the absolute final freewrite - at least for now
So I'm back from the writer's retreat and bracing to face the real world once again. We had our last freewriting session this morning, and the prompt was, "Once again, he/she/I awoke wearing the wrong dress."
This is not a cheerful piece. And sadly, it's about someone I know. Someone who, until few days ago, I felt close to....
Once again, she awoke wearing the wrong dress. It was becoming a habit, one of many and hardly the most disturbing she’d lately acquired.
Her stomach gurgled and something thin and sour surged up and tried to get out, the aftermath of too many cranberry vodkas - light on the cranberry and heavy on the vodka - combined with more earthy reminders of the night before. Sour, it was all sour.
Gone sour.
She didn’t want to turn over, didn’t want to see where she was this time, what unfamiliar bed she’d declared squatter’s rights on for the night, who she’d shared it with. She had to, though, had to sit up and breathe before she vomited. Slowly, painfully, she pried open one eyelid, heavy with stage make-up and burning from the aftereffects of too much tobacco smoke, too much drink. Empty, thank God. The other side of the bed was empty.
She eased into a sitting position, bare, estrogen-enhanced breasts rubbing the scratchy insides of that dress - Shawna’s violet-sequins gown, the one she always wore for her final number. She didn’t remember Shawna’s final number. Or her own, for that matter. When did they switch costumes, and why? Vague flashes of drinking, laughing, fighting. A shouting match with Chardonnay du Vin, the bitch.
“Invest in eye drops, troll,” Char had said, her raspy baritone pitched to carry. “If you’re going to get shitty wasted every Friday night, at least learn the feminine art of damage control. The camera loves bloodshot - not. You’ll fuck up the group photo.”
She racked a brain muddled by drugs and vodka and high-volume, low-quality sex. She didn’t remember the group photo, but she did recall fragments of the screaming match that followed, Char’s voice and her own, with the bartender and Typhoon LaFemm joining in to form a low-rent chorus. And she remembered a man’s hands, smooth-skinned but with dirty fingernails, closing on her wrists, leading her out of the club at the end of the night. An out-of-focus montage of jeans unzipping, of fishnets snagging as she scrambled over seats and down onto the front floorboard of a cab, smearing red glitter lipstick and losing a false eyelash because tips had been lousy and she was getting the ride for free.
Shit.
She had to move. She slid off the bed, staggering slightly under the weight of morning, and straightened Shawna’s dress, wondered where her underwear had gone. It was gone, that was sure as shit, and she was untucked, the part of her that felt the least like part of her dangling in flaccid shame.
June Cleaver was dead. The happy homemaker wife, the stay-at-home mom, the daughter-in-law who hosted Thanksgiving dinner - all pushed out of sight and mind like a science experiment gone wrong. Where had it gone? Where had she gone? Part of her wished she could remember.
Most of her was just as happy to forget.