The apartment closes around her like a held breath.
The door clicks; the chain slides; the night stays on the other side.
Sofia is a quiet hill on the bed, hair tide out across the pillow, a soft unambitious snore that doesn't ask her for anything.
Good. Let it stay that way.
Bathroom. Light up—cheap fluorescent cough, then a hard white that forgives no one. The mirror is the same liar as always, but it's the only witness she needs.
She peels herself out of the night piece by piece. Jacket first—zip scratches the stitch at her collarbone; the fabric sticks to a line of blood and lets go with a tacky sigh.
Gloves off; tape unwinds off her knuckles like old decisions. Boots thud the tile, then the cheap "armor": tank, shorts, sports bra—all shed into a dark tide that smells like club sugar, hydraulic oil, disinfectant, men.
She ends up naked in front of the mirror, one hand on the sink, the other on the counter edge because the porcelain is the only thing in here that pretends to be steady.
Inventory.
The visor line's still impressed across her brow; a purpled kiss will bloom there by morning.
Lower lip split—small, neat, the color of a promise you didn't keep.
Left tricep carved by a bullet's bad opinion—furrow three fingers long, pink meat smiling, black grit caught at the edges like punctuation.
Right thigh, outside sweep: a ceramic shard wrote a six-centimeter sentence through skin and a little fat—edges gaping, not much bleeding now, club scum ground in.
Ribs—right side, under the breast—brass knuckles left a galaxy: purple deepening to night, a tender starfield you don't get to wish on.
Shin—left—an extinguisher corner gave her a dent that pulses its own weather.
Hands—barb-wire kisses stacked like tally marks across the first knuckles, some shallow, one deeper over the index MCP where wire teeth took a nibble.
Collarbone—old stab seam reopened into a thin weeping grin; not wide, but warm.
Neck stiff.
Jaw humming.
Head ringing but the ring is distant, not the church bell she fears.
She watches her pupils under the bathroom light.
Phone flashlight up—one, two—track the beam: left-right, up-down, finger close-far.
Both follow.
No slurred edges on the world. No nausea that isn't earned. Good enough.
The cabinet opens like a drawer of old arguments.
She lays the kit on the counter with a practiced quiet: sterile saline squeeze bottle and a 60 mL syringe with a splash shield; povidone-iodine swabsticks; a small chlorhexidine scrub; sterile gauze (4x4s and 2x2s); non-adherent pads; benzoin ampules; butterfly closures and Steri-Strips; a single 4-0 nylon suture pack in foil like a dare; tweezers; blunt-tipped scissors; small hemostat; a roll of cohesive wrap (coban); paper tape; antibiotic ointment; alcohol wipes (for skin, not wounds); nitrile gloves.
Ibuprofen rattles in an orange bottle.
A strip of leftover amoxicillin-clavulanate from a clinic that didn't ask questions, expiration not today.
A little tube of petroleum jelly for lips and for anything that hates air.
She runs the tap to warm—cold will shock the muscles into clench, warm lets them stop acting.
Washes her hands until the skin squeaks.
Gloves on—snap—blue skin over skin.
Meth still edges her nerve endings; she keeps her movements slow, deliberate, a kindness to herself disguised as economy.
Tricep, first.
Bleeding is an accountant, not a poet.
She packs 4x4s against the groove and sets a palm there, elbow braced on the counter.
Thirty seconds. Sixty. Release: a thin ooze, not a fountain.
Good.
She floods it with saline from the bottle—the pressurized stream hammers grit loose; black flecks lift and twirl down ceramic like a tiny funeral.
Syringe next: draws saline, seats shield, then drives an 8–10 psi jet along the length, wall to wall, until the pink runs clean.
No peroxide—she learned that lesson; bubbles don't mean better, they mean dead tissue and slower healing.
She plucks two stubborn specks out with clean tweezers, the way you remove bad thoughts: find them, pull, don't stare.
Povidone swab for the surrounding skin only; the wound itself wants saline and respect, not brown tincture.
Edges? They don't quite meet without puckering.
Contaminated environment, ricochet grit—she leaves it open, no sutures. Benzoin on the dry perimeter, then butterfly closures a finger's breadth apart to give the edges a handshake without sealing the door.
Non-adherent pad, then gauze, then a firm but not strangling wrap of coban that sticks to itself and not to her.
She flexes. The dressing holds without pulling. Good girl.
Thigh, next.
The shard line glints ugly, deeper than the arm, with a mouth that wants to talk.
She tests around it—a press here, a press there—no muscle herniation, no fountain, just insult. This one could use sutures in a clean world.
This isn't one. She floods it until the sink looks like a softly murdered animal.
Syringe again; more pressure; more grit comes out like small confessions. She blots with 4x4s until the pink is honest. She trims a few ragged tags of skin with the blunt scissors—not fashion, just keep the flaps from rotting their way into a smell.
Benzoin borders; Steri-Strips ladder across, three good ones taking most of the stress, small gaps left between for drainage because sealed filth becomes infection, and infection steals time she can't afford.
Non-adherent pad large enough to be humble; gauze; a spiral of coban from mid-thigh to above the wound, enough compression to quiet the throb without turning her leg into a strip light.
She stands, weight tests the wrap; the pain is present, not boss. That's the deal.
Knuckles.
She soaks the two worst—index and middle—under warm running water, then drives saline across the cuts to chase out any tiny wire ghosts. She inspects with tweezers and the phone light—no metal glints, just meat.
Chlorhexidine scrub for the skin around, rinse by habit. A whisper of antibiotic ointment across each cut; not a gob (macération is a bitch); then fingertip-sized non-adherent squares and a lazy spiral of paper tape.
She caps the index with a finger cot more to keep grease out than to keep blood in.
She flexes a fist. The dressings wrinkle and don't fight her.
Tomorrow they'll itch—that's tomorrow's problem.
Lip.
Saline on gauze, dab until the iron taste forgets itself. No alcohol; no peroxide; she's not punishing the wound for existing.
A dot of petroleum to keep it from scabbing into a trap. She checks the inside for tooth nicks—tongue finds one sharp edge—she thinks about wax; she doesn't own wax; she accepts she will be careful or she will bleed on a shirt she likes less.
Ribs. There's no fixing a bruise that's already writing its memoir.
She lifts her arms, winces; she palpates along the arc—no step-offs, no rice krispies of crepitus, just pain that insists on its version of events.
No binding—she knows not to gift-wrap a lung and call it safe.
She hugs a folded towel and breathes deep five times, slow. It hurts like honesty; it keeps the alveoli from quitting.
She coughs once on purpose to keep the habit of it.
The mirror watches and keeps its comments to itself.
Shin. Cold pack from the freezer—the bag of peas that's more medicine than food. Towel layer, fifteen minutes while she preps the next thing; elevate on the toilet lid because sinners deserve a little R in RICE.
Collarbone seam. She peels the dried blood without reopening the whole poem. It seeps when she looks at it. Saline, blot.
She considers the suture kit.
The room shakes its head.
She gives it a reinforcement instead: benzoin, two Steri-Strips bridging, not tight, just a seatbelt to remind the edges where home is.
She dries the skin, lays a small 2x2, anchors with paper tape in an H.
She presses the tape down with the warmth of her palm and thinks of nothing for three seconds.
She swaps gloves when they feel like lies.
Thigh sting from the bathroom fight.
She catches sight of dried pink on the outside of her quad where the toilet shard bit. Smaller than the main gash, but deep enough to matter.
Irrigate.
Blot.
Two butterflies across and a sheet of Tegaderm she stole from a clinic once—clear film doming the wound like a tiny greenhouse, edges smoothed by the pad of her thumb.
Face.
The visor mark on her brow will flower.
She runs cool water and pats the area to convince it not to explode.
A thin line of arnica from an old superstition stick—maybe it does nothing, maybe it steals a day from a bruise; belief is a cheap analgesic.
She doesn't have time to be purple where people assume the worst.
She swallows water like a job—two full glasses, a pinch of salt in the second because salt knows how to be a friend.
Two ibuprofen ride the wave down and settle.
She considers the benzo; she doesn't even pick up the bottle.
Meth still leans on her shoulders; clonazepam would fold her into a shape that doesn't pay. She opens the antibiotic strip, hesitates.
Sauna. Club. Flesh. Grit.
The thigh was dirty.
She starts the course—first pill chalks her tongue with pharmaceutical certainty.
She sets the rest by the toothbrush like a promise she intends to keep.
Trash bag—she polices her mess.
Bloodied 4x4s into plastic, swabs into plastic, ampule shards corralled into a tissue nest, syringe rinsed, nozzle dried.
She runs a thin bleach solution around the sink because you don't leave a story for the morning to read.
The bat leans in the doorway like a bad idea with good timing; the wire still sings faintly with dry metal.
She looks at it once and doesn't. Later.
She checks her work the way she checks a tied grid: edges aligned, pressure right, no corners forgotten.
She presses a palm into the rib bruise and waits for the world to wobble; it doesn't. She flexes the tricep; the wrap holds.
She walks a small circle to test the thigh; pain tugs but doesn't pull.
She inhales, counts to eight, exhales to eight, one more time, because breath is the only metronome that forgives her.
The mirror gives her back—naked, taped and bandaged, a patchwork of white and beige geometry over brown and purple.
"Still human" is half-hidden under Steri-Strips and a smear of iodine, a label on a warm bottle.
The dotted "cut here" bracelets peek from glove lines like jokes that got too honest.
She pops the glove cuffs with her teeth and peels the blue from her hands.
Fingers pink, pruney, nicked. She runs petroleum across knuckles to keep the dressing edges from sawing skin.
The peas sweat through the towel.
She puts them back.
She takes a minute on the closed toilet, elbows on knees, head in hands—not collapse, just a pause between pages while the ledger numbers line up and approve each other.
She stands and the room stands with her.
Out in the other room, Sofia turns over and pulls the blanket up without waking.
Lucia ghosts to the doorway, watches the small rise and fall, the unarmed face.
She leaves no blood prints on the jamb.
Back in the bathroom, she closes the cabinet on the kit. The mirror catches her one last time and decides not to have an opinion.
She wipes a dot of blood off her clavicle and finds the tape still holding.
She cracks the window an inch to let the smell of iodine and metal climb out into the night.
She kills the light. The fan finishes a last, tired rotation and forgets it ever tried.
In the dark, she can feel every bandage like a small, well-placed hand telling her to behave. She does.
The apartment hums like a throat clearing—fridge lowing in vowels, fan sawing the air into patient strips, the neighbor's TV laughing in a key she can't use. Lucia pads barefoot over linoleum that still remembers another tenant. Bandage corners whisper against skin.
Kitchen: a counter that bows in the middle, laminate curling at one corner like a bored lip. A drawer that thinks noise is a personality. The fluorescent under-cabinet tube flickers awake and paints everything in morgue-light.
She goes through the obvious first.
Fridge—door gasket sighs.
Milk surrendered last week.
A takeout carton with a sesame-oil ghost.
Half a lemon hardened to philosophy. No bottle, no blessed, idiot promise.
Upper cabinets. She stretches and her rib bruises tell her about themselves; she lets them. Cereal box with more air than flakes. A jar of pennies that won't be quarters no matter how long they practice. Pasta in a plastic zip with exactly three bowties like someone counted and got bored.
She stands on tiptoe, fingers walking the dusty lip at the very back, and finds the shape by feel: squat, square glass, label half-peeled, cap sticky with sugar that learned to be glue.
Rum, probably. Could be whiskey. Doesn't matter.
The cap takes two tries and one muttered sentence; her knuckle dressing scuffs the metal and her jaw hums at the torque. When it gives, it gives with a tacky sigh and exhales a sweet, mean breath that could strip paint or solve a very small problem for fifteen minutes.
She sets it down and looks for a glass.
Sink: two bowls, one cup with a ring of some old day dried around the inside like a tide line. She runs hot water until the steam fogs the mirror of the window; the bandaged fingers rinse the ring to memory; the cup gets a quick baptism in dish soap and a clean finale.
She shakes it once, twice—drops spatter her toes—and sets it on the counter next to the bottle.
The room is a small jury.
The ledger in her head flips to a fresh page and draws a line straight down the middle with no labels.
Sofia turns over on the bed and makes a sound that used to be her name when it didn't have teeth.
Lucia glances at the clock that isn't there. The pill by the toothbrush did what it always does: promises in Latin. The meth, thin and precise behind the eyes, keeps the lights on in hallways that should be dark. The ibuprofen sits in the gut like a reasonable argument.
The night, which does not care about any of this, presses a palm to the glass and waits to see who blinked.
She pours.
Amber, not clear—so, whiskey after all, the cheap kind that wears a brown suit to a funeral and calls it class. It comes out a little too fast, shoulders over the lip, glugs into the cup and makes its own weather. It licks the rim and clings there, thick-legged, belligerent.
She gives it ice from a tray that tastes like freezer and old peas—two cubes that crack when they meet the heat of anything.
She brings it up. The glass prints a cold circle on her bottom lip before the burn finds it. The first mouthful is a negotiation—tongue goes numb at the edges, cut on the lip complains, then stops being a plaintiff.
The whiskey rolls over the taste of iodine, over the little metal echo of blood, over the memory of chlorhexidine's hospital breath, and plants a flag at the back of her throat. It drops into the stomach like a small, consenting fire.
She tilts again and lets the rest go.