She awoke on the first day of winter, with bells in her hair and snakes on her mind. It took longer than usual to disentangle herself from her dream, and the serpentine shadows and murmuring hisses followed her into the bathroom, fading slowly as she turned on the shower.
That should have been the first warning sign.
Sleepy green eyes blinked through errant auburn curls, and held no clear reason for concern. She couldn't quite recall tying the bells in her tresses, but vodka could explain many sins. If she'd been more awake though, she would've noticed her pupils were larger than normal. And so the second warning sign went unnoticed.
And the third.
The morning held eldritch swirls of fog, curling around the treetops as though winter had kicked the door open overnight. She reached for her i-pod as she walked to the tram stop, and noticed one tip of her left glove was unravelling slowly. She tugged at it with her teeth as she climbed the tram steps, leaving her finger bare to scroll down her playlist. A morning of wintry hues and lingering dreams called for Nick Cave, but as the tram rounded the corner of Fitzroy Street, the fourth warning sign curled a sly hand above her shoulder and gave an ominous tap.
She was gearing herself for her favourite verse when she blinked, and tilted headfirst into the middle of the next song. A whole stanza, a whole verse, a whole minute disappeared. She'd been ready for him to snarl of vipers hissing beneath his floorboards, but the lines of the next song rose up instead and tangled around her feet.
And her heart began to beat just a touch faster but she blamed it on the hangover, and scrolled back.
The fog followed her down Collins Street and when she crossed the lobby and stepped into the lift, for one moment it seemed to linger at the doors. She shook her head and slammed the heel of her hand against the floor number, longing for the burn of caffeine down her throat. Nothing a strong coffee can't banish.
But she knew better.
By the time the photocopier spat out copies of her lesson plan, the fifth warning sign had grabbed her by the roots of her hair, and yanked hard.
It was back. Jesus, here it comes now, lurking in the dark corners of her eyes and jumping back into the shadows each time she turned her head. She had to walk slowly, so slowly, balancing herself against furniture with each step in case it woke more demons. They could raise an army at a moment's notice, a mutinous army of braying little fuckers with their sharp blackened tails and wicked whispers, wedging their secrets in the crevices of her mind and tilting her world on its axis.
She clung to the corners of her day with sharpened fingernails and refused to let go. Eyes down, voice low, can't let the colleagues know, the students, the man who sold her coffee without remarking on her shaking hands. But she caught their gazes; she knew they could smell her poison.
And she already knew the dark lesson she'd learnt time and time again; in a relapse, she was on her own.
She sat on the back steps on the tram ride home and counted the fine network of cracks in the dirty glass of the door, over and over. She always reached the same number, pathetically reassured. The key in her lock never sounded as good and she gingerly felt her way to the fridge, looking for chocolate, comfort, distraction. Her hand paused at the bottle of vodka and when she noticed it shaking, she reached for the bottle of water instead and cursed her illness, her weakness, her genes.
And then she saw them. Floating on the top of the liquid; three plump little pills, their red and white colouring faded from swimming overnight in the water. Her medication, all of it, yesterday's dosage. What the hell? She'd been tired when she'd shuffled to the fridge and washed it down with water - or thought she had. But the pills must have been swept back into the wash without her noticing, sealed up tight, and placed back on the shelf.
And she'd stepped through the rest of her day without any idea, without any protection, and wandered off to bed, where her head had known its first unmedicated night in fifteen years, and silently, stealthily, released her demons into her sleep.
So goddamned quickly.
She'd long since stopped reading the packages. Don't mix with alcohol, don't operate machinery, make sure you eat regularly, yes doc, I know. But what was a life without hot clove whiskey and besides, St Kilda gigs didn't always allow time for eight hours sleep. Sometimes, when she was running on empty and the wine bottles outnumbered the milk cartons in her flat, she could feel her demons waking and vowed to take better care of herself - see her psychiatrist more, maybe even a naturopath, an acupuncturist. Perhaps next month, after rent was paid.
And occasionally she even let her herself believe that when her heart was strong and her hands steady, perhaps she'd be able to fill her last prescription; that her movements wouldn't be jerky and her speech wouldn't hold that slight slur that caused people to cock their head and give her The Look.
She knew better now. It hadn't taken long for the hisses to build and she was still raw, still flawed, and always, always vulnerable.
But at least she knew how to coax calm out of a poisoned mind, and popped a double dose of medication out of the foil packet. It wouldn't take long before the numbness slowed her heartbeat and tugged at her eyelids; bringing the breath back to her chest in gentle waves: just enough time to curl up on the couch, and untie the bells from her hair.
Rijn Collins is a Melbourne writer with an abundance of red notebooks, a degree in linguistics, and a passion for snakes and Berlin. Her work has been published in Going Down Swinging, Ten Years of Things That Didn't Kill Us (Paroxysm Press), Eclecticism, 400 Words and The Age. She's speaking at the Emerging Writers' Festival in May 2009, and is currently working on a novel, in which snakes and Berlin are likely to appear. Email: therednotebooks@gmail.com