Explicably Unknown Her shuddering breath echoed throughout the room like dimes in a tin can. A blanket in the corner, several empty boxes of cereal, a single box of sharpies, some newspaper from god knows when, and a half empty bottle of vodka littered the floor. Or was it half full? Fuck if she knew anymore. She had always been on the pessimistic side of things. Ha. Wonder why. She slammed herself against the wall. Her bloodstained fingers trailed down the white paint, thousands of sharpie written words littering the wall like confetti. Lyrics. Insults. Words of hope. Pleads of mercy. Signatures. Dates. Tallymarks. Words of the hundreds, even thousands, that had been here before her. Splattered blood permanently stained the walls and wooden floor, even an engraving here and there. She wondered how someone managed to get a knife in there. She slumped over to the shattered mirror on the far wall. Her once cascading firey hair had matted into unruly snakes around her sunken-in face. Newly forming scars laced between older scars, raking their way down her cheek and jawline, snaking their way down her neck. Her lips were cracked and dull, her emerald eyes #lifeless. The rag of a tshirt hung loosely off of her thin frame, making her appear ghostlike. She spun around at a sickening speed, absorbing the room around her for the thousandth time. The white of the walls was slowly disappearing under all of the sharpie scribbles. They whispered at her, seeping through her eyes and infecting the darkest corners of her mind. And once again, the screams hit her. Screams of the cursed. The broken. The hurt. The fallen. The lost. Everyone. The countless screams of every last soul in the city hit her dead on, the force sending her crumbling to the floor. Her screams mixed with theirs, and before long, she couldn't tell a single thing apart. The world blended into one seeping, throbbing open scab of hell. The words. The screams. The splinters under her fingernails from digging into the wooden floor, holding on for dear #life. The bleeding sores she had bitten through her own mouth. The bloody trickle of vodka laced saliva making its way down her chin with each gut wrenching scream of insanity. It was time. She grabbed the sharpie nearest her with shaking hands, and crawled to the nearest corner of the room. In the farthest bottom corner, she scribbled "Laura Fitzgerald, 367 days." She picked herself up off of the floor, hastily grabbing the bottle of vodka, and left the room. ©Sabrina Smith October 2012