Jane unhooks the fishnets from her garter belt at around 12:30am. She rolls them up and leaves them on the floor next to her stilletos. She steps into the warm water of the bathtub and takes a sip of wine. She has a half-empty bottle of Trazadone on the sink counter which happens to be within reaching distance, and she decides to take a little nap. She takes two. She takes another sip of wine. Waits a few minutes, and then continues the cycle, once, twice, three times, and four. First, it’s just two pills: then by the fifth time she pops some pills it’s five and there isn’t anymore left in the bottle. She doesn’t really care. As her taut muscles begin to relax, her memory drifts to a man who, earlier in the week, had given her crabs. She thinks of the obese man the previous night whose hands had went from squeezing her breasts to squeezing her neck in his 30 seconds of joy. She wondered why she didn’t even try to stop him. Something in her had felt this perverse desire to be controlled by him. He reminded her so much of her father.

The bathroom light becomes a vortex of white. She fixates on it, then suddenly there’s three of them, and she can’t tell which one is real, or if they’re all real. Her eyelids become heavier, and she blinks one last time before she succumbs to that deep slumber which she had been praying violently for her entire life.

Her eyes open to the abyss of a July night. Her body is sixteen again, but her mind feels exactly the same, only denser, and she can’t find the strength to fight through the fog in her head to say something, to ask any questions. Her boyfriend is on top of her, grunting, but she can’t feel anything. She wonders if she’s been transported back in time, or if she’s dreaming, or if she’s in hell. He rolls off of her, and promptly falls asleep with his arm around her stomach, and his head on a makeshift pillow of her bra and panties. The bed of his pick-up feel surprisingly moist and warm. She wants to move but she can’t, and when she does move, she can’t feel anything, she just knows that her hand is somewhere below her vision level and that her body is silently quivering in response.

The truck and her boyfriend seem to just fade away. Her eyes get blurry for a second (is that his hand in the bathwater or mine?) and the white vortex that was all at once the bathroom light fixture and the moon hanging in the sky became the lamp on her father’s desk as he stares down at her with a look of disgust on her face. He’s yelling at her but his words seem to stop in mid-air and never reach her ears. Reading his lips, she deduces that she’s a slut, and the talk of the town (How I gave it up so easily/How they’re saying I’m pregnant/How THEY think this How THEY think that What THEY want What THEY need) and all of a sudden her hand raises itself to her face and puts a small drop of blood in her mouth.

Her father tells her to go to her room and pray. She goes to her brother’s room instead because she knows he wants her to. She doesn’t know if she’s more afraid of what he’ll do if she doesn’t go or what she might do if she does go. Her feet betray her and lead her unflinchingly into his punishment.

His room is the darkest room she’s ever been in, darker than night, darker than the black of an eclipse and in his bed is the source of the vortex she sucked up into her soul when she was eight and he spanked her when she caught a glimpse of his penis as he came out of the shower. Daddy just told her to respect other people’s privacy more but Billy thought she still had a lesson to learn. Mommy never had an opinion. Time stops when she tries to remember her mother. (Washing dishes/cleaning house/cooking/doing laundry like always, she remembers, and time starts again.).

Laying on the sheets listening to how evil she is and how he’s trying to help her, something snaps inside of her. Memory becomes so much more when her mind feels at it’s densest and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter her entire body feels moist and her chest is moving in spasms because she’s running.

Running into the bathroom and locking the door she steps to the mirror and slaps herself. With that slap, each memory of her father, her brother, her mother, her boyfriend, and THEY all drain out of her head and down the bathroom sink. The white light of the bathroom light fixture is just a dull haze and she steps into the bathtub and lays down, fully clothed and smiling.

Jane slips a little deeper into the now lukewarm bathwater. The smell of death penetrates the pleasant scent of Chanel No 5.