It's a hard day for breathing again
Now every cells gone
Semi-tarpaulin, cos I
Sent love away
Zipped up the bag
Floated away, and I
Sent love away
Biffy Clyro-10 Bodies
Her laptop scalded her bare legs, the fans whirring angrily as if to announce the passing of time. A sort of artificial show of electrical distress that seemed more elegant and thorough than anything Carla could ever manage.
Even with a lifetime of practice.
A sort of angry numbness set in during tumbling into her second bottle of wine, the liquid such a pretty deep red that had become more a habit than a crutch. The gambling was newer. It looked a lot like addiction when truly it was a way to fill hours and systematically destroy the life she had fought so hard to build.
This was what she did.
This was who she was now.
A thoughtless killer who destroyed so many lives.
Someone too pathetic and weak to live with her crimes. With the voices that wouldn't leave her alone. The little flashes of memories that she had never seen (Amy breathing in black smoke/Kal gazing desperately down at the women he loved knowing it was already too late/Maddie cold and alone in the hospital morgue), that had never belonged to her that now caught her off guard every time she stopped actively trying to tear herself to pieces.
With every glass poured she thought of the blood she had shed. It was sacrilege, warm and tart against her tongue like underripe blackberries and regret.
It was the only atonement she knew how to offer.
Kal and Maddie had left the world so suddenly. While she would leave it in slow erosion. Undoing everything she had fought for, everything that has once mattered so much, a little more each day.
She fantasies that she could fray enough to become just a smudge lost inside a half furnished flat.
Punishment through death in increments.
She hadn't even bothered to find another coffee table when an upside down delivery box was good enough to hold wine and coffee mugs.
The smell of the smoke is lodged in her nostrils. She thinks of checking if maybe Nick and Michelle smell it too but doesn't think she can take the way their eyes shine with concern.
She should have let herself burn with Tony.
Plastic still wrapped half her replacement furniture ignored and sad for so long like Ikea's version of a funeral. She kept the plastic on her sofa for too long, liking the way it would make a crinkling noise against her cheek when she curled up on it. Liked the smoothness and how it felt wrong.
The people she'd murdered kept in bodybags until they were put in the ground.
It was like her brain had been re-wired and wrong became right.
Wrong became needed. And just maybe in the fuzziness of not sleeping, of spending the night with her eyes wide open and painfully still she could be dead too. Zipped up in her own body bag and drained of fluid. With it she could find her atonement, nothing but a husk that couldn't hurt anyone anymore.
There wasn't a single deity she wouldn't bargain, fight or pray to if for a second she thought there could be a way she could swap places with her victims.
The shame that she can't force people to leave her physically makes her sick. She does not deserve or like their concern or pity.
So she can't sleep. So food tasted like ash. So she would be at work trying to concentrate and suddenly she'd be back there, so close to being consumed by the heat and smoke and so desperate to reach the little girl in the other room. So she just couldn't stop.
It was nothing she shouldn't be feeling, it was nothing less than she deserved. They make her selfish when she can't just get over it for them. That there love isn't enough to make her better. How could she be saved when she was so undeserved.
Nick had never loved her when she was a whole person. Perhaps there was enough wrong with him to be so committed to someone so damned. He hadn't even liked her when he first came into her life. It was curiously backwards.
Liam wouldn't even recognise the person she was anymore. It hurt less to imagine him rotting into nothing than somewhere otherworldly watching her decent.
Taking Nick's credit card had been far more calculated than it looked. It was not the impulse of an addict it was a demonstration. 'I will hurt you in the end'
That look of hurt as he left had been a bitter victory that has left her with what could have been calm or just finality because now he would leave. Only a masochist would come back for more. Only an idiot would come back and retaliate with the L word. But then it appeared she had misjudged Nick just as she had the rest of her life.
Because he would not leave her.
Even though she's already hurting him. She wants to rip out his tongue to make him see the monster inside her, wants him to stop with those soft words that only make her word all the more stark when she's alone. If he would just let her be hopeless, if he would just run and leave her.
So many men had lost both their minds and their lives because they cared for her and she couldn't bear to watch it happen again. If only she had the strength to make him walk away. She hates the stubborn way Nick and Michelle have turned her life to an impasse when she just wanted it to end.
If only they all could see this was the only way and leave her before she destroyed more lives. Leave her to her slow death in her own personal tomb.
So she lies on her hard impersonal sofa and pretends she was already dead.