Tainted Window (Jackpot January #16)

Johnny’s favourite part was when the glass peacock would break into a dozen different colours. He’d stare through it and couldn’t move until it fractured, even with the full drain gurgling water at his feet. Strange that these shards never split the room up into fragments, only the person beyond it.

This glass… Johnny could never quite bring himself to call it ‘stained.’ The hues were too faint for that, but too bright to call the window ‘tinted.’ The peacock pattern was subtle and masterful, as if it were a delirious accident. So he sat in front of his tainted window and he watched.

Recall how long he would look at you. All those nights you performed for him and you never even knew it. For Johnny, that was where it came from: the urge, the reason he’d wait for hours just to see steam rising behind the glass, clouds blooming beneath the colours. Blood-red, amethyst, and cerulean would shift into ruby, lilac, and navy blue and back again, the gas a living pulse beneath the panes. And Johnny would bite his lip and ask himself what was behind it all. A cooker, a fire, or a simple shower? Beyond the screen, were you suffering?

Of course, he knew what he saw. He could never see the room, but he heard you scrubbing and singing over running water. He heard your groans and the suction of the plughole. But he could never be sure of it exactly, so he let himself pretend. He’d put his face close so there was more of you in a single room.

All he saw was tiles, and always the same pattern of tiles. Somehow, through the glass, you were the only thing that changed, the only thing that the screen and the steam could multiply in fragments. You were purple, black, and green as you danced through the segments.

However you looked in there, Johnny didn’t care. In fact, he couldn’t see you. The less he saw, the better. He was wrapped up in the mystery of it all, the motions behind the opaque sounds. When a dark ripple ran through the fantail on the window, he perked up. He leaned forward as if falling into the gathering rush of water, your shivering form and the gasp which clawed through the steam. Too hot in there, Johnny thought, so hot – and who knows what could happen? Your skin could come out lobster-red, turned purple through the blue of the peacock’s feathers, and if Johnny closed his eyes, he could imagine your songs were screams, he could picture you boiling alive, how he’d burst through the door and shield you with his body, and as he thought of this his hand trailed from his knee, up his thigh, and settled between his tensed-up legs.

You were never someone he could save, and he knew that. If he ever did save you, this would all be over. It’d be over, and he’d have to admit that his body was decaying all along, that his shoes were filling up with water, that the squelch that heralded the slow rotting of his toes disturbed him. And he couldn’t do that.

Neither could he know why you never left the house. He couldn’t know of your illness, that strange species of fatigue and the allergies that came with it. A limbic system totalled, one that erases love and fear, and makes the world outside impossible to you. You were never scared to go outside, you just no longer stood in relation to it.

And so your chosen mother would come and put a wet tea towel on your forehead when you awoke and when you went to sleep. She fed you soup while you looked at a plate of cream cakes to remind you that one day you’ll be on solids again. You strolled into the bathroom and ran the shower, just so she’d think you were capable. And she swore off any talk of things outside the house.

In this way, you slept through the flood that raged outside. The whole village damn near swept away: lampposts, benches, couples in slow kayaks searching for their dogs. You fell ill at its inception and rose again once it had passed. So for months you knew nothing of Johnny. You found no evidence of him, save for a strange tree-like shadow pressed against your birdie window. You came closer. It looked like a soggy hand. All you did was shake your head and wish for the fever dream to be over.