She awoke with a start, the cold and still water that surrounded her trembled along with her flesh. Her heart jumped briefly as a result of some unidentified disturbance, and it took a moment for her eyes to note the crimson tint of the cold water. Oh god, she thought as panic rose in her chest, I’ve failed even at this. She stood quickly and reached for a towel as bloody water streamed down her breasts and abdomen and splashed the dingy, toothpaste-speckled mirror across from the bathtub. Dizziness took her as she swooned and her tiny frame tumbled toward the cabinet just beneath the mirror, her hands never quite reaching the towel.The sink is so small, she thought as her head spun and her fingers refused to work at gripping the suddenly damp surface; and what the hell is it made of?
As her body adjusted to allow her slender forearms to catch in the sink before she’d folded completely onto the floor it struck her: plastic, of course. Nobody puts nice bathroom counters in a rental. Blood trickled from her wrists into the sink and slipped silently into the depths beyond the drain as she realized why her fingers had failed to work: her deep cuts had severed most of the tendons, rendering her hands nearly useless. The streams of water-thinned blood that had worked their way down her body left a splotchy, almost striped pattern of faded red over her pale skin, from her collar bone to her knees.
She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment, a simple brown haired girl with ordinary features and pale brown eyes. Her long hair lay matted and wet against her cheeks, arms and breasts, while dry patches along the top of her head stood in wild directions. She thoughtlessly pulled one arm upward along her face and attempted to move aside the awkwardly sticking strands, and a sinking sensation washed through her as she realized that her effort had spread a thick layer of half-gelled blood across her face. Small patches of coagulated crimson stuck in her eyebrows and the hair she had tried to move, reminding her once more of the futility in her every act.
Not even this, she thought, as an enraged, bitter sorrow awoke within. Her heart pounded as she faced the bloody and disheveled image of a girl she knew could only succeed at failure. A scream welled within as tears flowed in tiny rivulets down her face, while traces of blood descended away from the agony that tried to emerge from her diminutive lungs. A half cry burst from her mouth with the force of a lifetime’s pain, only to be drowned by a sudden torrent of vomit, hot and thick and acidic in her throat as it pelted the wall, the sink and the floor.
She wept with a gathering intensity as the sight and sound and acrid smell of bodily fluids mixed, a scornful array of red and orange and yellow that clung to her body in places and washed to the wet floor in others. She sank to the soggy, cheap carpet in a puddle of anger and sorrow and self pity; she hated the ordinary little thing she had always been, loathed the failure of twenty-one years effort even as she swallowed her inability to end her suffering. Twenty-one years, she thought. Why?
Her mind swam violently as her tears became a river of blood and salt, and sobs racked her body to the point where if she could have endured a thought it would have been that her ribcage would soon break as her heart desperately sought escape from its empty prison. Her chest raged and her blood pumped, faster now than when she had peacefully and quietly cut her wrists and slipped into the tub of warm water more than an hour ago; and the next hour brought relief at last, as the final tears and blood and life slowly slipped away from sweet Jenna McGee.