Blue Glass

Broken Glass

I huddled next to the window of the first class compartment I was in, my hands clasped so tightly in my lap that my knuckles were a pasty white. The train's wheels clacked noisily along the tracks, providing welcome background noise to stifle the troubling thoughts swamping my mind.
I was going home. For better or for worse, I was going back to Vienna, back to the brown two-story house on the quiet side street. And then? I didn't know what I would do then. But one thing was for certain: I could no longer stay in Germany.
I riffled around in my handbag for my hand mirror and held the square piece of glass up to my face. No amount of makeup in the world could conceal my puffy cheeks and bloodshot red eyes—bitter reminders of the few sleepless nights I had spent crying into my pillow as walls and floors of the ramshackle apartment creaked and groaned all around me.
It would have been so much easier to handle if Marie had been there. At least I wouldn't have felt as alone and despondent as I had. Screw it if she was really Svetlana in disguise.

I pressed my fists to the sides of my head like a toddler throwing a tantrum, willing all thoughts of Manfred to slowly recede into the dark corners of my mind. I didn't want to think about him, because if I did I knew I would start crying. And the last thing I knew I should be crying over was him.
I didn't know why his impromptu jilting me affected me so much. Anyone else would have moved on with their life. Anyone but me.
On impulse, his face slowly materialized in my mind: blond hair that looked like it had been spun from golden threads of sunlight and blue eyes the color of the ocean.  I knew I shouldn't love him anymore, but there was still a part of me that wanted him back—and for good reason. He was the only person that had ever overlooked what I came from and saw through that to who I really was. He was the only one around whom I could truly be myself.

I supposed that the only way to truly forget him was to let the pain of missing him gnaw away at me until one day I no longer felt anything anymore. I would wake up one day and life would go on, because that's just what time does to people—it makes them forget. It forces them to move on.
I wondered what would happen to me once I got to Vienna. Would Heinrich be waiting for me on the platform with an escort of armed men from the mental facility he had threatened to send me to?
My hand instinctively slid to the razor in my pocket. I would die before I got dragged off to some cold water sanatorium and given the universal treatment meted out to all "rebellious, hysterical women."

I had only heard whispers about what went on behind the thick stone walls of the mental facilities in Vienna. They had come mostly from my classmates who had had unruly relatives carted off to places like that and heard them telling their stories to those who would listen after their release.
The thing was, those women probably never really were insane. They were only branded as such by the men of their household for one petty reason or another.

Kate Otersdorf had been one such classmate with a story to tell. Apparently, her aunt had been sent to a mental facility after she tried to take her children away from her husband, who was a violent alcoholic. From what Kate had told us, her aunt had described to her in graphic detail how she had been repeatedly submerged in a zinc tub full of ice water, apparently to calm her "hysteria." The "treatment" had lasted for about an hour, and had left her psychologically broken. It had infuriated me that this is what she had gotten for trying to be a good mother to her children and take them away from someone who would in his drunken rages beat them and make their lives hell, and I could tell by the looks on the other girl's' faces that they felt the same way. I had gone home that day filled with rage at the bigotry of men. As I grew older, that story only strengthened my resolve to never let a man get the better of me.
But I had now. And now I was going to pay the price in the worst way imaginable.
I would have to move fast if Heinrich was waiting for me with a posse of plainclothes lab assistants. I had kept my razor sharp, and could only hope that the thin blade would manage to slice through skin, muscle, and arteries. The least I could do now was pretend all would be well when I stepped off the train.