She looked up, squinting through the ceiling, searching for the stars, searching for the universe through paint and plaster…searching for the place where people go when the red runs dry. She found nothing but the swirl of a white fan, the dizzying swish-swish of hot air and blue steam. Her hair, wet and slick, fell softly between her naked thighs, curling up where the love comes from, mixing with the forbidden spots in a dance of sleek, black velvet strands and course dark curls, speckled with crimson drip-drops. Her skin was stained red, and the thing that had once been a mind, an intricate maze of silver ribbon brilliance, became nothing but a ball of shiny gray matter that pulsed only for the benefit of the basic and the mundane. She minded the pain far less than the frustration of dying on a bathroom floor disrobed and mindless. Dead like an abandoned dream. Dead like the fish that rots on the water’s surface only to be eaten by something more fortunate. Who would consume her? Who would savor the taste of her flesh? Who would be nourished by the bright thick blood that pulsed through her veins, liquid whispers of blue and maroon, rivers of a union that had once been her mom and her dad, embraced, lip-locked and young? Who could appreciate the delicacy that had once been the dream of pretty blonde girl, who grew into a women and watched her dream dance for so many years on pink toe shoes, with blue-glittered eyelid paint and tiny little transparent skirts that twisted and twirled in time with the music, from a stage far away from the burgundy seats, swelled up with heat, where the blonde woman sat, wide-eyed and proud. Who will listen to the clap, clap, clap for the tiny girl who transformed her veins into alcohol tunnels, her body into bones covered only by a thin layer of yellow-pale skin? Who could appreciate the taste of what she should have been before she becaime void of everything, but the dreams that never died and blossomed into murder?