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Anonymous

I rose calmly from my seat, which had moments before seemed shrouded in darkness, and drew gently back the curtains that framed my window so casually. A soft beam of moonlight crept in on the delicate waft of cool night air that caught my hair by surprise and send my curls dancing around my face. As I turned back to my living room, the one I had spent so much time perfecting and arranging in my few years here in this home, my gaze drifted lazily in and out of focus, my eyes glossing over the details and textures of the room the way one runs their hands over an old black and white photograph. In the pale moonlight it looked as if it was just that, a photograph. Not a thing was out of place as my feet glided softly along the floor as I continued my trance like dance.

I ran my hand absentmindedly against the silky white blanket draped over the back of my couch the material sliding gracefully onto the floor as i dragged it behind me. My mind empty, my face plastered with a bright smile, my eyes hollow. I stopped abruptly at the doorway of my kitchen, the blanket slipping from my hands as the calm of my picturesque home was destroyed by brilliant red blood seeping its way through the cracks of my checkered tile floor. My smile was gone and my eyes came alive with frustration as the thick crimson substance began the delicate work of staining my shoes.

The picture was ruined and my calm was gone I found myself growing more and more agitated as I tried furiously to brush the blood back into the wounded body now lifeless on the floor. What a terrible mess. In a way I almost relished the way it felt, a dark deep mixture that felt alive on it's own without the pounding of a heart. It is a tingling sensation  to hold anothers’ life in your hands, physically, when you had already given them your own. I let it wash over my hands and continued to pour it back in until I realised after many minutes of doing exactly that, diligently and repetitively no matter how it continued to flow, my hands had become as stained as my shoes and I was getting nowhere. Calmly I stood, hands dripping, and wiped them against my skirt, brushing down the fabric that draped itself around me like the shadows themselves. I stooped ever so slightly to retrieve the red streaked silk and let it drag softly against the floor behind me. I sat on the couch and accepted defeat. It was a task for another day. I lay my head to rest and close my eyes, trying to grasp any remnants of that photograph in my head as I drifted to sleep.

I awoke from troubled dreams to find the sun intruding through my open curtains. I sat up, my head still spinning and my limbs tangled in a cotton blanket. I sat up on the couch and shook out my tangled curls tumbling freely about my head with no cause or direction. Standing up to change my clothes, realizing I had gone to bed the night before in an old sweater and torn jeans, and found myself watching my liar of a husband fumble in the kitchen for something he couldn’t find with me. I walked mindlessly towards him letting my hands run over the neck of an overturned wine bottle and grasped it loosely in my left turning it over between my fingers. My mind empty, my face plastered with a bright smile, my eyes hollow. The bottle smashed over his head as he dropped to the ground with a satisfying thud. Red blood trickled onto the nice clean checkered floor of my kitchen… What a terrible mess I made. The bottle clinked to the ground