The room was dim, lit only by the haze of a street lamp filtering through half-drawn blinds, scattering lines like prison bars across the detritus of her life: unopened bills, cracked coffee mugs, and the perfumed ghosts of a dozen wilting roses collapsing under their own beauty. Knife to her neck—the thought slithered through her mind, unbidden, unformed, like smoke escaping a fire too distant to see. She pressed her fingers to her temple, hoping to divine meaning from the chaos of the moment, but the jigsaw of letters refused assembly, scattered as though by some cosmic gust.
Words were a storm. They rained in torrents, fragmented and incomprehensible, soaking her thoughts with omens she had no strength to interpret. The post-it notes—cheerful yellows and pinks—spoke a language of lies, each one slapped haphazardly to the walls, the fridge, the bathroom mirror: “You’re stronger than this,” “One day at a time,” “Smile, because it happened.” Their saccharine optimism grated against the grinding in her chest, the truth she could not ignore: she was falling, spinning into the gravity of some unseen event she could not stop, only anticipate.
Across town—or maybe just across the hall—he poured amber whiskey into a chipped glass, his movements sluggish, like a marionette whose strings had frayed. The top-shelf bottle mocked him; it wasn’t his whiskey, it wasn’t his glass, and yet here he was, owning it all with the hollow gravitas of a man who sold everything, including himself. The liquid swirled, catching the dim light like a memory trying to surface, but it went nowhere, dissolved into the haze of his thoughts.
The voices came next. They always did. They whispered in tones too low for words but loud enough to unsettle, to make him wonder whether the sound was inside or outside his skull. They took aim, their intent barbed and deliberate, yet the execution was silence—a silence that curled down his spine, as intimate as a lover’s breath but as cold as the shiver it left behind.
She saw it coming—whatever it was. She always did. The omen hung in the air between them, a phantom that moved between their lives, threading their disjointed existences together like a careless seamstress stitching a wound. And still, the knife stayed at her neck, its edge a promise, a prophecy, waiting for the final rose to collapse under its own weight.
