"I don't care for your tone!"

She let the glass containing her Cabernet sauvignon slip from her fingers and onto the writing block, landing softer than one would normally expect. Judith had become increasingly worrisome, and for that matter argumentative.

"You keep trying my patients, Jonathan, you just keep it up!"

It was as if her voice were a hand itself, slamming the door and allowing the air in the dusky room to mingle with the outside. The cabernet was still falling to the carpet, leaving a sanguine puddle of aggravation. Judith sat at her stained-oak desk letting her sweat drip onto the ring now formed by a candle's wax; she didn't believe in writing artificially, everything must be as pure as possible. Hiding from the world in the only illuminated corner of a room in the farthest reaches of a two-story household, she stabbed at the ink well, each plunge more violent than the last. The glass jar buckled, and shattered the instant the pseudo-quill pen touched the bottom again, sending fragments of glass and ink to the floor, and some into her own hand.

"Bloody Hell, what do I pay the markets men for...sending me these low-grade pieces of shit!"

A trail of blood from the desktop followed behind Judith as she nonchalantly strode to the medicine cabinet in the lavatory. Penicillin. Cotton balls. Tampons. Razor blades. Hydrogen Peroxide.

"Damn, no bandages!"

------

"A bottle of Elyse Rutherford Petite Syrah, um, 2003, please."

"Special occasion, sir?"

"Our fifth anniversary, a celebration at the least,"

was the comment that set her off. Forgetting a grocery item could get you into the first circle of Dante's Inferno, forgetting the correct number of years of marriage will certainly get you a spot in the nineth.

Teeth gnashed and a foam forming on her upper lip, Judith managed to
sputter,

"You.mean.sixth.dear."

The rest of the night went just as well. Burnt steak. Fake table-flowers. Dirty silverware. Smudged lipstick. Black eye.

------

She decided to pull the glass shards from her candy-apple hands with a pair of tweezers from a travel sewing kit she received from a home and garden show; why the free gifts were for sewing she had no idea. Pain coursed through her body, from her palm to her head and back down toward her abdomen. One-by-one, glass shards were plucked from her hand as effortlessly as the eyebrows she did the same thing to not six hours ago. Consequently, the more the glass was pulled, the more the wounds opened. Soon, blood began pouring faster from her palm and there was little she could do. She fainted. Waking, she briefly froze at the sight of the blood mixing with the cold air from her mouth. The window was open, the curtains fluttering, and the breeze was more than adequate to distill the bad taste in her mouth.

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