Bloodletting

The floor is stained with ichor, the splatter of mucus and the viscous acid pool of my stomach spread across linoleum tiling like an inkblot, disrupting the pristine black-white checkerboard. You're standing with your back against the wall, not speaking, dimly lit by the bare lightbulb gripping desperately to the threadbare wire that latches it onto the ceiling.

My nails are revolting - the crusted crimson staining of blood curls away from my cuticles, fresh scarlet pearling as I scratch incessantly at these tiles, little impressions marking divots; my paper is cold and covered in bile, my ink is red and runs out along shattered nibs. It's strange, to be here. Here, in this kitchen, where you eat. Where you sleep, sometimes, your arms curling around your head like a cradle, neck arched in a pornographic mimicry of a hanging, mouth thrown open like those pictures of Jesus on the crucifix, like you're seeing God and crying out to him, but really you're just choking on your spit as your nasal passages contract and you snort and grunt and startle. You wake up in the mornings with spit drying on your cheek and you scratch at your crotch while you stand and stumble to the fridge, and you get out the same store brand jelly and slop it on your starch white bread, never toasted, but with the crusts cut off, which you then just drop in the trash can, even though your mother always comes in and nags you about composting. She only comes on Sundays, after church though, when you've closed the door on whatever girl you'd been eating out in your living room that week. She's all curly perm and big, fat pearls drooping from her neck like they're imitating Zeus's nutsack, or something, and you're the image of sapphic debauchery, with your mouth around a pair of tits and your fingers knuckle-deep in some broad's snatch after you go out and get wasted at six in the morning, when all the good fucks have already gone home and there's just the sorry, sad-eyed bitches who'll do anything to get another dyke to even blink at them.

Maybe it's gross to mention your mom and your sex life in the same sentence, but then, you've been eating a hamburger while pointing a Glock at me and watching me vomit as I shatter my way through withdrawal, so.

I'm not going to apologize. God, no, this has been the best five years of my life. I used to worry about my hair going grey or what wrinkle cream to buy or if my ex-boyfriend was going to try to bust down my front door and kill me like he'd threatened to before he got hauled away to jail after catching me sitting on his sister's face in his bed. But these days all I worry about is having enough coke to get me through a night of sitting in my car and watching you fuck up your life with your curtains flung wide open. That's the thing about college girls, really - all go-go-go, slutty and wreckless and devil-may-care as you bleach your hair after smoking a blunt, or doing Jell-O shots off a frat boy's ass, or shoplift a dildo out of a sex shop just to see if you can. It's fascinating, really, how utterly ridiculous your life is, how much of a screw up you are. You're going to shoot me in your own kitchen, because you found me out and gave me a striptease through the window, and now here we are, me starving on your floor after two days of this Mexican standoff bullshit, while you stare at me with bloodshot eyes, more sober than you've ever been since the day your nineteen year old ass walked into my English 101 class and started waxing rhapsodic about lesbian porn in your "creative" writing pieces. I failed you, but mostly just because I was bitter and it's never easy having someone trumpet their happy gay sex life when you're in the middle of divorcing a man you'd been married to for fifteen years, with no kids and a job you hate - I was never any good with words, I should have done math, but back in the '80s, we dykes did things a little different - we got high, too, sure, and had too much unprotected sex, but we also divided up the faggiest guys we knew and took the easiest classes we could and spent more time planning orgies and our sham marriages to ugly geeks than planning house parties and social media confessions.

I'm not going to apologize, not to you.

I'm glad I ruined my career on you, and I'm glad my son doesn't talk to me anymore. Because now you're ruined too, with your bare hands all over the gun and my body all over your floor, in this shitty little suburbia that your parents bought for you with their heterosexual money and their straight lifestyle. Killing me is just another case of justice to this world, getting rid of an old, dying cunt who remembers when being you would have been an impossibility.

I'm bitter, and sad, and sixty-four years old. Shoot me, kid. I've heard prison's a lot like high school, and with how bottle-blond bitch you are, I daresay you'll love it.