Rosemary and Rue | After Life's Fitful Fever

I am the rot that brings decay into every room I enter. Everything I touch turns to ash, and every person I try to hold on to curdles into a curse.

It was always me. I shouldn't have been born.

Everyone left. Some by choice, some by dying, and I am the common denominator in all of it.

And can I blame them?

Look at what I did to my father. Look at what's left of this marriage.

How do I justify waking up tomorrow? How does a person live when they are their own undoing?

It is a simple equation: I exist, and therefore things ruin.

Photo by Macro.jr on Unsplash

As the depression took hold, it ceased to be a mood and became an environment. Even politeness demanded attendance, but she simply couldn't muster any exertion anymore.

The erstwhile fresh air of the garden her father had built became, to her, nothing more than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Her guilt and isolation eventually manifested into a physical agony. It was a sharp, relentless trepanation of the skull that transformed the midday light into a million glass needles.

The pain drilled deeper into her skull until the internal violence locked her inside the darkness behind her eyes.

For days on end, she lay motionless. She was convinced that if she moved even the slightest, the pain would surge and snap her bones right there and then.

The curtains were drawn tight and light thickened until the rooms were draped in a funereal gloom - the fabric becoming one with the wall, as if the shadows themselves could suffocate the pain before it reached her.

One evening, the pain spilled into her chest. It was heavy, as if the physical mass of her unuttered guilt were crushing her.

An agonizing, blistering fire burned within her chest, her heart twisting like a sodden cloth being ruthlessly wrung dry.

It choked her, and her stomach turned with a sickening nausea as she buckled and crumbled.

Her hands shook so hard she could barely punch in her husband's number.

She tried no less than ten times - ten desperate, trembling attempts to reach him.

Each time, he let it ring out, her name flash on the screen until it went dark, repeatedly and actively refusing to answer.

She filled his inbox with voicemail after voicemail. What started as anger quickly turned frail and thin with desperation, a terrible one-sided conversation spoken into dead air:

"I'm in pain."

"I need to go to the hospital."

"It's urgent."

"I beg you."

"Please?"

She washed down a double dose of painkillers with a glass of wine, a desperate attempt to quiet the staccato stabs in her skull and the tenuto, incendiary fire in her chest.

Perhaps they could help to numb the agony until he came home.

She ran a bath, trying to chase away the cold winter in her lungs -knowing all too well that a sad tale is best for winter. But the medication and her failing heart took hold with a terrifying, slithering speed.

The world blurred into a hazy, warm grey. The air grew thick and fuzzy - a soft static that muffled the room as the shrieking staccato in her skull and the burning tenuto of her heart began to recede into a slow, fading coda.

A dead chill had taken hold of this house since her father's passing. Settled right into her bones.

Then, all at once, it was cold no more, replaced by a warmth that was terrifyingly gentle - so eerily comfortable it felt almost like a dream.

She felt so light, almost weightless. Detached from her pain, her agony dulled into a distant memory - and so was she.

The mix of pills and wine dragged her into a narcotic sleep as the bathwater went cold.
Then she just slipped beneath the surface, pulled down to a quiet, muddy depth in an underwater dream of uninterrupted silence.

After life's fitful fever, she sleeps well. Forever.

The rest is silence.

...to be continued.

Daily Prompts for FreeWriters

©Britt H.

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