She

She never felt like she fit in. She was a jigsaw piece without a puzzle, never completed - never even attempted. She was a lost toy at the bottom of a box, not touched since the move as the kids were too old. She was the skin on top of the milk, thrown away before the beverage was consumed - disgusting to all that encountered her. She was never appreciated, but unlike a forgotten work of art from a niche era, she never would be. She was the last breath taken at the end of a day, before the clock struck twelve and a new one began, not even noticed - foiled by slumber and replaced before consciousness. She was a broken glass, damaged and useless, kept in the cupboard to be grabbed but resented, scoffed at for her ineptitude and abandoned once more. She was a story without an ending. A narrative with no beginning. A trend that never caught on, or even began. A star without a glimmer. A cloud without any rain. A nothing. A loser. A ghost floating through life.

She was a child of no home and she stayed that way. Never finding a salvation in the arms of another. Never finding a purpose among the attempted feats. Lost in the throng of existence she couldn't bear the maze, the entwining of paths she could not follow. That was the way she stayed, from her start to her end. The end that would appear to have come too soon to anyone but her, but could not have come soon enough from where she lay.

Not even abandoned as she never was held. Not even rejected as she never offered the chance. Not even forgotten as not quite remembered. Not ever the victor. Not ever a pro.

She held on to the hope of a future for as long as she could, but it disappeared as she realized she was barely alive.

She was a poet of sorts, an artist of kinds. Forging the picture of a life she did not understand.

And then, as insignificantly as she was here; she was gone.

Incipient

[The following prose was written using a collection of ridiculous words provided to me on facebook. They appear in the order by which I received them, beginning with the title of this piece.]

Everyone has a beginning. Most lives start with the chaos of birth, the kicking and screaming of both mother and child, all sickeningly ignored once a cry is produced. That wail an adrenalin shot to the soul, awakening the maternal instinct. A necessary cappuccino for that naïve wench as she begins her first shift. Creation, a forgotten horror, lost in a hormonal haze of cooing and suckling. But I wasn't created there. I slid out of my mother's chlamydia riddled cunt into a life of begrudging acceptance. My childhood a conga line of meagre meals, neglect, belittling, fear - and ultimately poverty.

My mother was a crack-addicted cliché. She would slip a bottle into my mouth as a pipe slipped into hers. In her cloud of addiction she could barely see me. It was only in between hits she managed to differentiate me from the upholstery that engulfed my delicate form. In some sort of sick cosmic joke however, I survived the initial pandemonium. I can't remember growing up, but it happened fairly quickly. I remember having to clean vomit off my mother's face before I knew how to tie my shoe laces. I evolved, I grew able to deal with her capricious fits. Her crying, her declarations of love. Her screaming, her acrid hisses of loathing. I was her punching bag, taking hits from the rage and depression that came with her comedowns. I was her carer, there to watch her while she flew transcendent, her mind riding the cloud each puff of her pipe produced. I always made sure she landed safely, guiding her back to reality gently. I was too afraid of what I'd do without her to notice how cancerous she was. She was human aids, attacking the immune system of my life. Any bit of sadness I felt outside the walls of our rented hell floored me. I was far too crippled to withstand further third-party beatings.

So I became angry instead. As I grew I stopped being the timid child from that broken home and I started to break children. At home I was a runt, a forgotten mongrel cast to the shadows - the ill-favored brother to a fix born decades before. One off-spring of my mother's frivolity enslaved her, the other she enslaved. But on the days I was allowed to leave her, by orders from the council, I could be any one I wanted, do anything I wanted. Her darkness could no longer breed with me. But it had laid eggs within me; I wanted to hurt.

My performance deserves a toast, I was a convincing villain, frightful even - the role of terrorizer was one I played impeccably. Twisted serendipity meant I'd seen my fair share of terrifying people. Men who beat my mother against walls, bouncing her like a yo-yo from their fists to the brick. Men demanding money we could not give, using their chocking grip on me as a bartering chip as she frantically fished coins from her purse, jewellery from the cupboard, her stash from my room. She always told them not to touch 'the boy' - it made me wonder if she remembered my name. Or if perhaps my latest attempt at giving myself a haircut had made me unrecognizable to her constantly fluctuating lucidity.

She called me Asher to mean happiness - an ironic stab at the religion she abandoned when she ran away from home. She branded me with her rebellion, tarred me with the brush of it so that the only real blessing I ever received was on the day she died. Her organs stagnated within her. She didn't even feel it coming, so unaware of anything beyond her own mind. The air she breathed was always so toxic, a mixture of drugs, smoke, farts and sweat. We shared the air, but the production was all her. She lived in a midden of her own making. If it wasn't for me no one would ever have known she had died. The smell of her rotting corpse would have made no difference to the repugnant burn of the building we lived in. No one would have come looking for her. She would have just, stopped.

I noticed of course, when her lungs ceased and her pupils blew. I noticed. I screamed as loudly as I could, repetitively for hours, trying to wake a neighbour to come find us. No one came, and we didn't have a phone. I was forced to abandon her where she lay. Her eyes fixed, paralyzed in a bulging shock. Her hand coiled around the child she treasured above me - the pipe lived for longer than she, burning beyond the time I turned my back on them both and left the flat.

That was the day I was born, from the crusted excrement of someone else's not-quite existence. The eleven years prior; a prenatal incipience.

I pretend to others that my mother died in a car accident. She had dropped me at cello practice and she was just going to go pick me up a treat for afterwards when a lorry slammed into the side of her at a busy junction. I've told the story so many times, for so many years, that I almost forget the reality. In the engaging sonder I experience away from her I forget our abysmal existence, shocked instead by the diversity of life. But my mother's lies have not left me, they seep into my dreams at night; 'I don't do that much', 'I can quit any time', 'It's not my fault', 'I fed you already', 'I'll get help tomorrow', 'I'll come home tonight', 'I won't let him hurt you', 'I won't let anyone hurt you', 'If you don't help I'm going to kill myself', 'I love you'. They swim through my mind like ghosts that she left, hatchlings of the darkness that raped my psyche for the decade before I was born. A frustrated onism convulsing through me, fed by a crippling fear of my own DNA.

The ghosts are so often there I'm beginning to wonder if they're really my own. Children of my own darkness, not hers. I just want to make them go away. To confuse them, just for a while so I can clear my head. Maybe i'll give them something to make them leave, to make them stop. Just a little bit. Just once.

Kiss

I play movies behind my eyes. Walking on auto-pilot, the reels play; step by step, scene by scene. Some would call it daydreaming, but these are not dreams, these are memories. It's like as soon as I plug in my Walkman the video begins. My eyes the projector it shoots from my brain. My rucksack hits against the groove of my back as campus crawls past me. I'm obligated to stay for the whole showing. After all, I am the host.

'My uncle says it's called a kiss' she breathes with excitement. That girl, the movie star of my memory, materializes in a blue haze. 'He says that mum and dad give them to each other all the time.' Beside her is conjured the frame of a boy, my recollection of myself - perhaps taller than i really was. I look down at my scuffed trainers. I didn't have the heart to tell my mum that they were too small as we'd only got them on the day before I started second grade and barely three months had passed at this point. My toes press against their edge, struggling to burst through to freedom. I am wittingly aware of the throb of my biggest nail.
'Does it hurt?' I ask, shuffling my feet into the orange dirt of the field. Our breath rises in murky flourishes as we speak. On another day we'd be holding twigs to our mouths, pretending to be our fathers on Christmas, or the teenagers we pass at the arcade. Inhaling the dirty scent of the twig and blowing it out again in a giggling rush, congratulating each other on how grown up we looked. But today was the day of the kiss. She'd told me last week that she'd show me. She had cried all day in class. Only I noticed, only I ever noticed her. I asked her at recess what was wrong but she said nothing, tears cascading down from her eyes. The wind whipped her faded golden hair, swirling it around her head like a tornado. Where it collided with her tears it stuck, making abstract artwork across her damp cheeks. I reached to a strand of it, partially attached to her blond lashes, and with all the delicacy my stubby hands could muster - brushed it away. At this she smiled. Faintly and sadly her eyes met mine.
'On Monday I'm going to give you a kiss.' Her eyes burned with a fury they shouldn't have possessed. It aged her. I was afraid of it, more than I was afraid of the kiss. Beyond the eyes her chubby cheeks flushed pink in the cold. Her mouth so small between them returned to it's frown. It wasn't enough of a move to be active, it seemed today her face just fell that way.

I was a sensitive boy, raised only by my mother I'd never learnt the skills necessary to engage with the other boys, to run, to climb, to punch. It was instead this girl who taught me these things, as best she could, the knowledge acquired from her brothers. She was too male to be one of the girls, I was too girly to be a guy - we made the perfect pair. We were all each other had, all each other ever needed. She was my salvation, the thing that saved me from my awkward disposition and social disabilities. I assumed we'd have each other forever. I didn't ask her what a kiss was, I didn't want her to think I was naive. Well, more accurately, I wanted her to think I was cool. I just blindly agreed. She said she'd meet me at our place at midday. The holidays had begun that week in preparation for Christmas. The winter day meant we only had a few stolen hours of sun to enjoy together before darkness fell and our parents required us in the light of our homes, away from the sinister night. I thought about the kiss over the weekend, between meals and video games it plagued my mind, as much as anything can plague the mind of a child with a three minute attention span. Our place was the field between our houses. I shuffled through the loose plank of my garden fence, she scaled hers - we met in the middle. It was tradition. We lived in a suburban haven, chosen specifically by our parents for it's low crime rate and high school results. Freedom was a given in the liberal age of 1980, our parents too busy trying to hold on to their lost youths to notice us endangering ours.

On the day my mind replays the field is eerily bare, no longer occupied by hundreds of thousands of wheat blades waving to us with the gentle breeze. Extra friends with whom to play hide-and-seek, concealing ourselves between their shielding hands. Now instead it is just us. Her, a dot on my horizon, and me, a blemish on hers. I am screamingly aware of the isolation of the moment. Even with her approaching. She is what makes me alone, her necessity to me, a necessity she is now exploiting with alien promises. When we meet after our brief exchange we say nothing more, just sink down into the dirt beside each other, our gaze set on the road at the edge of the field. Occasionally on other days we'd count the cars. It was a tedious game, what felt like hours spent awaiting the arrival of a vehicle just for the satisfaction of confirming we knew another number in the sequence we'd been taught. Where we sit the rain has collected in puddles before us. They stretch across the dirt like fluid dreams, creating floating lakes. Solid like mirrors they seem, reflecting the stretched sky above them. Clouds swirl in the stagnant water, trapped there, unable to escape to the desperate sky that is calling them home. Liquid mercury punctuated by blades of dying grass. I want to jump into the worlds those pools hold, be trapped amongst the sky within them - fester there eternally.

She turns to me, fire lapping at the edges of her irises. Hesitantly I turn too, my eyes telling the story of innocence, a story she no longer knows. She asks if I'm ready and I can smell fruit on her breath, a cocktail of multivitamins. She was always the queen of thieves as she stole them, smuggling them in the pockets of her pinafore, unaware of the good they do for her - deceived by the bright colours, the smiling characters, the fruity taste. She pops in another as I nod to her, unsure of why I do so as I've never been less ready for anything in my entire short life. I wince as she reaches to me, my thoughts trail to jabs at the doctors office - the only fear I'd ever known until this point. She places her tiny hand on my hot face, my cheeks flushing as the cold skin of her palm makes impact. Then her hand travels from my face to the front of the cord trousers my mum makes me wear.
'What are you doing?' I squeak, startled. She looks hurt as she reaches for me again.
'It's a grown up kiss. Do you not want one? You promised.' tears prick her eyes as she reaches for me again. I stand up abruptly and stare down at her on the ground. She is kneeling, dirt smudging her pudgy legs, mingling in with miscellaneous scrapes. Her eyes are hungry for something, cohabiting with a sadness that challenges the famine within them. She reaches a hand for me to take. It hangs there sadly, begging me for rescue.

That's the image I hold of her. The last image. I turned from her and sped back to my house. I keep that memory a secret, growing more angry with myself. When I saw her at school the next day she did not speak to me. I tried to plead my apologies but the ice on her shoulder would not thaw. She did not speak to me for the rest of the year, and then I moved, and she didn't have the opportunity to ignore me anymore. Equally I never again had the pleasure of being ignored by her. From what I heard she grew up too fast. She got used to being on her knees, not just in my memory but in her living life. The twigs we played with became real cigarettes between her lips, poisoning her lungs. Her fondness for vitamins became a fondness for narcotics. Her kiss a currency she used to get them. She died at the age of nineteen, in the derelict basement of a house no one lived in.

In my mind though she died that night, I dug her grave with every step away from her I took. When the memory ends, the curtains close briefly then a new feature begins. The life we'd have had if I'd taken her kiss. We fall in love clumsily, not quite sure what we're doing until it's too late and we're already enamoured. When I move we write letters, correspondence of commitment - in some pictures I don't move at all, maybe with a reason to stay I convince my mum not to take that job, not to marry that guy, not to leave my girl. She's unyeildingly happy, and we grow old together, never knowing the hunger for drugs and sex and numbness as she did when she died. If I'd kissed her I could have saved her. But I couldn't. I was just too young.

Push

It isn't a practised art. Just the right pressure to get the job done, not enough to be misconstrued as aggression. It didn't take me long to pick it up, and I've been perfecting it ever since. Years and years stood on this platform, the air unnatural and artificial, any breeze generated hot and unsatisfying. But my obedience is feigning, boredom taking its place. As I enter the tunnel each morning, the light blinding me in waves - corresponding to each step I take - I feel a hush press about me. It constricts me. Embracing me in a forced silence, hundreds of feet below the organic sounds of surface life. My undeniable authority originally apparent in my attire, challenged by the mandatory quiet. A uniformed conformity to my meagre responsibility. The people all look the same now. I've begun to wonder whether the pattern of commuters has caused me to grow accustomed to faces I see every day, or whether I now don't recognise individuality. It's hard to appreciate it in a crowd like this. Body parts being pressed against you from every angle in a desperate necessity to surge forward. As the train pulls up to the station the edging begins. A communal glance behind separate shoulders and then a step. Anticipation mixes in with the hot damp sweat in the air as each person fantasises about the seat they may claim for the journey ahead. The odds are against them. Shuffling methodically like corpses in rapture they rev for the race. Competition screams from every face and as the doors announce their opening - the battle begins. They start alone, no need for encouragement. I stand with my back to the wall and my cap pointed down. The panic that gripped me when I was first employed doesn't faze me anymore. Instead a new excitement is born, somewhere sadistic in the depths of my exhausted, humiliated mind. As their struggle announces my requirement I step to them, arms outstretched in preparation. They thrash and squirm like cattle heading for slaughter. Their bodies half constricted in a confused conflict between the want for freedom, and the need for transport. I place my palms flat against the jumbled heat of their clothed skin, and I push. Beginning with a soft nudge and progressing to a desperate heave, I push. As they edge inwards, past the automatic door and onto the carriage, I realize my chance will soon pass. I remove my key from its strap around my neck, and slip it between my meaty fingers. Closing a fist around it I begin to jab. I watch the faces of the people it impacts. Their confusion and their pain expressed abashedly through their generic features. Men's gasps indistinguishable from women's, both alike in collective suffering. Before they can respond I pull back my assistance and the doors close on them, symbolizing the end of my responsibility. Confusion plauges them and as their gazes fall on my twisted features, contorted with unquashable ecstasy - acceptance leaks in and occupies their resolves. Through the glass their eyes accuse, pounding against the smudged divide. Unable to escape, unable to catch me, to punish me. Their focus is torn, dragged away and ripped from me. And in that moment I forget that I wanted to be a lawyer, that I am impoverished - hindered by a meagre salary- presented only with a fabricated title, supposed comfort for a glorified herder. Paid to touch but leisurely never allowed to. In that moment, as my sinister eyes fall back to the floor; I smile. 

Her

People keep telling me it's her eyes. They all get lost in them apparently. Her irises compiled of trapped amber. Fossilised resin, trapping hearts like bugs for thousands of years. They tell me it's her lips. Perfect leaves of flesh, peeling back like waves from a shore to reveal her crashing swell teeth. White and sparkling like the crest of a surf. They mention her skin. Porcelain and soft in the winter, calling to be caressed and sheltered, tan and taunt in the summer, being kissed by the sun, inspiring jealousy and screaming to be claimed. They say it must be her laugh; a symphony of wind chimes, cascading down a trickling ravine. Bubbling like a champagne opened for celebration - the jubilee of youth and liberty. They tell me of her hands, delicate and flawless - tools for her every day. No, they say, it must be her allure. The way she moves to music like she's part of the air, a gust of iridescent beauty, shimmering with every change in the tune. The way she speaks with a purr, a mighty lion discreetly prowling beneath the murmur of a kitten. The way she deviates from the norm, because she's wild and she's elusive and you're never sure where her brilliant mind is at any given moment. Or maybe it's her body? Sculpted by the Gods, with her curves all working harmoniously to capture your attention. Her hair is spun gold, a waterfall of the precious metal descending to her soft shoulders. That must be it. Or perhaps it's her legs, disproportionate to the rest of her body. Long and slender, challenging a quest to discover what is at their end. It must be her personality. She of intelligence and wit. She of intrigue and understanding. She of substance. Or is it her background? Revered in social circles, she is both educated and influential. They ask me on the sly if she's a good fuck, as if she her skills between the sheets are enough to capture my heart. It must be that. She must be incredible. 

All these things, people tell me, are why I love her. They look upon her like a prize I've won, captivated and enamored by her ceaseless glamour. They look upon me with confusion. Surveying me with skeptical eyes, as they calculate my list of attributes and make the inevitable comparison. But this is their love for her. Their raw attraction and searing desire. That which gripped them the moment that they lay their eyes on her. It will stay within them fleetingly. They have to forget or they can't go on. She takes their breath away. She takes their minds away. They bumble and hush over her appeal, every aspect of her they see they compile into a list entitled 'Reasons to love her'. 

But I don't love her, not in the way I'm supposed to. Each day passes and I try to muster up adoration, as is expected of me. But she's vacuous. She's vain. She's beautiful, but she's troubled. She's needy, she's obsessive. She leaves cups all over the house and never washes up. She expects the world but does nothing to attain it. She's entitled and she never lets me chose the takeaway. She's ambitious but lazy. Granted, she is wild, but it's irksome, she never sticks to plans. I wait in restaurants for hours past our reservations to discover she's spent hours and tonnes of our money choosing a new bread maker. She never even makes bread. She never even cooks. She steals peoples heart the moment they meet her, but she's just stolen my mind. I'm beginning to despise her. Every time she's home late I cautiously hope she's been killed walking home. Targeted for her short skirt and high heels that apparently I bought. All this considered I do stay with her, she is still mine in the eyes of the lord and the rest of the world. After all she really is phenomenal in bed. 

Stress

It's all getting too much. I feel like there's a woman sitting on my chest. She's not slight in stature or doing it playfully, this isn't foreplay on a Sunday morning - she's obese and she's pinning me down with her meaty knees, her pudgy fingers wrapped possessively around my heart. And she's squeezing. Squeezing like my organ is a stress ball and she's a smoker two days into a begrudging bid to quit. I wish her chest was open, rib cage spread like legs in a brothel, so I could reach in and grab her innards; repay the courtesy. Maybe then the feeling would fade, she'd readjust her stance, relieving me for a brief euphoric moment. 

But she's set on her position, and with each passing second, each day's meals, her weight increases. I can feel myself snapping under it. Breaking slowly around the edges, creaking quietly further to finality. What relief that would be to fall into darkness, to be welcomed into the vacuous entirety of death. Free of the burden of tactile experience. But this woman is selfish, she's relentless and she's cruel. I think once I snap she'll keep my heart beating, crushing rhythmically just enough that I survive. I'll have fragmented bones protruding through my skin but she won't notice through her gluttonous rage. Too fed by the calm I give her. Then I'll be forced to keep on living, not quite sure of what I am. Of that I am terrified. 

She found me through my desperation. She smelt the desire for success as it dripped in beads from my temples, as it seeped from my pores and dirtied my clothes. She was infatuated by it and to it she flew. She stalked me, kept to the shadows, taunting me slightly at every turn until her scent mingled in with mine. Corrupting the purity of my determination and making it something heinous and daunting. Something from which I could not escape. The toxin was ripe around me and it infected my lungs, weakening me. Then, as I floundered and fell. She pounced.

I never lost my ambition. It's what she feeds upon. Gorging herself on my frenzied hope of accomplishment, a feast plentiful with choice, all birthed from the mind of a man who can't decide. She can feel the fruits of aspiration sweltering intrinsically within me, she will not cease until they're all dead, maggots writing within them. Rotten, mold spreading like a disease, devouring them. Then she will be done with me, once my riches are spent. However they are woven innately within me. Byproducts of my upbringing. The veins that run through them are extensions of mine. And my end is all that can present them with theirs.

So we will remain like this, this woman and I, entangled in a non-consensual snarl - eternally. Until by the miracle of mortality, one of us fails to take breath. My lust for life ultimately forging our coffins.

Mummy

Her depression was terminal. I remember hearing it before it really hit. Lacing a soft sigh to no one in the kitchen on the morning of my seventh birthday. That was six months after dad died. It wasn't really there in the entirety I know it today, but it was flirting with her, with the idea of her consumption. I suppose it'd be logical to assume the depression was there from the day we put him in the ground, but it wasn't. I became an expert at spotting the difference. There was anguish, and there was pain - but only sadness behind them. It was temporary, and it was safe.

At first she would cry all the time. Weeping at the dinner table, the salt of the gravy welcoming home their cousins found in her tears. Or howling into the darkness, a pillow muffling her screams. A soft cotton hand to replace the callus one that used to banish the moisture from her hot cheeks. No beating heart beneath the cloth, just downy feathers and a wash instruction tag. Do not tumble dry. Cold cycle only.

It wasn't even when the shrieking stopped that I first knew she was finite. Back then I still clung to the hope of repair. I suppose it'd be logical to assume that pain is preferable to death but it isn't. I suppose If something is in pain then at least it's alive, and at least there's the ability to feel left within it. And in her begging I could sense fight. But then came the silence. It was tortuous, even more so than the anguish because at least in the face of horror we're equipped from experience, we know how to make a cup of tea and slap on a warm consoling smile. Even though I was young I was still learned enough to know how to battle misery. But in the silence there was something else, something new, something unnatural.

The tears spilled from her eyes without provocation at awkward and frequent intervals throughout the days, it seemed like she didn't even know they were there anymore. She'd reach an absent hand up to scratch her face and be alarmed by the liquid her fingers met. She'd stare at her moist tips with bewilderment in her frown, as if inquiring how they came to be that way. I suppose she just didn't know the extent of her trauma. Like when a victim is pulled from a crash unaware that they're hurt while their blood and organs are spilling onto the pavement in cascades of crimson like a grotesque waterfall. I suppose It'd be logical to assume that then all it takes is to look down, to lock eyes onto your throbbing intestine, to know you're injured but with her injuries the wounds were hidden. Phantom pains lost within a heart made vacuous by confusion and despair. There was no band aid for her. No antibiotic.

This continued for a while, this bizarre juxtaposition; a woman seemingly healing, but a body betraying her lies, exhibiting her torment. I suppose it would have been logical to assume she was doomed but I couldn't accept this dysphoria as my own. Not me. Not yet. 
But then came the final nail in the coffin she'd spent months building. Months of solo DIY all precisely aimed at this event; she smiled. Just a brief grin, beginning one morning and lasting one day. I arrived downstairs to the smell of bacon and saw her, skipping around pan in hand with a sundress i'd long forgotten existed draped around her body. I watched her and in my youthful innocence I was relieved. To have my mother back, it was such a thing of beauty. I cherished each second she looked at me, naively ignoring the emptiness trapped within the stare. She was lucid, but she was lost. But without the grotesque hands of despair I couldn't recognize the danger. It was as if corroded fingers were previously latched onto her irises and without them I could see the blue again. That was enough for me, so deprived of happiness as I was. We merged into a family again that day, laughing like we used to before the stroke - before dad. We washed the dishes and cleaned the house, I was so ecstatic to have her again that I didn't even protest to the busy work. I soldiered on making sure every dish was sparkling, every surface wiped. She kept saying 'it all has to be clean, it all has to be clean'; I didn't care why. It was difficult to care about anything that day - because she was back. I fell asleep with fantasies of the happier years ahead, things returning somewhat to normality within our depleted family. I suppose it would have been logical to assume that no one can heal that quickly. But I was a child. I was alone. And I was terrified.

I woke in the night with my bladder screaming to be emptied so I scurried to the bathroom. When I entered my foot met a heavy liquid. I could feel the cool ceramic tiles underneath, made colder by the substance coating them. I reached for the light but when i pulled down on the slowly swinging string no illumination occurred. I stumbled forward through more moisture of the same consistency, making splashes as I maneuvered, feeling satisified with every ripple like a toddler at play amongst an october rain. I rubbed my bleary eyes trying to locate the toilet in the abyss. Then suddenly my footing slipped and I fell. Scrabbling to get up from the wet floor I reached for the rim of the bath tub. But something else met my grasp. Rising shakily my gaze fell on the bath, illuminated by the shy rays of ethereal moonlight playfully peeking through the cloud, there she was. My mother. Nude. Surrounded by a slowly coagulating pool of her own wasted blood. The smile she'd held all day still breathing across her face. I remember my first thought when I saw her.It was compulsive and I will always be ashamed for it. I wondered who would take me to school in the morning with her occupied in this manner. I couldn't avert my eyes from her, as banal necessities and responsibilities filled my mind, they stayed locked to the gaping slashes cut sideways through the creases that her elbows made. As they wouldn't move I closed them, instead picturing sunday mornings as an infant, flailing among the bubbles as she flanneled me down. I couldn't bear to open them, to see her lifeless face mock me with it's reality, to have the sinister red stain my memories of her. So I didn't. I sank to the floor, my hands and feet meeting the damp, and began to crawl back towards what I thought was the door. But I collided with a wall almost immediately. I stayed there, curling myself inwards towards the corner I had met, my back to the horror.I stayed there for 36 hours. I suppose it would have been logical to get up, to move, to remove the clothes covered in the dead blood of my grieving mother, to clean myself of each drop of her, to continue my life, to take myself to school, to go to college, to meet a girl, to fall in love, to live. But i'm still there in my head. Because I couldn't. I just couldn't move.