White Lies.

It's in the silence that he hears words. Murmurs, whispers. Delicate promises spoken earnestly under the kitchen glare. 

"Genius," he manages to mumble between paralyzed lips.

They watch him tediously. Dark pupils secluded to evacuated corners, shrouded in a familiar film. He wishes to touch them; to extend a forearm and brush his fingertips of their corpses, return the welcome they had so graciously given him. But he would not. More accurately, could not. It was perhaps because his wrist was not connected to his hands, and instead the white models hung lifeless at the end of each arm. Paralyzed, like his lips, with a morbidly buried fear.

Time slips like a ribbon through his conscious. Recluse eyes observe that the time is exactly eight oh three. He peers only a moment later, and the numbers have morphed, and it now reads twelve fourteen. He wonders, remotely, if he has moved within these four hours, or if every muscle within his skin has ceased to work. His physique in denial, rebelling against the tenacity of his vivacious thought pattern.

"Come," they beg.

He obeys.

He slinks purposefully across the wooden floor, scraping bruised knees and cut elbows. Brown eyes dance tirelessly from the repetitive detail of the floor to the caricatures of his reanimated hands. It's at this moment that he notices their color.

Maroon.

A sound gurgles from the precipice of his cracked lips. It resembles a scream.