In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

chopping the present into the past. The red obelisk stabbed at the
shrouded sky. Squeak, squeak, squeak, the sound of the wheel launched
her through space into a blood colored void. The sky, the obelisk, the
Wheel all dissolved into this sea of red. Rush of wind shot through the
top of her head. Pop! She shrank to a point of fuchsia haloed white
light.
When she opened her eyes she was on the floor. She pulled
herself up, grabbing onto the window sill. She could see from the
floodlights of the monument that blood was running down her pant's
leg and between her toes, staining the light wool carpet. Her period had
come with a vengeance. The last one had been... in September? Her
knees crumpled beneath her as she tried to walk to the bed. Out of
tissues, she crawled to the armoire, found his stack of crested linen
handkerchiefs and stuffed one of the squares into her pants until she
could get to the bathroom.
In the bathroom the bowl filled with blood. She ran a warm
bath to ease her pain. The water soon darkened and she saw Ula's
mother, dancing next to a gravestone in the months before her
daughter's birth, then going to sleep in this. She lifted the plug and
watched the vortex of pink water slide down the drain. Like the tea in
her cup that day. The passage of Time.
She wrapped herself in one of the fluffy white towels from the
heated rack and stepped out of that room and its smell of iron. A brutal
smell: of slaughter and sacrifice.
Back at her desk she pulled up the chair and turned on the
machines.
Days passed. Somebody, somewhere, perhaps across the river,
was on the ball, because every morning an American breakfast with
eggs and bacon presented itself at her door. Small comfort, because he
didn't call and he didn't show his face.
Half a dozen or so breakfasts later, the new piece reached its
inevitable conclusion. Not that she had much to do with it at this point.
She couldn't logically see how it had developed, yet it made sense, and
certainly it expressed her state of mind, something she was incapable of
processing otherwise.
Penny opened the drapes and saw the sun shining thinly
through the morning fog and set out down the carpeted marble stairs,
past the windows of diamond tiaras, down the reflective marble
checkerboard of the entry hall and congested stacks of logo luggage
and into the real world to stretch her legs along the sandy gravel alleys
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