Red Wrists

Dark streaks trickle down her cheeks, whipping round in a large loop towards her chin, cascading of the tip through empty space until finally crashing onto the fabric of her shirt or splashing noiselessly on the carpet. 

Pitiful pleas escaped her lips uncontrollably in barely audible bursts.

"This isn't happening! This is only a dream! It's a dream!! Please let it be a dream!" soft words before a long, mournful howl pressed through her throat, filling the room ominously.

"Please dear God! Don't let this be real!" she covered her face, cowering and hiding from her deity, hoping her prayers weren't whispered in vain. 

The darkness hiss in her ears, "This is your fault. This is your restitution! You are cursed and broken!"

She writhed and wriggled in denial on the floor, wailing in devastated, meager, pathetic but almost theatrical resistance. "I am a good person! I have done good things!" Her thoughts were frazzled, despondent, drifting in and out of good and evil.

"BABY KILLER!" she sobbed at this and gulped on painful pockets of air, choking on the burn in her lungs. "Everything dies in your hands, in your care!"

She clawed at her ears and hair, willing the voice to disappear. But he images were already flipping through her vision like a slow motion movie reel. Slow scene after slow scene. Slow death upon slow death. Blue lips on a sibling, petrified bodies of pets, Withered brown plants. Precious, innocent, pure babies.

She opened her hands and raised them before her eyes and screamed at them as if they were the cause of all her agonies, the symbol of all her failures. The the red dripped from her wrists, spluttering here and there. The tub was a puddle of crimson. Would there be relief at the end, at her expiration date? One last death and no one would suffer by her hand and by her obvious curse.

"You'll go straight to hell!" the same voice that belittled her so savagely was now toying with her emotions. That slick, mesmerizing, slippery eel voice slipping once again into her consciousness set on causing confusion and chaos. 

"No! This is my hell!" he red wrists glared at her as her vision blurred. Her pulse quickened. Her breathing slow, deliberate and raspy. Her skin became cold. Tiny beads of sweat bubbled up on her forehead, turned frigid, then disappeared as soon as they appeared. Her heart continued to hum loudly and more rapidly. She lost sense of time. She could only feel the tick-tock of her inevitable doom. 

Time was not the thief tonight.