Portrait of a Sunset

Chapter 3

I awoke over sixteen hours later to the bright afternoon sun beating down on my face as it poured through the window and into my tiny living room. Groggily, I sat up and yawned. Normally, after a sleep coma like that one, I would awaken feeling even more exhausted than I had before, but that day was different. I didn't know why, but something had changed. Maybe it was the sunshine, or the sleep, or the fact that I'd finally achieved my dream of a dreamless night, but whatever it was, I actually felt like a human being for once, instead of a lifeless zombie.

Full of some vague purpose that I couldn't quite define, I stumbled down the shag-carpeted hall and into my closet-sized bathroom. Once my immediate needs were met, I stepped in front of the sink to wash my hands. As the cold water flowed into the even colder ceramic basin, I thought that, since I was already at the sink, I might as well brush my teeth—something I had recently been neglecting. There was no real reason to have fresh breath when the only people you ever spoke to were ghosts.

After giving my miraculously still-reasonably-pearly whites a thorough cleansing, I figured, since I was already in the bathroom, I might as well take a shower too. Lord knows I didn't have anything better to do.

I undressed and stepped into the shower stall—I had deliberately rented an apartment without a bathtub—and closed the Plexiglas door behind me. Tentatively, I grasped the hot water faucet. I shivered a bit as the frigid apartment air clawed at my naked skin.

"Just turn on the water, Clara," I told myself, my voice rough from disuse. My hand trembled, so I gripped the tap tighter, clenching my teeth. I was sick of having the same argument with myself every time I had to use water. The bigger the faucet, the harder the struggle. But the water wasn't my enemy. The water hadn't killed my sister; she had been dead long before she had reached the bottom of that cold, heartless lake.

Tears sprang to my eyes and I realized that, as usual, it wasn't going to happen. I had lost. The shower had defeated me, and I was just going to go and cry myself into a stupor. Again.

I turned to open the shower door, my bare chest heaving with stupid, hiccupping sobs that sickened me. I glanced back at the showerhead, but it was no use. Already, visions of my sister's pale, swollen face were creeping up behind my eyes and I knew that I was in for yet another wasted day.

Depressed beyond recuperation, I stepped in front of the mirror above the sink and forced myself to take a look at what I had become. At one time, I had been proud of my long, chestnut-brown hair, but my once loose, lustrous curls had lost all of their shape, all of their shine. My eyes, my beautiful jade-green eyes, had faded to grey and had sunk into deep depressions in my skull, amidst painfully dark, purple shadows. My cheekbones stood out so far that I looked like a skeleton. My lips were cracked from dehydration and lip-biting, and my nose was dry and flaky from near-constant, crying-induced nose-blowing.

Who was that in the mirror? That girl wasn't me! At that moment I hated that grey-eyed stranger almost as much as I hated my sister's killer.

Suddenly filled with a rage I had never known before, I reached forward and grabbed the mirror by its frame and ripped it from the wall. Growling like a wild animal, I raised it above my head and turned to the shower—that damn, impenetrable shower—and I gathered my strength. Then, with a primal roar, I threw the mirror, sending it flying at the shower stall like a projectile missile. With sick satisfaction, I watched the looking glass shatter as it collided with the shower door, which exploded spectacularly, sending shards of splintered, tempered glass flying at me like a million tiny diamond bullets.

Miraculously, I was unhurt, but that only enraged me further.

I looked wildly around the room, searching for something else to break, to maim, to destroy. I wanted something, some unlucky inanimate object, to know what it was like to be so broken that there was no chance that it could ever be restored to what it had once been. Breathing heavily, I picked up the metal toilet paper rack (the only other thing in the room that wasn't bolted to the floor), and threw that at the shower stall too.

It bounced off the metal frame, doing no further damage.

The shower was mocking me.

Frustrated to the point of insanity, I screamed at the top of my lungs and I balled up my fist. Then, without as much as a millisecond of forethought, I punched the solid brick wall over the sink with all of my strength, shattering the bones in my right hand, but nothing else.

Instantly the rage left me and I collapsed onto the glass-ridden floor, clutching my broken hand, too shocked to scream or cry or even to regret my actions. As I began to lose consciousness, I remember thinking only one thing:

The shower had won again.