Knives Make Lives

P.) Mirror

Prologue

She counted the droplets as they fell, like she always did.

Plink. One. Plink. Two. Plink. Three.

As they fell, she counted, and hummed. Niaomi did not always hum, but she did now - not because it was a nicer day than usual. It never was a nice day anymore.

Plink. Seven. Plink. Eight.

If it had been a nice day, then she wouldn’t be counting. As Niaomi remembered the events that had driven her to the bathroom, she pressed harder, and the drops fell faster, and her internal counting sped up.

Plink. Fifteen. Plink. Sixteen. Plink. Seventeen.

The droplets ran down her left hand, dripping off the fingertips and staining the white porcelain basin a bright scarlet. Niaomi stared into the sink, focusing on the red as she hummed. As the liquid pooled, the shade darkened. As she looked, her eyes darkened. Scarlet to burgundy. Brown to black.

Plink. Twenty-nine. Plink. Thirty.

The song she was humming had no words. It was just a tune she'd composed on the spot to drown out the noise. Various notes drifted through her mind - As and Gs and sharp and flat - and she hummed them all. Her volume grew as the shouting below got louder.

Plink. Thirty-five.

As the pressure of the knife decreased, the droplets ebbed into a slower, more erratic tempo. Plink. Thirty-six. Niaomi slid the blade down her wrist and to her fingers, running it over the bloodstained calluses. Plink. Thirty-seven. Curling the digits, she stopped the soothing sound and lifted the knife.

She relished the burning sensation of copper skin splitting further apart as she flexed her arm. The movement made the blood fall once more, and Niaomi began to count once more. She transferred the knife to the crimson palm and picked up a clean white cloth in the now free one. And then she stood there, swaying slightly while waiting and humming and counting.

Plink. Forty-eight. Plink. Forty-nine. Plink. Fifty.

Before another drop could fall, Niaomi wrapped the cloth around her bleeding wrist, admiring the bright smattering her vein’s liquid made against the blank backdrop. She loved the difference in color, an art all on its own. The random notes turned into a score, composed and remembered in the span of time it took her to somewhat staunch the bleeding.

Fifty: a Harshad number. The smallest sum of two non-zero square numbers. Tin’s atomic number. Half the measure of one hundred. Fifty drops of blood approximately equates to one ninety-sixths of a fluid ounce.

Niaomi curled her hand forward to keep the cut partially sealed, reverently removing the semi-soaked cloth and applying a thick line of antibiotic ointment to the jagged red ends. Even though she’d only counted fifty drops of blood, she’d lost a lot more - more than usual. She could barely take note of the pained wails coming from below. One part because of the music in her mind brought on by the song, and one part because of the vagueness of her mind brought on by the blood loss.

The cut was not as straight as it usually was, with Niaomi being as rushed as she’d been. So, once the blood had clotted enough, she took a roll of bandages from her midnight satchel and ripped a strip off to wrap around her wrist. It stung as she tightened the linen, but she was not scared of the pain. She welcomed it, enjoyed it.

Why else would she be a cutter?

Her humming paused as Niaomi put an ear to the door that divided the bathroom from her room. The muffled sound of deep breathing came from the other side, and so she continued murmuring the tunes till she finished the composition. Niaomi washed her knife lovingly, making sure the steel blade and ceramic handle were unblemished before drying it off and slipping it into a fold in her bag. The ointment were buried inside as well; the cloth found its way to the depths of the trash bin.

Slipping down the sleeves of her black shirt, she stared at herself in the mirror: curly hair tied in a ponytail, long fingers pulling at the cuffs, brown skin ashen in the lighting, dark eyes detached from the world around her. Full lips turned up in a small smile. Niaomi liked the way she looked. Not in the egotistical sense, but in the practical one. She looked like she didn’t have a care in the world, about anything.

It was as if she didn’t care about her parents’ escalating argument going on downstairs. Or about what methods she was going to have to use protect the one sleeping in her room. Or about the difficulties she’d face tomorrow hiding her taped up wrist. Or about how each time she cut herself, the only thing that drained away was her blood, and how the pain was just temporarily obscuring the scars on her soul.

And if she didn’t look too hard, didn’t try to find an emotion in her eyes, Niaomi could pretend that she didn’t care that it would have been their third anniversary.

She was a jar, filled to the brim with emotions varying from worry to anger to sadness, and always coming back to pain. And her knife was the cap that kept a lid on her. And whenever she started to overflow, all Niaomi had to do was twist the cap a little tighter, and the jar would remain bottled up as the contents drained away.

Now, the lid was sealed, the fighting was done, and the song was complete. So she tucked away the notes in her expansive memory, storing them for later. And for one fleeting moment, as Niaomi stepped out of the bathroom and eyed the peaceful figure lying in her bed, it all felt...nice.

But it couldn’t be, because she wasn’t allowed niceness anymore. She reminded herself of that fact as she slipped in her weathered earbuds and allowed LAD’s rough music to lull her to sleep and let the small body curl up against her own. And the feeling came back, but it wasn’t nice.

Niaomi flexed her wrist, just to be sure.

It was never a nice day anymore.