Or am I? The knot coils tighter and I feel like I might turn inside out. I put my hands to the glass that reflects the clouds above. I need something solid, something stable, something besides the concrete.
My hands pass through and I look up my arms, my bare arms. Then down, the same dress.
No, it can’t be. She doesn’t look anything like me. She has lank tangled hair while mine is fluffed and wavy. She has pale skin, but mine is rosy, flush. Her eyes seem empty, reflective. I look into the glass for my reflection, to see my eyes.
Nothing. I’m not in the reflection. I AM the reflection.
No. I am not dead. I storm through the window and the house. Who did this? Who is responsible? I am not going to just stand around and be dead. I gasp when I enter the next room. It is good this one isn’t visible from the window or the man on the phone would be more panicked. Blood smears the wall, the bed. Ricky lays in a pool of his own blood on the floor. On the nightstand is a glass next to a bottle of pills, the ones he gave me. The ones he said would make everything okay.
Blackness. I can’t see the room, or either corpse. It’s dark and empty, but I hear screaming, Ricky screaming.
“Wait! Trish! Don’t do it! It’s me. Remember? It’s Ricky.” Then more screaming and yells to stop.
Color returns in a flood, first red, then yellows, greens and blues. First the blood, then the earth and sky. He couldn’t have known. Neither of us could have known what that white pill would do in combination with the pink ones I took every day. Was it the interaction that stopped my heart, or the reality of what I’d done when I recovered enough to know?
I’ll never know. And neither will anyone else.
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