The Weight of Being Whole, Part II: Half of a Whole

Fiction

Sandolore Sykes

and

SUM FLUX

Feb 23, 2025

Read “The Weight of Being Whole Part I: Ink in Water” HERE

This story was written for SUM FLUX V.2.3. Check out more writers and artists featured in my zine here.

PART II: “Half of a Whole”

"But who is the dreamer?"

-D.L.

Roe shivers under the musty-smelling still blanket from an apologetic guard. She is tucked into a corner, feeling the cold lobby tiles through her pants. Her seal-skin jacket is in a wet pile on the floor next to her. Meat suit, Roe thinks looking at it, and shivers again, pushing the thought away.

The conference will continue after mopping and draining. Hold tight, they said, coffee and tea were on their way.

Roe takes out her notebook, resting her back against the lobby windows, knees up, noticing that her hands are shaking. It’s just the cold.

She steadies her hand against her knee and begins writing.

Things I don’t want to think about: my shitty brother, Evelyn’s beautiful body, my desiccated twin.
But now it’s out there, isn’t it? Nothing else to do but think about things I don’t want to. Should be focusing on keeping my nerve up or am I now just going to fall the fuck apart, overreacting to every piece of Evelyn’s Keyser Söze/Edward Bloom fictional monologue, connecting it to every repressed childhood memory. Fuck.

Out of nowhere, Roe imagines her mother, in sunlight, washing dishes, calling them “meine kleinen pferdchen.” Her little horses. What was it with her mom and horses?

She remembers telling her mother she wanted a new name, she must’ve been what, five? She threw a tantrum saying she didn’t want Rosemunde, and its stupid horse meaning. You ride horses! Her mom told her about the wild horses in Colorado. Roe said she wanted a water name—announced that, from then on, she would be “Ariel.” Roe laughs to herself at her stupid child self.

Roe writes:

We decided I could be Roe—then Mom gave me the seahorse pendant.
But wait, my twin had a name too. How could I have forgotten?
What was it? Was it a sea name?

The memory seems to slur, and she can’t concentrate, she almost has it—the name—but her mind slips into seeing her room again, its blue walls, that damn quilt. She sees the cracks in the paint, the seahorse pendant hanging on the lampshade. She can see every diamond on the quilt, the textures bunching up unevenly. Then she realizes someone is under there.

Roe stands up suddenly. Change your thoughts. She goes to the water fountain and puts her lips full into its stream, wanting the cold to shock her thoughts away.

A ray of sunshine through the lobby window hits the water. She imagines her mother again, singing to herself in the sunlight through the kitchen window, doing dishes, the light prisming in the flowing faucet, throwing colored light.

But why, in this crystal-clear image, are the walls a cheap fake wood paneling, why is there mold all around the tiny blue tiles of the sink?

Roe stands, feeling her chest seizing up... not now, she can’t have an attack now... It’s just imagination, why are you overreacting? Breathe, control your thoughts, think of something nice.

Cam’s face— no, anything but that, toes bare in the sand, water rising to her ankles with the waves.

Roe walks back to the windows, taking a breath, feeling her chest relax. Sitting down, she rubs her eyes and catches a brief image behind her eyelids of multicolored fins flashing in foamy ocean water.

Four massive coffee thermoses have been rolled out, and Roe joins the slow-moving line. She looks across the lobby as she waits, and a dizziness comes over her, looking at the sunlight coming through the wall of windows, distorted in the almost foggy air, an effect like light rippling through water—like being in an aquarium. She looks down to try and shake her vision right, and when she looks back, she sees that the optical illusion was made by the warped glass.

As she reaches for the spout of the giant thermos, someone says, "Yeah, I wouldn’t drink that one." The man has leaned in beside her, an amused look on his face.

"Tastes like someone left a fish in the percolator," he says, a laugh like he thinks he made a joke.

Roe gives him a glance— then selects another pot. As she turns to walk away, he turns with her.

"So," he says, "this is pretty interesting, isn’t it? Evelyn Waters is putting on quite the show."

Roe pauses and gives him a second look. He is wearing a dark grey vest making him look like the perfect caricature of a university nerd— his gap-tooth smile gives him an open look.

Roe flicks a glance at his badge, and seeing it, he says, "Northwestern Clinical Psychology PhD program."

"I’m writing my dissertation on the positive function of fictional narratives in psychotic disorders."

Roe just stands there, stupidly blank, and he, seeing that his words didn’t land—tries again, “how she’s constructed an alternative narrative to reframe her life story—living inside this fantasy—and whether it’s actually, you know… therapeutic."

"Okay," Roe says, nodding her head, almost interested.

“And you?" he asks.

Roe hesitates, mouth slightly open, big intake of air.

Nothing is coming out of her mouth; she’s gone completely blank. This happens to her.

His eyes drop briefly to her badge and for a fleeting moment, she wants to cover it with her hands.

"The Palimpsest Files," he reads. "That’s an interesting name; I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a working name,” Roe says quickly, sounding defensive.

She wants to say something intelligent, so she says, "I’m researching an article with the angle that Evelyn was acting in self-defense against sexual predation." She hears herself as if from outside, what is she even saying? Trying to sound like a real writer?

He responds, evenly, openly, "What about the drowning of that woman, her lover?"

“She was never convicted for that.” Again, she sounds defensive. She tries to soften her tone, “I want to see her as a real person, understand what she went through.”

The auditorium doors open.

"We should go in," she says shortly, giving him a curt smile before slipping into the crowd.

***

Roe sits down in the same chair as before. She arranges the blanket around her shoulders and opens her notebook. As she flips through the pages, she catches a glimpse of something she doesn’t remember writing.

Mom singing in sunlight, “Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund.” Mother on the phone, “Ich weiß einfach nicht mehr, was ich mit Rosemunde machen soll…” Mom saying, these nice men want to ask you some questions.

Roe tears her eyes away and tries to concentrate on her question. Will she have to ask it again?

The spotlights snap on, and Evelyn is sitting there looking directly at Roe, ready to start up where they left off. Her wet hair hangs in two long black ribbons over the pale green dress that must have come from the costume room. Damnit if she doesn’t look like a real mermaid in that wrinkled silk gown with its pearl embroidery.

Evelyn says, “What did I feel when it happened? Nothing. I felt nothing at all."

Roe feels the disappointment hollow in her gut. Evelyn’s face shifts, her features lighting up with sudden clarity, "I don’t do anything.” She says, "They do it to themselves."

Without thinking Roe blurts out, “but how do you do it?”

Evelyn leans forward. "Like I said. First, they go blue.”

"When they’re excited—titillated.” Her hands rise, fingers curling around a huge invisible phallus, which she strokes up and down, drawing uncomfortable laughter from the audience.

Roe’s pen moves like a lever writing:

Excited—titillated. Cherry-red blot on cherries, spreading, no, it’s ink.

Evelyn’s smile fades. “Their eyes slide over me, slow and greedy. I see into them. Into their waters."

Roe writes:

Blue, dark blue. The flannel soaked through. Into their waters— saltwater, frothing white around his face.

Roe feels heat rising on her neck.

“And then,” Evelyn continues, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “if they come too close—if they try to touch. It happens. A greasy, black pool.”

Evelyn’s gaze drops to the floor as if she’s watching a stain spread. When she looks up again, her eyes lock onto Roe’s, Roe pulls in a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

“They say ‘acid.’ They always say ‘acid.’ But acid bites, carves. This isn’t acid. This is permeation. The hermetic seal opening. Solvent to serosa.” Her tone is clinical now, she looks past the audience.

Roe writes:

Acid, permeation, hermetic seal. Solvent.

"The infinitesimal space between the molecules opens… and they spill out. The fragile webbing that holds them together can’t withstand…" She pauses, her head tilting, a mock-innocent smile, “well…me.”

The words slip from Roe’s lips before she can stop them. “You didn’t do it on purpose?”

When Evelyn turns back it’s with a slow turn of her head. “No,” she says softly. “I can’t control them, their reaction to me. You don’t blame the bacteria for breaking down the flesh. The fire for turning the paper black."

She shrugs. “It’s not my job to hold the world together.”

Roe writes:

not on purpose. These nice men want to ask you some questions:

“Do you want to hear about the first time it happened?” She lifts her hand, spreading her fingers, expanding, bursting apart in the air, then softening, melting downward, imitating an oozing, “Other than my brother?”

Evelyn goes silent, swaying slightly, and then becomes animated and says, “I’ve never told this story before.”

Rose turns to a new page and transcribes.

“He brought me one rose a day. Like an offering.”

“Like it was romantic. Never a bouquet. Just one. A parsing. A trail of breadcrumbs.”

“I was still a young girl, innocent. My overprotective father didn’t like me going off on my own. He wanted me locked away, like I was his. But I would sneak out and go down to the lake.”

“And there I would sink into the water, letting its darkness close over me. Letting my legs—” Evelyn inhales, her lips parting, her voice dreamy, “deploy.”

It happens again, that tightness in Roe’s chest, the sharp, quick catch of breath. Every damn time Evelyn mentions the fins, the feeling grips her, no matter how absurd it seems.

“He saw me there,” Evelyn continues, “watching from the shore, waiting. And day by day, one rose at a time, he came to me.”

“I gathered them all. Broke them down into their petals, hiding them under my pillow. I rubbed them, caressed them into shreds until they became a sticky blackened rotten pulp.”

She lowers herself into the chair, but not with the same grace. Her movements have loosened, her limbs slack.

And then, just as suddenly, she rises.

Her arms lift, sweeping overhead in a dramatic flourish.

“And I ran away with him.” A flash of teeth, fake bravado.

“To Paris, to Rome! He wrapped me in fur stoles, wound silk scarves around my throat. He was always admiring me.” Her voice drops. “He told me I was beautiful, the most incredible creature in the world.”

“And I ate it up.”

“Until things started to get nasty.” She steps closer to the audience.

Roe sees the stage superimposed against a blue wall, cracked paint, and light coming from above like she is seeing two scenes at once.

Keep writing, she tells herself and stop freaking the fuck out.

"Until it was his hands on me. Wrapping around my throat." Her fingers press into the skin of her neck.

“And one day, he went too far. I was sitting by a fountain, my fingertips skimming the water, watching the ripples, when he yelled—”

“ARE YOU LISTENING?”

Evelyn’s voice booms so loud that Roe flinches, her voice seeming to come from every direction, reverberating on the tiled walls. It didn’t seem to come from Evelyn at all.

Now Evelyn’s voice is just above a whisper, speaking rapidly— breathless. “And then he grabbed me. His fingers tightened around my throat.”

“And that’s when it happened.”

"You see," Evelyn murmurs, "it excited him. To hurt me. To make me small. I saw him go blue. And I realized I’d been seeing it all along, without seeing it.”

“And then—" Her hands lift, cupping something unseen, something fragile. She opens her hands, letting it spill from her fingers.

Roe shivers. She looks down, sees the words she’s just written.

Black ink, white foam, black foam, white foam. Flat on the floor, his body. Foam on his lips.

Silence stretches. The audience shifts uncomfortably—clearing throats, adjusting seats.

Evelyn begins speaking about the silence of her mother. How she would sit in a chair in the sun singing to herself, but Roe’s mind is wandering.

***

Her mother singing “das Zeitliche segnen…” from downstairs and Roe is looking at that quilt. The patched-together horrific body made of parts of other bodies.

Her brother is there, what was his name? He’s there, transparent, sitting on the other bed, on the blue flannel of the quilt. It shifts, its lumps moving. Where’s Phillip? You should always know where Phillip is. Panic—are her eyes playing tricks?

Phillip laughs, throwing back the covers.

He could wait for hours, just for the thrill. He could be anywhere. Every shadow behind every door could be him.

Remember the journal of plans, elaborate ways to get him to stop, each more brutal than the next? They’d found it, hadn’t they?

***

Roe’s attention is pulled back by the voice of the PhD student, who is asking Evelyn if she read the original “Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen.

Evelyn throws her head back and laughs, saying, “Die kleine Meerjungfrau” of course I have! Although if you’ve read it, you’d see that our similarities stop at the tail.”

“The Little Mermaid had a choice— to give up her voice or eviscerate her man. She chose to dissolve into sea foam. It’s almost as if her voice would’ve gutted her prince from cock to throat, isn’t it?”

“I’m not giving up my voice for anyone. When I turn into sea foam, it’ll be for me.”

Roe is writing: as if two minds at once—Evelyn on the left, herself on the right.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

        Keeps her voice				        White foam			
	Turns to sea foam				Face below
	Meerjungfrau					flashing color in water.

Evelyn looks lost in thought her head lifts slowly, as if surfacing as another voice, a woman’s, warm and melodic asks, “What do you want, Evelyn, what would make you happy?”

A smile starts out slow on Evelyn's face. “I am in the pool now and you are all here with me.”

Her palms are pressed together, “I am going to tell you the story of one of my most beautiful memories.”

***

Roe transcribes:

Roe writes:

Mom had her diary in her hands, saying, these nice men want to ask you some questions.
Is this the quilt in your drawing? They asked, how did this hole get here?
It was after Phillip was gone, they sat on the quilt, sitting on him, not Phillip, on the other one. You said, yes, I drew that.
You said, “we went to the beach, I didn’t see him after that.”

Roe feels awake again, looks down at the page, only partly visible in the dark. She can almost read what she’s written but the waving of the darkness beneath her notebook catches her eye— like black shifting water.

Evelyn shifts, her posture resets.

"See, that’s it. I never figured it out. How to be someone— this one thing, all sewn up, this plastic sac called Evelyn."

The strange acoustics of the room make it sound like Evelyn is inches away, whispering directly into Roe’s ear.

Someone is asking a question, but Roe isn’t listening, she’s squinting down at her page. What are these memories? None of this ever happened, did it?

His face underwater as she held him. Her feet blurring, a shimmering tail.
Is it Phillip, those long black curls? Those beautiful hands. The sea? Or white porcelain? Light coming through from a sky light… rainbow colors of light prismed through beveled glass.

Roe’s attention snaps back to Evelyn who is saying, “We can’t imagine what it will be like to no longer exist. We fight against it; think we are forever.”

“They can’t understand why I want to go. It’s ironic. They want to burn me up like it’s a punishment.” She laughs.

“See, I want to unravel.” Her fingers mime pulling a thread, unraveling a weave.

"I don’t want to be just one thing anymore. I want to be… particles. The charge in lightning. The hair on a beetle’s leg. The photosynthetic cell in a plant. The negative space between stars. The sweat on your brow. Sea Foam.”

“But first, I need to tell my story.”

Her gaze shifts, landing on Roe.

She writes frantically.

Transcribing:

I can see into you. Prism lights, warped sun. Into your blue. White foam, black ink. The mythological creature in you. Blue flannel, black spill. Underneath your bandages. White enamel, black curls. She could hear the sound of her mother singing downstairs when he did those things to her, when he opened her. She lifts out of herself, travels down the stairs, takes herself away… goes to her mother, who is singing in the sunlight.

Evelyn steps toward the audience, her robe shifting like something liquid, and she leans in conspiratorially, her voice light and singsong, almost childish.

“And it’s coming.”

“Imagine it—electricity rushing through me.” She tilts her head back, eyes flashing, hands hanging open at her sides, fingers loose, one foot stepping forward, pointed like a dancer’s.

“Imagine the air changing, just after they pull the lever… the air swelling, shimmering. Imagine me, lit up, glass heated to white.”

Roe’s pen flies across the page, she flips to a fresh one. Focus on Evelyn, she tells herself.

She writes:

Evelyn’s skin bleached-- flame white, hair lifts, unseen window, dark hair burning, going white. Death as ascension.
Sublimation. Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair.

Roe realizes how tightly she is holding the pen and how hard she is pressing.

Evelyn is stretching out her hand as though reaching for something; her body follows.

The hand seems to move of its own accord and without warning her body jerks forward, her limbs flailing into a stuttering jig.

Roe watches, pen frozen. It is grotesque, the seizing of her body under electric currents.

Evelyn goes still and her voice softens, becoming syrupy. “Oh, don’t be sad,” her mouth curves into a pout, eyes sweeping over the audience, “I get to leave my meat suit behind.”

Roe looks down at her page covered with words, no longer neat in lines and columns, but words everywhere. Roe feels suddenly confused—exhausted. The light seems to have gone inexplicably blue, and the room feels smaller, emptier.

“They think it’ll be like with my brother. That they can absorb me. Absorb my gold light into their skin, take my powers for themselves.”

“But when we’re gone, we’re gone, Roe.” Evelyn says, “but we’ll get to be sea foam and rosebuds, no one gets to steal our power.”

Roe is jolted by her name. Evelyn steps toward her, her pale green gown rippling like water.

Evelyn sits down on the edge of the stage, lets her feet drop down onto the tile floor, and walks toward Roe. There is no one else in the room. Sunlight streams across the auditorium through windows that weren’t there before. But no, now the light is from above.

The room is going blue.

Their eyes are locked. Roe’s pen continues to fly across the page, words covering other words.

"You’ll write my story," Evelyn says, “ours.”

Roe sees her feet, outside of the frame of her blackened page. Her feet are bare now, the room is filling with foaming, clear blue water. Her page is dense with tiny script, sodden with ink.

Roe stands, and continues to write, notebook in her palm:

“At first you were just my fantasy. But then, the story took on its own life, didn’t it? You came alive, Roe.”
“I like your story better than mine. Sitting in my cell those long days, nothing to do but stare at my peeling walls, dreaming awake, nothing else to do but dream us up.”

Roe—still writing—sees the water now up to their waists, their two reflections dark, distended whirling oil shapes in the surface. The pixeled tiles glint in shades of blue under their feet as they begin to float. Roe sees her reflection, sees her own face, bloated under the water, her own hands on her throat.

“You remind me of her,” Evelyn says, “of my Camilla.” She laughs, “Your Camilla looks like me, my Camilla looked like you. Our Camillas met the same end, didn’t they? You and I made the same mistake.” Her smile fades.

“I am tired of pretending. I want to face it, before the end.”

Every single one of them deserved it, starting with Philip, and all the way to the last fat fuck, with spittle on his disgusting fat lips. His hard dick in his hand, pressing it up against our thigh, trying to make us small, trying to get up inside us, rip us in two… open us up and ride us like the fucking horses we were told to be. Every single one of them deserved it.

The first time we tried to kill Philip, he was hiding under our blanket, waiting to tear us in two. He bled out, didn’t he? Right onto Grandma’s fucking dead-memory quilt.

Did father realize that he was protecting us against the wrong thing, keeping us locked in?

Did he? Did mom stir from her fucking comatose waking dream, or did she check out, leaving us to deal with it on our own, comforting herself with her incessant, vacant singing?

They just wanted it to go away. Dad locked us in tighter.

So, we had to learn to protect ourselves. Every single fucking one of them deserved it.

Until Camilla.

Roe writes but there’s no paper anymore, the water is up to their throats, and her hand is moving through it. The words are there before Evelyn says them, Roe sees the reflections of their faces, the black oil swirl of the reflection turns them into one.

The water foams around them, the face of her brother under the waves, her hands holding him, the face of Camilla, in the bathtub, her eyes going empty, her black curls moving like tentacles.

The men, in elevators, in cars, in parking lots, bathroom stalls—how easy it was to open them. One long cut, and their insides couldn’t hold, spilled into black oil. Into nothing but body gunk.

But Camilla. We loved her so much we couldn’t let her go.

Roe sees Camilla’s face under the water, now she’s Evelyn, now her Camilla again. Now it’s her own self she sees, Roe’s hands around Roe’s own throat, holding her down. Holding her to keep her— to keep her from going away. The tenderness of this holding, the sheer love of it.

To love someone so much that you’d keep their breath from them, be there with them that moment they pass to the other side. Your face— the final imprint on their eyes, the last image of an entire life.

The water is up to their lips now, and their feet swish.

Roe’s hand is still writing, as the water sucks over their heads. Her hand continues to loop, the ink sending out ribbons into the blue water.

“We will write the story,” Evelyn says.

But Roe is already writing it.

Each word spilling her out.

Each word frees her.