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23
Kit
Fuckwhatshername
My eyes flutter open and wheel around. My face presses against the cold concrete, the world turned on it’s side. Warm blood congeals beneath my bad shoulder, but it’s the only warmth I feel now in the cold room. The heater is off. The concrete beneath me, cold. My heart hammers with renewed adrenaline, but my body doesn’t fly off the ground and save me the way my brain wants it to.
The lights are out, and without climbing to my feet to check, I still know with my heart that I’m all alone. They’re gone – for now. The air around me feels so lonely, like that feeling you get when you come home after a week away. The air is stale. The silence so… silent.
Fog races in front of my face with every rattling breath I take.
The silence makes me wonder if I’m already dead, but the pain in my stomach assures me I’m not.
I attempt to sit up, but the pain slashing through my shoulder says no way. White hot fire tears through my ribs and up my spine until it works itself into vomit and makes me sick all over the floor in front of me. The heaving wretches only create more pain in my body, and the pain creates more vomit.
It’s a cycle I can’t end. A pain that just won’t stop.
Tears leak from my eyes and bile chokes me as I try to breathe through the agony.
Make it go away. Take me home. Back to bed. Let me wake in Bobby’s arms and leave this nightmare behind. I’m done. I don’t want this anymore.
The vomit slows to dry retching, then that slows to quiet sobs. Lying on the floor like a bag of broken bones, I pray to a God I’ve never prayed to before that the numbness returns.
My eyes scan in a daze as the congealing blood slides along the concrete around me. Lots of blood. I think maybe too much. I need to get out. I need to go home. I need to stop bleeding, because the dizziness is making me sick.
I wish Bobby would just run through the door like the superhero I know he is. I wish he’d find me and make it better. But my superhero can’t find me if he has no clue where I am.
Idon’t even know where I am.
Preparing myself to stand – because I know that if I don’t, I’ll die from blood loss, or the cold, or if I’m really unlucky, infection from that putrid knife – I cry and slide my good arm forward to leverage myself up.
I try to move slow. I try to stop my head from slamming back onto the concrete from dizziness and fatigue, but despite being careful, black spots float in my vision and almost send me unconscious from the pain shooting through my body. Loose bones rattle around inside my torso and scrape against each other. Broken ribs poke at me like a stitch when running too fast.
Breathing through my mouth, I stop and start, stop and start, and work through the pain until I achingly find my feet.
Eventually, with tears in my eyes and a heaving chest, I straighten my spine and lean against the wall to catch my breath. Swaying dangerously to the left, I clutch at the window frame and cry out as my ankle rolls over itself.
Still wearing my work clothes – I swear, it feels like forever ago I was in the office – I use the barely there moonlight peeking through the window to study myself. My blouse is torn to shreds, especially along my left side and injured arm. My stomach and bra are exposed, and a patchwork of angry bruises angrily mark my skin between the ribbons of ripped fabric.
I tuck my bad arm close against my body and take a step forward. Stumbling with a cry, I look down and realize I only have one heel. Like thick oil through a clogged sieve, my brain slowly wonders where the other fell off. Gone. It’s gone. I kick the remaining heel off and pull my skirt higher so I can move.
Right hand on the wall, I shuffle forward on stockinged feet. Silent except for the shivers rattling my teeth, I creep toward the single door leading to God knows where.
Hell? Or freedom?
The whooshing in my ears makes me dizzy, and the dizzy makes my eyes roll around and close for too long. I reach the door and test the flimsy handle.
Locked, but loose.
Strong Kit would laugh in the face of this door, butthisversion of me wants to sob that it’s not already open.
I stand in place for minutes. Several minutes. Long, almost hypnotizing minutes as I nap and think. I can’t breathe in as deeply as I’d like. My ribs poke and throb inside my torso. Hot rivers of blood and pain pulse at every nerve ending in my body, but that light veil of numbness keeps most of the pain away. I feel the throb, but the sting isn’t awful.
I stare at the doorknob as though expecting it to come to life and open for me, but when it doesn’t, when not even my bloodless consciousness can conjure a hallucination, I sob and step back, and prepare to ram it open.
My stomach rolls preemptively for the pain sure to come, but I bolster my reserves. Bobby might be on the other side. That’s all the hope I can summon, so I roll with it.
Bobby. Go to Bobby. After that, it’s all better.
