The Daily Write: Photo #3 (May 22, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Photo #3 (note, this is a visual prompt, an image from my writing teacher, which I can't show so you'll just have to imagine: a woman's body filled with flowers).

"Her body contained worlds of pain, enough to suffocate her from the inside out. She looked in the mirror one last time, picked up the carefully placed Wustoff knife with the trident stamped into the handle and raised it to her throat. They say that women don't kill themselves as violently as men, but what they don't mention is the women who far surpass men in the inflicting of self-mutilating wounds. It's simply too hard to grasp the woman as life-giving vessel with the furious Kali reversing her own birth.

She didn't flinch as the tip of the knife pierced her skin, didn't move at all, in fact, when the blood came down like a waterfall on alabaster."

"Okay, that's enough, I can't take it." Stephanie's brow was clinched up into a rose of worry. What was wrong with her best friend? Who the hell wrote this kind of stuff?

"What?" Deirdre laughed derisively. You read Stephen King like he's going out of style. You watch shows that are more graphic than anything I can even imagine. What exactly is the problem?"

Stephanie looked at the red velvet curtain flapping against the open window. A big summer storm was coming in according to Two Weather Mike. He wasn't usually wrong. God, she wished she was hanging out with him now instead of her suddenly macabre best friend.

"I don't know Dierd. It's just..." She couldn't say it. They both knew what she was thinking. Ever since the abortion, nothing had been right.

Deirdre's eyes hardened her expression as she looked over Stephanie's head.

The rain began suddenly, pelting the open panel of the warehouse window. Neither woman got up to close it. They both loved storms, one of the many things that had drawn them together that first awkward year in college.

"You're right, of course," Stephanie acquiesced. She couldn't stand for Deirdre to be mad at her, and couldn't blame her for her character's turn toward self-destruction. Better for her to write it out than to act on her pain.

She lifted the bottle from the middle of the table, poured them both another shot and they toasted the lightning as it broke across the sky.