“Ms. Albright, please repeat your statement,”  The man breathes as he twirls his pen, skeletal knuckles jutting out from the severity of his grip. The woman’s head shakes, greasy cobwebbed tresses plastering to her forehead. Her fingers are doing a mesmerizing dance, swirling and dipping, threading and cutting. The only thing to ruin the waltz is the dirt caked under her fingernails, the same dirt that has unabashedly kissed her wrinkled clothes. The same dirt is under my own nails, the stuff dark and ominous, contrasting against the innocent, baby pink of my fingers. I wrinkle my nose and sniff, folding my hands into one another.

“Ms. Albright?”  His voice is threadbare now, his eyes bruised from skirmishes with sleep and stress, perhaps. She snaps her gaze back to him before her wild eyes find mine, starving for acknowledgement. For recognition. For encouragement,  ‘we’re in this together, you and I.’ A comforting thought for someone like her. She wants this crumbling dirt under both our fingernails to warrant her some kind of support, some kinship. But it doesn’t, it won’t. Instead, I watch the clock, grappling with the persistence of time. I find I’m sympathetic to this clock, entrapped in a never ending dance with it’s callous and unforgiving dictator. 

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Beat. Pause. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Beat. Pause. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.Tick. Beat. Pause. 1:03.

Between the threaded cracks on my watch face, I can see the clock on the wall is 10 minutes behind. A whole ten minutes. My lips twitch at the now unbalanced atmosphere. See? I think, as I tap the detective on the shoulder, See how easily a detail ruins a beautiful mirage? This almost irresistible and alluring sense of wickedness, bathing the scene in an effervescent quality. 

He doesn’t turn, however, at the incessant tapping of my finger. My silent pleas to fix that goddamn clock. Rose, tapping her own finger to her leg compulsively, peers at me. Her face could be a flawless disguise amid devils, the drying blood creating an intricate mask, congealing in the creases of her withered face. My nose wrinkles, and I choke back a sour reflex, disgusting. 

“--We have your records at the rehab center,” He displays a few, neat manila folders. 

“I’m sober,” She gurgles, eyes bulging at the papers, finally fixing her gaze back on him. 

“This is from three weeks ago,” His voice, though lullaby quiet, echoes through the room. She shakes her head profusely, tears starting to track down the layers of dirt on her sunken cheeks. 

“No, no, no,” She’s choking on her words, each syllable drowning in the collecting saliva on her lips. I remember my own rehab center. The thought still brings a certain kind of shame to me, but the breath of wine drifting through the hallowed oak of my limbs invigorates me in the way only alcohol can. It was a mistake to show up to work like I did, head still teeming with thick weeds, stems twisting with a vice grip around blood vessels until I cannot think. But no one seemed to notice, and now I’m here. We’re here. 

He’s tapping his pen, eyes switching from the sham window to the women. He even throws a look back at me, as if I had suddenly solved this great mystery. Which, of course, I haven’t. Rose still has iridescent drops of sorrow slipping down her face, catching in the dim light of the overhead. She checks her fissured watch face, mournfully rubbing a finger across the lavish crystal. That was so like her. She loved those frivolous things and hated for them to break. It reminded me of when we were girls, and she’d wear the same look on her face that she wore now, lips trembling at the broken pieces of porcelain from her dolls' china bodies. The dolls I had broken. Apparently, Rose did not find it as enthralling as I did to dissect the dolls. To see if there were tiny, beating hearts beneath their delicate frames. 

He clears his throat and puffs a sigh, 

“Why don’t we take a break--For now. Someone can escort you to the bathroom, if you’d like.” She nods quietly, with a pitiful squeak of response.

. It takes around five minutes for someone to open the door after the detective leaves.  I watch from my post at the door as another cop in blue unlocks the silver chains from the table. After some soft coaxing, Rose rises, thin legs shivering. As she whisks past, she mouths something. Although I can’t hear the ghostly words, I do feel them,

“Follow me.” I stand struck, immobile, for  a minute. Follow her? Where? The woman’s bathroom of a precinct? There’s no reason to, there’s no reason not to. The clock ticks. The overhead buzzes. I adjust my lapel, straightening it, then straightening it again as I fall from the doorframe.

I follow the click of her heels, the sound gently beckons me forth, not having to repeat itself because it knows I’m close behind. Like I’m meant to be here. When I reach the bathroom, the cop is waiting outside. I nod at him, he only stares straight ahead. Then, pushing open the door, I scan the bathroom. The linoleum floor strongly smells of bleach, the same stuff I use for my laundry. My clothes were always spotless, never stained, always bleached. The overhead is a beehive, light like golden honey oozing from the frosted glass, so thick it could drip down and coat my hair in sickeningly sweet layers. The sound is excruciating--that buzzing.  If only I still had that knife with me. It could easily cut through the wires like it did those delicate tendons in the neck. I make my way to the sink and twist on the tap, watching the small light above flicker like a dying firefly with shredded wings.

Why am I here again? I am in the bathroom because…I am in the precinct because I…What did I do? Ah yes, the knife, all that scarlet blood. Without thinking, I look up. My reflection looks oddly familiar, but someone I do not recognize as myself. Another woman. She reminds me of Rose, pale eyes and skin. My mother used to say Rose always  looked as  if she’d been struck with fever, sweaty and shaky, with cheeks like wilted roses. ‘You,’ She’d say to me, drifting a hand along my brow, ‘You’re pretty enough.’ Not pretty. But pretty enough. 

I swipe a dripping hand across my face, only successful in smearing the crusted blood. My brow is slick with sweat, thin hair sticking to my forehead. The woman in the mirror ticks her head. I tick my head. She considers me for a moment before putting her hands to the mirror and howling,

“Admit it! You did it!” My eyes widen, I trip back, hands dripping with the taste of copper. She bares her teeth,

“You put that knife in his throat! Your own husband, how could you? Who does something like that?”

“I didn’t--I don’t…”

“Albright,” A voice leaks into the bleached oasis of the precinct bathroom, “Dahlia Albright? Are you alright?” The women in the mirror turns at the noise,

“That’s not my name,” She screams, like she’s been physically wounded, clawing at the mirror. I ignore her, Dahlia Albright? 

“Rose!” She wails, “My name is Rose!” And then in her fit, she cracks the mirror. At first her features freeze, cracked lips stuck wide open. But then she smiles, takes a look at me, and then starts to smash the glass. It doesn’t matter that her arms are coated in scarlet, she breaks and breaks and breaks. I recoil to the wall as the tiny shards create a broken galaxy on the floor, the golden honey light catching each starfall. A few riddle my skin,  blemishing my arms. 

“Stop!” I call to her, pushing my hands to my skull, clinging to the wall behind me. I expect to hear her high pitched shrieks following my outburst, instead other voices are rendezvousing outside the door, mixing and swirling together. I press my hands further into my head. If I press hard enough they can sink inside, tend to those teeming weeds grown with Merlot and indiscipline. Just a little harder. 

———

“You said you found her like that?”

“Yup, she’d smashed the mirror, cut the light down.”

“With what?” 

“A shard of glass, I think.”

“Jesus.” The two men continue down the hallway, adjusting a tie here, flicking a piece of hair there.

“Who was on her case?”

“Silverman,” One says, as he leans down for a pot of coffee,

“Silverman? Him? Brutal.”

“I know,” The other crinkles a paper cup as he pours a generous helping, 

“He’s been put on two now, two of those sh*tty family deals. This one killed a sister or something, that’s what I heard.” 

“Couldn’t have been, she was screaming about killing a husband.”

“A husband? That’s not right,  it was uhm, a Rose. A Rose Albright. The one on the news about a week ago.” Then they continue down the hallway, one joking about flower sisters, the comedy of it all.