The Boiling Point

The anger sat in the dip, just below her throat, where the heat of her chest threatened to burn it into oblivion. She felt as if she could, no would, vomit at any moment without notice. Her heart clawed at her insides, begging to be released from its cave, crying for fresh air as it tried to climb from within her.

She hated him. She hated everyone. She hated that she was too much of a coward to remove herself from the planet for good.

Day had gone and night had come, yet in the corner she stayed. When the door slammed for the last time and all the air had been sucked from the room in a final “fuck you,” all she could do was sink into a ball. The whiskey and the bathroom were too far away, the two-bedroom apartment feeling cavernous and immense. It was freezing, yet her body felt like it was on fire as her tears turned to animosity.

An ambulance flew by out front, illuminating her dismal hollow with vibrant red lights that screamed “EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY!” and when she closed her eyes she saw herself running alongside the vehicle. The strong legs, her strong legs, the ones she used to fight him off when he tossed her to the floor, felt light and fluid like a gazelle. The breeze was strong on her face as she flew down the road, her lungs panting, her blood pumping.

The sun rose again, and her skeleton felt one hundred years old, stiff and crumbly like old mattress foam and rusted fence wire. It had been hours, who knows how many, and the ball she’d slept in on the wood floor had turned her body against her. Her sweats were damp, she’d wet herself in the night, and her hair was matted and misty as if she’d contracted and broken a fever while she slept. The phrase “every inch of my body” resonated for the first time in her short existence.

She slowly, and with the help of a chair and the wall, made it to her feet and into the bathroom where she sat on the toilet for eternity. Every liquid within her begged to be released and as she peed she sobbed and used twelve tissues to absorb the tears and snot pouring from her nose. Finally, she felt truly empty. She breathed in more deeply than ever before, the air filling the cobwebbed corners and whistling like a dry bottle.

The sweatpants were tossed into the hall, the t-shirt onto the floor. If “scalding” was a setting on her shower she would have pressed that button and gladly stood under the fire water until her skin washed down the drain, her muscles and tissues following, until she was bones with no brain, no emotion, and nothing to lose. Out of nowhere, the idea made her giggle and she laughed a hearty chuckle as she screamed into the steam, “You are losing your goddamn mind, Ryan.”

With the shower off and her naked booty sitting on the edge of the tub, she wished she smoked. This seemed like one of those moments when lighting a cigarette, pulled from a pack on the counter, would be perfection. A swig from a bottle half consumed, a puff of nicotine, and total satisfaction of not giving one single fuck.

She stood and walked bravely to the mirror, wiping the dense fog off the glass with a twice-used facial cloth. The bruises were everywhere, and like a rainbow of blues and yellows made a consecutive river of pain from one side of her body to the other. The three scratch marks on her neck were not quite scabbed, a missed slap that turned into a grab and then a shred. A smile spread across her lips and the pain of the swelling in her cheeks and gums caused her to wince, then shove the pain away and return to her reflection. What looked back at her was not herself, but a monster that had crept inside her the night before. The woman who would cry, cover her wounds with concealer, and bake a cake was gone. The sunshine had been extinguished, a darkness taking hold of her former self.

She was awake.

First, she cut his favorite sports jersey into a million tiny pieces and tossed them into the air like confetti. She took a video and posted it to her Instagram story with the hashtag #onlythebeginning. Her phone pinged with text messages she ignored as she silenced the outside world with the flick of a button.

A photo of her urine and blood-stained sweats, the vase he’d shattered when he chucked it across the room at her, the framed ultrasound photo ripped beyond recognition and soaked in her tears.

Deep breath, release, endorphins, the return of self.

She posted a photo of her split and purple swollen lip with the caption: “For each of these, I’ll take one of these...”

An image of his baseball card collection worth thousands, each card meticulously preserved in plastic and organized into a binder, was next in the story. Slowly, methodically, and with enormous satisfaction, she shredded them one by one. The sound of the machine devouring the paper made her heart pound with excitement. When the shredder was full she poured the tiny bites into the Super Bowl helmet he’d purchased at auction last year. The hat was encased in a glass cube, which she smashed into oblivion with his iPad, then placed on her head and photographed before filling it with the tattered cards and lighting it on fire in the sink.

The new 64-inch plasma went next, destroyed beyond recognition with the signed Babe Ruth bat his father bought him when he left his mother for his aunt. A moment of empathy came and went without sticking or swaying.

After trying to puncture the basketball signed by Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordon with a kitchen knife, she threw it through the living room window and drove the dagger into the World Series poster instead.

The drawers in the bedroom were painstakingly emptied, with each electronic and tech gadget obliterated one by one. Her phone continued to ping and vibrate, but she persisted, looking only at her feed as she added to it. In the back of his sock drawer, hidden in a zipper bag with sports quotes on it, she found a phone she’d never seen before. She unlocked it (what kind of moron uses his birthday as a passcode) and called the one number in the contacts.

“Hey you,” a woman answered.

There was no response.

“Who is this?” the woman sounded worried.

Ryan sat silent, listening to the woman fidget until she hung up.

As the phone hit the wall on the other side of the room, Ryan screamed from the deepest bowels of her being, a roar so loud she scared herself.

Everything was silent. She realized she was hungry. Someone knocked on the front door. She thought about calling Postmates and ordering a burger. The person at the door got a little louder. She took the Violet Crumble bar she’d found earlier off the nightstand and ate it. The outsider began pounding and yelling, the animalistic rage radiating off him in a familiar fashion.

Numbed to the danger, she grabbed the phone and dialed 911, carrying it to the living room with her, the voice of dispatch calling from her side as she walked.

“Hello? Hello?” the woman repeated as Ryan tucked the phone into her tiny t-shirt pocket. She wondered if this was what the pocket had been for all along.

Ryan grabbed the baseball bat and the knife as she approached the entryway, and without a single moment of hesitation opened the door and looked him directly in the eye for the first time in months.

He was screaming but she didn’t hear a thing. There was gesticulating and spitting and beet-red cheeks flinging insults and threats, but she just stood. No feelings, no sensation, no thoughts. In nothing but a shirt and underwear, with a knife in one hand and a quarter million dollar bat in the other, Ryan just was.

When he lunged she simply bent her arm so the knife pointed at him, and he retreated, momentarily stunned. The briefness didn’t matter, but the flicker of fear in his eyes did.

Sirens in the distance, he began to break down as he fled. Ryan dropped the bat, pulled the phone from her pocket, and took a video of his cowardly and vulgar diatribe. The outrage, the intimidation, the promises, the imminent danger.

As he jumped into his car and sped away, she calmly hit “share,” tossed her phone into a bush, then went inside to make herself a PBJ.