Arms around knees, fingers intertwined trying to twist each other off her hands. Head down, hair framing her knees as her tears dripped onto her knees and ran down her thighs. Under her heel laid the crushed remains of the corsage he had bought her, curling up around the back of her boot, trying in vain to grab at her and drag her down deeper. She took it all in as if outside herself, all the pain all the fear and frustration. She didn’t know how to let go, and she was worried it would kill her. Quickly, she reasoned, it would kill her quickly bursting her heart in her chest and ending her sorrow like the flicking of a light switch. She longed for the switch, to caress it one last time and them flick it with an anger unseen since the Vesuvius had burst forth it’s molten curls onto the village below. She sat and considered herself, and she wondered why she had killed him. He hadn’t tried to hurt her or even been cruel. His gentle touch and shy smile had drawn her to him, and yet there she sat facing his cooling shell, her knife still sticking up out of his face like a sundial constructed by the Marquis DeSade. Her hands released each other and one of them curled out slowly towards the knife, fingers flexing over and over again as she drew near it. They curled around the handle and yanked it free of him, making her fall over onto her ass as his head jerked and bounced with the release. Then her hands turned it towards her own face.

Closer.

Closer.

Closer.

Warm tip, still dripping with pieces of his flesh that had stuck to the blade, pressing against her cheek. She drew it in and up slowly, making herself stay still, feeling it curl the skin apart as she went rending her face into a twisted snarl. She came to her senses and dropped the knife suddenly, standing up and falling backwards until her hips collided with the concrete wall of the park. She stood there breathing and bleeding, not sure what she was going to do next, not sure if she would even know before she did it. Her feet made her turn and run.

When the police were eventually called, 6 hours after the fact, and investigated the scene they started looking for her and told the press they wouldn’t stop until they found her. They never did find her, they were looking for a living girl, not the corpse that would lay undetected for centuries inside the foundation of the construction site that had been across the street. The foundation she had tossed herself in, letting her body drown in concrete impaling herself on rebar and tainting the building with her desperate pain forever.