Alabaster White
There was nothing in that room...
There was nothing in that room but four white walls, newly painted, and a dead body sprawled out obscenely, a naked, empty thing, and the pooling, rapidly cooling blood around it. Red, but a shade darker than it ought to be. There was nothing in that room, but an ocean. A deep-red sea, it seemed to me, the collected run-off of cruel rivers emptying an island of alabaster white. Some body, a body that used to be somebody. Somebody that used to brush her teeth in the morning. Before her teeth stopped meaning anything—being anything more than rows of pearlescent tombstones, bones strung through a rictus grin inside a slack jaw. A smile like tribal shell jewelry set in a face, once proud—all disapproval and high standards found wanting, now wanting for much more than the bare minimum. How disgraced she would be, if she could see herself now. How graceless her form’s fail state, how… awkward the unfolding sprawl of untethered musculature and bone. This body, unfolded, this wilted flower, this open empty hand that used to hold things, like the air in her lungs, like her ability not to succumb under her own dead-weight— held together by grit and the sheer concentrated effort of life under duress. But she buckled. The evidence of it could be seen for years. In the hollows of her face, eroded by tears, in the deep lines lack of sleep had cut down her face, through decades of unrest. And the deep lines she cut down her wrists, canyons they seemed, screaming blood. She won't be wanting for sleep anymore, that's for sure. I mumble under my breath before opening my notepad and getting to work.