Meta dropped the empty bottle on the hardwood. It shattered shattered, her mind shattered was stripped, torn to ribbons thin as the fringe on the pillows. She teetered into the kitchen, grabbed the last bottle of wine, and unscrewed the cork. It flew across the room and bounced off the walls, one two three, like a rubber ball in a cartoon.

Meta staggered back to the couch, her knees buckling with each step, her ankles crackling, her eyes rolling around like billiard balls in her sockets. The pillows hissed at her as she loomed over them, like her mother had done when she was little.

Meta wrapped her lips around the bottle and tipped it upward, pouring it down her throat like oil into a car. She had just changed the oil before—

The pillows screamed screamed screamed screamed as she doused them with red wine. It looked like blood. It smelled like oil because everything smelled like oil, it smelled like death. She watched the pillows wilt, their stuffing deflating, their fringe drooping like wheat after a storm.

Then they laughed.

She heard them, oh god she heard them so loud, louder than she had ever heard them before. They were laughing, snickering, howling at her. And she felt the drunkenness building in her bones, in her limbs. It slithered beneath her skin, and the room turned somersaults. The pillows were still laughing as her elbows struck the wood, then her head. The wine bottle crashed in front of her.

Glass shards buried themselves into her face, but she was so numb she barely felt them. She heard nothing but a buzzing in her ear, a humming like the goddamn refrigerator. She hauled herself up onto her knees, grasping at the couch, and flinging her chest onto the cushions. She was so heavy. So heavy.

Her eyelids were closing, falling toward the glass still lodged in the flesh of her cheeks.

She saw blue capsules, broken open, half-hidden beneath the red-stained pillows.

And a blue bottle.

Empty.

Her friends laughed and laughed and laughed.