A Thousand Fragments of Self
(A very short story about brokenness and wholeness)
©September 24th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
She was one with the dark, all thousand fragments of her. She sat at the table, her glass of water, a cylinder of dim light in a shaking hand, catching the passing light of a moonbeam.
She gazed, unseeing, into the distance. Water flowed down her tongue, down her throat down her gullet, and into her roiling belly. She felt its coolness settle somewhere within, a pool of quietude in a vast, drying prairie. A memory of the evening swept over her suddenly, and the coolness was replaced by fire.
The glass of water and her shaking hand blurred before her eyes, while the darkness collected around her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, her knees, her ankles.
Suddenly, her solitude was too much to bear. She reached for the kitchen light, and the darkness retreated to the far corners of the next room.
In the harsh electric light the water glinted. She looked around at the pictures on the far wall, and at her yellow and white-painted kitchen cupboards, and at the simple kitchen island where she had placed a bunch of sunflowers, and she wondered how she could erase herself, how she could start over, how she could undo what had happened to her when she’d walked home alone that night, and how she had made it out of the attack alive, but scathed, beaten, broken within, collapsing on her apartment doorstep, shaking, dry-sobbing.
She was alone, all alone. There was no one she could turn to, not at midnight. The house was still, listening to her.
Somewhere below the pit of her roiling belly swirled a fire of pain, and the bile arose in her throat. All that was beautiful in the world had burned into a little ash-heap somewhere. This phoenix could not regrow its feathers.
She could not recall a single happy moment from her previous life in the horror of the here and now, but her glass of water, a cylinder of light in a shaking hand, glinting, distracted her, and she held it as a drowning person might, except that this was water, and she wanted to drown in it.
Gazing at her cylinder of light, she let her mind wander, a lost creature in a vast prairie filled with wolves.
And the glass of light glinting liquidly calmed her. She though briefly, in her grasshopper mind that leaped around to avoid dwelling on pain and horror, about how the shapes of things change with the containers they’re in.
She thought: I shall change mine.
With her shaking hand, her cylinder of glass-water still glinting, darkness still retreating at the edges of the pool of light, she reached for the switch. The darkness flooded back in, and she became one with it.
A glass of water spilled, and shattered into a thousand fragments.
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This short story is in response to the prompt for Writing 101 Day 13: Compose a Series of Vignettes