She dipped her toe in the shallow pool of water and lurched back. She already knew it would scald her, momentarily, but her toes couldn’t resist the test. The jolts of awareness that break up the monotony of the day. Yet another day. Placing her right foot into the tub, forcing herself to keep it there, liquid fire tormenting her ankle and calf. But this time she didn’t budge. She slowly sank into the cloudy bath of mineral salts and the grey reflection of a nondescript ceiling tinged beige in the light.
The water consumed her. At first, through a sudden sting that felt as if she might be being burned alive, and then softer, a warmth which swallowed her deeper. Her toes danced under the still-running faucet, still pouring its liquid flame. Right when she could no longer take its heat she ran her toes firmly against the bathtub knob, pressing into its curved edges, barely gripping it to push it quickly towards its opposite offering. Liquid ice shocked her toes and ankles and calves as she still felt existent heat burning her torso, lying there somewhere under the slipping current resulting from her mere existence.
A bottle of red wine, some blend, opened two nights prior, sat taunting on the counter, along with a wine glass she brought to this very occasion to pour into it the blood red juice of calm into a soul hectic. She failed to remember to drink it, or pour it for that matter. It sat there next to the small heater. A heater which, as her gaze softened on the bottle, turned on suddenly and reminded her of the silence seconds before, which she hadn’t even noticed, with her racing mind always exponentially louder than any sound or taste or touch which dare not to cause clear distraction.
She thought to herself how she needs the sound, the heat, the water scalding, to wrap around her so tightly that for a single moment she gets lost in it. Lost in forgetting whoever it is she is now or was yesterday or who she might be tomorrow, but instead she just pretends to be a creature, any creature, prey and hunter, with the vulnerability of sculpted glass and the strength of unpolished granite.
Bottles floated beside her like dead bodies lost in some battle, left to rot. Bouncing up and down against her flesh, smooth and plastic, as they were. The casualties of sharing a tub with a child. Not at that very moment, but the day prior, without time or resources to purge its victims out on the open battlefield of parenthood.
The water around her too soon turned lukewarm, another victim of reality reflected. She romanticized sinking further into it, her chin and lips swallowed by simple water still. Those pools which are far deeper, intoxicating with their virtue, as vultures make offerings of vice, and so she sinks into it, the lukewarm, the cacophony of a thousand endings, the stories painted in the embrace of tub water displaced into a delicate dance, the same element against her, she reasons, that churns violently about the sea.
life with interest 