Fifth floor.

And I'm alone still.

Again.

But I can hear the screams down below. A few floors down.

And if I close my eyes I can trace them.

Like that high pitched one a few moments back was from third floor, cell six. She's been here for two years. She's a youngster. Barely begun.

They move you up with each passing bit of time, each human being who passes over. Gives up. Goes under.

Those are the lucky ones.

You know when they go out because you can hear them start to sing, and it's fucking eerie. Like an opera singer when whale, or something with a bit of wolf howl thrown in for flavor.

To explain why they always sing more on a full moon.

And after a month or so, then they stop singing.

And we never hear them again.

But the screams on third are softer now, and there's a bottle of isopropyl on hand for all your painful needs.

Cuts, scrapes, burns. Cleaning, waking up, getting sick. Burning shit.

Except the only way to bleed is to claw through your own skin, and they try to keep us from being able. Smooth walls. Smooth enough to go mad against, and the only other flammable substance is thought. Everything else just seems to wait, laughing.

But as torture poured into sinuses, it does the trick. It hurts, and it's impossible to sleep through.

But I wish there were more matches. It feels so wrong not to have the graze of fire on my skin.

Like a bit of me has died. They tell us the need will go away. We know it doesn't. That they don't know what they're talking about.

That these men in pale green and alien suits have never known the touch of a knife, or match. Have never dreamed what release it brings.

Have never -

Singing.

It's coming from the seventh floor. May souls rest in peace, in a hell less hellish than this one.

And as for me,

I'm sleeping now.

Don't much care when,

Don't much care how.

And when I wake

I'll sing a tune

And laugh and play

My own soul's doom.