She lies there in the bathtub, gently and carefully stroking a sharp razor blade down her right wrist over and over, like a light feather. The blade is positioned in the correct way that would let the blood flow out of her so easily and consistently. Consistency… That’s what she’s always needed in order to have some tiny semblance of sanity. And right now, she feels the sanest she’s been in a long time.

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Tiny little beads of red well up on her wrist. She’s hyper-focused. Her head is cocked sideways. She’s curious. A BEAT as the beads starts to become tiny rivulets dropping into the water. One, two, three beads of red. Drip, drip…drip. One, two, three. Drip…..drip……..drip. Just a taste of what could be. She sucks the tiny amount of blood that starts to dilute in the water and gets out of the bathtub.

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The lukewarm water is a pastel pink that could be mistaken for rust rings from over mineralized city water. The kind that once, when she was little, was told could give you cancer if you drank enough of it. She’d drunk bottled water ever since then. But right now, it doesn’t matter what kind of water it is, as long as it eventually does its job, enveloping her life and swirling it around like clouds of smoke. And like smoke, as soon as it is blown in your face, the unstable and rippling “O”s coming from a gaping maw to show you a mediocre magic trick, just as quickly it dissipates, leaving you with a bad taste in your mouth and watery eyes.

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She inspects the highway lines, the ones like in Nevada and Arizona that make your car vibrate as you switch lanes, giving you a tiny little panic attack for 2 seconds because you’re not used to feeling like you’ve just switched over to another universe. Those highway lines aren’t deep enough to leave a scar. But for what it’s worth, she feels something that is only for her, and no one else, for the first time, in a long time.

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Water runs against her wrist from the faucet. She patches it up but the bandage blooms into a red ink blot that reminds her of a butterfly. There’s beauty in pain.

She looks at herself in the mirror, dark red hair dripping from where they tested the water as she looked the Devil in the eyes and taunted him. The strands leak that cancerous mineral pink onto her white sink countertop. Drip…..drip……..drip. She contemplates why she’s drawn to shades of red. She stares at her reflection intently, and the other version of her mouths, “because it’s dangerous.” She smiles slightly, because to her, there is comfort in chaos.

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She knows that blood stains, if left for too long. She bled between her legs, once, onto her mother’s white couch, slightly off-white now, from the bodies that had lain there and relaxed in its soft embrace for so long, and realized that the remedy for removal would only fix the surface of the stain. It would still linger, sinking into the fibers underneath the epidermis, silently soiling its insides, creating a facade, welcoming arms with a sinister intention.

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Inspecting the reddish pink splotches on the counter, butterflies blooming, daring to become a monstrous singularity, she puts the poor lost souls out of their misery before they, and she, can decipher their cumulative meaning. The porcelain is already stained, but she refrains from using the remedy. She leaves it for now, a reminder of what could be.