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“Did you see?” Carol asks Zosia on the third day.
The first day was a blur.
The second day, questions started needling in her scalp like a hangover—one that none of her usual tricks could drive out. (Not hair of the dog. Not even Zosia getting her down on all fours.)
Now, she’s taking a measure of last resort. She’s asking the questions.
Head in Zosia’s lap, words muffled by her thigh. Her skin’s still sticky with sweat, even though they’ve been this way awhile. Long enough that the arm Carol has pinned behind her reclining lower back feels less like a limb than a staticky sandbag. Long enough for the shadows around the room to thin and lengthen.
The static’s climbing to her chest, and the shadows are climbing to the ceiling corners.
Save yourself the trouble, Carol wants to tell them, since here’s nothing there for them to find but cobwebs.
Zosia’s working apart the knots she knuckled into Carol’s hair, making soft, clucking sounds that Carol can’t decide are familiar or not.
It doesn’t matter. Either way, she’s comfortable.
(Like, actually comfortable. So hungover or not, it makes perfect sense that she wants to fuck it up.)
Zosia’s hand stills, and softens into a cradling hold.
“See what, Carol?”
Her tone is gentle, but cautious. Carol swallows thickly.
“While you were… while I was…” She puffs out a sigh, shakes her head in frustration. The preamble threatens to choke her, and she’s pretty sure it isn’t necessary. So she settles on, “The firework.”
There were a lot of fireworks, but she’s only talking about one. She hopes she won’t have to specify, since that would be even worse than the preamble.
“Yes,” Zosia says, quickly and simply. (Saving Carol from herself.) “The drones are equipped with a night vision system. It’s pretty advanced.”
She pauses. And within it, Carol can hear her—them—thinking. Weighing pros and cons, like she’s a bomb they’re working to neutralize. Words deployed like wire cutters, hovering an extra loaded moment before they decide which lines to snip.
“We calculated the trajectory it would take, based on the visualized angle and the typical thrust force of that sort of explosive. We determined that as long as you didn’t move, there was only a negligible likelihood that you’d be in its path.”
“Negligible,” Carol repeats, and the word feels like a mouthful of gumballs.
She extracts her arm from around Zosia and pushes herself up to sit beside her, then scrubs her staticky hand up and down her face.
It’s strange, touching herself without enough nerve function to feel herself touching back. Almost like being touched by somebody else.
“Um—insignificant,” Zosia says. “Too small to be worth serious consideration.”
Carol scoffs. Her hand falls, and makes a whooshing sound when it hits the pillow. She can’t feel the softness of it any better than she could her own skin.
“I know what negligible means,” she mumbles.
She’s getting angry now, and she can’t stop it. She wishes that she’d let herself stay comfortable. She wishes she knew how.
“And if I did move?”
Zosia makes an indecipherable expression. Her lips part, but nothing comes out. Then she gives a non-committal shake of her head—possibly explained as a way to ease the hair draping over one side of her face back behind her shoulder.
(Possibly not.)
There are two glasses on Carol’s nightstand. Identical low ball tumblers. One filled with vodka, and the other with water.
Zosia brought the water, without being asked. Carol’s pretty sure she used the glass she did so Carol might reach for it by mistake, and somehow get fooled into hydrating herself before she noticed the absence of a sharp and soothing scent.
Zosia doesn’t get it, Carol thinks as she reaches for the water. She doesn’t realize that if she numbs her senses enough, she can almost pretend she’s being touched by somebody else.
The promise of a smile ghosts over Zosia’s mouth when Carol lifts the glass from the table. Already beautiful, already victorious. And Carol thinks about how beautifully she’d smile if Carol ever surrendered to her for real.
Then she leans sideways, smashes the glass against the wall. And the victory, at least, dissipates in an instant.
Fragments clink and clatter, and some land in the glass of vodka. For a moment Carol grieves the loss of it, since it’s only a matter of time before all the vodka in the world is gone. Before all the potatoes and corn are rotten and there’s no more windfall left to put to use. Really, she should savor every drop she can.
But then she looks at the shard of glass she’s holding, the small bit of blood trickling over the heel of her hand.
It looks so right, and feels so right. So maybe it would feel just as right to swallow the glass as it does to clutch it, and taste red metallic rivulets all the way down her throat.
Zosia’s eyes widen, and she shrinks back against the pillows. Her nakedness makes Carol think of cornered prey, or the true crime shows she used to watch after Helen went to bed.
She remembers most clearly a case involving a woman who got held hostage by her ex-boyfriend. The way her hands flew up to protect her face in the footage they got of her rescue.
(She was naked, too, but they blurred her body out.)
Carol takes a breath. It’s steadier than she would’ve expected, considering how fast her heart is beating.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she says. Ever-so-slight emphasis on “you” before she moves the glass to her own thigh, a few inches above the knee.
She’s cut herself before, here and there. Mostly using the baby pink Venus razor that appeared in the shower around the time she turned thirteen.
No explanation, no justification. For awhile she ignored it. But then it was summer, and it got too hard to ignore the pointed looks her mother gave her bare and downy legs. So she gave up, and gave in, and she hated herself for it back then, too.
She never really took to it. Not the shaving, nor the cutting.
The pain didn’t do anything to cancel out what pain she was already in—it only added to it, and made her crabby. And even with all the hair shorn off of her, her mother kept giving her those same pointed looks. So why go through the trouble?
Then her father died, and all of a sudden there wasn’t anyone around to notice if the bottles in the liquor cabinet got topped off with water.
That, she took to. So readily that she wondered if maybe that was what other people meant when they talked about how good it felt to come home.
Maybe things have changed since she was thirteen, she thinks. The glass looks right, feels right (tastes right). Maybe that means she can come home again.
“Carol,” Zosia says, and there’s an edge to it.
The tension in her frame changes. Not cowering—coiled. Her gaze flicks between Carol’s face and hand, and she shifts her weight. Flexes her fingers. Subtly, enough that Carol almost doesn’t notice. But she already knows what to look for.
She already knows that Zosia’s capable of saving her from herself. The scars on her back guarantee that she can never go too long without remembering that.
But this is something different. She’s sober (kind of), and it’s daylight (however long the shadows are), and she knows the glass is real. It’s as real as anything has ever been.
The bead of red that’s formed where her skin meets the apex of the glass dribbles downward, joining with the blood from her hand and heading toward the sheets.
When the first drop feathers out among the weave, she presses harder. Drags the shard sideways.
It stings. It jags. It bites. Carol grimaces as she pulls a sharp breath through her nose, and Zosia starts to reach for her.
“Stop,” she says. Orders, really. “I want this, okay?”
Zosia obeys, and her hand brushes futilely against Carol’s forearm before she tugs it back. Her brows pull together. Voice wavering.
“Okay.”
Carol makes a sound. Maybe it’d be a laugh, if it wasn’t so coarse.
“Okay,” she echoes, mocking Zosia’s fearful tone. “Pretty sure there’s an artery near here.” She looks at Zosia. “There is, isn’t there?”
Zosia nods, just barely.
“Where.”
“Carol,” Zosia says again.
“I said, where?”
Zosia traces her thumb slowly up the inner plane of her own thigh—running over the row of marks Carol left with her teeth that morning. Her hand trembles.
Carol moves the glass to mirror her.
“How deep is it?”
“A few centimeters—an inch or so.” It comes out steady, now, but distant. Like Zosia’s voice has detached itself from her body to float in the air above their heads. “Maybe a bit less near the tendon.”
She taps her thumb up past the marks, and pinches the tensed protrusion of flesh near the trimmed line of her pubic hair.
“Hm,” muses Carol. She pulls the glass away, and looks at it for a moment. Holds it up, waving it in front of her. “I’d need something bigger, wouldn’t I? Like a knife?”
Zosia’s lips contort around words she doesn’t speak, and then she chews on them to keep them still.
“It’s not really a question,” Carol sighs.
And it’s not, because she’s already gotten her answer.
She slumps against the headboard, and limply lets the glass drop to the floor. Not a second passes from the time she does to the time Zosia’s grabbing her hand, pulling it to her face to inspect the cuts on her palm with narrowed eyes and a tutting click of her tongue.
The blood’s still running—from her hand and thigh alike—but it’s slowed. Enough that Zosia seems to feel comfortable leaving her, so she jogs to the bathroom to rifle through the shelves and cabinet.
When she returns she’s carrying tweezers, Band-Aids, gauze, and a bottle of witch hazel.
Carol says nothing, but when Zosia sidles onto the bed—in front of her now, instead of beside her—she shakes her head.
A memory floods in. Like so many memories lately, it melds together with the image in front of her. Edges bleeding between one and the next, making it so Carol struggles to name exactly where the difference lies.
She and Helen were doing a puzzle on the coffee table, and Helen went to bed. Helen went to bed, and Carol poured herself another drink. Carol poured herself another drink, and Carol poured herself another drink.
Exactly what happened after that, she’s not sure. But she knows that somehow, the puzzle and the glass top of the coffee table ended up shattered, pieces scattered across the rug. And she remembers thinking that maybe she could reassemble both of them, and maybe Helen wouldn’t notice.
But then she looked down at her hands, and realized they would turn the puzzle’s serene blue sky crimson.
(Helen did the sky. She always claimed the hardest sections when they did puzzles, and Carol thinks now that she never dared to ask whether she actually preferred the challenge, or if she was just trying to save Carol the frustration.)
(She decides not to ask Zosia, because she’s too worn out to stay angry.)
The next thing she remembers is standing by the bed. Waking Helen with a knee in the hip, so she wouldn’t ruin the comforter. The growing whites of Helen’s eyes as she came to, and adjusted to the darkness enough to take in the sight of Carol caught red-handed beside her.
They didn’t stay on the bed. That part was different, Carol knows for sure. Helen hurried her to the bathroom, making a wry joke about blood and bed sheets and consummation of medieval marriages, that Carol laughed at far too loudly.
Helen didn’t laugh with her, but she looked at her with an intense and piercing fondness as she sat her on the corner of the tub. Then she held her hands beneath the faucet, dousing them in hydrogen peroxide after the water had run enough of the blood down the drain.
It stung so bad that Carol told her to go fuck herself, and then Helen did laugh.
“I want the peroxide,” Carol says to Zosia, whining like a child begging for candy instead of broccoli.
Zosia’s brow smooths out, softening with the knowledge of every emergency room physician and every chemist and every mother whose child has ever whined for candy instead of broccoli.
“Both substances have similar cleansing properties, but witch hazel has been shown to cause significantly less pain upon application. Peroxide is preferable only if there’s a high risk of infection, which is not expected in a setting like this.”
“Why clean it at all, then? Just give me the Band-Aids, I’ll slap one on and be done with it.”
“Well, infection is not expected, per se, but the risk is still present. Albeit, neg—”
“Fine,” Carol snaps, because if she hears Zosia say the word negligible again she might actually strangle her.
She looks away while Zosia tends to the cuts. And as she presses the last Band-Aid in place, the aftermath of Carol’s stunt settles in her, and turns her stomach.
The nausea feels less like a hangover than preemptive embarrassment. Like she somehow lost a race so spectacularly that she’s still going to be in the paper for it.
All she wants now is to forget. She wants to forget she ever cared whether Zosia would value her life enough to intervene if she really tried to snuff it out.
Because of course she doesn’t. Of course they don’t. They value Carol just enough to be conflicted over her pain, right up until the conflict disappears.
After that, they’d probably be grateful for another body. For the sustenance her self can provide in a time of dwindling supply.
A wrecking ball’s worth of grief knocks her in the chest as she realizes that when she inevitably starves, there’ll be no one around to make sure she’s buried next to Helen.
Zosia certainly won’t.
But Zosia cleans up the glass while Carol steps gingerly into a pair of sweats, easing the waistband over the gauze bandaged neatly on her thigh.
Zosia strips the bloodstained sheets, and Zosia pours more vodka into a fresh and frag-less glass when they settle in front of the television.
Carol leans against her chest, and puts her feet up on the coffee table.
Helen replaced the broken table with a wooden one, with no input from Carol.
Zosia didn’t bring her a second glass with water this time.
One decision bleeds into the next.
Carol wants to forget, so she tries to forget. She tries to focus on the television, and Zosia’s breath tickling her ear. The warmth of her arm draped across her, and the steady, sure thumping of her heart.
She tries—as she often has, and often will—not to think too long about the jagged, bleeding edges.
It never does her any good, when the difference between the broken halves is negligible at best.