022/100 aka 162/365

EVAPORATION
Word Count: 350

She cried and cried and cried. She wondered if it would kill her, her tears bleeding out unstopped. If she cried out all the moisture in her body, left shrunken and skeletal like a maple leaf under the microscope of November. She wondered from arm’s length away, as if watching herself on a screen. It was the first sign of things possibly returning to normal, that first rational thought.

Spurred by a Kodak Moment TV commercial she cried for the loss of her lover, the mean things she’d said, the words flung back and forth across torn nets of traditional kindness. She cried because maybe she truly was selfish and as he said, her gamine quirkiness was a foil for egocentricity. The purple shoes were a cry for attention, the Jackie O glasses a focusing lens.

She cried for not telling her father she loved him once she grew up and had experienced the sexual penetration of a man. She cried for allowing her mother to believe she looked good in red hair. Then the past came in with its armies of girls she had snickered about, boys she wouldn’t be caught dead having lunch with at the same table in the cafeteria, teachers she’d outwitted and the lies she had told to them all.

The weight knocked her down to the floor. Her fingernails tore at the polished oak floors, ripped at the fine oriental rug that she now understood she didn’t deserve. Tears ran unchecked to mar the luster of wood with their damaging moisture, leaving clouds on the surface of sky. She took handfuls of clothing and stuffed it between her thighs, blocking another doorway into her soul. Always and still, sobbing. And when she could not cry anymore, when the sun stumbled and fell down, when the darkness crept out of her onto the walls, out the doors and into the street, she fell asleep.

In the morning there was barely a trace of her left. White clouds on the oak floor, tufts of navy blue and red carpet, and a maple leaf way past November.