• I walk into a dimly lit room. I hesitate. I smell purple. Flies buzz in my ears. Humm…they say. I hum too.
    There is a chair in the corner by the window. The chair is old. It rots from the base of its legs, a cancer in the wood that eats away at white enamel. I feel sad, cold, and thin. I feel like cancer.
    The window is big, but it’s no longer a real window. Not quite. Yellow paint is smeared around the panes. It was done by hands, small ones, the prints still embossed into the canary paint.
    I feel sick.
    I taste amber.
    My mouth is dry. I want a glass of blue.
    Water. I want a glass of water. Not blue. What is blue again?
    I hear red.
    God, I am thirsty.

    The chair collapses and crumbles into ashes. My stomach knots. I place an unstable hand to my mouth and feel the bones beneath the skin of my fingers.
    I throw up blood, heaving. My hand is a bloody skeleton. I taste copper. I smell purple. I think I am dying. I think I am going crazy. I think that I am in Hell.
    I feel like Bram Stoker’s white worm, a parasite. I have no eyes, I have no tongue, and I have no ears. I am nothing. I am suffocating. I cannot breath. I hear black. I see black. I taste black. I smell black, and I feel black. I am all alone.
    I think I am going crazy.
    I think that I am in Hell.
    I walk to the windowpane and place my bloody hand to a small print no bigger than a child’s palm. The blood had begun to congeal and flake off my white skin like puzzle pieces.
    I think that I am in Hell.
    I think that I killed my daughter.

    I wake to child’s laughter and my husband’s voice as warm beams of gold broke through the window beside my bed. My head hurts and my body feels weak, the muscles and tendons tight and aching. There is a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water on my white nightstand. I smell breakfast, stretch my limbs, and drown my mouth in cool water.
    God, I am thirsty.
    When I step off the bed, I feel crumpled paper beneath my petite foot. I pick up a picture my daughter had finger painted. Red paint smears on the bottom of my foot. I ruined our family portrait.
    “s**t,” I mutter under my breath, trying to salvage what was left of my daughter’s masterpiece, my husband and I holding hands with her underneath a yellow sun. My dress in the painting is red. I hate red. I set the painting on the nightstand to dry and hop on one foot into the bathroom to clean up the mess I had made.

    My fiver year old daughter, Tessa, tugs on my cashmere robe and bats beautiful blue eyes up at me like pools of water. She looks like a miniature angel. I pick her up and balance her on my knee, taking a bite of egg and offering her a piece of toast.
    She smiles when she chews, small roundish teeth that will eventually fall out. She will sprout new ones, an exciting but painful time. Then she will become a pre-teen; maybe have braces if she is unlucky enough to have my genes.
    One day she will become a woman, frightened at first of her new body. Then she will grow into it and drive the boys mad and the girls into jealous fits. She will go to college. She will marry a musician with long hair and she will live happily.

    I kiss the top of her head. Her skin is soft and smells of lavender baby shampoo.
    “I wuv you mummy,” she says behind a mouthful of buttery bread.
    “I love you too, princess,” I whisper in her ear.
    She giggles and buries her small head into my shoulder. My baby bird, hiding beneath her mommy’s wing.
    I glance up at my husband, Glen. He serves more pancakes off his spatula, avoiding eye contact with me. There is a dark spot on the base of his neck, just below the white collar, a few bloodspots on the surface. Glen is handsome. He works late. He is having an affair.

    Tessa is eight. I run her into the emergency room, my cashmere robe is bloody, Tessa is unconscious, there is red around her mouth. I smell antiseptic. I smell that Tessa’s body had relieved itself. She jerks in my body again and I set her on the ground and pull out her tongue. It has gone blue. I cry. Nurses run to yank her from my arms. I hesitate, not letting go.
    My baby is having seizures.
    She is throwing up blood.
    My baby has cancer.
    I think I am in Hell.
    Later her doctor asks if cancer runs in the family. Yes, I say.
    I was twenty-eight.
    I had breast cancer.
    I think I killed my daughter.


    I wake in Tessa’s hospital room in a green recliner. Her hair is gone, her body is thin, and she misses school. There are dark circles beneath her eyes like little macabre moon drops beneath baby blues. She’s tired, I know. I run my palms over her head. Small circles that make her fall asleep. Sometimes I would rock her pain away.
    Glen is in Florida with his new wife. I am here with our daughter. She doesn’t have long to live. I hate Glen.
    I hate God.
    I think I am in Hell.

    Glen stand beside me, his new wife hooked on his arm. She cries. I hate her.
    The pastor says prayers over a coffin.
    I hate him too.
    I hate what is inside the cherry wood box. That glossy wood that was like the gloss that covered Tess’s eyes in her last days, when I would hold her in my arms and weep openly into her bone like palms. When I would pray and hum above her ears, singing of birds and sunshine.
    Afterwards I sob and slap at Glen’s chest. I call him every name I had learned, every name that spilled from my lips like curses. His new wife, Tiffiany, stands by and weeps into her palms. Friends pull me away. I hit them too.
    I hate them.
    I hate myself.
    I smell dirt.
    I taste bile.
    I smell purple.
    I think I killed my daughter.
    I think I’ll kill myself…