Calliope: The Bruised Woman (Short Two) By Imani Wagner

Will Calliope get to the bottom of what she saw that night at the cafe? Enjoy part two of Calliope, a short story series! - IW

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What happens when you have unexplainable experiences? How do you cope when the words needed to express this intangible moment never find you? I didn’t go to sleep when I made it home last night. My mind was filled with all types of terrifying thoughts. I felt inside of myself that what I had seen was some kind of hallucination. It had to be. That woman was in front of me until she wasn’t. She stood right before me and then turned into nothingness. The entire time she had spoken of her own death.

I think back to earlier that day. Seeing the man and the woman when I walked into the coffee shop was most present to me. It was strange but subtle in the way that the moment unfolded. They first appeared to be just a man and his wife sitting down for a short meal. Mya told me that she had never seen a woman with the creepy man in the blue button up. It was difficult for me to get any understanding from what I knew or thought had happened. One thing I was certain of was that I needed to make that doctor’s appointment. Everything had gone wrong after the white thread I found hanging from my ear.

After being placed on hold I discovered my doctor's office was booked out for the next three weeks, but I wanted to see someone today. I needed to tell someone about this strange thing that happened to me. I wanted them to tell me that I wasn’t crazy, and that there would be an easy solution to make it all better. Within a couple hours I found myself at the urgent care clinic. Not sure why they call it that considering the two hour wait. Nonetheless, I was called in to get my vitals done by the nurse. As I sat waiting for the doctor to arrive, the image of the man and the bruised woman played over and over in my mind like an old scratched up VCR tape. The bustling of human interaction outside the door of the small examination room got quieter as my thoughts folded in on themselves.

Three gentle taps on the door paused the bubbling brew of my anxiety. “Come in,” I said just loud enough for the doctor to peek her head in and see that I was ready and waiting for her to tell me what was wrong with me. The white paper stretched over the examination table crackled underneath my constant shifting. I had already popped holes into the thin paper where my hands had been.

“Hi, Miss Proctor. What brings you in today?” I had seen Dr. Delvaux plenty of times before. She was young, maybe thirty-five years old. Her face was warm and heart shaped. Her voice was raspy and deeper than my own. There was something else about the way in which she spoke. Her tone made you feel as though she knew things about the world, but that she had to give space for others to learn those things on their own. It felt obvious that she was more than just a doctor. This was just a role she played in her life, for her purpose seemed much more complex.

“Well, I haven’t been to sleep in about 24 hours. Yesterday, I pulled this white thread out of my ear and I'm pretty sure I passed out after that. Things have been… weird since then.”

“Interesting. What did this thread look like?” Dr. Delvaux’s brows furrowed as she awaited my answer.

“It was white, maybe a little translucent. The texture wasn’t like a normal string or strand from a piece of fabric.” I tried my best to explain what I had seen.

“Has your hearing changed, and has your balance otherwise been alright despite fainting?”

“Everything has been mostly normal since then.” I wasn’t sure how to explain anything further to her without sounding like an absolute dummy.

“Okay, well let’s examine you and then we can go from there. How does that sound, Calliope?”

“I think that sounds alright.” I turned my head from one side to another as Dr. Delvaux looked inside my ears with a tiny ear examination flashlight. I tried to relax as I felt the little black cone wiggle into my ear. She checked my nose, my eyes, and even timed my heartbeat, before she decided to give my ears a second look.

She removed her stethoscope and wrapped it around her neck before sitting and crossing her legs. “Calliope, I think you might have pulled a nerve. Based on your description of the thread, that’s what it sounds like. There is also a very small amount of dried blood in the canal of your ear. It seems that somehow a nerve wiggled its way through the ear canal, which made it visible, so when you pulled it caused you to pass out.” Dr. Delvaux rose from the little black stool and sanitized her hands for a second time. She grabbed a cotton swab and traced the inside of my ear before showing me her findings. There was coagulated blood on the long white q-tip.

“Oh, wow. So, what do I do now?”

“I think that we should monitor you for a few days. It doesn’t look like there is any real damage, as this was not an auditory nerve. If you find that you’re having issues or new symptoms in between that time, we can have you come back to test for any nerve damage. Truthfully, I’d like to do a more in depth examination. This nerve doesn’t appear significant in any way, which makes me curious as to how it came through the ear canal. I think it’s important we understand why it made you faint.” I began to sit somewhere else inside my mind as Dr. Delvaux explained the details of a nerve conduction velocity test and electromyography. Her raspy voice was now soft and distant. I wondered if I should keep what I had witnessed later that day to myself.

“What if I had been hallucinating?” I asked her.

She immediately stopped talking and her eyes met mine. It was like her eyes wandered through a story which my own had to tell. She searched for something and when it seemed she found her answer in my pupils she said, “What have you been seeing, Calliope?”

“I don’t exactly know how to explain it. I thought I had seen someone in front of me disappear, but it hasn’t happened since then. I don’t know, maybe it’s nothing.” I was hesitant to give any more details. Delvaux didn’t seem to believe it was nothing but she didn’t reveal any of her pressing thoughts.

“Okay, I'm going to give you my on-call number. If you have any more hallucinations I'd like you to call me so that we can get you back here for some tests. Even if everything seems fine, I’d like to check in with you again next week. What do you think of that?” She moved to tuck her dark hair behind her ear. A moonstone ring contrasted with the deepness of her skin. She folded her hands on her lap and the ring glistened brightly with movement.

“I’m good with that, Dr. Delvaux.” I was good with that. Maybe what I had seen was nothing. I had let my imagination get to me plenty of times in the past. Could it be that’s all it is?

We wrapped up my appointment and I headed home. I sat at my computer for most of the day completing some personal assistant tasks for Gina, and making sure everything was finalized for her upcoming trip. I could hear Henrietta calling for me in the other room. Her meowing grew more obnoxious the longer I waited, and I eventually gave in. “Henri, I’m working, what is it,” I asked her as I followed the sound of her voice into my bedroom. She sat in the middle of my bed as she looked up at the strange woman talking to her. The bruised woman from the cafe was in my apartment, playing with my cat. I started to wonder if I should have told Dr. Delvaux my thoughts on my impending psychosis.

“What the heck are you doing in my home? You need to leave, now.” I tried to stop my voice from shaking.

“I’m sorry, but I need your help.” Once again, I saw the man she had been sitting with at The Coffee Shop in my mind’s eye. “He was my husband. I think he murdered me and I think I know where my body is.”

“Ma’am, what are you talking about? You come into my home, disturb my cat, and then demand that I help you?”

“Well, the cat gets it. You could learn a lot from her, I think. I’m sorry for bothering you. You’re the only person I've met that could see me, and that might be willing to help me.” The woman didn’t look as disheveled as she did when I had first seen her, but she still had bruises printed on her chalky skin.

“What do you mean only I can see you?” I planned to give Delvaux a call at that very moment but something in the air washed that feeling from my emotional state. Then, I was calm.

“I told you, I'm dead, which means you can see dead people.” A version of myself screamed inside my head at this declaration. Henrietta laid down in the middle of the bed where she was sitting. That could be a good sign. It was like the woman was saying, maybe Henri understood something I did not.

“Okay, so what is it that you think I could possibly help you with? I’m still trying to wrap my head around whatever it is that’s happening right now.” I could feel an anxious panic stewing in my chest, but once again, a calmness washed over me.

“My husband's name is Delton. Our relationship seemed perfectly fine, and then one day he just became a different person. I realize now that he had always been this way, and that I had chosen to ignore those early signs. He would beat me for anything and nothing. After four years of this, I had enough money and enough courage to leave him. He walked in on me packing my things, and when I tried to run out of the front door of our apartment, he dragged me back inside. Eventually, he was on top of me with his hands wrapped around my throat. I remember being slammed over and over against the hardwood floors. I could hear my skull fracture. It felt like my very being was rupturing, and I just wasn’t strong enough to stop it.

At some point I found myself in a dark room. I just knew in the core of whatever I had become that I was absolutely dead. There was nothing in the room but boxes and some old furniture. The sofa we kept in our bedroom was there too. That’s where I think my body is. I think that you could help me stop him from hurting anyone else.”

“You think your body is hidden somewhere inside this room?”

“I think that my body is hidden inside the sofa,” she said as a matter of fact.

I hung to the end of every word she spoke. This was really happening and I struggled to grasp what I was feeling. It was like wind with no breeze. It was just the sound and the smells that travel with the wind, but the air around me was still. I was not only experiencing the spirit of this woman, but my own spirit. It was like we had created our own bubble of energy, and my body was on the outside while my soul stepped inward.

I looked at the woman as she stood in front of me pleading to be heard. “What’s your name? Let’s start there.” I dragged my hands across my face in disbelief at my own blossoming involvement in something that I knew was bigger than me.

“My name is Ellie Marshall.”

I could feel my eyes growing to an absurd largeness as my understanding came full circle. For the past three weeks, Ellie Marshall had been classified as a missing person.