For Emma, Forever Ago

It wasn't necessarily that she wanted to kill herself. It was more that she didn't not want to. Normally it was a quiet thing, like a snake in the garden. Evil, insidious, but tucked out of the way so much that she didn't know where the danger lay, and nobody would see it even if they looked carefully. It was the one second hesitation before she raised the window when she was cooking. The brief moment before she eased her foot onto the brake. That two seconds of intense stillness when she plunged her head beneath the water. But today ... today it was different. Today the snake had crept through the front door and was wrapping tightly around her throat, cold and suffocating. Today the walls were closing in, collapsing around her like beige-painted dominoes.

The metal was cold against her fingers, small and rectangular. She twisted the metal square deftly between thumb and forefinger, and then they tightened. Sparks leapt from the top of the rectangle and climbed greedily into the air, devouring the oxygen around her fingers and eventually settling into a tall, flickering pillar of fire. She could smell the gas inside of the lighter, the tinny smell burning her nostrils. She swallowed once, hard.

Her eyes were the color of cinnamon - a brown so light they seemed to glow a shade of burnt gold in the evening-darkened sunlight. They were soft, but heavy. She blinked once, turning her eyes across the room toward the corner where her plain white stove sat. The black-metal grates were round on top, like charcoal plates. There was a knot the size of a fist in her throat, and she could not seem to breathe around it. As she swallowed, it tumbled into her stomach like a rock down a hill. It threatened to drag her to the floor, so heavy a weight it was to carry. The flame in her fingers wavered slightly.

She had been a beautiful girl. Built as if to be a princess of another time; tall, with light olive skin and thick, sandy-pink lips. Her dark hair spilled down her back in curls, and fell past her slim shoulders in tight ringlets. Her eyes, once reminiscent of a hawk, were not hallow and gaunt. Red-rimmed by lack of sleep, and tight around the edges. Those eyes had once inspired men to bow and run, stumble and gasp. But no longer. Pride had turned to spite, and strength to crippling pain. There was a sadness in those eyes which writers had spent a thousand years trying to find words for - a sadness which was not even close to poetic. They were those of a doe, large and edged to points - and hard. Hardened to cover the fearfulness beneath. The fear which had betrayed her in its truth. She wore a white dress that had once swung around every curve of her breathe-taking figure, but which now hung on her as if across the bones of a scarecrow. Her bottom lip pulled between her teeth, and she pinched it almost hard enough to draw blood.

She barely felt the pain. She barely felt anything these days.

The flame faltered, and went dead. The metal was hot under her touch, but she did not pull away. Her eyes remained fixed to the stove, and she took one slow step toward it. As her foot touched down on the black-and-white checkered linoleum tiles, it made a sound like a gunshot. A sound which would forever echo through that kitchen. One turn of her wrist, the hissing of gas through the unsealed ventilators of the stove-top grill, a click of a lighter - and it would all disappear. A thousand days of worry, ended in the blink of an eye. Fifteen-hundred days of anguish, of torn hair and ruined fingernails, of fits of rage attested to by shattered plates and cracked mirrors, by screams which echoed like explosions through the empty house - vanishing, in an instant.

She exhaled shakily, feeling her body tremor like a leaf in a storm. She reached out, her finger gently touching the stove gauge. The gas. The hissing poison which, with a spark of fire, would become her own personal inferno.

There is no purer death than that in flames.

The words echoed through her head. The world rippled around her, washing of color as tears pushed forward from behind her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. If it wasn't for those tears, she would swear she had lost the ability to feel completely. She shivered, her spine rigid and her fingers tense. She could feel the coldness of the metal gauge beneath her first two - the cold of death. She breathed in once, stronger this time; more certain. Then she exhaled, and pressed it to the metal stove, beginning to turn.

The sound of bone cracking against wood almost made her collapse. So sudden was the sound, so demanding, that she was instant torn away from the stove. Pressing herself into the counter, she raised the back of her hand to her partially split lips and heaved back a sob.

She had been ... so close.

Three times, like consecutive gunshots, the sound reverberated through the air. It was more of a dull thudding, really - but it seemed sharper to her. Her nerves were on knives edge, pulled tight and lain against the cold metal. Taut, ready to snap. She would have done it, she knew. The certainty was not one of fear any longer, but of hollowness. A dull, numb ache that sawed through her chest when she breathed and pulled at her limbs when she moved. She leaned against the counter a long time. The only sound in the room was that of the clock ticking, slow and methodical. Tick, tick, tick, tick. She stared wide-eyed at the wall across the room with its arched doorway leading into a dark hallway, which ended at the glass-and-wood front door. The light in the kitchen; sunlight and fluorescent cooking lights combined, waved in tandem.

It came again, more expected this time. Sighing deeply, the young woman - for she is no more than twenty - pushes herself off of the counter. The action seems vaguely like that of a defeated warrior climbing to his feet, to meet his death with honor. Stepping around the counter, the young woman leaves the light of the kitchen and enters the dark corridor beyond. The smell in her nose is light, but musty. Like dusk in sunlight.

If Mrs. Dunwell is asking to borrow butter again...

Stepping into the tiny foyer, she reaches out and grasps the long door handle in her grip, twisting the wrenching the door open. She does not know where her anger comes from, but if floods through her like wildfire. The air hisses between her teeth as the door passes by her face, and her brilliant brown eyes flash in the morning sunlight. For the first time in years, they seem something akin to regal. Her voice is a snap.

"Excuse me, I am not a-"

Her words die on her lips as she sees the figure standing in front of her. A cold shiver ripples from her scalp to her fingertips, numbing them to ice instantly. She is looking at a man, a ghost - the ghost of a man. A ghost of the man she used to love. The ghost of the man she loves. The ghost of a man - she knew had died.