The Year in Review Through Prose Poetry

The Pack (Dead Space 2)

The nice woman used to play music in this room, like music in the circus or the cartoons with the animals that spoke like people. She used to smile real big, her eyes as pleasant as a mother’s, her voice as soothing as a cup of warm milk. She was kind and smelled like flowers, the ones the children would pick in the domed gardens where an artificial sun shined all day long, where butterflies would land on the tips of their fingers. Children used to tumble through this room, lost in their imaginations, the innocent way of layering their enormous wishes onto the smallest of spaces.

The little plastic chairs still circle the table where the children drew pictures of families, the stars, the Earth their parents would talk about over a glass of wine. In the corner of this room, a scattered pile of building blocks, alphabet-themed, tossed like plucked flower petals against the plush carpet. Look close enough and the blood, not yet dry, shimmers under the fluorescent lights. This room used to echo with tiny laughter. This playroom. Now full only in its abundance of emptiness. Yes, the children still roam the halls of the nursery, still frolicking, still the cute mob the nice woman would lovingly refer to as her “little rascals.” I wonder, though, if those were the words she thought when they came at her, changed as they were, when they burrowed into her abdomen like little explorers, rending her from top to bottom, when they gobbled her insides like so much jam.