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Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind  – Entry Seven:

The walls were peeling again.

Not in the way of a neglected apartment, with cheap paint curling off plaster in thin, tired strips, but in wide, curling plates of color — beige slats splitting like sun-bleached bark, hanging on just enough to whisper of the surface beneath. Some flakes curled outward like tongues, sharp-edged, brittle. Others clung stubbornly, trembling at the seams as if waiting for the right breath to tear them free. The scent of decay lingered, not putrid but ancient, like opening a book sealed for centuries.

Every morning I woke to more on the floor, curled and broken. A brittle carpet that crunched underfoot, as if I lived inside the ribcage of something too old to remember its own name. I’d stopped sweeping them away. What was the point when tomorrow would bring more? Perhaps the room was shedding what it no longer needed, the way I wished I could shed my memories.

And then there was her.

She leaned against the fractured backdrop as though it were her throne. Her hair lifted even in still air, a slow unfurling as though water carried it. Her eyes fixed beyond me, past the walls, past the world itself — pupils so dark I could feel myself falling into them whenever I dared look directly. When the cracks behind her widened, they seemed to bloom around her, a halo of rupture, and I wondered if she was causing them or healing them.

I don’t remember her arriving. One day, the room was empty. The next, she was carved into it, as natural as shadow. Her skin was dusk-drawn, her collarbone marked by a hairline seam that pulsed faintly — light, or blood, or something older. When she breathed, I felt the air change temperature against my skin.

I didn’t speak at first. Because I knew she wasn’t supposed to be here. Because I feared what my voice might summon from those widening cracks.

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She came and went like condensation on glass: sometimes present, sometimes gone, but always leaving the trace of her shape behind, a ghostly imprint that lingered in my peripheral vision long after she vanished.

In daylight, she was most visible. The fissure at her collarbone flared faintly then, like embers beneath ash, pulsing in rhythm with what I imagined must be her heartbeat. I found myself counting the seconds between each glow, wondering if the pattern held meaning I was too human to decipher. At night, I only caught her reflection, a smear of movement across the window, quick enough to make me doubt my senses yet definite enough to leave me cold. When I turned my head, the glass was empty, but the air still carried the faint scent of iron and ozone, sharp enough to sting.

Once, I asked her name. My voice sounded foreign in the weighted silence — too solid, too certain in a room where certainty felt like trespassing.

Her head tilted slightly — that almost-birdlike tilt that made me feel like I’d asked the wrong question, like I’d attempted to name something that existed before names were invented.

And then silence, thick as water, filling my lungs until I forgot I’d spoken at all.

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The peeling worsened. Wide flakes of paint snapped free with brittle cries, tumbling to the floor in a pale avalanche. I braced myself for crumbly plaster, gritty dust — but beneath the curling edges lay something softer, warmer. When my fingertips hovered over the exposed surface, I felt a faint thrum, like pulsing flesh just beneath the skin. A rush of heat radiated outward, and for one breath, I was certain I’d heard a heartbeat echoing through the wall.

That night, she whispered. It wasn’t voice or breath but a pressure, as if her word scraped along my bones, rattling marrow in its socket. One syllable — or something shaped like one — resonated: fracture. The room answered with a hollow groan, low and shuddering, like a ribcage creaking in sleep. In that moment, I understood: these cracks were not signs of decay but veins, pathways carrying some secret current. And she was here by design.

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Dreams came next.

I walked across a desert of lacquered faces — thousands of them — each mask cracked but unbroken, gazing skyward with painted eyes. In endless rows, women knelt in silence, their black hair drifting upward as though suspended in water. Faint fissures split their bodies in perfect symmetry, their hands pressed flat against walls that breathed with slow inhalations. Above it all a voice rumbled from some primeval depth — neither hers nor mine, but older, harsher, grinding like bone against stone.

“You are not yet peeled,” it said, and I woke with the taste of mildew and dust at the back of my throat.

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By dawn, compulsion seized me.

I pressed my nails beneath the curling paint, prying each plate free with a rasping crack. Behind every sheet lay warmth — flesh, not masonry — pulsing with hidden life. Each fragment I stripped away seemed to strengthen her: a faint glow flared along her collarbone, veins branching outward like roots. Strands of her hair lifted as though buoyed by some unseen current, drifting in a silent tide.

I dared to ask her again, voice trembling: “Who are you?” The air shivered, and her lips parted against the dark, revealing only that single word: “You.”

I wasn’t certain whether it was a confession or an accusation. All at once, the boundaries between us began to dissolve. Fine cracks snaked across my own flesh — along my wrists, across my throat — thin lines of searing light oozing outward. Every pulse stung like a brand, the tiny fissures widening when I moved. Mirrors became unbearable; I could no longer bear the stranger who stared back.

In dreams, we stood together before a wall as large as continents. Its surface heaved with breath, the ridges and valleys of some living organism. Her palms pressed flat against it; mine did the same. When she inhaled, my lungs ached to expand. And as her fractures spidered across its vast surface, identical cracks took shape in me, echoing each divide.

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Then came the night the wall within me split. The rupture was almost silent — no thunder, only a subtle give, like the parting of lips. In that instant, the room dissolved: walls peeled back in curling strips of living tissue, revealing an endless horizon of cracked earth glowing from within, veins of molten crimson faintly lighting the dark. The air quivered with the scent of scorched iron and rain that would never fall. I stood at the threshold of something vast, hollowed down to the marrow of the world.

She turned then, fully. I saw her face merge with mine — not a mirror copy, but a palimpsest of all I had been, all I was, all I might become. Her eyes bore into me with recognition and a hunger so fierce it scorched my spine. She was part ancestor, part parasite, part echo — and perhaps wholly myself.

The walls had never been mere walls; they were a cocoon we were meant to shed. Now, peeled bare, there was nothing to separate us.

What comes after emergence? No one speaks of what follows the final split, the twisting inside-out of identity. Some nights I wake, reaching for edges that no longer exist, only to remember: no walls remain — only that scorched horizon, stretching gigantic in every direction.

I walk it still, side by side with her, with myself, carrying the fracture made flesh. And sometimes, drifting across the silence, that primeval voice returns, a grinding echo from distances too immense to measure:

“You are not yet peeled.”

As though this is but the first layer — and more walls, more selves, wait in the darkness, endless as bone.

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Author’s Note:
This story was inspired by the image prompt of a woman against a cracked, peeling wall. The tension between beauty and decay, emergence and collapse, became the core of this piece. I imagined the cracks not as weakness but as transformation — the surface shedding to reveal something alive, inevitable, and haunting underneath.

A nod as well to Pensitivity101’s 3TC – MM#166, which provided the words immense, large, and gigantic woven into the text.