Foreword This is a 3D halloween story. Listen with headphones and close your eyes for the full experience.🙂 Lyrics [Verse 1] That winter I couldn't get up, and the days went black, and the annexe door by my pillow breathed open a crack, and I knocked on the wall, and the wall knocked back. Then one night it knocked first. It had never knocked first before. Its handle was on the inside. It opened a little more, and I crawled in on my knees, then my belly, along the floor. [Verse 2] Under boxes gone soft, over mice rotted to lace, past the dummy that faced the wall. It had turned. It had my face. At the back, where the roof met the floor, was a slit of a space. And the seam where they met was a mouth, with its lips pressed tight, and I breathed all the way out, and it swallowed me, bite by bite, and a cold little hand in the dark put out the light. Then she seeped from the walls, where the soft stuff should go, up my ankles, my knees, to my lips, and I drowned in her, slow, and somebody called my name, in my voice, from below. She climbed in through my mouth, and she pulled me on tight, and she spread, feet in my feet, teeth in my teeth, and she sat up instead, and she snapped me to fit in a box at the back of my head. [Verse 3] Knees to my chin, and a lid made of bone on my skin, two eye-holes in front, like the box that we buried the hamster in, and I watch through the holes, and she's wearing my grin. [Refrain 1] Up at the alarm with her homework all done, a gold star, straight A's, and a smile for everyone, and the teachers don't count all the teeth, and she's doing so well, and she's doing so well. [Verse 4] Mum says I've come right out of my shell, Mum hugs her, and I scream two inches back, in the cell, and she whispers, "You're doing so well." When it was me, it was "What's wrong with you now?", the sigh at my door, and the crease in her brow, and she'd have loved me like that, if I'd only known how. [Refrain 2] There's a frame on the wall, and its eyes follow Mum down the hall, and Mum tells the neighbours she's the pick of them all, and Mum loves her the way that a mum's meant to be, she loves her much more than she ever loved me, and she's doing so well. [Verse 5] Through the eye-holes I watch her grow up, years and years, her exams, the cap in the air, and the cheers, the train to the city, Mum waving, in tears. Her birthdays in tally marks, gouged with my nails in the lid, thirty now. She's done all the things I never did, and she's worn my skin since I was a kid. [Refrain 3] Promoted again, and a flat with a view, and a card from her mum saying "So proud of you," and she hasn't slept once in a year, and she's doing so well, and she's doing so well. [Verse 6] Night. She walks me to the fridge. Door open wide. She stuffs me like a goose, with my hands. Something rips inside. Wrappers under the bed, where the empties hide. Wine with her dinner. Then wine before dinner. Then wine. My hands shake in the morning. She tells work she's fine. Less room in the box. And less of it mine. [Refrain 4] A whole cake at midnight, the crisps, and the bread, and a bottle of red just to send her to bed, and her eyes have gone yellow, but she glows in the light, and she's first in the office, and everything's right, and she's doing so well, she's doing so-- [Verse 7] Three o'clock. My face lit up by the screen. She types with my thumbs what the feeling might mean. The word isn't ghost. It's never been. The gold stars were it, and the girl out of my shell, and every promotion, the bottles, the cell, and everyone told it, "You're doing so well." Old now. They screw down the lid, and the soil comes down, black. The worms come in through the eye-holes. The wood starts to crack. And I knock on the lid, and nothing knocks back. Still in the box. Too low to stand. There's a handle on the inside. I can't lift my hand.
