Linoleum

posted on 8 Sep 2025

Surrounded by jaundiced lighting, the linoleum walls peel around me. My perception is foggy and shrouded in shadows, as if I’ve taken a third-person perspective atop my existence, an out of body narration. It’s unclear to me if I’m dreaming or if I’ve been in a habitual loop for so long that it merely seems like a dream.

Not a day has gone by that I haven’t found myself eating at this sepia-toned establishment. I draw this conclusion based on how easily my eyes scan the menu in recognition, how it feels like the decrepit chair that I sit in is a part of me.

The only way I can really describe this experience is that it feels particularly dirty in a liminal, domestic way, reminiscent of times in the past when institutions were celebrated and societal roles were carried out with religious fervor. Just as I have done at any point in the historical timeline I’ve found myself in, I’ve been a passive observer rather than a participant. People enact their script out there, beyond my boundaries. I can see it but I cannot touch it.

The food is dirty and flavorless and lukewarm. Gooped atop dull, white dishware, a long, curly hair plastered beneath the pasta’s cream sauce like a parasitic infection, it provides no sustenance. I eat it regardless, forking my way around the uninvited keratin oppressor. It’s difficult to swallow; the weight of this decaying atmosphere is pressed down upon myself and the other patrons whom I cannot fully make out. Their chatter is obvious, and so are their outlines. But their faces remain obscured behind a blurry veil.

They might as well be replicas of the stale smelling table that I sit at.

This place is nothing but filth. Grimy, yellow, filth.

“Anything else for you?”

The voice nearly caused me to jolt from my seat.

The waitress is wearing a dress of black and white. Something about her seems more human than the rest. Perhaps it’s her facial expression. The way that her mouth curves upward with her eyes seemed genuine. Yes, she smiles with her whole face. And because of that, I feel like I know her.

I don’t remember the last time that I had to talk. It’s as if I’ve forgotten. “Just the check.” I stumble my words, but manage to extract them from my brain. My proclamation sounds more like a question than a statement of fact.

She looks me in my eyes and nods.

A few minutes later, another plate is placed in front of me, this one smaller. I feel her presence behind me.

“I didn’t order this.” The piece of cake stared at me.

“It’s my treat,” she says. “I hope you enjoy it.”

I cut into the dessert with my fork. The slice stops midway, coming up against some sort of resistance. My eyes widen and I feel a pang in my chest, ripping me from the subconscious spell I’ve been under. Methodically, I move some remnants of cake out of the way to investigate what stopped the utensil in its tracks.

A small, yellow slip of paper juts from the cake. I can only make out the end of the message, written in black ink. A long time.

A chill runs down my spine. I spin around. The waitress is nowhere to be found. Only the vague impression of other patrons going about their dinner in the dimly lit corridors, frozen in time.

My hand quivers as I reach down. I tug at the note and it slips from the cake with a splish.

I’ve known you for a long time.

The wound left by the excised note in the cake oozes a bloody liquid and faintly gurgles, as if it were a body that’s been cut open. I bend my head down closer to inspect. Only when my face has gotten a few inches away do I discern the true composition of the cake. It seems to mouth the words to me.

I freeze. An emission of nausea overwhelms me. Petulant nerves rise from my stomach and into my teeth, numbing them. Suddenly, I realize that I’m awake. And by this I don’t mean that I was dreaming beforehand necessarily, but only that I was existing in a state below normal levels of consciousness.

I toss the piece of paper onto the plate and stand up. The cake is beginning to stink of fermented corpse. My chair scrapes against the wooden floor, creating a sound that rips through the dingy joint. Momentarily, the inconspicuous chatter ceases. I can feel the gaze of the other patrons, even if I cannot make out their eyes or the expressions on their contorted faces. I’m an awakened anomaly residing in a world of the habitually sleeping. I am no longer a flatlined pulse. And because of this, I feel fear for the first time in as long as I can recall.

How helpless one feels in the face of fear, the destroyer of all.

My wrinkled suit drinking the beads of neurotic sweat from my body, I shuffle from the restaurant with a mild limp. It seems that at some point, I’ve injured my leg. When or how is unclear. One thing is certain, however: the entrance to my vehicle could not reveal itself quickly enough. I parked it too far away in the gravel road.

Nearly hyperventilating, I sit in the driver’s seat after what feels like an eternity of being exposed in the darkness, the uncanny whispers of the night.

My jaw clenches. The cadaverous smell still lingers in my nose.

I’ve known you for a long time.

That smile.

I jump from my seat when I hear the boom of a knock on my window. That peculiar presence which had intruded upon my psyche crawls up my throat and licks my brain. My neck stiff and eyes wide, I dare not turn, for I feel as if doing so would be my demise.

A knock again, this time louder, this time reverberating in my soul.

I swallow. My arms will not move to put my keys in the ignition.

I hear her voice. “Hey you! Open up!”

Unblinking and with the speed of forever itself, I crane my head to turn and face the feminine voice, the witch.

Her smile again, this time staring at me from outside of my window. She still wears her work clothes, perhaps having just now gotten off her shift. How long had it been since I last saw her? I can barely remember.

“Roll down the window!” She gestures with her hands in an odd way.

Behind her, a van is lit up inside. Other faces stare in my direction to see what the woman is doing. Her acquaintances I surmise. A blond woman in the back and two men in the driver’s seat. The driver seems particularly disengaged, as if he’s used to such antics displayed by the waitress. The blond woman wears a scowl.

“Well?” Her voice grows louder. I wish she would go away. She’s overly incessant and my fear is beginning to shift to animosity.

Something stirs within me and I do the unthinkable.

“What do you want?” I ask after the window is rolled down.

“You should come with us.”

“What do you mean? Why would I do that?”

“Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but you seem lonely. I’ve seen you so many times sitting at that table, alone. And you have this, I don’t know, sad look on your face, I guess. But you seem nice. So I thought I’d introduce you to my friends. You know, get you out of your shell or whatever they say.”

I pause, taken aback. Who is this person? I swallow.

“No,” I manage. “I want nothing to do with you or your friends.”

I begin rolling the window up and she puts her hand down as to stop it.

“Better not keep going or you’ll crush my hand and damage your window, mister.”

“Then get your hand out,” I say, now raising my voice more than I’m comfortable doing.

She doesn’t budge. In fact, she looks at me with a pugnacious smirk. My heart begins beating faster. I despise the feeling of intrusion. And she seems to be worming her way in, no matter the cost. I think that perhaps I’ll crush her hand and drive off Yes, that’s it. The thoughts rush through my mind, granting me a momentary burst in adrenaline. But alas, these are nothing more than mere fantasies, and I am asleep in this world. My body cannot be willed to action.

It never could.

I stop rolling the window up. My mind conjures another plan, one of temporary appeasement. Just a few minutes, I think. I’ll talk with them in the usual way a person talks, pretend to be cordial, and then I can be about my way.

“Ok,” I manage. She seems to sense the resignation and backs up so I can vacate my car. By the time I’m out, she’s already halfway in the large van, looking back at me over her shoulder, her eyes draped with black, straight strands of hair.

“Wait.” I stop her. “Did you leave a note in my food?”

She looks at me with a raised eyebrow. What’s disturbing to me is that it seems like genuine confusion.

“No,” she says, beginning to chuckle. “But if you got a note in your food, you should’ve gotten your money back. Doesn’t seem sanitary.”

That entire establishment is unsanitary, I think. Grimy, yellow, decrepit decay.

My suspicions temporarily abated, I climb inside of the van. Prodding at my gut, ever so faintly, is a peculiar feeling that all of this was meant to happen. What that means, exactly, I cannot say or expand upon in any meaningful way.

Before I’m fully submerged in their van’s large back compartment, I catch a glimpse of the black hole of a sky, notice how it is absent of stars and stripped of a moon, how it resembles an incomprehensible miasma swallowing the world that I stand on. For a mere moment, a sense of arcane horror feels like it explodes from my very marrow and I am paralyzed by the sepsis. Lasting a millisecond and an eternity at once, I find myself orienting back toward bodily instinct, my legs moving as if another entity is pulling the tendons.

I live and breathe, but against my wishes.

The inside of the van is quite large and worn out, several of the seats covered in torn fabric exposing a stained foam material. Stale scents, sweat, and old perfume linger in the air. The blond woman, after peering at me for a moment, offers me a beer from a case by her side. I open it and take a sip. No one has said anything yet, and I’m beginning to feel even more uncomfortable.

“Thanks for joining us,” the waitress said, breaking the silence, her voice emanating from behind me, near the door.

I say nothing and take another sip of the beer. The waitress climbs in the van and shuts the door behind her with a loud clank. She should not have closed the door. Why would she do that? We’re not going anywhere. I begin to tense.

All at once, the group begins laughing. My hair stands on its ends and my stomach is pierced with anxiety. I freeze, my bloodshot eyes delirious with fear. Amidst their incongruous cackles, the driver shifts the van out of ‘park’ and slams on the gas pedal, the old engine whirring to life. The acceleration is overwhelming, and with a jostle I’m thrown back, my beer spilling every which way.

By the time I smack the floor of the vehicle, I realize that they likely plan to end my life, amongst other things.

I scramble back to my feet and push the waitress to the side before she can restrain me. Running on the agility of survival instinct, I hurl the half-full beer bottle at the windshield and it explodes into several pieces. Shards of glass shatter with force into the face of the driver, eviscerating his eyes. Blood pouring from his sockets, he shouts in agony and lets off the gas as to not spin out of control. The vehicle slows.

My chance to escape has revealed itself. I feel arms wrap around me from behind. It’s her, screaming obscenities in my ear in a high pitched shriek, revealing a psychotic side that I knew lurked under the surface. I elbow her in the stomach and she loosens her grip momentarily, just enough for me to grab another beer bottle which I smash on the hardened middle compartment between the seats, creating a makeshift glass weapon.

The blond woman draws a gun from under her seat, a high caliber revolver, and my heart pounds. With reflexes manifested from the fear of imminent death, I thrust the sharp glass into her throat before she can bring her arm up any further. Blood sprays like a fountain and she begins gurgling. She drops the weapon and brings her hands up to her neck, but in vain; she will not survive this one.

The waitress is now hysterical and lunges at me. I leap for the other side of the van, past the bleeding blond woman, and fling her door open, nearly falling on the gravel from the momentum. Whisps of cool air brush against my face and I inhale for maybe only the second time the last 30 seconds.

I sprint to my car and start the ignition as past as possible.

I step on the gas.

My vehicle’s trajectory narrowly misses the waitress who has closed in on me alarmingly fast. As I accelerate past her, she smacks my car with her hands, emitting a bloodcurdling screech in the process that grates on my eardrums. The blond woman’s fluids, covering the waitress’s hands, are smeared all over my windows.

It’s not until roughly 15 minutes later, speeding down the highway and starting to regain my composure, that I notice something bizarre.

The smears were not random. They form a symbol on my window that I can’t quite interpret regardless of the perspective I approach it from. A lump forms in my throat and my fists tighten on the steering wheel.

Something deep within myself, something that should never be accessed under the typical conscious experience, resonates and unfurls itself. A primordial intuition overcomes me, the noxious substrate seeping into my nerves with a cold resonance.

I’ve been marked.

The days pass like fluid dripping through an IV.

In retrospect, what had occurred now seems like a dream within a dream, or a hallucination. I observe the familiar art on my apartment unit’s wall, I feel the rough exterior of my living room couch under my fingers. All is back to normal. All is back to the way that it has been since the beginning of time. My memories are looping, their weight collapsing inward. My mind is empty. My experience of myself has dissipated, slipped from a clinging grasp. Once more, I shift into a state of delirium where waking moments are rotted by time’s linearity.

I awake one night in a profuse sweat, nearly hyperventilating, as if someone was smothering me with a pillow while I slept.

Blackness envelopes my room, winds itself around my walls and through my opened door, smears itself onto my closed curtains. Shivering in the cold from the rapidly cooling sweat pooled under me, I lift my covers with a quivering hand and manage to stand up, wobbly from the dream’s inertia.

Out of instinct, I make my way to the kitchen. Nothing but silence. By this time, my eyes are adjusting to the dark. I open the fridge and take out a water bottle. There I stand, drinking to soothe my parched throat. I put the bottle back in the fridge. Nothing is out of the ordinary, and I’ve managed to calm down and reacquaint myself with my pseudo-waking world, although my naked body shivers from the dampness assaulted by the air conditioning overhead.

For several seconds I stand before realizing that I can’t seem to will my body to turn back around. A nudge from my head to lead me, and I stiffen. A movement from my foot and it sticks back into place as if I’m a mannequin. I start to become irritated rather than frightened. With all of my strength, I jerk my body around and fall to the floor. A success. Midway down, before I land, my eyes catch a glimpse of an aberration plastered along the end wall of my living room across the way.

The visual imprint still fresh in my mind’s eye, I realize that the drapes seem to have changed shape.

Now on my hands and knees, it takes every ounce of courage I have to turn my head up once more to confirm my suspicions. I hope the darkness is doing an illusory dance with my perception.

I breathe deeply and then shift my gaze upward.

The curtains in front of the window on the right have assumed a different shape. Instead of being a rectangle to match the window, it appears that one side is distorted, as if it’s grown a tumor.

My eyes adjust further and in dismay I realize what the shape resembles.

“Get out!” I scream. “I can see you there, now get out!”

Silence besides me trying to catch my breath after howling.

I scramble to my feet and leap toward the drawers in my kitchen. From my collection of knives I draw the longest, sharpest one available.

Slowly at first, I plod forward. “Get out, or I will kill you,” I say with a firm voice.

Still silence, and not even the slightest shift of the humanoid outline. Panic is beginning to set in.

I begin running toward the window in a frenzy, my arm raised, the knife cocked. While only a few feet away, in a mere instant, the humanoid behind the curtains dissipates with what sounds like an explosion, as if spacetime had warped and transported it elsewhere. My ears ring. Dazed, I feel blood dripping from my left ear. I hear a cackle behind me and the sound of the voice makes my testicles recede into my body.

Pivoting in the reverse direction, I see that the blackened form now stands behind a lamp near my work desk. The combination of the figure and the lamp creates a sort of illusory, uncanny monstrosity.

“I was only trying to help you, and look what you did,” she says. The voice of the waitress. I stop walking in abject terror.

A dark arm rises from her side, the distorted hand reaching for the light switch on the lamp. With a click, the entirety of the apartment is illuminated. She stares at me, her eyes devoid of eyelids. She smiles at me with teeth, her mouth no longer covered with lips.

The stench of gangrene hits me all at once. Vomit rises in my throat.

“You’re mine now. And you can do nothing about it. I’m inside of you. We are together.”

Another explosion as she hits the switch with elongated fingers, causing her form to vacate with the darkness. A stabbing pain in my eyes makes me to crumble to the floor. I scream in agony. It feels as if glass shards have been forced into my sockets. This goes on for several moments until I begin to calm down, the feeling faintly lingering as if I’d just woken from a night terror. I rush to the bathroom and turn on the lights. My eyes are extraordinarily bloodshot. It looks as if blood is pooling beneath the whites. I turn on the rest of the lights in the house and inspect each and every corner, behind each and ever closet.

There is nothing. There are no footprints, there is no smell. It’s as if she was never there. A feeling of insanity washes over me, and I quickly realize that the boundaries delineating reality from fiction seem to be absent in my mind. The fatigue is now overwhelming, and back into my bed I slide, hoping that my eyes do not open again.

But my wish does not come true.

I’m awakened partially from the sun’s rays peeking through my curtains, but mostly from a horrific stinging sensation on my chest. It feels like I’ve been the subject of an autopsy. Before I look down to inspect myself, a flashback of her face appears in my brain from the night prior, and a feeling that what I saw was not a hallucination becomes a certainty. She is real, she has followed me home. And somehow, she’s inside. Both inside my physical space and inside the empty labyrinth of my mind. I feel as if a parasite has laid its eggs inside of me.

My hand moves to inspect the sensation along my sternum. I wince in pain as a finger makes contact with something foreign stuck to my chest. I panic, because what I hit does not feel like flesh.

It feels like plastic.

I jump from my bed and run to the bathroom mirror. The air leaves my body when I see my reflection.

A vertical row of plastic buttons, like one would see on a dress shirt, is transposed onto my flesh. Irritated, raw, and caked with dried blood, the buttons are sewn to me.

I avert my eyes and begin pacing around my bathroom. I’m going mad. My brain is unable to process what it sees.

It needs to come out.

I look down at the row. With my thumb, I dig into the underside of the topmost button and tug. It hurts like hell. I gasp and then hold my breath and tense my frame. It feels like whatever material was used to sew it into my flesh is burrowed deep. This is not a superficial suture. It’s perhaps even past my bone and lodged in my organs.

I pull hard, trying to rip the object away. My lungs feel like they’re being violently strained. It finally gives way with a juicy snap, leaving some of the stringy material undoubtedly lodged deep within my torso, damaged ends hanging out. I inhale for breath, my eyes watering, snot pouring from my nose.

I’m now close to a panic attack, but the first member has been extracted.

The nasty piece of plastic lay on my sink, covered in blood and some bits of skin. I bring my head in to inspect it and stare in disbelief. The stringy material used to sew the button in place is not comprised of fabric.

It’s hair. Human hair.

The color and texture elicit an atrocious memory.

That blackness. It’s hers.

It’s her hair.

Embedded deep within my body.

Caressing it.

Claiming it.

Smothering it.

Contaminating it.

I see her lipless smile and I’m overtaken with hysteria. I rip the remainder of the buttons from my body like it’s a contest. Blood drips down my stomach, runs down my legs and onto the white tile floor. My torso looks like it’s been through a meatgrinder.

After bandaging my wounds, I head to the kitchen for a glass of water, which at this point is sorely needed. Trapped inside of my head, I barely notice my surroundings, and it’s not until I grab the handle on my refrigerator and several yellow sticky notes dislodge that I realize what has occurred.

The entire kitchen is covered in a collage of notes. From top to bottom, all of it. Hundreds and hundreds of them, each of which is scrawled with demented scribbles. My heart beats out of my chest and I go numb as I begin to parse the writing.

You fucking killed her you cunt, and now you’re going to die the most painful death imaginable.

She will never come back, and I’ll make sure you never come back in return.

I’m going to slit your throat you disgusting fuck.

I’ll rip your intestines out and squeeze the digesting shit into your mouth while you bleed out.

Each note is unique. Not a single one is repeated. Instead of any known human vernacular, several have a language alongside symbols that I cannot make out, but nonetheless appear blatantly profane. I feel as if I’m not meant to look at them, like eyes were never meant to see what I’m seeing. Trying to interpret them conjures the onset of insanity.

After several minutes of bewilderment, it dawns on me. The entire time that I was asleep, she invaded my domain; she had breached my perimeters. She made all of these notes. She had violated me, sewed the buttons into my flesh.

Strands of her hair wiggle inside of me. I can feel them slithering around. In both waking life and in sleep, she is with me.

I collapse to the floor and lose consciousness.

Each night she returns, and each night I am terrorized. I am the only one who can see her, I’m sure of it. The murky faces of the people on the outside only stare at me, lacking any recognition for my existence. Communication is fruitless.

I am alone. The waitress was right when she tried to invite me in. Deeply and utterly alone. I always have been.

The realities of my day and night bleed into each other, becoming a conglomeration of un-perception. I awake to a dream. I dream that I am awake. My psyche becomes a formless, weightless substance tumbling through the blackened miasma above, no sun or moon to orient itself to. My personality and memories fracture and split and recombine into distorted perversions. I become decentralized, parts of myself severed. A feeling of overwhelming loss and mourning for who I once was pick at my bones like scavengers. There is nothing left. There is nothing behind my eyes.

Only emptiness.

I wish I had let them kill me that night. After all of this time, what have I been living for? To what end is my sentience pushed? And moreover, where am I? The question had not occured to me until now, but every answer that came up was unsatisfactory.

All I’ve ever known was that jaundiced lighting, that dirty food that I mindlessly consumed, and now, I know incessant violation too.

The end draws nigh for me. I can sense it in my guts.

For my last night in this world, I settle into my bed and attempt to relax, to gain some sort of peace amidst the nightmare that is my ‘life’. I think that if I can create this little pocket for myself, even against the blight of this onslaught, then I have been redeemed in some miniscule way.

The minutes pass and the atmosphere around me morphs.

I don’t need to open my eyes to know that she is there, looming by my doorway.

“I think you’ve endured quite enough,” she cackles.

The scissors by her side open and her footsteps draw near.

“I’ve known you for a long time, now. I’ve known you ever since I gave birth to you. You’ve always been mine.”

In her layered voice that sounds like it’s within my skull, I can hear the synthesis of them all, everyone I’d known and had forgotten about since drifting into my infinite hellscape.

Stunned, I open my eyes in dismay and try to say something, to communicate one last time. But it is no use.

My body is incapacitated, my voice is cauterized, and I cannot even scream when she cuts off my cock and balls.

I can only feel it.

Feel it until the last ounce of blood is drained from my vessel.