Anna
MAYBE I’VE HAD ENOUGH TO drink now. It’s strange, I feel saturated by everything.
It’s like I have taken on all the colour in the room, all the humidity and feeling.
Something has multiplied my feelings and brought them right up under my skin, so close to the surface that one twitch would have them seeping out of my pores.
Everything has been magnified. Somehow better and somehow worse.
And then, I shatter it all by knocking Betty’s glass off the table and onto the floor.
‘Oh god. Sorry, Betty!’
Don’t cry.
Don’t cry.
Don’t cry.
Don’t cry.
Don’t cry.
I get down onto my knees to start picking up the pieces of glass before Betty can stop me and tell me not to worry – and she would have told me not to worry, if I wasn’t so quick to move. Surely she can see my scalp redden.
Oh, but the glass makes everything worse.
Wet from whatever it was holding and determined to upset me, it slices apart the tips of my fingers.
Or have I used the glass to slice apart the tips of my fingers?
It’s hard to know. Everything is happening so quickly, I don’t have time to consider whether I wanted this to happen.
Is this unfortunate embarrassment just a cry for attention?
Does it matter when the blood is so dark and so much, so suddenly? The drink stings.
A drop falls onto her dress. She hasn’t even noticed.
Overwhelming, to realise that all that I am amounts to little more than an unseen stain on her dress.
Yes, we have had too much to drink. If we hadn’t, surely Betty would never have taken my fingertips into her mouth and sucked the blood from them.