It sits in an ornately carved blue bottle, blue with gold strips laid in patterns aacross the surface.  The bottle is a flask shape, round at the bottom with a handle attached to a thin neck that’s leading up to stopper.  Blue, again, with lines of real gold metal twisted into shapes and welded on to the ceramic.

She puts the bottle on her plain wooden kitchen table, smiling slightly.  It’s exactly in the center of the smooth, shiny wood, not an inch to one side, and this makes her happy.

Her house has never been so clean because she’s never put the time into it, but she likes it when it’s aesthetic, when it’s neat, unsullied.

And now she has the time, all the time in the world, because she now she can decide when her world ends.  She made it that way.

She goes over everything one more time, making sure it’s perfect, that everything’s in place.  The two gleaming wine glasses, standing on the spotless counter, shining in the sunlight streaming in through the window.  She is almost ready, but there is one more thing she has to do.

She picks up the telephone and dials, her long red nails clicking on the buttons.  She has the number memorized, she’s had it memorized for years, and now she dials it for the last time.  The telephone rings three times before he picks up.

“Can you come over as soon as possible?” she asks him as soon as she hears him breathing into the phone.  “I’m about to do something...drastic.”  Her gaze lingers on the blue and gold bottle, placed exactly in the middle of the wooden kitchen table.  She isn’t lying when she says drastic, but she’s not giving him a hint of what she has planned, and that is how she’s deceiving him.  But he falls for the deception, so sweet, so sweet, he promises to come and protect her even after all that she did, all that he did.

She lays a long, white finger on one of the wine glasses and lets it rest there, smiling again.  It is a calm and morbid smile that flies across her red lips while she feels the clean glass against her hand.  She stands there, waiting, waiting, her feet aching in her high heeled slippers, until she hears him cautiously opening her front door.

“Hello,” she calls, her voice low and melodious.  She turns her slim, willowly figure and walks out to greet him, smiling her slight smile, happy, purely happy, for the first in six years.

“Do you want something to drink?” she asks, her voice still low and vibrant, as he turns the corner and enters the gleaming kitchen.  He sees her and stops, taking her in, her pink fluffy high heeled slippers, her bare, newly waxed legs, smooth and soft from lotion, her silk magenta bathrobe, its fake fur ruff smooth around her bony shoulders.  Her makeup is done perfectly, lipstick, mascara, eyeliner, a touch of eyeshadow, a touch of blush and she stands with one hip jutted out, one hand on that hip, the other holding a wine glass.

“A drink?” she asks again to his dumbfounded face, and he pulls himself together and accepts.  He feels out of place in her clean, clean kitchen, looking at her while she looks lovely and he’s only wearing a pair of jeans and his plaid jacket and his three year old sneakers that were once white but have now turned a faded grayish color.

She puts the wine glass down and unstops the blue and gold bottle.  She pours a few drops of the clear liquid into the glass and hands it to him.

“My mother’s finest vodka,” she says, her voice so sweet, sweeter than he’s ever heard it, and she swallows up her lie and her vodka in the same gulp.

And it’s not vodka, because he falls out of his chair, his chest and head pounding in pain, and collapses to the floor.

She empties the blue and gold bottle into the second wine glass and returns it carefully to the center of the wooden kitchen table.  She bends down and reaches across his body, glass in hand, until her face is above his face.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she says, her voice throaty, and she leans over and kisses his cold lips.  She wraps his limp arms around her and rests herself on top of his chest.  She gulps down the clear liquid and tosses her glass aside, and then falls, her blonde head tucked under his chin, her lips on his neck, his arms around her skinny waist.

The blue and gold bottle poses in the center of the table.