Today is it.

I have been waiting for this for as long as I can remember. Since that day so long ago when my childhood was shattered along with the dark brown bottle I found in pieces by her head. She lay almost motionless on the floor as her blood and tears seeped out, her bodily contents oozing deep into the pores of the hard wood floors. That blood. That blood was the same that flowed through my veins. My toxic blood burned.

“Miss. Miss? Miss! They’re ready for you. She’s waiting,” squealed an obnoxious young nurse. Her voice sent a chill through my ears and down my spine, shaking me out of my dark nostalgia. “Thatta way! Have a wonderful day!” That woman, she made me nauseous. She even rhymes! I rose from the tacky red, patent leather couch as Nurse Bubbles bid me farewell. I walked down an eternal hallway in which there were no windows, the air was stale and suffocating. Air had quickly become a thing of the past, a vague and frantic memory. What I was breathing now was fabricated, circulated. My heels clinked on the pewter tiled floors as I neared the end. I dreaded and yearned reaching my destination. It was about to happen.

My journey down that abysmal hall was delayed by a run in with a tremendously burly man in a rent-a-cop outfit. “Hol’it right there lit’l lady. I’ll need ya to check your overcoat right here with me. We don’t allow any extra items into the rooms with the patients. Sorry for tha inconveeenience.” I said nothing. His degree of intelligence, or lack thereof, did not warrant a response. I handed him my coat distrustfully, fearful that he might take my purse as well. “No, no ma’am. You keep your pockey book with ya. Just the coat.” So. Fucking. Weird. I faked a smile but he knew I was not there to make friends. As I walked away he called to me, “don’t you worry your perty little min’, I’ll watch your belongin’s just right fine. Have a nice day!” Infernal Rhyming!! I sighed and walked past his security check point.

Finally, after being secured by Officer Dim-Wit, I reached yet another check point. A large door stood guard, the windows were barred and the door was duly reinforced. A bell sounded and I was allowed in. I was told to sit on yet another red patent leather couch, for someone would fetch me briefly. This was the end. I could not leave now. I had to go through with it.
This waiting room was more like a common area for the patients in the ward. I sat down on the couch, attempting to cover the back of my legs with my little black skirt so as to avoid any more uncomfortable sticking.

After about two seemingly endless minutes, a man sat down next to me. Apparently his conception of personal boundaries was nonexistent. He sat close to me but appeared to not even notice my presence. So, likewise I ignored his. I shifted as close to the arm rest as I could to give myself some space when I realized… he was
caressing an old grey sock. He was petting it and looking at it adoringly, calling it “boinky” every now and again. Awkward. I stood up and tried to appear as though I was reading some of the announcements posted on a large bulletin board across the room from where I had been sitting. I was suffocating! I had to do it soon. My toxic blood was burning.

To my left, a young girl sat at a table all by herself. She was not talking to inanimate objects or stroking any dirty laundry. She just looked sad, her eyes were dry but they were crying, screaming. Those blaring eyes were black but otherwise, she was quite beautiful. Her long black hair was unkempt but for some reason it did her elongated face justice. There were bandages wrapped around her pale, skeletal wrists. I was comfortable near this girl. At least she knew enough to recognize what she was and had tried to rectify it, apparently unsuccessfully. It’s always the wrong ones who end up successful. I blame families for keeping the sick cycle spinning. I could feel my toxic blood.

All around me insanity had taken hold. Men running away from invisible chipmunks, women crying… anger, fear, desperation everywhere. I was surrounded by everything I despised, everything that was wrong with the world, everything I was saving myself from. I stood near the suicide girl until I heard my name called. My name fell from the lips of another woman, a nurse, a rather large and extremely masculine nurse. She ushered me to the room, the final place. It was so close.
The room smelled somehow familiar. It was a smell of my childhood; a disastrous blend of bleach and Chanel. I tasted the smell, I felt it. Nausea, the same nausea I felt as a girl.

I stepped through the door way and the man-woman nurse turned and walked away. I looked pleadingly after her, I dreaded being left alone with her for the first time since puberty, but I knew it was why I had come.

Her face struck me immediately. I knew her and yet, somehow I did not. It had been four years since I had last looked upon her- at the funeral. The memory of it forced itself up me, taking my mind its prisoner. I could see her as she stood transfixed by the coffin, staring glassy eyed at the body she had once touched, the body she had once loved. Her lip quivered as though she knew that it was her lifeless corpse that belonged in that box.

The woman that stood before me now only slightly resembled the woman from my past. Her eyes were deadened, her skin pale and lifeless. Her skin, tinged with blue, was offset by the overall whiteness of the room; the white walls, the harsh white lights and the robe draped around her body washed her away like the scent of bleach that filled the room.

Her dead eyes lit up, a spark of fire that had reignited but soon fizzled into ash. I, too, had changed since last we met. I was no longer the girl she knew, the little girl that had once loved her. That fire that she could not maintain burned fiercely behind my green irises. I think this frightened her. I know this frightened her.

It was so close. I shuddered.

“It’s been so long,” she started. She tried to pretend that she was happy to see me, thinking that I had come because I actually wanted to see her again. Fool. “You are so beautiful. You look just like your father.”

I cringed at her mention of him. My father’s dark green eyes of the past flashed in my mind, or were they my own? I wanted to do it, I needed to do it! Patience, patience was key. Oh, how my toxic blood burned.

She looked at my hand, “no ring, not married?”

“I don’t believe in family happiness.” She sighed and I continued, “How long have you been here. I only heard last month that you were admitted.”

“Don’t say admitted. You make me sound like a crazy person. It’s been years since I’ve seen you and that is how you speak to me? Real nice.”

“Yes...” I said blankly. I waited for a moment, breaking the silence with my complete disregard for tact, “So you finally tried to do it, huh?” I said harshly, fire flowing through my words, scorching every hope she had of happiness. “ You finally tried to do what he did so long ago? Thought it was a good idea huh? Finally realized that it was you who should have done it, not him?”

“How can you say such things? I’m sick! Your father was sick. It’s a disease.”

“You are a disease, daddy just caught it.”

“Ah, You’ll never change, will you? It’s hopeless trying to get anything into your thick skull! I, I give up,” she said angrily. I smirked, pleased that I was affecting her. To prove a point she quieted herself for a moment but noticing my resilience to be difficult she spoke up, “May. I’ve been here since last May.”

There was a pause, neither of us knew how to keep up the conversation. It was all so meaningless. She had wasted her life away and had tried to waste mine in the process. She ate up my precious moments with her waste. I could not let it continue.

“Seven months. And a hell of a way to get admitted! Couldn’t even do that right.”

I stressed the last word.

“Why are you here?” she asked me flat out. Finally, enough with the facade.

“Now, now… It’s been years since I’ve seen you and that is how you speak to me?” I said sarcastically, mocking her. I wanted her to hurt.

“Why, just why!?”

“To give you one last chance. To confess, repent,” I said, completely abandoning my sarcasm and assuming my true role.

It was all up to her. It could happen. Right... Now…

“One last chance for what? What am I repenting
exactly? I have nothing to confess. Especially not to you.”

“It is your one last chance to find the faults within yourself. You already took a step in the right direction in your attempting to rid the world of your sickness. AH, but something tells me that you did not do it for the world but rather for yourself. A selfish suicide.”

“Just leave. It is not my fault how life turned out. People make mistakes. It is not my fault your father took his own life! When will you forgive me?”

“It is your fault. It is your fault that daddy left the way he did. It is your fault that it was him and not you. It is your fault that for so long, I thought that I should follow him and bleed out all this pain. I thought that it was the only end. But now, now I know how I can fix it and the answer does not lie within my blood but in yours.” She looked puzzled and terrified. “You and I will both be ok… when it is all over,” I said, reaching out and grabbing her hand.

“What? When what is over?” she was oblivious and angry, afraid of my gesture of kindness. She withdrew her hand from my cold fingers. She had no idea how close it was.

Frustration began to bubble through my brain. It was over, this was it… “Well, I suppose it was a waste for me to come. You were always a waste. I suppose it is high time I came to terms with it. Good-bye.” I held out my hand once again, this time in an emotionless, crude gesture of departure. She grasped my hand. She failed her final test, she was letting me go. Again.

I gripped her hand tightly, holding it as I reached into my oversized bag. I pulled out an old relic of our past. It was a wooden rolling pin, an old rolling pin my father had bought for her when I was just a child. I can still see it, as a family we banded around the kitchen table that year, rolling out the soft dough for perfect Christmas cookies. We were the picture of a perfect family, a picture soon to be poisoned.

She looked at the wooden thing in my hand, recognizing it at once. Tears cascaded out of her eyes as the memories infected her mind. I wielded the pin high. Before even panic could settle into her drowning eyes, the tool collided with the flaccid skin on the side of her head. With a resounding thwack, her lifeless skin split. A second, a third hit landed perfectly on her once beautiful face. Her blood rained down on me, my face and hands stained with the crimson liquid. Her cracked skin betrayed her mortal veins, emptying their contents. Death seized her black heart and her eyes flashed with pain and fear. But she said nothing. Only her eyes screamed.

I sat beside my dying mother and the rolling pin, our past. The breath stopped deep within her lungs. I cried. The tears were not contrived, nor were they tears of longing or regret or even sadness. They were tears of release. Tears of release for both of us. She had been dead for a long time and through death, I freed her from dying. My blood no longer burned, it was no longer shared.

I held her limp body in my arms until I was ripped away from her. As they dragged me away, I shot her one last glance and whispered, “I love you mom.”

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...