The Daily Write: A bottle of pills (August 17, 2012. 12 mins)

A bottle of pills

The house up on a hillside in a nondescript neighborhood contained two bottles of pills behind two front doors. The master bedroom also had two doors. The bathroom only one. The kitchen seemed to be an afterthought, cramped and hard to use to make a meal. She didn't need much though. She wasn't accustomed to eating. A purse full of gum and mints, a cupboard with cookies and marshmallow cream she kept just to remind herself that she could eat if she wanted to, and a fridge containing cold Tang, a stick of margarine and an empty egg carton stuck to the bottom Plexiglas shelf on some ancient sticky strawberry jam, the remnants of a disgusting old boyfriend she guessed, staring at it with anger.

She couldn't touch it, of course. Couldn't risk bending down and putting her head next to that rotten old fruit and sugar pulp. She would pay a price too high if some part of her hand touched it. So she stood there, glaring, breathing, then trying to breathe, then losing breath until she fell down in a nauseous haze of dizzy.

Sometimes the only way out was the most grueling and painful. Her head hit the edge of the open broiler drawer and got cut, an oozing sweet gash of red. After she came to she just lay there, feeling the wetness dripping through her tangled hair and staring at the bumpy ceiling, textured like an orange peel, peeling and yellowed paint curling like clouds.

One leg bent, her hips flat and hands by her sides, she wondered what god would think, looking down on her in this position. Chewing the inside of her lip until the urge to puke overcame her desire to stay still for the next 7 hours, she turned her throbbing and wet head toward the rubber molding under the sink cabinet and felt the bile spill out.

Milo walked in the left front door just then. Some part of her was happy to hear his shuffle toward the side table with the day's mail, keys chiming as they got dropped down onto the wood (how many times had she told him to watch it so the table didn't get scratched?) She thought about calling out to him, but decided it would be far better to simply be found, in a fog. He hated her "dramas" as he called them, acting as if she had nothing to do with the scene she made, in a pool of her own blood on the floor between the stove and the sink, seemed the better choice.