1. Going hungry (the dead girl that just wouldn't die and how hungry she was in the little house with the odd windows)

It didn’t work.

 It took a moment for my eyes to focus on the room. It was night time and I knew this because those high windows above my bed were completely black. Dangling skeletons swayed in the slight breeze of the Air unit, as did the ruffles of my makeshift curtain which didn't even cover the windows. I watched those things move and they moved in a staggering rhythm; if visualized things had a rhythm. I couldn't think in order; I think they had rhythm.

 It was different in the light; those days that I would smile instead. During the day, I loved to lie there on my bed and watch the leaves of the trees twist and shake in the wind. The blue sky beyond was magnificent contrasting the green of the leaves, then the red and brown as autumn came. I looked up and out of that window almost every day until I fell into a revere. I even began to float above it all, dancing among the leaves with my pretend wings, letting the air ruffle my feathers. Then, I would come down again and enter my mortal body. I would always be shaken from the experience; somehow filled with a new fire. I would be rejuvenated with  life to go on.

But, It was dark now, so I focused on the black that filled both rectangular window panes: and I fancied myself in a dream.

My arms were weak. The blood had dried upon my wrists. I didn’t understand it; there was no pain. As I stared at my arms, my vision  began to clear; but not entirely. It didn’t feel normal at all, my vision, nor did it completely go clear. There were cloudy corners in my eyes and when I would look up into foggy areas, my eyeballs would start to shake; then they got stuck. I immediately wanted to pull them down with my fingers. My hands made claws reached up in habit: I shook my head.

“Uggh” I grunted. I squinted my eyes.  I opened them again and they were moving as normal: all normal but the groggy corners. I looked around the room and held both arms out in front of me. The blood crackled and broke loose when I bent my wrists.

2 hours later

I sat upon the kitchen floor, propped against the cabinets; and I cried. I thought I cried but I guess the tears has all gone dry from the night before. I looked at the gap, 5 inches in length below each hand. My wrists had been opened up, wide open, like mouths. There were no scabs, no dark bruised patches; there was nothing but slits that grew wider when I bent my wrists. My vision was still not clear. My panic grew with each moment that I realized my vision was not clearing; the groggy corners had spread to cover most of both  my eyes. Everything resembled a painting by monet, dappled and blurred and filled with fading color. I saw floaters, speckled spots that raced to and fro in front of me.

 I screamed suddenly; over and over, bringing from the bowels of my being, a wretched screech.

The echo of my screams announced my lonliness and all was quiet again.

 I noticed my hands growing stiff, my neck followed suit.

 

4 hours passed

 

I knew something was wrong besides what should have been wrong. My deed lay undone and I realized I had flubbed it all. I failed miserably and now I had contracted some sort of infection from the blade or some flu.; I would say that I felt horrible, but something prevented me from feeling anything but confusion. My mind was chaos, madness; nothing made sense.

 Or maybe the pills has some awful blinding side effect. I could barely walk from the kitchen to the living room without things popping and  scrubbing around my bones. My whole body was affected by my stupidity.

 I thought about the meds, wondering and trying to remember the after affects. I took 5 Hydrocodone and shook the contents of Acepaminaphen, Tylenol and Bactrim bottles down my gullet. I didn’t count those other pills though. I knew it was enough, or was it? Apparently, it hadn't been enough to kill me. I thought about it again and my thought patterns suddenly shifted.

 For one moment I was considering the fact that I still may be in the process of dying; then I thought of food.

 I was hungry.

I felt  a hunger pang, deep within my stomach. It rumbled softly at first then it built into a audible thunder.  I heard it with my own ears. The noise reverberated on my ear drum making strange echoes. I grabbed my ears and realized the sound hurt them badly. My ears started to ring; loudly at first then dying down to a low hum. Everything was going haywire, my system, my brain; I was losing touch with reality and at a very fast pace.

And, then the awful wrenching silence crept in taking the place of all other things. I thought for a moment that I heard my own breath but I was mistaken. I pushed and strained for air to come out of my mouth but there was nothing. I opened wide, my nostrils; flaring them and scrunching my face.

I could not breath and yet....I lived....or maybe I didn't live at all. I was going mad.

I thought once more with logic. It was true, I just wasn’t done dying yet. But I was torn. There was only one thing that made me second guess that thought; I was hungry. My stomach had no idea that I was done for. It kept rumbling on like some deranged starved thing. As I rubbed my abdomen and made to shush my growling gut, the fingers of my bones popped and grinded at the joints. But there was no pain....

 

cept for the undying pain of my starvation