Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
BLOOD POOLS BETWEEN HER LEGS, a catatonic crimson cataract welling from the tops of her muscle-thick thighs and staining the sheets of her bunk bed.
Sitting up with the blanket cast back to expose her bare legs to the half-light filtering through the window, Sawyer cocks her head and thinks: well. It wasn't supposed to arrive this early, but antidepressants had this inconvenient tendency to screwing the regularity of periods, according to the label on her prescription. According to the label on her mood stabilisers she should function normally—or, as normally as someone doped to the roof on a motley of drugs could operate. With the torrential litany of exceptions—side effects include—such as: weight gain, involuntary shaking, aches and pains that have less to do with life and more to do with physiology, cognitive problems (eg. for example, feeling that your thinking is slowed or fuzzy), etc. Otherwise, not quite cured but close. Not quite happy, but not quite I Want To Die Violently And I Want The World To Die By My Violence Too.
But she hadn't taken her medication yet and the moon glowed a little too bright, a little too cold, a little too mocking. Bones like liquid, Sawyer slanted it a languid look. You think you're better? You're just a piece of floating rock. You might control the tide, but you have no other pull on this Earth.
In the moonlight, her blood glimmered like pools of obsidian. Most of her doesn't want to move. Was it worth the effort to deal with it now or go back to sleep and slip back into the darkness of her eyelids where it is too easy to pretend nothing exists? Between her legs the blood is sticky and cooling rapidly in the frigid September air. Side effects include: indecisiveness, irritability, lethargy, thinking: I guess I'll just die, then.
"Sawyer?" A quiet voice croaked from the other end of the room. Quinn's sheets rustled, static sluicing through the silence.
Without tearing her eyes off the blood staining the sheets (no doubt seeping into the mattress, too), Sawyer flicked a hand at Quinn's confusion-muddled face. "No."
Nonplussed but too groggy to process the flat-out rejection, Quinn only nodded and fell back onto her pillow. Sawyer waited until Quinn's breaths evened out again before she made her decision.
Sliding back under the covers, her bare legs brushed the cool moisture of her bedsheets. She shut her eyes and the darkness engulfed her once more. This would be the morning's problem. When your life is just one uncomfortable position after another... Call it laziness or any other variant of the name. But she had no energy to deal with anything other than breathing now. Even then that seemed a difficult task. It's a vicious cycle she's trapped herself in, do you understand? Dahlia, her psychiatrist, called it The Scab. Keep picking at it, and it'll never heal right. Sometimes it's better to get through the itching phase, leave the wound alone before applying anything to it. But Sawyer has a macabre habit of hurting. As long as she stays this way, she'll keep reopening the wound, keep picking and scratching so it never gets to heal. Scratch until she bleeds, and then scratch some more. Some days she feels like she's fifteen again and learning how to hold her breath underwater for a whole summer. Some days she feels like she's been drowning her entire life.
