She stares at the floor. She has to be dreaming. She can’t believe it actually happened. She’s in shock, a deep shock vibrating her core and numbing her skin.

She shivers, and looks up at the ceiling, where drops of blood fall into a small puddle on the clean linoleum below.
A small trickle of water seeps in from the laundry room to her left, and the clear veins of water glide around her extended foot, attracted to her self-loathing tension. The water knows what she’s done, knows it can’t fix her and wants to be a part of this torture in her soul.

She kicks the water away, futilely and desperately. This is the most movement she’s taken since she came downstairs, and it is the opening of the reservoir of tears within her. She sobs, huge racking sobs that convulse every fiber of her being.

She hates herself. She hates herself. She takes her fist, and she punches. Anywhere and everywhere she can hit. Her legs, her neck, her stomach, her chest. Anything she can do to herself to make herself feel, to make herself hurt. She needs to be punished.

She knows that she deserves to die, but she isn’t sure if she has the guts or selfish selflessness to do it. The gun lays on the tile across the room, it’s barrel turned toward the wall in cowardice. She scoots over to it and picks it up. In her mind it burns her hand, but she holds on strong. This pain is nothing to her.

She slowly finds the strength to stand up, and squints her puffy eyes to hide herself as she walks past the mirror. She has to crawl up the steps. She didn’t realize she was so weak, but she’d looked at the clock on the way up, and she’d been sitting there bawling for over four hours.

At the top of the steps, she loses her breath. Her lithe, agile body isn’t tired, but she sees his foot, carelessly hanging out into the hallway where he fell. She can’t go on yet. She looks at the gun, still in her hand. It’s her light, her only exit sign.

She walks on, into the bedroom, stepping over his foot. She squats down beside his head and looks at his pale, sunken face. His body is already well into the process of rigor mortis, and it flushes her hopes that he’ll sit up and say, “Boo.”

Tears are streaming down her face, a hurt so intense, so overwhelming, that she is not even aware she is crying once more.

Finally, she’s done looking at him. She cannot grasp that she did this to him, and yet her hands apparently can. They put the barrel of the gun to her head, and she inhales sharply without exhaling. The cold barrel feels hot against her temple, and it slides a centimeter from her perspiration and the pressure she’s applying. Maybe if she just pushes it into her temple hard enough, it will take care of itself, and she won’t have to pull the trigger.

She lets go of all pretenses, and time seems to pause as she pulls the trigger. She drops, falling onto his body before her. Her tears roll down his stomach, the force of gravity in action.