All Your Insides Fall To Pieces

In Despair’s realm, there are many windows. They hang in the air, like clouds. In the windows, you can see people, the shadows of people.

Despair walks in her realm from time to time. Her footfalls make no sound in the fog.

She stops beside a window, a dark wooden one, and watches as a woman holds a pregnancy test in her fist and tries not to cry. Despair knows her story. (Despair knows all their stories.)

Despair knows the way the woman presses a hand against her stomach when she thinks about it, knows the way she comes up with names in the middle of the night, knows the way she imagines holding it in her arms. Despair knows that the test in her hand reads negative.

Despair knows all of these things and thinks that the woman has not been beautiful until this moment, when she is giving up hope.

Despair holds the woman’s face in her hands (because she is one of the Endless, who are everywhere and nowhere all at once), and slices a line down her cheek with her hook. The mark on her face looks like a tear.

There are other windows, however, and Despair moves on. In the next one, the edges of the window are thin and pale, and she leans against them as she pushes her face toward the glass. Inside, a man is sitting on a hotel bed. His head is bent, and his back curves forward. There is weariness in every breath he takes.

Despair knows his story, too. She knows the way it felt for his wife to leave him, for his best friend to yell at him, for his job to be yanked out from underneath his feet. Despair knows that he is in the hotel room because he has nowhere else to go.

She presses a kiss to his cheek, and slides her hook into his heart. She pulls, and she can feel the blood spilling out of it, splashing across the floor. He won’t cry, she knows. But he will hurt, and his pain will taste sweet and sharp.

Despair keeps walking. She walks for what may be years, weeks, seconds, anything in between. The next window is gray metal, cold and dry to the touch. She peers inside. Inside, there is a man who is sitting on his couch. In front of the man, there are a line of white pills, neatly arranged. He is staring at them, and he is counting each one. Despair knows his story well.

Despair knows that there are only ten left, that this means they will only last a day at the most. Despair knows that he knows this too. She slides her hook into his lip, pulling his mouth open, and watches as he tosses a pill inside.

There are only nine left, now. His dread feels like velvet, soft and thick.

Despair leaves, walking away without a sound.

(But not really, because she is still there, still with the man and his couch and his pills.)

(She is always there.)

FIN.