Grey Matter
Fidgeting with her fingernails, for the 35th time that day, Felix sat apart from the other kids as they marveled at the puzzle pieces solving themselves. Unbeknownst to them, she was the force behind their levitation, and the thought made her smile--she liked knowing things that others did not.
Holding her mother’s hand loosely, Felix’s eyes traced the corners of the room as if they would move too, before sticking most of her fingers into her mouth. There were some other people that occupied the unfamiliar waiting room, most sitting in the single row of chairs lining the walls, while a few young kids played with the large, wooden block, which had a simple jigsaw puzzle on each side, in the middle of the floor.
Despite being around the same age as the other kids, Felix felt no interest in the puzzle, and instead turned her attention to the old TV in the top corner of the room. The rims of it were the off-white color of eggshells, and the screen was completely static; the occasional, horizontal color bar flickering in and out of existence across it.
With calculating, grey eyes, Felix watched the room with the quiet observance and intellect of someone who didn’t quite belong there, like a time traveler from another era. Looking at her reflection in the crackling display of the TV, she observed herself closely, as if she expected her body to move without her commanding it so. Felix could just barely see the details of her face, which was cinnamon-colored, like the rest of her body, and completely smooth, as if she’d never smiled nor frowned in her entire life, a theory that was supported by the emotionless look she held on her face. She noted that her facial features were wolf-like, predatory; anyone who looked long into her eyes would feel as though they were being hunted. For once, instead of her grey eyes, which she was as obsessed with as she was with the color grey itself, Felix focused on her head with the most vigilance. However, the short, brown bangs that cut across the bottom of her forehead in a perfectly straight line were not her fixation; she was more fascinated by what she knew was lurking behind it, in her brain.
A grey jay landed on the window to the outside and did nothing, only staring down at her observantly. She met its gaze, but only for a little while, before returning to the room in front of her. As she sat there, numbers began to stream through her mind, and she could barely think straight. One, two, three, four, five, six, five, four, three, two, one, another number, then another, so many she could barely keep up. Felix could hardly stand it, and she could now see the numbers rushing across her vision, inky-black blurs like rushing animals in the dim dusk of her mind’s eye.
Without any sign to anyone around her, she reached out with arms that were practically hidden under her hospital gown, exactly 3 sizes too big, and grabbed the plastic, tacky silver remote that was completely buried under a pile of magazines. She liked the black buttons; Felix brushed her arms across them with fingers that worked heavy, and blunt, like her. People often told her that she had an eye for the unseen. Doctors of all sorts had come to the conclusion that she was dangerously different from the other kids; that was why she was there in the first place. Felix didn’t care though; to her, nothing mattered, really.
Upon pressing a couple buttons on the remote at random, Felix was interested to find that the TV blinked to life, in rapid white flashes, before displaying a black-and-white video of six people in formal clothes, suspended in the air, each one a couple feet away from the other. The people, who were each poised like ballerinas in a music box, twisted ever so slightly in a wind that didn’t appear to exist. Felix stared hard at the screen with an intense curiosity; although nothing but a soft song, that reminded her of the one that played on her parent’s old record, accompanied the odd scene, a far-away buzzing had started in her ears. There were 6 people; she repeated the number again in her head. 6, 6, 6. The number scorched itself into her mind, and her finger almost flinched away in slight pain at the memory of a bruise forming on her skin. She imagined that her body was covered in bruises; when you touched them, instead of pain, a number rose there, until there were enough numbers scattered across her body to match how many there were forming inside her brain.
Suddenly, the TV glitched to another black-and-white scene, one of a woman and a man talking in some sort of living room; it seemed to be from the same era as the first clip, but it was like a sitcom. It wasn’t like any sitcom Felix had seen; the characters spoke in deep, glitched voices that were impossible to understand, and there was a laugh track on almost every sentence.
As she stared, a single, grey splotch appeared on the side of the TV, the same color as everything on the screen. Felix realized that her hand was tapping against the chair subconsciously, and more of the grey blots appeared on the TV, almost covering the rims. She couldn’t look away, and as she heard the laugh track for what was exactly the 43rd time, the inklike, grey substance began to stream down the sides of the TV, out the cracks around and across the screen. There was a noise, breaking at the walls of her focus as it became louder and louder, but it sounded like her head was underwater.
“Felix!” she heard an unfamiliar voice bark. Her mom was tugging on her arm, for her to focus on the man in a lab coat calling her name.
At that moment, she turned her head towards the man at the end of the room, and the break in her focus on the TV caused it to crash to the ground, its screen shattering against the floor. Everyone in the room jumped back, as if they hadn’t even been aware that the TV had been on. Once the TV began to settle against the ground, just as the other people were back into their seats, a feeling of unease hung in the air like static. Her body twitched of its own accord, and she wrapped her hands around her chest in an attempt to steady herself. Although it was certainly expected for odd things to happen in that type of place, most of the people, even the other patients, weren’t truly prepared for things like that to occur, when it was right in front of them; people rarely were. Felix had come to learn that much.
“Felix Novell? Sex: Female. Age: Six years old. Reason: Unidentified supernatural qualities. Is this information correct?” The man asked as she walked over, without her mom.
Felix gave a small nod as she took the man’s hand, and followed him out the other end of the room. In a single glance behind her, she saw that the grey ink was still leaking out the now-broken TV, spilling into the room behind her, engulfing the color from the walls. The buzzing faded from her ears as she gave her mother a stiff, last wave with her free hand; as the grey substance reached the other people in the waiting room, they froze in time, like the interwebs on a shattered computer screen. She tilted her head back, and felt the greyness crawl across the room and seep into the vacant spot left for it in her brain, leaving a still, colorless vacuum of a room behind her, where everything crumbled and drifted apart; she doubted that the doctors would be able to remove the grey matter within her.