Bunny pictures the bathtub. It’s filled with warm water; a pack of cigarettes and ashtray are on one ledge. On the other ledge of the tub is a wineglass, but it’s filled with vodka, not wine. She will smoke a cigarette and drink the vodka in a measured way. That is, in neither diminutive sips nor swigging it as if she needed it to assuage a particularly bad day or to steady her nerves, as if her hands were shaking. But her hands would not be shaking, and this day would, in fact, be far better than the days preceding it. She’ll smoke the cigarette, and she’ll lean back in the tub and picture an end-of-summer afternoon, late August. She’ll picture floating on an inner tube on a lake, squinting up at the late afternoon sun as the shadows shift and light breaks through the dark density of the fir trees. When the bathwater cools, Bunny will extend her left leg and turn the H faucet with her foot, prehensile in its ability to perform that particular task.
Did it ever happen, Bunny wonders. Was there ever an end-of-summer day when she floated on an inner tube on a lake surrounded by fir trees and squinted up at the sun? Not that it matters. On this last day of December, there is no end-of-summer afternoon, no inner tube, no lake. But still, her ideation is not unlike squinting up at the sun, the way the light breaks through the darkness.
One more cigarette; she’ll smoke that one, too, to its very end. Alongside the ashtray is the box cutter, and not pausing for so much as a thought, she’ll cut one wrist, then the other. Immediately, she’ll wish she’d had one more cigarette, but it will be too late for that. She will watch her life flow from her wrists into the bathwater, and as if blood were food coloring and this, exsanguination, is like a grade school science experiment, the bathwater will turn pink and grow cold, and because she’ll no longer have any control over what is happening, there will be no way for her to stop Jeffrey from pawing at the door, which he always does when Bunny is in the bathroom. He doesn’t like to be left alone. Bunny sees herself well into leaving the world, or maybe she’s already gone, when sweet stupid Jeffrey gets the door open, and instead of drinking from the toilet as he usually does, as if he believes himself to be a lion drinking the cold water from Lake Tanganyika, she pictures him lapping the pink bathwater.
Here is where Bunny’s ideation quits. To picture Jeffrey, having no idea that she’s dead, drinking the bathwater pink from her blood, that just about kills her.