Burst.

He throws his rattling laugh at her. Unintentionally perhaps, but it still has the same nails-down-a-chalkboard effect as it bounces down the hallway. She grits her teeth. Clenches maybe? No, she clamps her mouth shut trying to subdue the hate that bubbles like acid in her stomach. She can feel it eating a hole clean through her.



It wasn't fair.



He had gone ballistic when he discovered the letters, words, sentences she had scratched into the backs of the doors. Things she had read, lyrics that got stuck, names of people that filled her head, going around and around."She had trusted many, but been unfamiliar with almost everyone but you." It scared her to have a mind so full- It felt like being on the boat in "Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory" with Gene Wilder muttering away.

The only way she could fix it was to lay on her stomach in the half-darkness at dusk and scratch them out. "What happens in the heart simply happens."
Day after day for weeks she had methodically emptied her thoughts in the quiet rooms, while he sat, clutching a warming beer and watching mindless televsion.
Out of sight, out of mind.

He hadn't caught her in the act. It had been an unfortunate accident, the way the afternoon sun climbed in through the slanted blinds lighting up the raw markings like a neon sign in his peripherals."Gustav Flaubert"

Ballistic.



What hurt the most though, was when he took the desk key that she had used. It was a small, brass key her mother had carried on a red ribbon. After her mother left, she had taken it upon herself to be the keeper of the key. She had worn it around her ankle, and without the comforting weight- she felt lost. Like she had been cast off, into the same royal blue abyss her mother inhabited.



But she hadn't been cast off. She was tied to him by a thin red ribbon, reeled in by his rattling laugh.
Sitting at the end of the hall, curled like an unborn child, that laugh filled her until she thought she would burst.