Restless (The doesn't suck as much version)

Restless, we called it, when she got like this. Coming straight home from school and arriving a good fifteen minutes earlier than normal because she couldn’t help but walk faster, propelled by some itch inside her to move. She’d take two steps into the kitchen then out the other side and straight up to her bedroom. These were the nights we’d hear pacing and furniture moving across the halls, and her bedroom light would still be lit when one of us got up to pee at three-thirty in the morning. She’d take on projects behind that door, and every piece of her furniture would suddenly sit on opposite corners of the room by the time she made it to breakfast the next morning. By the next day they might be somewhere new again.

These were the nights we forgot the alternative was a near-dead daughter, drooping in melancholy at the dinner table and not moving from that table until she had to drag herself up the stairs to bed in the early evening.

“Manic depressive.” The doctors had told us as we sat on too cushy couch pillows and avoided his words by studying the inspirational messages in brushstroke on the walls, “She’s bipolar.”

The words seemed too harsh, much too crazy, for a girl who was not even old enough to drive a car. Bipolar. The words left a sour taste in his mouth that he wanted to spit onto the green carpet.

Well here she was again, scooting up the stairs almost as soon as we caught sight of her. Miles of to-do lists were draping down the hallway behind her, following her as she went and only growing longer. Her mother gave a sharp cry about dinner. She couldn’t fight her forward momentum, though, and continued up the stairs with some incomprehensible murmur that sounded something like “homework.” He wasn’t disappointed, nor even a bit surprised. Nothing scared her more than the prospect of a family dinner on nights like these. I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t be able to stand my mother’s eyes following every movement of my fork. Then again, I didn’t blame Carol from staring either. That utensil moved much too quickly between her mouth, eagerly waiting its dinnertime portion, and her full plate. Not once did she let it linger long enough to pick anything up. Though we heard her stomach give a grumble of protest, she would get straight up from the table and shoot right back to her room. Her dresser grated against the tile floor.

I glanced toward my wife for a moment, and she rolled her eyes and turned back to her mashed potatoes. She’d tried to fight it enough already. Enforcing bedtimes on school nights did nothing more than force her to hide alone in the darkness during those early morning hours, in hope that no one could see. She hadn’t fooled us though, as I caught her soft trod against the ceiling of my study down below. The beat of her toes from above formed the perfect rhythm to finish grading papers to before the sun found us. Her footfalls grew heavier as the night went on, and I noticed the nights she pretended to sleep, finally leaving the furniture in its places, that beat was ten times as quick. Ten times as restless.

I  imagined her up there, the darkness stifling her much too productive mind. While bedtimes tried to blanket her in silence, her mind buzzed to the sounds of due dates and appointments she probably didn’t have.

She used the little light she had to count the tiles as she paced from off-white wall to off-white wall, the dresser banished to the far right corner so she had a straight path between the two. Twelve blocks there, twelve blocks back. He’d counted once too, just by the sound of her feet against the floor, and snuck up to her bedroom when she was still at school one day to check if he was right. He was. After a few hours though, somewhere between the time of night when his coffee went cold and when he finished the cup and went to get another, that rhythm would tire her. She’d begin the little games with herself and count tiles by threes, then fours. Four steps there, three back. Then switched. But even that could not hold the monsters back forever. He knew because last month, right after final exams had finished up, he was kept up much later than he intended reading a particularly boring term paper. It was then, as he was scribbling a thought about a thesis shift into the margins, he heard her muffled screams. They were not the loudest, she couldn’t risk her mother finding out she’d broken bedtime rules again, but they were loud enough to unsettle him and force his pen back down on the desk.

The night had already unnerved him, and the unexpected cry had knocked all clear and rational thought from his mind for a few moments. The sound was off-putting, to say the least.

As a professor, he spent most of his days looking for the logical answer, tangible representation of an absurd world in which they lived, but what was tangible about this? A young girl pacing alone in her bedroom as the clock hand past two o’clock and the sun was still hours from being seen. But this seemed like even more than that. His logical mind begged the question again and again, what could possess a girl just barely fifteen to scream out to no one but the walls? 

He could see it now, though. The tiny ants, lacing pathways across her skin as they scurried through her veins through her blood vessels, painted long streaks up and down her arms in a sickening black color. He could so perfectly picture the sickening ripple of their movement beneath the skin. She knew the monsters had been coming all day. He had seen it in her eyes, that raw and powerful fear gripping her tightly beneath those soft hazel irises. Maybe he realized now why. He could feel the tidal wave of ants sweeping and spreading through her suddenly as she closed that thin door on the rest of her household.

They raced out of her pores, an army of black ocean waves pouring out from within. Their legs hit the ground, spreading over the walls with the sound of needles, and drawing patterns of pinpricks in the wallpaper. Such a sound might be silent if given off by one, but it poked holes in the very film of her eardrums when played by such a mass. They all chanted together her mother’s and my favorite word, though each at a separate beat so the sound became constant. As soon as one trumpeter broke free from his place, another immediately filled its silence. Restless. Restless. Restless.

She wants nothing more than to let a scream crash through her bones, rip the bugs from her lungs and spray them out with the sound. That might break through their methodic chant, she thought, and break its hypnotic spell, the one which propelled her ever forward. She wanted nothing more than for them to leave her.

Soon the walls swelled outward, the room flooded by their tidal waves. She tried to continue her strides, though her pace was slowed. Trekking through the bodies which latched themselves to her feet was much harder than her usual quickstep over the smooth floor. As her feet fell one after the other to the ground, she heard them crunch beneath her shoes and the sound echoed through my study down below. One thousand bodies crushed in a single step. But plenty more soon filled their posts on the tiled battlefield.

The insects gushed out of her from every inch of skin exposed, and even some tunneled through sweatshirt sleeves out into the world. The moving puddle at her feet grew deeper. Soon she was afraid she’d be breathing them in with her air. Then they’d coat the hollow of her lungs with restless legs. Soon they would crawl on every side of her, inside and out, darting in and out of her eye sockets and under her toenails. Soon she’d be nothing more than a floating object in that sea of restless legs.

With her next breath there they were. She sucked them in, and the only way she knew she might take her next breath was if she screamed. And so she did. It forced its way out of her. A final wave crawled up her esophagus and she spit them out with a long shriek. She felt choked, yet never once did her body reach that way. Breathing insects felt natural, less demanding than air. In the next instant the tides shifted with a beautiful inhalation. Time slowed finally to a painful pace, much closer to that of the world around her. Though she felt every tiny creature which crept in and out of her innards, their march seemed calculated now. It flowed softly, the trickle of stream more than the gush of a waterfall.

When I heard that sound tonight, imagining her lungs filling with air, I couldn’t allow myself to sit there, perplexed, forming theories rather than solutions. I pushed the chair away, trudged up the stairs, and search my mind for the right words to say to her, or even the questions he could possibly ask.

My footsteps clacked down the cherry floors must have alerted her, as her own sounds stopped quite suddenly. He could feel the waters fall back, blackness shrinking around her. Maybe my own sounds broke through the needle sound. His hand gripped the doorknob and in the short seconds before the door swung inward, he felt the room clear. The ants receded and suddenly ceased to exist when finally it opened.

“A-are you okay?” He managed. He grew even more concerned when he caught sight of her crouched there in the middle of the floor with her knees clutched to her chest as if she was hiding away or futilely attempting to protect herself.

“Just fine.”

It was unnatural the way she shot up from her position on the ground and scooted towards her desk, feigning interest in the papers laying scattered there. As she did, he imagined a single ant lingering beneath her sweatshirt sleeve, just out of his sight.

 “Are you sure? You seem a bit…” He studied her for a moment, mulling over his next word, tasting it for just a moment, “restless.”

“Really. I’m alright.”

I took a deep breath, then struggled for a few moments as no words came to me. Finally, I nodded “Don’t wake your mother,” and left the room.

I retreated to the safety of my study; my body slouched forward in my desk chair. It wasn’t thirty seconds after I left that room that I felt her pacing vibrate the floor again. Leaning forward in my seat, I propped my elbows against the mahogany and ran my hands through my hair, as black as the army filling her room again.

I looked up at the ceiling and swore I could practically see where her foot landed on the other side. Then, the slightest movement in the corner closest to the sound caught my attention. A single line of ants, looking harmless, escaped from a crack in the ceiling. I immediately turned my gaze back to the term papers, trying to convince myself I hadn’t seen a thing.  I couldn’t help but mutter the word, “restless.”