Disclaimer: This is a scary story with mentions of suicide and implied disturbing imagery.

Today has not gone well.

Friendships are not easy to make but are very easy to break. My mom told me that once. The last person I had considered a friend for the past five years has ended her life. I am now left with no one.

I sit on the kitchen floor with all the lights off. It’s night out. There is no light, no sound. There’s everything beyond the four walls of this room. I stare into the darkness with my mouth open. I’ve been here all day.

I had an exam this morning. Three actually. I just realized. I missed them all. I won’t bother letting them know why or that I plan to make them up. I don’t care.

The pain of hunger has sat inside me for over a week. I had just learned of her death this morning, but for eight days leading up to this moment, I could feel something. I could feel that oncoming premonition of dreadful, evil news. Everything smashes through the windows of my life with such a quickness I don’t have time to move before the shards of glass cut up my body. The sickness is not evil. I am the sickness. I am my own evil.

I knew this from early on in life. What I had to do, what I had to have done to me, to get just this far, in the gutters of this loud and empty city…this would never happen to a person who was meant for goodness. To a woman who was good.

My ankles, my feet, my hips, all of my bones ache from sitting here. My throat is tight from dehydration, and the breath coming off my tongue is hot and dry. This whole room is hot and dry. The curls on my head are rough and mangled. I’ve been feeling bad for quite a long time. I thought I was getting better.

Finally, I stand up. I flick on the lights, dull and yellow. I haven’t been to the grocery store in awhile. Maybe one or two weeks. I open the fridge and cabinets and see how barren they are. Maybe one or two months, then.

There’s one thing. Always one thing without fail. My jar of peanut butter.

Through good times and all of the bad, I have always had a jar of it. Not this exact jar. Obviously. But peanut butter in general. It has a density to it in so few bites that no other food can make me feel. I grab it.

I go to my bedroom and close my door. It’s messy and cluttered, and my study material is thrown everywhere. My bed is unmade and stained with sauce and spilled orange soda. I remember the pizza I had two weeks ago. It was fine. That day was better than today.

I forgot to grab a spoon. I untwist the jar. The peanut butter feels strange in my hand, as if the jar has a different weight to it than usual. I shake it slightly. There’s a shifting sound at the bottom. I feel my heart pick up a bit, wondering if it may be expired. It slows down, and I stop wondering.

I put four of my fingers in and scoop the peanut butter out. It’s thick and light brown, like always. I shove my fingers in my mouth. And I keep doing it until I forget what I’m doing.

Of all the people to die today. Of all the people in this world, it had to be her? The only person I had? To hell with everyone else who loved her. She was my friend. No one is more broken by her loss than me. Not her mother, not her father, not her sister, not her boyfriend. No one in the world grieves for her like I do. To all the rest of her family and friends, they will move on, and the world will do as it always does. But I will still be here, because I have nothing. Outside of her, the one who got me out of the lowest point of my life, I have nothing. And because of her I’m lower than ever before. Thanks to her.

She was my strength. She was my savior. And now she is my enemy.

There’s a shattered mug on the floor in front of me. I had thrown it earlier from rage. I screamed. I had cried out. I begged. I had prayed. All of that is over. I’m done feeling anything. All my grades will plummet to automatic D’s for missing these exams. All of my hopes and all of my future was wrapped up in this last day, this last day of my student life. She’s ruined everything for me.

Half of the jar is gone. I went from starvation to deep sickness within two minutes. And I keep going. The pleasant nutty taste is now a sludgy mess in my mouth. I think I feel disgusted. I keep going.

And I keep going.

And I keep going.

I choke from how tight my throat is even more from the peanut butter. I wish I had some water, milk, juice, something. But I keep going anyway.

And now my dirty fingers feel something odd. Something hard, rough, boney. I stare inside the jar with mouth agape and my eyesight blurring. 

I keep going. 

And beneath the layers of tan paste I finally see part of what had concerned me early. A pink, worm thing. A tail. I keep going.

Fur. Patchy and dark. Wrapped around in a circle at the bottom of the jar. 

The corpse of a rat.

I think I am terrified. I think there is a pit in my stomach unrelated to the thousands of calories failing to digest inside me. I know my heart has picked up its pace. I know the jar is shaking in my hands.

The tail is still speckled with peanut butter. I pick it up. I dangled the rat in front of my face. The feeling of it makes my whole body tremble and grow cold. Its eyes are open and afraid. I wonder if that was how she had died. 

I open my mouth and pull it closer.

And I keep going.

–

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Happy Friday, everyone!

Sorry for the not so happy story, hopefully it wasn’t too creepy! My mind has been rolling around in darker head spaces the past few months, and sometimes writing it out makes me feel a little bit better. For balance, I’ll watch two more Disney princess movies today. I hope your day is going better than the lady in the story! And thank you for reading ❤

~Sammicakes