Mollie: Hot Cocaine Moon

Mollie missed sleeping in the soft dark womb of mental illness. Hey, I hear you say, you're not supposed to say that! But she missed being crazy, she missed the easiness of writing then. When Mollie was crazy she never felt as alone as she did after going back to work. Now she felt like a black pinprick standing on an orange wasteland that went on forever. She felt like a rotten eucalyptus. She felt like she was a dog standing on a street corner and nobody knew she was rabid.

Mollie could honestly say that she did not love herself; she was no hot-stomping jitter-bugging glitterbug dancing under a hot cocaine moon. Instead, she was the famous disappearing woman! She vanished behind sadness and famine. Mollie looked in the mirror and saw a woman that ate her own baby. She catalogued her clothes and counted the steps that it took to walk to her office. She liked to make her skin angry.

In her dreams she liked to climb up the same hill every night. As she climbed, Mollie was aware that there were bones in the grass, vertebrae crackling underfoot. At the peak of the hill there was always a ladybird cowering on the underside of an old leaf, no bigger than the bud of a charred matchstick. Mollie, cooing, would take the ladybird and gently crush it between her finger and thumb. The insect's blood tasted like spaghetti sauce.