Suicide Attempt

She shook the bottle out into her hand and lined them up in a neat little row – nineteen innocuous white pills arrayed in battle formation on her kitchen counter.

The bottle had a childproof cap and the label advised her to KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN and to NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL. It was dangerous, after all. She could hurt herself.

She smacked the bottle back onto the countertop, causing some of the pills to jump and shimmy out of their place in line. Raking her hair out of her face, she furrowed her brow and carefully lined them up again, her little white knights glowing in the sodium-vapor light. Her chewed fingernails drummed restlessly against her thigh.

She grabbed a cup from the drainer beside the sink and held it beneath the faucet, watching the water thunder down. She wondered what it felt like when it crashed against the bottom of the glass. Like the soul-shattering impact after a leap from the side of a bridge?

She shut the water off.

Nineteen little white pills. Her gaze caressed them as she sipped at the water, moistening her mouth and throat. She’d only begun to count them recently, around the time thirty or so remained in the orange plastic bottle that admonished her to TAKE CONTENTS WITH FOOD. She counted them all the time now.

She wondered if Mitch had counted out his little green pills before he’d swallowed them down, one after another, like candy.

She tipped the glass, sucking the water down as her outstretched hand hovered over her tidy little line. She thought of bodies crumpled against red pavement and overdoses that may or may not have been accidental, of the time-worn scars that stitched a story across her forearms and the slender box of blades still tucked away, hiding in her room.

She dropped eighteen dull white pills back into the bottle.