The illustrated woman was a broken puppet in a dead man’s sprawl, party garbage on wooden floorboards when the light crept in, bled white through closed eyelids. She was the gasp of a fish strung on the line, reanimation, the film rolling backwards as thin dawn pushed past cumulus clouds and picked apart the sorry excuse for grounds. Serpents shriveled, withered like wines over bare brown skin. Hip-to-hip woad dried away, flaked like poorly painted daubs and the woman (girl) beneath curdled, mottled, skin turned to milky cream.
Aware was last thoughts as first thoughts. I do not want to die.
Aware was tacky with blood, aware was thick, choking sobs, rolling over to heave beneath a blanket of hair.
She was shuffling feet in sneakers and faded jeans, and rusty red flakes showering as she moved, life’s blood poured out beneath a tee-shirt, a bus that snorted thick, smelly exhaust and stopped at every stop and some more between the hotel and home.
I do not want to die. Fingers fastened over wrists where rattlers had coiled, wriggles of scarlet and gold, thin voids of white laddering skin. I do not want to die. A shuffling dead-whilst-standing creep forward, foot in front of the other. Stairs climbed. The sticky early-morning heat of the hall.
The apartment key wouldn’t turn. The apartment key, fresh-cut, shook in her fingers and scraped at the lock; it looked like a fucking psycho had tried to break in, it looked like someone was trying to rip off an apartment with nothing in it to steal. Better luck with the fire-escape, next time, the kind of thin-edged, knife-blade laughter that prickled like hysteria beneath the skin.
She stood beneath the shower until the hot water ran out, until a body’s worth of dried blood circled the drain. She stood and she gasped and her shoulders heaved, and Thea wished the whole hotel to hell.