suicidegirl.

I heard the sirens from miles away.

A screaming forward procession of spinning metallic voices, growing louder and playing into itself more with each passing second. The sounds bounced off eachother and the fronts of the Pacific Avenue houses with a rippling distortion, like separate splashes across a flat sheet of water, bursting and melting combining until there was nothing to hear but a shimmering movement. and then silence. 'Goddamnit, they must be here'. and yet, even knowing that, I couldn't quite grasp what it meant.

My vision swilling, I tried to put together the pieces; my left palm was streaming with blood, a dark thick redness that covered a feelingless hand, five feelingless fingers. In my right I felt a thumb against buttons and realized it was me who had dialed, the smallest voice calling out to me from the end of my arm, "Don't let go of the phone. Can you hear me? Don't let go." Chin and stomach facedown on the carpet, I know I'm at the bottom of the stairs - a smear of blood down the banister, all over the walls - but have no idea how I got there. The ground sucks down on my body hard, down into darkness, my ears and now my throat beneath the floor, sinking into nothing.

The firefighter kicked down the front door in one swift motion, the splinters of white-painted wood bursting off alongside bits of hinge and sunlight; a twirling ballet of iron and oak and dust. His name was Manuel Gomez and he had two daughters, Pamela and Mercedes, and a beautiful wife named Lisa whom he loved. They lived together as a family on Oak Street and on the weekends in the summer Manuel would set up the sprinkler in the backyard for his little girls to run through, shrieking and giggling in their turquoise two-pieces. When his eyes finally adjusted to the darkness of the house and Manuel saw me lying there motionless in a pool of my own blood, he said a quick prayer to God that he would never find his own daughter like this.

More than the screaming or the yelling, my limp limbs as they rolled me over and carried me onto the stretcher, I thought about how I wished one of them would fuck me. A sick thought, but with all of those strong hands touching I couldn't think of anything else; the firemen tearing off my jeans and taking me from behind as my lungs hollowed out, readying themselves for death.

It was here that my eyeballs wiped to pure whiteness. My vision meant nothing, a shrill ringing brightness the backdrop for my movement, the world bouncing me up and letting me fall and shaking me limp, my tendons bulging with pain, joints begging to disconnect, threatening to leave me alone here, nothing but breath and stomach.

Soft piano chords rise out of the screaming, gentle at first but slowly climbing in volume, arpeggiating as if to anticipate the coming of cacophony, rising like a flood, climbing like a sunrise, reaching up like a hand back from the dead finally breaking the surface when...

silence.