“they’re heeeerrrrreeeeee.“
Almost in time for Halloween, only a day late, it’s the end of “Periphery!” And hoo boy, what an ending it is. Whether you guessed something like this from the beginning or think this came out of left field, I want to hear your opinion of the ending, and you should leave a comment! Except for you, Mom, I know how you’re gonna feel about it already.
In fact, I have several strong feelings about it myself, so much so that I do think it necessary to add a content warning to this particular chapter of the story. Sorry if you think I should have added content warnings earlier on. But we really do need it this time, I promise. Even if it feels like this warning is spoiling things a bit before we get to the end, I want to leave this here.
Content Warning: Purposeful Self-Harm and Body Horror
I don’t consider myself squeamish. Gore and body horror makese me laugh in movies and games, more often than not, and I don’t necessarily shy away from real-world fleshy stuff (though I’m not often exposed to it, mind you). But writing this ending… it did give me chills. Could be because, well, this story is semi autobiographical, and it’s not hard to fall into the trap of “I’m writing about myself.” But the emphasis is on the “SEMI” part there. This does not reflect how I feel or act now. Just remember that, those of you who know me well.
Although, full disclosure, I got the idea for this story when I myself was forced to suddenly quit my antidepressant medication about two months ago. There really was just a hold-up with insurance and I ran out of pills in the meantime, but going cold turkey was bad, even if it was accidental. I crashed hard. Really hard. Like, “broke down crying at work for no reason” hard. I never cry (and by never I mean “maybe three or four times a year”). Of course, after about a week or so of an adjustment period, I did stabilize and I was fine without medication. I wasn’t necessarily happier, which is what I had hoped, paradoxically, to happen when I went off medication, but hey, can’t win them all. So I’m back on it now, with a new appreciation for the fact that my medication doesn’t flatten or dull my feelings. It just kind of raises my baseline a little bit.
But, enough of that. On to the story! And remember, this is fiction! I promise! If you want to read part three to refresh, it’s here.
“Periphery,” By Andy Sima (2022)
Where we left off…
*Good lol she texted again.
Haha I replied. I mentally kicked myself, and then physically pinched my arm in disappointment. What the hell kind of response is “Haha”? Surely I should have said something better than that. Something a person deserving of a position of leadership in an environmental activism club would say….
….whatever the hell that would be. I was way too out of it to really formulate any sort of meaningful response right now, anyway. But surely someone in a position of authority was supposed to know what to say during these kinds of things. Right? Who are you talking to?
But I had another class to get to. I huffed my way across the street that separated the engineering part of the university from everyone else, and, sliding in between the doors to one of the older buildings on the quad, I snuck my way through halls scattered with students before finally creeping into a seat for the local ecosystems class. This would at least afford me a chance to calm down before talking to Stephanie, I figured.
And sure enough, it was a class I really didn’t need to be present in at all. Stuff I, largely, already knew, and if I needed to review it, the professor put the PowerPoint on his class website anyway. So I practiced breathing, like I had learned in the hospital years ago, and worked on clearing my mind. Sometimes this worked, and I could let the thoughts seep out of the cracks at the base of my skull. Sometimes it didn’t, and things pooled up anyway.
This was one of those latter times. I got my heart rate to lower, but my face kept twitching and I could feel the knot of muscles at my neck pulsing, convulsing, repulsing to the person next to me, I’m sure. It almost felt like it moved up and down by spine, clinging the right side of me, a sordid mass of flesh and fluid that seemed to have more control over my anatomy than I did. It pulled my hand up out of my seat, and squeezed my fingers together into a fist at my chest. My heart thumped to racing, but then it was gone, and I was left sitting again.
And there was something that I needed to sit and think about anyway, wasn’t there? Don’t do this to yourself, you stupid bastard. It felt like since at least when I stopped my medication, how long ago had that been? That there was something I needed to bring to the forefront of my brain, and maybe if I sat quiet and still enough in this little lecture hall I could focus on what it was. But even with the breathing exercises, the voice of my professor was a bit too much for me to focus on it. I just got vague shapes, like a play taking place behind a thick curtain. I don’t know. It seemed like there was something, and if I could just think of it for a little longer, I would see it, and then
“See you next week, class,” the professor said from the front of the room, and the jarring motion of dozens of bodies suddenly rising up and animating themselves threw me out of my own head. Wait, that wasn’t right. It had only been, like, five minutes? Hadn’t it? I must have dosed off, or something. But I checked the time on my phone, and sure enough, it was the end of class, and I had to leave. Only an hour or so before my coffee meeting with Stephanie. She’s doing this out of pity.
The next hour passed in the student union, sitting quietly at a chair near the window, motionless, as I tried to grasp the thing that kept eluding me. What the hell was it? There had to be something, right? There’s no way I was just deluding myself at this point. But I could almost see it, I swore I could. You’re grasping at straws you stupid motherfucker. Surely onetwothreefour there was something there. It wasn’t homework or a club function, that much was obvious. It was something bigger than that. Something in my apartment, maybe? Not the ghost. That was its own problem to be dealt with later. But what?
My agitated body kept moving back and forth in the chair, which would occasionally make an awful squeaking noise, groaning under my weight. Which must have bothered those around me. Because of course they heard it. How could they not? They had to. And they probably hated me for it. Everyone hates you so it’s no different. I mean I would if I was in their shoes, if someone kept squeaking and making this awful noise, but it sounded almost like voices a little bit, like every sound just briefly opened the airwaves to something else to speak through. Something red. I couldn’t sit still in the chair, it was like something else was moving me, and it pulled my head back and forth.
But I leapt up around 3:50 or so, and ran out of the room. God, I must have looked like a crazy person. Sitting there, practically vibrating, and then dashing up to leave onetwothreefour. I would never go in that room again, I vowed.
Paradise Café was pretty close to my apartment, all things considered, and I’d been there a few times before. But I didn’t care much to notice the leaves of the monstera plants or the classy flagstone façade of the place. Pushing open the door to the café, I could only see Stephanie now. And I could not look away, as much as I tried.
I tucked my backpack under my chair as I sat down across a low wooden table from her, sinking into the plush faux leather couch. I smiled, and briefly admired her septum piercing again. I had always wanted one, but had never had the money had been too chickenshit to get one. “Hey, how are you?” I said.
“Hey, dude!” she beamed. “Thanks for coming on such short notice. It’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you too,” I said. Oh no, was that too forward? Should I have said something else? I picked at my shirt, looking for the buttons, but for now I tried not to make a scene out of it.
“So, I promise this isn’t, like, an interrogation or anything. And I know you want to be an officer in the club eventually, but this isn’t about that, either, I swear. This is just, like, a check-in, dude,” she said. She smiled, easily and breezily, and her eyes moved between my face and my fingers fidgeting with the buttons on my shirt.
“Uh… why?” I asked. Stupidly.
“Oh, duh, I should have opened with that,” she said, slapping her forehead and making a comical, lopsided grin. “Well, uh, if I’m being totally honest, one of the newer members told me they saw you, uh, crying, uh, out in the hall after you left yesterday. And I wanted to check in on you about that.” She glanced down, awkwardly, and then back up at me. “Sorry if that’s weird. I’m not great at knowing what to say. But… I’m better in person than I am over text so, uh, here we are?”
I stared down at the table and didn’t really look up as I spoke. “So they told you about that, huh?”
“Yeah. And I figured that, along with what you mentioned before that, and I kind of put two and two together and got five and figured, well, maybe there was something else going on,” she said. She leaned forward and put her hand on mine. On the one that wasn’t counting my buttons. “Everything alright, dude?” Absolutely not. Not in any capacity.
I looked up, and for a second, her face was that of a telescope. I could see into her, not just into her but past her, and the inside of her skull was spiraled like the inside of a gun, and through that spiral that was her face I could see into oblivion, out past the back of the coffee shop and out past the back of the town and beyond the hundreds of miles of cornfields that stretched in all directions outside of this godforsaken city and beyond the edge of the planet into clear space, and there wasn’t a void but an immense mass of red hanging there, hovering behind her eyes and a billion miles away, and just as soon as I saw that it rushed at me and snapped forward and everything collapsed inward until it was just her face again. It was just Stephanie. I couldn’t help but count the buttons now.
I shuddered as I breathed out. “Um. Uh. Well. No. I guess not? I mean, not really. I don’t know. Things are ok, I think. I’m just kind of stressed out, you know? Lots going on.”
She bobbed her head, somewhere between a nod and the movements a bird makes when it’s interested in something. “I get that, man. Shit’s rough right now, with midterms coming up and whatever. Plus we got that campout coming up, and I know you’re helping out with that, which is awesome, but if you need to take a step back, just say the word, dude.”
“No, I still want to help out,” I said. “I should be ok enough for that.”
“Awesome,” she said. And here she paused. “Is there… something else that’s been bothering you?” I couldn’t meet her eyes for more than a second. Coward.
“Well… I mean, there was that ghost, right? It, uh, it showed up the other morning. But I don’t think it was literally a ghost, I think it was more of a… hallucination? A premonition? I don’t know. It didn’t feel ghostly, you know what I mean?”
“Not at all,” she said. “But continue, please.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Try opening up. “It felt so real. And it really reminded me of my childhood, I guess? I, uh, I used to see these things when I was little, these orbs that would float over my bed as a kid, and they always scared the shit out of me, but I wasn’t scared of this one, I guess?”
Stephanie leaned back in her chair, and made the same sort of disconcerting silence my mother had when I first lied told her. I knew that look. That was the look that people made when they caught me counting buttons on my shirt. Or the look my first couple doctors gave me when I told them about how I couldn’t stop counting the buttons. Or the look that you give someone who’s just told you they have a contagious illness. Onetwothreefour Great, I’ve ruined any chance I have of being her friend, of being an officer in the club, of getting close to someone around this goddamned place, now I was going to have to ask her if things were ok, and I was going to blubber and blunder my way around until I said something even worse onetwothreefour and she’d hate me forever onetwothreefour and
“I get that, dude,” she said. Wait, what? “My, uh, sister had auditory hallucinations as a kid. I’m not saying that’s what you’ve got. But she’d hear people calling her name from the other room, and there’d be no one there. Freaked us all to hell and back. But she got… better. I believe everyone can get better.” My hands paused.
“I don’t know, I just feel really under a lot of pressure right,” I said. “It’s like I’ve got all this stuff to do, but the problem is I create so much of it for myself, and I can’t seem to ever cut through it, and I just keep doing more and more and it just keeps piling up, and one little thing will set me off and I’ll spiral for hours and waste a whole day, and…” I felt my heart rate creeping up again. My fingers clenched and unclenched.
“Sometimes you just gotta call some days a wash, you know?” She said. “Hell, I’ve lost whole weeks before, know what I’m saying?” She said. “If yesterday was a wash and you had to skip a meeting to feel ok, that’s ok. I just want to make sure that you’ve got the space to do that.”
“Why me?” I asked. What a stupid fucking question to ask, why me. Like I’m some sort of poor stupid dog in a storm drain, why me. What makes me so special or so pitiable that I need some sort of help? What the hell am I saying? Onetwothreefour No. I need to be better than this. I can’t let myself do this. I’m close to something here. A fog around my head was starting to clear. Don’t dig back into this. Try harder. Try harder. Try harder. You aren’t trying hard enough.
She shrugged. “I mean, I’ve known you for, like, a year now? I think that’s enough time to get you some coffee and talk about how shit life can be, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, and half-smiled. I looked at her. I felt like I was holding back tears. But they were good tears. Right? But I couldn’t cry in front of her. Normal people didn’t cry about this stuff. I couldn’t cry in a coffee shop. Could I? Who was going to tell me I couldn’t? Was I going to tell myself that? But she’d hate me if I cried. That would be so awkward. I wouldn’t look like officer material.
“But it’s not really enough,” said a third voice. A pale face with details I couldn’t quite make out began to slide out from behind Stephanie’s head. It looked like it was upside down, with the eyes at the bottom and the mouth at the top, but it had no neck, no ears, no hair, no nose, nothing besides deep, sunken red eyes, high, emaciated cheek bones, and a tiny, sucking mouth. It looked like me.
I started to breathe heavier, fingers grasping at my shirt. Onetwothreefour onetwothreefour what the hell was that and why was it just floating there, why couldn’t it go away and just leave me alone “Woah, dude, are you okay?” what the hell is wrong with me there’s something wrong with me and I’ll never be right why can’t I get red of it I’ve wasted so much time already what the hell wait no I’m ok I have to be ok “Yeah, I’m good” onetwothreefour onetwothreefour “You look really pale, dude,” onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree WHY ARE THERE ONLY THREE WAIT WHAT ONETWOTHREEONETWOTHREEONETWOTHREE
I looked down at my shirt, and I couldn’t find the fourth button. I couldn’t find the fourth button. Oh god. I couldn’t find the fourth button.
And it all went black. Not like a veil had been dropped over my eyes, but more like my eyes had been ripped out of my skull and the sockets stuffed with wax, like my ears had been drilled out and my skin had been flayed and peeled from my body, I couldn’t feel anything, I was just a head floating in a pool of darkness, not even darkness, nothingness, but this wasn’t what I wanted, this wasn’t right, how could it be, I was still panicking and I was still thinking, this wasn’t my gentle quiet darkness, what the hell is going on why is it so dark is it because I’m still here and is it because
I opened my eyes again and Stephanie was staring at me, almost on the verge of panic. And I stopped myself. I breathed in once, sharp, and held it. And I looked at her and I smiled, thinly. “Hey, I think I need to go home,” I said.
She stood up, rapidly, and offered her hand for me to stand up, too. “Do you want me to walk you home?” she asked.
“No, I think I’m ok,” I said, slow and measured. In a tone of voice I had learned got people off my back. “I really appreciate you talking to me.”
She backed off, maybe without even realizing she was doing it. “Of course, dude, I’m glad I got a chance to talk to you before the campout this weekend. See you tomorrow night?”
“Yup,” I said. “See you tomorrow night!” And I left the café in a hurry.
I practically ran home to my apartment. Good thing it wasn’t very far away, because I could barely stand the thought of this all anymore. I had to get it to stop. There had to be something. Everything had become too loud, too much, even with Stephanie’s help there wasn’t anything to be done, not even my mom knew what to do anymore, and she was hours away, and there was nothing to be done, except what I could do myself. Right? That’s what this all came down to, right? It started with me and I had to end it. And whatever I was forgetting might show up along the way.
I got into my apartment and immediately pulled my shirt off. I counted the buttons there, on the couch. One. Two. Three. Four. It didn’t make any fucking sense! How is that possible? I counted three in the café and it threw me into a fucking frenzy. That’s not normal! I’m not normal and I never would be! And it’s all because of this fucking thing in my fucking head that I can’t get fucking rid of!
You were fucking getting somewhere, and now you’re gonna run? Typical. You’d be better off running for good. Maybe I was. But for now, I could see what I needed to do.
I was going to sit. Alone. With my thoughts. For as long as it would take, I would sit here, and figure out what it was that had been bothering me. What had been at the edge of my vision, of my mind, of my thoughts, for so long. I would bring it into the light, drag it by force, if I had to. But I was going to do it. And I could do it alone.
So I cleared off the table in my living room, and I climbed up on it. I sat down, and I crossed my legs, and straightened my back, and began to breathe like they had taught me in the hospital. But I was going to do it right this time.
Breathe in. Hold for four. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Hold for four. Breathe out.
Breathe in. Hold for four. Breathe out.
And then…
Something had been nagging at me for hours. No, days. No, weeks. No, months. No, years, it seemed like. STOP IT! YOU WERE SO CLOSE! Some thought that existed just at the edge of my mind, at the periphery of everything, something just out of sight but with enough gravitational force to pull my perception towards it just enough to know it was there, but not to know what it was. Some sort of a black hole of sensation, of knowledge and information, shut up you idiot! some sort of void where ideas and mind and a sense of self went to die, a quiet, inky, gentle, deep and delicious darkness, a vast and endless as the space between the north star and the little dipper, they won’t love you after this a place where things were finally quiet and I could look at the stars in all the time that I wanted to, and things would finally shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up everywhere. I could watch the stars drift apart in the endless expansion of space and finally explode in a immense encore to their flaming existence or else dim into dwarfs and die out in a gentle sputter as if they had never been there at all, as inconsequential to the heat death of the universe as I was to those around me, a space between spaces you’re just going to hurt yourself where I could finally, finally sit and thing and puzzle out just what it was that I had been trying to see for all this time.
All the ghosts you’re a liar that had been haunting me for years would finally cease their overbearing task of beating me into the ground, the light at my window just a few days ago you have to stop this and everything I had experienced in between now and then, from my face melting in front of Anish and him recoiling in terror and the buttons on my shirt misaligning like stars pulled out of orbit and everything before that, too, before I had been on medication back when I had been a child and I had peered through that accursed telescope every night to count the same patch of stars in the sky, no and how later on I had laid in my own bed, the green and red checkered quilt my grandmother had made before I was born pulled up to my neck but not over my own mouth to avoid suffocation, please stop and I could feel the smooth wood at the foot of my bed where my outstretched toes had rubbed it smooth and thin from a simple repetitive motion I could not seem to get myself to stop no matter how hard I tried, stop and those red things had swirled over my head, not things, really, but just one distinct thing, something that had appeared out of the false darkness of a child’s bedroom, lit from the corner still by a Buzz Lightyear nightlight, not the true darkness that I so craved, but yet this thing found purchase in it, and it spun its redness around and speckled lights behind my eyes so even when I could look away and close my eyes I could still see it, hovering there, stop but how had it gotten there at all, it had to do with the telescope, I had assumed, because the truth was, that night, the thing I had been too afraid to admit to myself or my parents or my therapist or the doctors or the world itself for so long was that it wasn’t even a plane that I saw and miscounted, there had never been a place in that part of the sky the entire time I had been counting the stars every night, and I never would have been fooled by something as simple as that anyway, no, no, the truth was that there had been something else there, a new star, something that appeared out of the emptiness between the north star and the little dipper, I had seen it, too, a new star that suddenly blinked into existence, and even from however millions of miles away I could see that it was huge and red and fiery and full of the burning of exotic elements we couldn’t even begin to have names for yet, and it looked at me, and I saw it, and it saw me, and I knew that it knew that I knew it was there and it was new and it wasn’t right, and it winked at me, it closed its eye and disappeared for but a split second and then it was there again, and then just as suddenly as it appeared it was gone and then it was right at the lens of my telescope and it filled everything I could see, and I could see nothing but this new terrible red star and I was filled with such despair and terror and hopelessness and I couldn’t get it away, no matter how I turned my telescope or zoomed out or in it was there right there and I could see it and it could see me and I screamed, and I knew I had no choice but to destroy the thing once and for all and I threw the telescope over the platform and out the window and it shattered with a scream on the concrete below, a guttural howling sound like the wind blowing over the open mouth of a cave on moons lightyears away, and my eyes were covered in a veil of a night sky, and I could see all the stars closing in on me and it was beautiful and terrible at the same time, and my parents came in and they both held me so close, they held me so tight and they looked at each other with these eyes that seemed to say I don’t know how to help him and they felt so afraid but not for the right reasons and no one would ever really know how to help and there was never anyone who really knew what was going on in the inside and if they didn’t know then then there was never really ever any hope for me at all was there and I had never felt so alone as I did in that moment and that feeling never really left and then my parents looked back at me and they tried so hard to make things better but they couldn’t’ and they never could and they never did and the telescope lay shattered on the ground but that thing was still there on the inside and then and then and then and then and then and then and then and then and then
Oh.
There it was.
So that’s what I had been forgetting.
I opened my eyes and stood up. My stomach growled, and my joints were stiff from sitting in the same position. Behind me, the sun shone down through my apartment windows. It had been three weeks.
I brushed the dust off my legs and walked to the closet in my bedroom. I opened the door, and pulled out the camping hatchet from the back of the space, behind my hiking backpack. I held it in my hands. It was heavy and had a fiberglass handle, embossed with orange and black. The edge of the blade was sharp.
I gave a few swings, practicing, getting the feel for it. I took it in two hands, and went back to the table where I had been sitting. Meditating. Thinking.
I swung it once, cracked it into the table, and when it stuck in the particleboard wood with a loud thrum, I jimmied the blade back out again. I looked at the axe head. In it, I could see my own reflection.
I held it in front of me, blade facing to the sky, and stared straight ahead. I swung my arms inward, turning them towards myself, and brough the blade directly into my forehead. It hissed through the air.
It stuck in the bone of my skull, splitting the skin open and embedding the blade cleanly in my face.
I did not stumble as I pushed the handle of the blade back and forth and released it from my head. The red blood dripped down the end of my nose and filled the crack in the table.
I did it again. The right side of my face began to sag with the stress of the impact. My cheek and eye drooped and my mouth fell open. I felt the bone split this time, but not quite far enough.
I put the hatchet down on the table, blood pouring from my forehead. I put my hands up to my forehead. I felt the pinch of the bone where it had split. I laced my fingers into the gaping wound, and I pulled…
The thing that had been at the periphery exploded outward with incredible force. Red, viscous tentacles, or things like tentacles, sprouted from the hollow space where my brain was supposed to be. It screamed, ear splitting and unending, but I could barely hear it.
A jet black liquid poured out of my face, spilling onto the floor and turning into a cloud of space, a void of emptiness and stars forming at my feet. A plume of smoke of that same nebulous stuff rose up between the tentacles, gathering at the ceiling and forming a vast array of resplendent blues and purples before which the vivid red tentacles danced madly, smashing the walls of my apartment.
My head had cracked open like an egg. The right side of my skull fell to the ground, hair sticky and matted, and my face drooped, hanging on by tendons alone. I spluttered and coughed, blood oozing from my mouth, now mixing with that blackness, so that when I breathed out I sprayed void in front of me.
Only now did I stumble, and I rocked back and forth as the tentacles pulled my cranial cavity in all directions.
There was a knock at the door, and a voice I couldn’t make out said my name, and some other words. It could have been Stephanie, asking about the campout I missed. It could have been the police, sent by my mother. It could have been anyone.
But it wouldn’t make a difference.
I stepped towards the door and tried to smile with the half of my face that still worked. The room was almost full now, and the tentacles helped me take steps forward as they screamed and thrashed.
I turned the door handle and prepared to meet the world with my very own quiet, gentle darkness.
END
And that’s the end of “Periphery,” and maybe the world? What a downer ending. I hope to tighten this story up and have a post up some time of a draft where it’s all in one piece, instead of serialized like it is now. And shorter, too. The next draft will definitely be shorter. So tune in next time for… whatever the hell I’m gonna do after this? Right now, it’s gonna be “take a cold shower.”
There’s a happy ending somewhere in here where the story ends right around the end of the coffee shop talk, somewhere before shit hits the fan and the spooky vampire face shows up. I hadn’t considered making that scene so “effective,” but that’s how it formed itself when I wrote it, and Stephen King says to let scenes develop themselves, and clearly Stephen King is never wrong. I might have to think about that. Maybe there should be a different ending, where they go feed some horses or something and the story ends there.
On a serious note, If you or a loved one is dealing with suicidal ideations or considering self-harm, please know that you are loved and there is help out there. Consider the National Suicide Prevention Helpline (dial 988), or if you don’t like them, consider the Crisis Textline (text HOME to 741741) to text with trained counselors, which is a resource that I used and got help from years back. They’re good.
Suicide is not the answer. You can get help and you can get better.
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