She Drowns for Attention; I Stay for the Show...
"Have you ever noticed how water doesn’t kill the noise in your head? Just warps it, makes it stretch and twist like some bastardized jazz solo played through a busted radio."
Her voice comes slow, slurred at the edges like she’s talking through a morphine valium haze. The bathtub is a mess of cigarette ash and half-melted ice cubes from the bottle of cognac we abandoned somewhere between regret and indifference. The whole room stinks of chlorine, sweet nectar sweat, and the kind of decisions you only make at the bottom of a bottle.
She floats, eyes half-lidded, lips barely above the waterline, the rest of her sinking like an elegant corpse waiting for a crime scene photographer.
“ Jesus, I should’ve left an hour ago. Maybe last year.”
"You’re rambling again," I mutter, dragging a palm down my face. The marble tile is cold, the kind of cold that creeps into your bones and settles there like an unpaid debt.
She smirks, lazy, her wet lashes clumped together like some doomed femme fatale from a film noir fever dream. With her soft, lush voice, "Or maybe I just like the way it feels—almost gone, but not quite."
Ah. The Great Disappearing Act. Right on schedule. The perpetual game of Almost—almost sober, almost sane, almost drowning. Not quite dead, but giving it the old college try. I shake my head, flicking my lighter. "You’ve got a real knack for this kind of thing, you know that?"
She hums, the sound vibrating through the water. "And yet, you’re still here. What does that say about you?"
I take a long drag, watching the glow of my cigarette burn in the mirror. "That I appreciate good theatre."
A splash. A laugh. Then, like some sick magic trick, she’s under—just gone. The water swallows her whole. One second. Two. Five.
I don’t move. I’ve seen this act before. She always comes back up. And then she does slow and deliberate, like some reborn prophet emerging from a baptism she never agreed to. Her grin is wide, Cheshire-cat deranged.
"See? You were watching."
I tap my cigarette against the edge of the tub. Ash drifts onto the water like a funeral procession.
"And you were waiting for me to."
Her grin widens, smug and electric, and she has the look of someone who just danced with death and came back for an encore.
– JSPC ] The Wanton Crew [ … Death Wasn’t Impressed, So She Came Back. Again.
