Chapter 1
2 am. It’s always 2am. The blood runs down her leg; she wakes up to it. Reaches a hand down to figure out what the wetness is. Her water has broken. But it’s too early. Her period has come. But it’s too late. And there’s too much blood.
She still isn’t fully awake. The world is grey like water down the sink drain. Her own blood smells like an open tin of soup. Warm soup, and she’s walking in it, thick and hard to move through. If she could get the air out of the way, she’d move faster.
The sun isn’t coming through the window yet. Jerry is snoring loudly in his pyjamas, rolled over on his back. You have to roll him over on his side when he’s like that, to make the snoring stop. When it’s loud enough to wake you. When you feel like you’ll go deaf.
He’s sleeping in her blood without knowing it. It’s horrifying. Splotches on his pyjamas. His arms. His face. There’s so much.
She wills him to wake up, gazing in longing at the closed lids of his eyes. Wake up, damn it, something’s wrong. She tries to call to him, but no sound comes.
Her knees give out. She’s dizzy. Something moves.
She has to go to the bathroom.
When did the hallway get so long?
It tilts to one side unexpectedly, and she falls against the wall. Another handprint staining the drywall. And she complains about the ones he leaves. This one’s worse.
Her palm sticks to the wall. She pulls it off, takes another step. There’s more blood. More pain. She crumples to the floor like dirty laundry being carelessly dropped, and crawls toward the bathroom door, feeling the burden of the legs that drag behind her.
They pull against her spinal column and she fights for purchase with both hands. It doesn’t feel like dragging herself across the floor. It feels like falling. Like the bathroom is the edge of a cliff with a sunny meadow on top, and the floor is an edge she’s hanging over, barely clinging on.
Her body swells up and the bleeding slows. She rolls on her back and screams for him. Even though her voice feels loud, it sounds tiny. Whispered words in a darkened hallway. It’s the middle of the night and he got home two hours ago. There’s no waking him up. She knows.
The bathroom is so far away. She has to get off the carpets. She has to call 911. But the phone is on her nightstand, back the way she came, and she’s come so far already. There’s no place to go but forward. No where to go but up.
Her gleaming meadow is a cold room full of icy, slick tile. The toilet threatens to hit her on the head and she calls it’s bluff, leaning into its gaping mouth and vomiting. Take that.
She tries to call him. There’s no sound now. Less sound every second. God is an old woman turning the volume down so she can hear the neighbours talk. God is a mother silencing the TV to go and tend to her baby. Her baby…
She has to save her baby. But her phone is so far away.
The neighbours. She hates the god-damned fucking neighbours. Every time you flush the toilet, the pipes make a horrifying sound. BA-WHOOSH! And then wumpa-wumpa-wumpa all the way down the line, from apartment 3 all the way down to apartment zero in the basement.
And when it reaches apartment zero, that cranky bitch with her stringy bottle blonde hair and oversized jaw and underbite, the one who just had a baby and blames her shitty attitude on her iron deficiency…
Julia flushes.
The girl from apartment 0 pounds up the stairs, waking the entire building. The shift worker in apartment 1, who has a crush on her (for some reason) follows her up to 3 and vows to help her stomp the face of whoever made that sound. Once, she would have been scared of the threat. Now, she welcomes it. Because it’s 2am and she’s on the floor, and she’s taking off her underpants to let the blood flow from under her nightgown, and there’s so much goddamned fucking pain that she could do with a good head-stomping.
The old woman in 2, who can’t be bothered to get out of bed, takes a stick she reserves for the purpose and bashes it into the ceiling. This sets off her cat, an elderly Siamese with one good eye and a missing fang, whose only worldly pleasure is to howl at the top of his lungs.
They’re pounding on the door. They’re pounding on the floor. They’re screaming at the top of their lungs. They’re calling the police.
THEY’RE CALLING THE FUCKING POLICE
She heard none of this the first time, of course. The retelling is always worse than the original. She didn’t know how slowly Jerry got out of bed. How he didn’t look for her, despite the blood, but answered the door first. How they thought he’d killed someone.
All she knew was how many times she flushed. So many. So many times. If she died, if the police didn’t come, she would die happy. Not giving a shit what anyone thought. Not tiptoeing in and out of her own bathroom to keep them happy. Not leaving shit in the toilet for hours to avoid them pounding and screaming and threatening and pounding and screaming. Fuck them. She was going to die, and she was going to take their sanity along for the ride.
She flushed again. Again. Again.
She felt it like a need to pee at first, then a need to shit. She couldn’t crawl up on the toilet, so she bore down right there. It didn’t matter if she shit the floor.
It came out in a glory of screaming pain and spouting blood. Not pee. Not a shit. A 6 month old fetus. Dead. Pale and white and covered in blood and green shit and looking way too much like a human being and dead. Fucking dead.
She flushed again. Again. Again.
And she grinned so hard her face hurt, so hard her teeth fell onto the tiles, so hard she shattered into shards like a dropped porcelain doll.
Fuck those neighbours. Fuck those fucking neighbours.
Julia woke up, screaming.
