Reinforce

My lower lip started to tremble. I felt myself losing control. It came in short spurts of tears, and I almost kicked the feeling in its entirety. I indulged the feelings a bit too much...you needed to ride a fine line between crying and holding it together- make yourself feel better without making yourself look like a weakling. The feeling came back, and I started heaving in sobs. I sat down on my chair and pulled my shirt over my face. No one needed to see. The shirt was quickly coated in snot and tears. I looked at the inside of the shirt, then took it off. I wiped my face on it. The thing was a fucking mess. Everything was a fucking mess. Blood splashes from the puddles that I was stepping in had coated my pants from the bottom to halfway to my knee. The acrid smell of gunpowder still lingered on my hands and clothes. Alice was sitting on her bed, crying into her crossed arms. Her tears had mixed with the cut on her arm. The blood and tear mixture trickled down and off of her arms in a pink hue. I spat in my shirt and started work on getting my breath back. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Or was it the other way around? Oh, who gave a fuck. Alice started taking deep breaths as well. Her breathing steadied, then she picked her head up and wiped the pink stuff of her arms with her sleeves. "Agh," she gurgled, her mouth still full of saliva from her bout of crying. She looked at me, and I realized that I was looking at her. She got up and started walking towards me. I stood up in response. As soon as she got to me, she ran her fingers along the set of scars on my left shoulder. "These are from you... aren't they?" Except it wasn't a question. Her voice didn't go up at the end. I looked at the wall behind her. "Ahhh. Yeah. Why? You as well?" I put the last three words together in as casual a way I could. She shook her head, her expression unchanged. Hm. Alice smiled for a quarter second. "Why?" she said, taking her hand off of my shoulder. I suddenly wished I had kept the mess of a shirt on. I put my hand on my scars. "I just wanted to see some blood. Then the instant of pain was momentary bliss from everything else- my mind, primarily. People get addicted to it- I see how they could be. That urge to make one more cut is there," I monologued. My eyes watered. My ears pounded, begging for release. I blinked them back, but one stray got through, running down the right side of my face in ceremonious fashion. Alice put her hand on my cheek and wiped it away. I recoiled slightly at her touch. "S-sorry," I muttered, choking on air. I stepped out of her hand and grabbed my pocketknife and a change of clothes from my suitcase. "Fuck," I breathed, as I did so. I turned back to her.

"I gotta get cleaned up, I-"

"What's with the knife?"

"I'm not going to- aw, fuck."

I unzipped my pants and found the sweater. Its fibers had intertwined themselves with the dried blood. I started cutting around where it had connected itself to my skin. I dropped the sweater on the floor along with the knife. I turned sharply on my heel and paraded to the bathroom. I flung the showerhead to max heat and stood for a moment, seething. Who the fuck did she think she was? My fucking shrink? I found my bottom lip quivering again. Fuck this. I turned the water off and resumed crying, harder and louder than before. I went for about thirty seconds before Alice walked in. I had forgotten to lock the door. I didn't try to pull myself back together after a bit this time. I just let it go. Alice stood, leaning against the door. I started breathing again in quick, labored breaths. "You weren't really fazed by those rooms at first, were you?" I said, looking up at her with a raw, red, teary face.

"No," she said, frowning. Some of my parent's people were cutting up bodies to dispose of. I wandered in while they were doing it. Maybe four or five years old. Never realized how screwed up that was until I got older. Guess I just thought it was no big deal."

"So why were you crying?

"I thought I should and I thought that it was weird to not cry. Why are you crying now?"

"Not really over all of the dead... It just causes me to think about myself. Don't know how I'm going to do this job. God that sounds fucked when I say it..."

"We're doing fine. I can guarantee you that's the worst thing any of us are going to see."

"Yeah. That makes sense."

"Let me see that cut I made."

She put her hand back on the series of scars and ran her finger along the one that she made. It wasn't a deep cut, by any stretch of the imagination. She just pushed the knife in so far at one spot so that it made that burning sensation. Dried blood lined the cut, smeared just slightly from my shirt.

Alice ran her finger back and forth along it, feeling how deep it was. "How was that?"

"Good. Just enough to make it hurt."

I pulled back her sleeve and saw her wince as I did so. I pulled back the rest slowly. "Holy shit," I muttered. The cut was the deepest one I had ever seen. Three or four inches long, a third of a centimeter deep. The skin creeped open if you wanted it too, revealing a mouthful of what looked like bloodied corpses of the damned from its gaping maw. I opened my mouth in a look of quizzical shame. "Sorry," I stated. I pulled my hand off of her arm as if I would give her third degree burns with my hand. Alice's empty hand snatched my wrist before I could put it back at my side.