Bottled Up
By Asche Keegan
“You might as well come in,” I say. “I’ve thought about every possible ramification of your coming, and I’ve determined I can no longer deny your existence outside my door. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t inviting in a ghost. Not that those exist, of course, but I’m sure you know what I mean.”
He coughs, stooping in and glancing around. Dust and cobwebs cling to every wall, and a broom lies abandoned in the corner of the room. Random objects clutter every desk, each also covered with the dust and grime of time. His gaze rests on the ceiling though, where glass bottles swirling with multicolored liquids are taped to nearly every crevice of the roof.
“It leaks sometimes,” I say. “But don’t worry, there’s bottles in your room too, so you shouldn’t have any problems.”
He nods, then asks, “Do you live here?”
“Have for years.”
He looks around some more, surveying His new home.
“Well, are you going to come in?” I ask, gesturing with the door. “I decided in your favor, didn’t I? You don’t have to be so reticent.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. What, are you a vampire or something?” I say it like it’s a joke, but it falls flat, and He merely smiles and steps inside.
It happens so quickly. Thunder rolls, the room trembles, and above me, every bottle taped to the ceiling shatters at once.
Coming down, the glass cuts me in every way, and I instinctively sink into a defensive crouch to wait it out. Blood soaks my shoulders, but it’s the bottled liquid that stings, sizzling in the wounds. I bite back a cry, on the verge of tears, but I refuse to cry in front of Him. Eventually, I risk a glance at Him.
He’s just standing there, unfazed, offering me His hand and pulling me to my feet. “Are you okay?”
“Do I look okay?”
He looks worried, rooting around in His bag. “I’ve got some bandages in here, hold still.”
“No, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,” I say, panicking. “Don’t touch me. Did you do that?”
The emotions are coming in now, and this is the part I hate the most. It’s clouding my judgment, blanketing my actions in irrationality, pulling apart every carefully chosen word and argument.
“I’m fine. I’m fine. You can drop your stuff in your room. And after that, you might as well help me put my bottles back up. After all, if you’re going to live here, you might as well make yourself useful,” I say.
Yet later, even as I’m balancing on the top rung, stretching over three or four different items to affix my bottles to the ceiling, he doesn’t help. Doesn’t even hold the ladder.
He does sweep up the glass though.
A few days go by, and we form an uneasy truce. We don’t really talk much. He stays in His for the most part, and I stay in mine, coming out only to change the bottles when they start filling up too much.
Then I decide that if we’re going to live together, I might as well get to know Him, so we start talking. He proposes questions that exercise my imagination. We debate spiritual intricacies and life choices. Morals and ethics. I go for the middle ground, He for the black and white. And throughout it all, he challenges and delights my mind.
And it is through my mind that He reaches my heart. My roof starts leaking more, but it’s a purple liquid I’ve never seen before. Once, I stretch my hand under the leak, just to see what it feels like, and it is the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever experienced. I don’t really know how to respond, so I shy away, and I reinforce the tape and the bottles to make sure it stops leaking into my house.
Sometimes, He comes in and dusts, and I watch him, confused.
“Why are you dusting?”
“It’s dirty, and I’m cleaning it,” He responds.
“It’ll just get dirty again, you know. What reason is there to cleaning?”
He just shrugs, and I leave him to His work, baffled. Afterwards though, as I linger in those places, I run my fingers over the clean brass, wondering why I never thought to dust before.
Yet somehow, resisting every step of the way, I learn to love this stranger in my house in a deeper than words sort of way. If He even goes for a walk, I look forward anxiously to His return. He helps me with everything around the house except changing the bottles, though He’ll sometimes hold the ladder to make sure I don’t get hurt.
It gets to the point where I wait up for him, where I’ll get up early to seek him out or we’ll stay up talking long into the night. One such time, I whispered to him, looking more to the stars than to him, “I’d do anything for you. I’m all Yours.”
And He said, “Anything?”
“Anything,” I responded.
“All mine?”
“All Yours.”
He smiled.
Then one day, He walks in as I’m sweeping, and again, every bottle above me shatters. As it slices into my back, I fall apart, screaming. The familiar pain burns in old scars, drenching me in the sticky-sweet smell of blood and emotions. But this time, it aches and burns more than ever before, the collected purple stinging every mark and bruise.
He runs to me and picks me up, carrying me to safety while purple rain continues to gush. I start crying, fighting against Him as He bandages my cuts. “Stop, I need to stop it,” I say, but He doesn’t let me run away until my wounds are covered. I stagger from my couch, limping back to my ladder, grabbing more bottles to plug the holes.
“Why are you trying so hard to keep it out?” He asks.
I’m crying, trying to hold on to some semblance of logic, and it’s abandoning me in droves. “None of that belongs in here,” I say. “It’s ruining my carpet. It’s horrible and smells disgusting.”
He glances at my carpet, and I follow. It’s odd, but in tears, I see it how He must have seen it: ripped, tattered, stained. I look around the rest of the house too, at walls once covered in cobwebs, ornaments once decorated in dust. Glimmering lightbulbs shine where my musty chandelier hung, and the room feels almost cozy. What once was dry and austere is now cozy—almost alive, even when dripping purple.
“The liquid isn’t what cuts you,” He comments. “It’s the glass.”
“It never used to crack like this before you came along,” I say, angry from the red liquid seeping over my shoulders from the leaks. “I was doing just fine before you came along, destroying my house, changing everything. Quit breaking my bottles!”
Yet, in memories, these bottles have shattered many times, carving the same scars deeper into my back every time. Every inch aches from miles of pain and maps marked far beneath my skin.
“I used to play in the rain,” I say. “I used to bask in it.”
“Why don’t you still?” He asks. I teeter on my ladder, and He holds it for me, ready to catch me if I fall.
“It hurt.” I think to the first time blood seemed to seep through the ceiling, pouring around me, scarring and burning my skin. I screamed, running away, but my entire roof was leaking, pouring everywhere.
It happened again and again, leaking nothing but pain, betrayal, hatred, anger, misery, grief, regret, fear, desperation, and more. I had to contain it somehow, so I made bottles, sticking them up there, taping them to the ceiling, trying to stop the rain from falling in.
“I can fix this,” I had said. “I can fix this all on my own.”
And even if the bottles got too heavy and fell over, the glass still didn’t hurt as bad as what was inside them. Sure, glass stopped the few good things too, but that was a small price to pay.
I climb down the ladder, crying, and He catches me, holding me tight.
“What do you do with the rest of the bottles?” He asks.
Wordlessly, I limp to the back room, an off-limits place. I pull the key from around my neck. It’s locked just so I can say, “I fear nothing. I regret nothing.”
Now that the rest of my house is clean, I can smell what the inside reeks of, and I wrinkle my nose, repulsed.
He pulls a string, and a single lightbulb sputters on, illuminating a room of thick shadows, dust, and cobwebs.
As far as the eye can see are rows of bottles, lined up. Each is corked and wrapped in three or four layers of plastic wrap, just like I did in chemistry labs to keep samples uncontaminated.
Each swirls with hundreds of colors, and I pluck the latest fragment of glass from my clothing and place it on the shelf next to all the orderly rows.
“There’s no organization except by time,” I say. “Just colors and bottles, all neatly contained.”
“Do you ever go back and open them?”
“Not really. Only the ones that are mostly blue and green,” I say. The colors swirl around, and only now do I notice just how rare the blue and greens are. I almost don’t ask, but I whisper to Him, “Why is there so much red?”
He doesn’t answer, merely starts trailing His fingers along the shelves. He walks halfway down the hall before pulling a specific bottle from the shelf. He takes it and three or four others and walks back to me.
“You said you would do anything for me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes, absolutely. But what does that have to do with anything?”
He takes a bottle that is almost entirely red, and He uncorks it, instantly filling the room with the sickening scent of festering pain. Before I can protest, He dumps it over my head, and it soaks through my skin, burning unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.
I scream, and through it all He holds me, a vague, unseen comfort. In the first’s peak, He pours the second bottle over me, which burns even greater than the first.
“Stop! Make it stop!” I shout. But He continues, until each of the four has poured over me.
“Stop, stop, stop, stop, please, please!” I weep, but He does nothing, and I am forced to face the truths I’ve hidden from for so long.
In fully embracing these emotions, the universe ends in one fell blow. I cry for the pain I have caused. I feel every regret I’ve once had. I see every way I’ve darkened the worlds of those I said I loved. I see all the hatred I’ve ever doled out, every life I’ve harmed.
It cascades endlessly, and I groan in a pain I can’t voice, my soul screaming.
And as He tries to pull me closer, I pull further away. “Stop, don’t touch me!” I shout. “It’ll just get on you too. Don’t come near me. Don’t come near me. Don’t, just don’t.”
I curl into a ball in a corner of the room, sobbing. Still, He draws near to me, and in His hand, He holds a bowl, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. He dips in His hand, and it flows white.
“You are forgiven, if only you ask,” He says.
In that white, I see His goodness, and I see my evil. I picture this house of mine He’s been living in, falling apart in every corner. It’s ruined and destroyed, covered in dust and dirt and mud. It holds nothing of note but tattered carpets and broken furniture. And somehow He’s still here.
“I can’t. Go away. Get out of my house. I don’t deserve to have you here. It’s not good enough. I’m not good enough.”
“You only need to ask.”
He waits there, crouching beside me, but I ignore him. I ignore him for days, crying over this pain, shivering in its hurt, feeling every cut and bruise with an intentionality of never before. I cry over the smallest things, each thought hitting me harder than the ones before. I think of every moment with my sisters and mourn for the love I haven’t given, for the pain I’ve caused.
Two or three weeks later, when I feel like I might be able to stand again, I turn around, thinking He must have left by now.
He’s still waiting there.
“I’m so so sorry. I can’t—I can’t express it—”
And as I struggle to form the words, He pours His bowl over my head, simply covering me in His forgiveness.
Under its weight, every red line flows away from my skin. Every orange, pink, and yellow scar, every mark left by all these bottled hurts, and every piece of shattering glass fades away.
I marvel over new skin, left spotless and mark-less.
“I’ve been waiting a long time to do that,” He says.
He stands, offering me His hand, and I take it. Together, we leave the room, and I enter a far different one than I left behind.
“You have to let the rain fall sometimes,” He says. “See, that carpet is completely ruined. We’re probably gonna need a new one. And if we’re getting new carpets, we might as well get some new armchairs too. I mean, we might as well rebuild the entire house.”
“What—what about the other bottles?” I ask.
“We’ll get to those eventually,” He replies. “Some will probably stay bottled up for longer than others. But until then, let’s maybe set the glass aside.”
“But…but the rain,” I say.
“Hmm, maybe you just need a new roof,” He says. “Besides, anything that comes in this house has got to go through me first.” He laughs, gesturing as if in a mock battle with an adversary.
The sight strikes me, and for some reason, I throw back my head and laugh in joy, and the rain leaking in feels cool and good on my spotless skin. It’s no longer weighty, but light, flowing right off my back.
