The Letter

"Miranda, are you okay?" asked her friend, right before taking another shot. Miranda looked at her with heavily lidded eyes. "Curt sent me a letter" she said simply, as if all her life's pain could be condensed into this single sharp sentence. Valerie flinched while saying, "I know, me too" The music there was loud, and the windows had been painted black long ago by necessity. Miranda felt the floor slope off to a crazy angle, and reached out a hand to steady herself on the bar. "Val, how long does acid take to kick in?" she asked over the music. 

Val looked at her watch, "about an hour, I think? still not sure it was the best idea tonight." Miranda ignored the caution and took a heavy swallow of her drink, the foamy surface of it glistened like  fireflies in a snowstorm. A gleam of light caught Miranda's eye from across the room, she realized that she had been sitting for two hours. She left the stool shakily and waltzed across the busy dance floor, stepping on several toes along the way.

The black paint had started to crack years ago, it began in the center with a single small tear, possibly from a patron's fingernail. The resulting cracks and chips spread across the ebony glass like an inverted tree made from lightning. The midnight sun glared relentlessly outside. Someone cleared their throat next to her. "Howdy," said a low voice to her left. "I love this town to death, but it's hard to get properly s**t-faced when the sun never sets." Miranda looked over at the man who'd spoken. 

A fine layer of stubble coated his jaw, his dress shirt opened at the neck a large, daring "V". She smiled and said, "it's true, I love this place, it's far away from all the stupid horny men and the traffic." she looked into his eyes as he entirely missed her point, they looked like the soft floor of the forest, brown and laced with dark earth black. Miranda took him in, his clothes, his easy smile, his tangy orange scented cologne. She gave him a coy smile and one stuck painted fingernail up her nostril. She watched as his face went through several emotions simultaneously, "wow" he started "that's..." 

In the end he couldn't find the words and left her standing by the window, muttering "crazy b***h" under his breath as he walked away. She grinned, finger still in nose. It felt good to take some control; to have some say in her life. With one fateful finger she had changed the entire course of her night. She knew that he had planned on taking her home, she could imagine how his prickly jaw would feel against her skin, she could almost feel him entering her. It was all so animialistic, so trite and boring. 

"Miranda!" called her friend from across the bar. Valerie got up quickly and did a high heel hobble, smiling apologetically to anyone she had to walk in front of. "Dude" she said, pulling Miranda's finger out of her nose, "maybe acid isn't for you." 

"No, it totally is, I finally feel fine." Miranda threw her head back and laughed, a deep laugh that shook her ribs and made her teeth rattle. 

Miranda suddenly saw the letter in her mind's eye, the gold trimmed letter with his sloping handwriting across the front. A new and sudden panic filled her chest. It felt like her skin was falling off, she to go. She left Val behind and made for the door, ignoring her coat on the rack. The midnight sun blinded her. The road hadn't been plowed since the new snowfall, so she had to dredge through shin-high slush. Her high heels slipped and she twisted her ankle sharply. She yelled wordlessly and bent to peel off her shoes. She's gotten them as a gift years ago, she couldn't remember who or when, but now they hung soaking and limp, a heel dangled lamely. 

The first of the cold began to creep up her bare feet and into the bones of her legs. She threw the ruined shoes behind, making a small crater in the powdery snow behind her. "Miranda!" chided a shrill voice behind her. It was Val, standing at the doorway to the bar, shielding her eyes from the sunlight and holding both their jackets in one arm.

"Where are your shoes?" she asked, looking Miranda up and down with furrowed eyebrows. 

Miranda couldn't explain why, but she turned and started jog-running down the road with no particular direction in mind. The cold had settled deep inside of her and she felt anger surge from within that wintry mountain inside of her chest

She ambled down fifth street as fast as she could, her bare feet slipping and losing all feeling with each passing step. A truck passing the opposite way slowed down as the driver's window came down shakily. "Hey miss!" said an older man with a hunter's cap and thick flannel from within the truck. "You can't be out here like that!" She ignored him and kept stumble walking through the bitter cold. "Wait!" he yelled as she passed.  

She felt the cold slice up into her thighs and press firmly into her ribcage, she was becoming entirely numb. Miranda looked down at her legs, there was no feeling anymore, her legs were just stupid pink tree trunks leading from her skirt to deep beneath the snow. They could fall off or catch on fire, it would make no difference to her at all. She felt free. 

Time seemed to slow down as she took step after shaky step, she read the letter over and over again mentally, it was death by a thousand cuts and finally, finally she couldn't feel them anymore. She couldn't feel anything. 

"Miss!" came a voice from behind her, the man with the cap had gotten out of his truck, he was holding a woolen blanket and seemed to have every intention of wrapping it around her shoulders. Miranda felt the tears start to streak down her face in warm lines. everything felt like it was happening far away, or to someone else. 

The man guided her to his truck, the heat inside of it made her legs come alive suddenly. It felt like every pore was being stuck with a hot needle and splashed with cold water. The man wiped the water off her legs and stuck some heavy fur lined boots onto her. He asked where she lived and if anyone was looking for her, she mumbled something and it might have been her address. Everything was so far away, her hands belonged to a stranger. 

She rested her head against the cold pane of glass and watched as the neighborhood sped by. She was dropped off at home, she didn't say thank you. She simply walked like a someone in a dream to her front door and latched it closed behind her. The sun beat down on her, even though it was well past midnight.

Miranda went up to her room, leaving tiny lakes of bootprints on the staircase, not caring for once that the floor would be filthy. She closed the heavy blackout curtains and squeezed her hot eyes shut. Why was she still crying? She opened them and saw her reflection in the tall standing mirror. To her left was the heavy green book that Curt had given her for her birthday, five birthdays ago. She'd never cracked it open. She felt the weight of it in her hand, the tough leather skin still felt new. She hurled it against the mirrror, expecting a great crash. Instead the book bounced off the glass at a lazy angle and fell on the ground like a surprised bird in mid flight. 

It always seemed so easy in the movies. She picked it up again and threw with both arms, her shoulders felt like were going to pop out of the sockets from the effort. The mirror cracked once, in the corner. Miranda cried out once and punched the mirror, nothing happened. She stood up, stripping her clothes and the boots. Her reflection looked back at her with unrestrained smugness, it seemed to say. "Is that all?" Her eye makeup was smudged and running down her face like a crazed raccoon. She expected to feel sad when she heard the news. Curt was engaged to someone else. The first boy, the first kiss. The first eyes she had ever loved, now looked into someone else's. 

She grabbed the book again, this time she kicked the mirror down onto the ground with a resounding smash and threw the tome hard, straight down. The mirror exploded in every direction like a sharp blooming flower. 

She laughed, that deep roar that came from her pelvis again. He had invited her. They'd invited her to the wedding, as if she was any other guest. She tried to imagine what they had been thinking, maybe they were sitting together and looking at his silver laptop covered in band stickers. "That one honey," her imaginary Curt said as Miranda played the scene in her mind. "That's the exact series of colors that really conveys the subtle 'f**k you' that I want to send." His fiancee would frown and cross her arms. "No dear, I'm not of fan of that plan, lets just write 'eat a dick, Miranda' instead" They had sent her an invitation. She still shook when she thought of it. 

Miranda left the room, stepping around the angry teeth of her mirror. She walked down the steps, her feet managing to find every frigid puddle of water on the way down. In the kitchen a single slice of sunlight cut through the curtains. Without thinking, she spun on a heel and ripped the curtain from the rod, not caring about the awful noise, the sudden inpouring of light, or her nakedness. She threw the curtain against her dark wooden winerack and made no attempt to catch the rack as it slowly teetered, tottered and rested on one foot for an impossible second then fell to the ground with an earsplitting crash. Dark red wine seeped from beneath the curtain. she had the sudden desire to make a cup of coffee.

This damned sunlight was throwing off her internal clock, it always felt like a time that it wasn't. "The world isn't right" she said aloud to herself. Everything had turned on its head and was wrong now. The sun shone during the day, her Curt was holding a stranger when he slept. When he slept. She remembered how he always had that smile tugging at the corner of his lips while he dreamt. He always looked as if he had just gotten the best news of his life. How could anyone walk through life so god damn chipper all the time? His smile was always inches below the surface, waiting for any excuse to break through the waves.

Everything was his, the coffee mugs, the flour in the pantry. Even the cold jar of honey sitting in the fridge. She opened it and stared at the glass jar and tried not to remember. The mock fights they'd always have about the honey. She would insist that you didn't need to refrigerate honey, the stuff lasted forever. "It's the only thing in the world that will outlast the glass jar its in." she'd say. She didn't know if it was true, strictly speaking. But she'd heard the fact once and it had stuck. Now the jar stared blankly back at her. Despite Curt's best attempts it had formed a crystal layer on the top. She felt something cold and sluggish shift within her. 

She didn't cry, or couldn't; she wasn't sure which. She stepped past the wreckage of the wine rack, now illuminated from the open window like some kind of divine judgement. She limped into her bedroom, careful to avoid the sharp petals of her broken mirror. She slept. The coldness of her sheets was oddly reassuring. 

When she woke, she had no idea what time it was. The sun continued its crazy waltz across the sky with no respect for the standard pattern of day and night. Her head felt like pain. There was a railroad spike lodged somewhere in her head, and every movement made it rattle and bump into more nerve endings. She rolled over, not wanting to deal with the mess that was so patiently waiting for her. She stood up, knocking the railroad spike in her head loose, grabbed a fuzzy bathrobe and walked downstairs in a sleepy daze. She blinked in mild surprise when she'd realized that the fridge door had been open all night. She rummaged around the kitchen for the necessities of coffee, the filter was somewhere, the beans somewhere else. Even this simple task seemed impossible and terribly stained with Curt. 

There were three sharp knocks on her front door, Miranda stumbled over the wine rack, cursing silently as she stepped in a red puddle. She looked through the peephole and saw Val standing there with two armfuls of white take-out boxes. She cracked the door and squinted into the brightness. "Let me in sleepyhead! My arms are tired and hot." Val muscled her way in before Miranda could stop her. She went straight to the kitchen and started unpacking the food, careful not to look at the torn curtains or the broken tangle of wood that once was a wine rack. 

"Hey, I'm sorry I-" She started but Val held up a finger with one hand and handed her a plate with another. "Eat." 

They sat at the table and drank black coffee, as the milk had spoiled some time in the night. They talked about the weather, the snow plows, even the upcoming grammies. Everything but Curt, everything but the wedding that was happening right then, less than ten miles away. It was then that Miranda saw her friend, truly. Someone who had seen the best and worst of her and still came to her door with food and company. 

"Valerie, I just wanted to say thank you. I know you got invited to the wedding and already had a dress picked out. I know that he's been your friend since kindergarten and you really wanted to go but you're here and...." She felt a lump start at the bottom of her throat and start to swell up to the size of a grapefruit. Val smiled with one corner of her mouth in that oddly feline way she had about her. "Don't get all mushy on me now, we have some cleaning to do."

They spent the rest of the morning sweeping and throwing things into garbage bags. Most of the fridge had gone bad and only one bottle of red wine had survived the wine rack incident. Miranda swept little pieces of the broken mirror into a black bag, a thousand tiny versions of herself stared back amidst the dust bunnies and the loose hairs. 

Hours later they both sat exhausted on the living room couch, watching a show about British bakers. They both agreed that America could learn a few things about decent reality TV. Suddenly in the middle of an episode Valerie pressed the power button and the screen went dark. "It's almost time!" she said excitedly. Miranda felt one eyebrow raise in question. "Time for more wine?" 

"That too, but it's the sunset!" she opened the heavy velvet curtains and they both gasped as they saw the sun change color for the first time in weeks. They stood at the window for a long time watching in reverent awe as the sun wobbled and slowly sank towards the horizon. Miranda thought of all that had happened while that sun had been up, the tears, the pain, the poisonous righteous anger that had fueled her, that had also been killing her from the inside. She felt afraid as the anger left her, it was the last thing she had of him. 

After a while, Miranda felt something loosen and let her go, and it felt something like being born again, she felt like could reach out with one finger and flick the entire sun away. 

She smiled reached for her friend's hand. They sipped from their glasses as the day finally ended. "Thank you." said Miranda, to her friend, to the sun, and even to herself as she watched the giant ball of fire slowly shrink to a wavering line and vanish.