew at least not to speak of it out loud, lest it lose its power and potency, and become nothing more than an awkward pastime like the smalltalk they made to whittle away the hours.

~~~

Now the time had come that Red's stomach had swollen to the point that she could no longer button her shirt. The fact that she was pregnant was now undeniable, and the girls made a fresh effort to escape the room. The window had proven fruitless, as no amount of force that the girls could exert seemed enough to break it or force it open, so they turned to the door.

Blonde, Black, and Brown all coordinated to break the door down by slamming against it at once. While it was a heroic effort, this still wasn't enough to so much as noticeably bend the door, let alone break it down. It was clear that the door was not simply locked, but was in fact incapable of opening at all. The hinges and the door knob were false, and the door was no more permeable than the rest of the wall. In desperation, they began to search for any hidden doors in the walls.

The one thing they found that would yield to their efforts was the vent cover, which they were able to wrench off the wall with minimal effort. However, the vent revealed a yawning black abyss of such perfect malevolence that none of the girls could bring themselves to enter it. The cold dark stillness of the air and the gentle empty groaning frightened them too much to even think of trying to crawl into it in search of help, and they hurriedly resealed it.

Finally they tried climbing on the toilets, onto the stall walls to push the ceiling tiles up. Here too they found that the ceiling yielded to a consuming abyss of impenetrable darkness. 

Soon, Red began to get contractions and eventually, at a loss for what else to do, found herself squatting over the last unsoiled toilet and birthing her bloody, writhing child into it as she would any other waste.

~~~

The child, if you could call it that, was a hideous corpselike thing. Half rotten, as if left out in the sun, splotchy skin too thin to fully cover the bones and muscle tissue. It could scarcely be identified as either human or animal of any kind, and its misshapened skull was more evocative of a bald, beakless bird than a child's. In its sunken, black sockets, only one held an eye, small and beady, wide with panic, it jerked back and forth as if searching for something. At the bottom of the skull was an opening, only identifiable as its mouth by the position on its face, and a row or piercing sharp white teeth that spiraled inwards into the blackness of its throat, and from that mouth it uttered a low, guttural shriek of agony, like an infant crying through shredded vocal cords. It was this cry, as well as the uncertain jerking of its atrophied arms that were closer to tendrils, with tiny fingers that flopped uselessly at its side.

The sight of it twisted their stomachs, and filled them with a painful terror, as if their bodies rejected the very sight of it, recognizing the metaphysical threat its existence posed to the very idea of life itself.

Its cries did not stop, and the girls were no longer able to sleep. Day in and Day out it screamed its rattling, inhuman scream, and the girls had no recourse but to plug their ears and pray their consciousness failed before their sanity did. Blonde wept near constantly through this whole ordeal, while Brown and Black simply endured as silently as they could. Red, for her part, did her best to nurture the child, even offering it her breast to feed, but it rejected her offer with a painful bite that broke her skin.

All talk ceased in the wake of the child's arrival, and what patience they had for their situation dwindled rapidly as exhaustion took them. 

It was endless, the cries of that abominable child. A foul Ooze secreted from between its exposed sinews and bones and filled the bathroom with a smell more horrible than the stench of urine and vomit, for this was the stench of death, and though they had never smelled it before, they recognized that smell from a deep and primordial part of their subconscious.

But despite all of that, Red loved the child, and spent her every waking moment cradling it, and attempting in vain to coo and soothe it to rest. She wouldn't hear a single word spoken against the child and at one point threatened to drown herself in the fouled toilet water if any attempt should be made to harm the child.

And so the girls endured the child's presence, as much as they could, even through the screaming and the stench of death.

It was Black who snapped first and screamed at Red to drown the child and end their misery, and Red screamed back, tearful and incoherent. She had endured more pain than any of the other girls in that room. And Black threatened to inflict yet more pain upon her if the child was not silenced. Desperately, Blonde begged them to stop fighting, and cried until her throat gave out.

But Red knew to watch Black closely now, for Black could no longer be trusted around the child. Every time Black approached her, she screamed and thrashed her feet violently and held the child tight to her chest.

But she couldn't stay awake forever, and eventually, even through the fear and the pain and the piercing cries, she passed out.

Slowly, Black crept across the floor to avoid rousing Red. Only Blonde noticed her, as Brown was curled up in the opposite corner with her jacket wrapped around her head. Blonde thought to cry out to warn Red, but decided against it, for she too was exhausted beyond her limits.

Carefully, Black took the child from Red's lap and crept with it still screaming in her arms into the stall, and drowned it in the urine filled toilet, until finally those screams were silent.

~~~

Only after the child was dead did the mother wake, and when she saw her offspring still in the filthy water, she unleashed a hail of belligerent screams and blows upon Black, who could only curl into herself and hold up her arms as a shield. The attack left deep bruises on Black's arms and face, and the other girls had to wrench Red off of the girl and hold her down through force, until finally she calmed down, and screaming gave way to sobbing.

And with the child dead, the girls were able to get some much needed sleep.

When they awoke in the morning, they found that Red had bitten her tongue off in the night, and was dead, blood pouring from her mouth and bathing the black-white checkerboard tiles.

 

3

 

Blonde began to notice even more chips in the tiles. Disruptions in the perfect unity of design that defined the sense experience they were meant to create. In one corner of the room, she noticed a white tile that was misaligned in its placement. Crooked and completely at odds with the rest of the floor. Elsewhere she found two black tiles that had been placed next to each other, breaking the sequence entirely. The most egregious of all, though, was when she found a tile missing entirely, right in the middle of the room. Until this point she had mistaken the exposed grout for a white tile. These flaws threw her whole perception of the bathroom into doubt. Had there not been a design at work here after all? Had this whole operation been some haphazard, spontaneous farce? She began counting the tiles again. It was all she could do to avoid what had just happened.

Red's body lay untouched by the wall, blood drying around her, but otherwise unchanged. No decomposition took place, and again it was hard to know how much time had passed since she died.

Neither Blonde nor Brown could bring themselves to look at Black anymore, and no one had uttered a word since the incident. Black sat beneath the sinks with her face buried in her knees, hugging her ankles. She didn't want to face them either. Brown sat crosslegged against the door. There were no clean toilets left for her to sit on anymore, and Blonde's spot had freed up now that she was busy with the tiles.

Blonde found a white tile that was cracked down the middle and loose in the grout, so that she could wrench it off the ground and hold the fragment pieces in her hand. The illusion of unity she had found such solace in had been shattered, and the truth lay stark and naked before her. Random pieces of still matter, their corpses arranged in a grotesque simulacrum of order. The rotten clay of creation congealed and set down hastily, and forced into place by that grout which held them like insects fossilized in sap. Any design Blonde had seen in this room had been entirely a fabrication of her mind, desperate for something stable and real to latch onto and ground herself, and now that the illusion was gone she had nothing. Even the pattern of colors had been a lie, as close inspection revealed the tiles were all in different shades of almost-white and almost-black, with no rhyme or reason to the arrangement at all. Now she could only float in that terrible sea of dead static and feel its cold gnawing emptiness soak into her bones.

~~~

Brown examined the dripping sink with the socks and mold. At this point the fungus had grown and taken over the bowl and seemed almost to crawl out of it and drip down the rim onto the floor. All black and white fuzz hanging and floating in the water, clinging to the white ceramic sink and even edging its way up the mirror in tiny furry tendrils. The water in the bowl had darkened and took on a greenish blue color. It smelled rotten, but so many hateful odors had assailed them during their time in the bathroom that it held no more power to disturb them. Brown regarded the fungus with a curious fascination, and prodded the soup with her naked finger.

"I wonder if it's edible," Brown said, and almost startled the other two living girls. It had been so long since anyone had said a word out loud in that room.

Black, through a throat hoarse with disuse and sorrow, said, "don't eat that, for god's sake."

"I just wonder if it can be eaten."

"We don't know what it is."

"We know it grew out of that one's sock," said Brown, gesturing at Blonde in her corner of the room where she kneeled over a black tile in a stall that had been set into the grout upright on its edge.

"I don't want you to die too," said Black in a voice so helpless that Blonde felt her heart sink with agonizing pity for her, and for herself as well for the part she played in what happened to Red.

"It's too late to start caring now," said Brown in a heavy and angry voice. She dipped her hands into the dark water and scooped out a clump of soggy fungus. "Not like it matters anymore."

She drank the deadly soup, gagging slightly as it slithered down her throat. She burped and worked to hold it down.

"What does it taste like?" Blonde asked.

Brown stood for a second, bumping her chest with her fist before letting out another soft burp. "Kinda sweet, actually."

Black whimpered and sunk deeper into her legs. She whispered, "you wanted to sleep too, didn't you? We all just wanted to sleep."

"How do you feel?" asked Blonde.

"Pretty normal," said Brown.

"Do you feel sick at all?"

"Not so far."

Brown walked back to her spot by the door and sat down. She looked at her hands, opening and closing them rhythmically. 

"What are you hoping to happen?" asked Blonde.

"I don't know. Maybe I was hoping to see something. I'm so bored I figured it would either show me something interesting or kill me. I'll take either at this point."

Black flinched.

Brown scowled at her.

Blonde turned back to the tiles, focusing on one that was colored a bright green hue.

~~~

At some point they lay down to sleep, and some time after that Brown began to spasm and sputter as her body digested the fungus in her system. She thrashed and screamed something about visions of dark, twisted landscapes and evil malignant things crawling and slithering on her.

"Are you okay?" Blonde yelled, shaking Brown in the hopes that she'd snap out of it.

Brown fixed her gaze on Blonde, and seemed to scowl with terrible purpose, then pulled her in by the tie and kissed her, pouring thick, bitter saliva into her mouth. Blonde swallowed it accidentally and coughed, shoving Brown away. 

Blonde heard a scared indignant whimper from the stall Black had hidden herself in. The one in which she had drowned the poor wretched thing whom Red had birthed. 

"Please don't leave me here alone," she whispered, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet.

Blonde's vision of the room began to blur. Already the intoxicating mold was taking effect. The yellow walls and checkerboard tiles that once stood as a stoic and intractable prison began to quiver weakly around her, and seemed to dissolve against her touch. Now the walls melted and the tiles fell away and she was surrounded by television static. Blonde felt a strange and terrible freedom grip her as she tumbled through that electric void. She shut her eyes to it, and suddenly found herself standing in a vast gray desert. Clouds of dust blew in a vast, serenely desolate valley below high dark jagged mountains that rose into a red sky, all beneath the watchful gaze of a burning black sun that hung directly above Blonde's head.

"Do you see it?" asked Brown. "Do you see that empty place?"

"What's happening?" said Blonde. "I'm scared." 

"Have you ever thought that maybe nobody came for us because we're the only people left alive? That the whole world is like this? That it always has been?"

"Stop. Please."

Something rose up from beneath the gray and shifting sands. A sea of gigantic creatures emerged withering and spasming to the surface. The nightmare children like the one Red unwittingly carried here in her womb, hundreds of them, all towering over her like titans, shambling aimlessly over the mountains in a circle, counterclockwise. enormous and hideous, with those jerking terrified eyes and slithering tendrils. One emerged under Blonde's bare feet and wrapped its arm appendage around her ankle and bit her toe with its sharp spiral teeth, and she screamed and screamed in a terror more profound than anything she could remember experiencing, in the bathroom and out of it.

"Careful," said Brown, "or she'll drown you too."

Black sobbed loudly in her stall, snapping Blonde back into the bathroom again. In the window, Blonde saw that the featureless white light had been replaced by one of the horrible wandering eyes of those nightmare children like the one currently floating dead in a toilet bowl full of urine.

"The window changed!" Blonde screamed.

"What do you mean?" asked Brown.

"The eye!"

"But, that's always been there."

~~~

Blonde inspected the tiles more closely than ever, desperate for anything to take her mind away from that horrible eye in the window. It seemed to be watching her. She searched for any hint of the unity she had once believed the tiles to share, but found that the closer she looked, the more each tile differed from the last. No two tiles were the same color, the same shape, or placed at the same angle. It's as if the interchanging pattern of black and white were simply a mockery of the very concept of design and purpose. Those hideous haphazard tiles that surrounded her screamed with a chaos and disorder so absolute that it was almost beautiful in its own nauseating way.

Brown unfastened the vent cover and peered into the gaping abyss beyond. 

"What are you doing?" asked Black. 

"I'm going inside," Brown said.

"You can't."

"I must. Don't you see? This is what we were meant to do all along. This bathroom is a test. It's meant to teach us the truth of our existence. This darkness. This is the true reality. The bathroom was always an illusion to hide it from us."

"Please, don't."

But Brown was already crawling into the opening. She was surprised to find a metal shaft inside. She had half-hoped she would simply tumble into the darkness. She crawled deeper and deeper into the long cold dark, until the metal gave way to a soft, tissue substance. Wet and sticky, and growing hotter as she crawled deeper inside. The walls around her pulsed and she realized that the abyss was alive. 

She tried to turn around and crawl back but the walls closed in around her and forced her deeper into itself with its rhythmic contractions. She thrashed and jerked her limbs but couldn't get free. The walls gripped her tighter and tighter until she felt like she was going to burst. The heat cooked her from within and the walls grew wet enough to fill her mouth and nose with a foul, burning liquid that dissolved her skin and teeth and tongue.

Through choking gasps she screamed and screamed, and her screams reached the girls in the bathroom. She called out and begged for help as best as she could through what remained of her mouth, but she was beyond the reach of anything but the churning abyss. 

Quietly, Blonde resealed the vent, and the two remaining girls sat and waited until the screams finally fell silent.

~~~

Black and Blonde lay naked in each other's arms atop their piled clothes. Blonde ran her hand through Black's hair, and Black gently sobbed into Blonde's bare chest. They said nothing since Brown's disappearance into the vent and the terrible void beyond. Now Blonde stared directly at the eye watching her. She could no longer stand the sight of the tiles, and had stripped herself to cover as much of them as possible with her clothes. Black had followed suit, if only to feel Blonde's warmth. She curled herself into Blonde's naked body, hiding from the judging stare of that eye in the window. 

Red still lay in the corner, her jacket draped respectfully over her face by Black. Her blood had dried, and her body had cooled, but she did not rot. She simply lay there. When Black had finally fallen into uneasy slumber, Blonde crawled to Red and uncovered her face. Colorless and cold, dried blood trailing from her mouth, eyes closed and restful. She looked at peace, despite everything, as if content in the knowledge that she had done all she could. Blonde placed a hand to Red's cheek, and trailed it down to her chin, then leaned in and kissed those cold dead lips, then pressed her tongue inside to feel Red's own mutilated tongue. She tasted of cold, dried blood, but still Blonde pressed on, as if she'd left something behind in there, something that had gone into loving Red that was now lost forever. 

She lifted herself from Red's face, and saw that Black had woken up, and was watching her. Black's face was twisted with disgust, but she said nothing, and turned over on the pile of clothes. 

Blonde crawled back to her, and caressed her naked shoulder. Black shuddered horribly at the touch but Blonde did not withdraw her hand. She ran her hand down Black's trembling body, down her stomach and past her waist, and to her crotch, and silently, Blonde took what she needed.

Still, Black said nothing. Through it all, Black did not utter a sound.

~~~

They sat naked beneath the sinks. Blonde watched water drip from the mold hanging over the bowl onto her underwear. Black's head was curled in her knees again. She was shaking.

Blonde said, "Saki."

Black said nothing, but looked up from her knees.

"I remember the name Saki. I don't know what it means or who it belongs to, whether it's mine or someone else's. That's all I remember. I think I'm not supposed to know. I think I was meant to imagine what the name means. That's why I kept it to myself."

Black looked at her for a second with tired eyes, then nodded silently and returned her head to her knees. 

Blonde shivered slightly, and decided it was time to get dressed again. She took her now slightly damp panties from the floor. She examined the wet patch and saw that a bit of mold had started growing near the crotch.

~~~

Blonde sat in the middle of the floor, fully dressed, and again stared into the tiles. She saw past the checkerboard pattern, the flaws in each and every tile, even the grout holding it all together. She saw through the hues and rough edges and the grids on which she had once grounded her inner thoughts. She saw into the real horror of the tiles beneath her feet. They had never been a static grid, still and stable. The chaos she had recognized extended far deeper than any chip in the ceramic or discolored hue, and was in fact embedded within the very particles that made up their matter. Tiny bolts of quivering energy held together by deep ancient forces, separated by voids of space too vast to even comprehend. Screaming and shifting and decaying, she was surrounded by an ocean of absolute disorder and constant change. Nothing in this room had ever been still or stable. She saw now what Brown realized too late. There is no void. It's all screaming with the agony of being. Hungry and waiting. To eat. To be eaten. To be changed.

Black began to fill a sink, stopping the faucet when the bowl had filled with acrid, yellow water. She turned to Blonde.

"I don't want to stay here," she said. "Please. I can't do it myself."

Blonde sighed and stood up. She walked to Black and placed a hand gently on the back of her head. Black closed her eyes, and Blonde gently lowered her face into the water. Black held still for a few seconds, then began to thrash violently. Blonde held Black's head down even as she fought to get out. Black's hand shot to Blonde's arm, and she began clawing through the sleeve of her jacket to get away. She pushed with all her might, but Blonde held her down through it all. Black fought it to the very end, until she went limp and the bubbles in the sink stopped. Still Blonde held Black's head down, as the body twitched and jerked in death. And then it was still, and Blonde let Black slide out of the sink and collapse to the ground.

~~~

Blonde sat, surrounded by filth and death, listening to the terrible harmony of the tiles, and the walls, and the water in the sinks. All of it roared like a cacophony in the silence.

Until it was interrupted by a soft click at the other end of the room. Blonde opened her eyes and saw that the door was open, just slightly. Not enough to see out of.

Blonde stumbled to her feet and walked to the door, reaching a trembling hand to the knob. Excitement and terror mingled as she gripped the doorknob. She took a deep breath.

And closed the door.

She walked back to her spot beneath the window and sat down, listening again to incoherent screams of the tiles and the trickling of water, surrounded by the bodies of the girls who sat waiting in here with her.